Everyone’s heard of the gory human sacrifices of the Aztecs to the gods. But we tend to forget they offered their own blood to the deities, too.
According to Mesoamerican mythology, the Sun dies of old age, along with every era. However, the belief was that this process could be slowed through bloodshed. The Sun gives life but also demands it in exchange, so the Aztecs sacrificed themselves and others to
Pythagoras, who formulated the famous mathematical equation, practised fortune-telling, Epimenides of Crete was a soothsayer, while the philosopher Empedocles could supposedly resurrect the dead. Does this mean that ancient Greece had its own shamans?
The term ‘shaman’ comes from the Tungusic word samān, in turn derived from the verb sa (‘to know’). Strictly speaking, shamanism is a religion of the Siberian peoples. Its ‘discovery’ and description by Western scholars (including the exceptional Polish researcher Maria Czaplicka, who is little known in her own country) led to the reinterpretation of many cultural texts and phenomena, beginning with prehistoric cave paintings and ending with European ‘paganism’ or folklore.
