Originally, soul flight is a technique of ecstasy used by shamans with the purpose of entering into a state of trance. During the ecstatic trance it is believed that the shaman's soul has left the body and corporeal world, not unlike an out-of-body experience, which allows him or her to enter into a spiritual world and interact with its beings. As if going into another realm, shamans either descend into an underworld (cf. katabasis or nekyia) or ascend unto an upper world (cf. anabasis) and they are in sense flying through these other places.
By entering into the trance-like state, shamans profess to provide services for their tribesmen and one of the techniques they apply for this purpose is soul flight. They alter their consciousness to connect with the spirit world, which is considered to be the source of their knowledge and power. Among the many tasks that practitioners believe could be accomplished through soul flight are: healing, divination, protection, clairvoyance, dream interpretation, mediation between the divine and the humane, communicating with spirits of the dead (séance), and escorting deceased souls to the afterlife (psychopomp).
Soul flight, also known as shamanic journeying or magical flight, has been exercised from paleolithic times to the present day. As time went by, this shamanic practice evolved into a way for the individual to transcend themselves.
Theoretical background
In 1951, Mircea Eliade's historical study of different manifestations of shamanism across the globe, titled Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, was published in France. He pointed out that shamanism wasn't just practiced in Siberia and Eurasia, but could be found in cultures all across the world. According to Eliade, the core principle of shamanism is the application of techniques of ecstasy which enable people to interact with the spiritual world on behalf of the community.
There are three ways of becoming a shaman: by spontaneous vocation (i.e. the "call" of "election), by hereditary transmission, or by personal quest. A shaman is only recognized after he received two kinds of teaching: ecstatic (e.g. dreams, trances, visions) and traditional (e.g. shamanic techniques, names, and functions of the spirits, mythology, and genealogy of the clan, secret language). The former teaching is conveyed by the spirits while the latter lesson is given by the elder shamans. Together, both teachings constitute initiation.
Selection for the role of a shaman may be derived from a crisis, an illness, or an episode of insanity; all of which are interpreted as experiencing personal death. This initiation crisis usually involves an experience of suffering which is followed by death and dismemberment (i.e. descent into the underworld), an ascent unto the upper world and interactions with other souls and spirits along these both ways (cf. dying-and-rising deity). The cross-culturally recurrent mytheme of death-dismemberment-rebirth reflect the death of one identity and the birth of another one. Overcoming these experiences leads the shaman towards a new level of identity, and this transforming experience is symbolized as the flight of his or her soul.
A shaman's soul-flying abilities presuppose a sacred cosmology, or a world-view that encompasses a sacred or ultimate reality that is structured in what has been called an archetypically, three-storied cosmology. It entails the earth in the middle or the everyday world of non-ordinary reality. The upper world is supposed to be the abode of benevolent spirits and heavenly scenes, while the underworld consists of ancestral and malignant spirits as well as dark and gloomy places.
Historical overview
The Stone Age
Prior to the first agricultural revolution, when people still lived in hunter-gatherer societies, shamanism possibly emerged from a belief in the afterlife. Shamanism was practiced among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, and it has often been proposed by anthropologists to be the world's oldest profession. By visibly transforming during initiation and trance, the shaman attempts to convince tribal members that he or she can interact with invisible forces that control uncertain outcomes. By doing so, the shaman acts like he or she can influence unpredictable, important events. The transformative display of the shaman during trance is thought to be essential because it serves as evidence of spiritual communication for those who behold his or her ritual, which then contributes to the credibility of the shaman.