You are confusing the actions of a practitioner and a “patient”. A shaman is a practitioner. The one “invaded” by evil spirits is the patient.

This is not exactly true. When I was studying this stuff in school I can remember various accounts of shamans, bokors and houngans, witches etc who were basically at the mercy of the spirits(to them anyway they were)..they basically HAD to shamanize or they would die(again in they're words). They had no say in any of it..they were like gang raped by the spirits, pulled into that life weather they liked it or not. They do the work becasue they must. The shaman might very well live out they're entire life with the spirits that once invaded them..the only difference between them and the patient is that the shaman has made deals with these spirits and now comes to them as familiar aquaintances and "coworkers".[/quote]

That is true and there are PLENTY of ethnographies and interviews with traditional peoples to support that.

There is a woman in tibet, or was rather she died recently. She was your classic paranoid schizophrenic, homeless very violent and delusional, she would attract people and growl and chase people in the villages he would wander through. One day a lhaman or god-man from a nomadic tribe in tibet saw her and was told by the spirits (obviously mentally ill himself) that this woman was to be a lhamo (god-woman, its their version of shamans, they get possessed by these wrathful deities, obviously primitive and psychotic people...) This shaman went into a trance and saw that this woman had a block in her pranic tube. he released it and or cleansed that blocked energy and the woman got possessed by one of the demi gods that is a consort to the white tara. This was a wrathful demi-god that was associated by healing. They diety told those present at the healing ceremony that the womans previous incarnation that she was a devotee of this deity at a temple that did healing work with people. There was a statue and a monestary dedicated to this entity and it had been attacked by foriegn tribes and destroyed, the nun was raped and killed and this was her next incarnation currently. The block was her past life trauma, now that it had been healed the lahman was to teach her to again embody this deity and preform healing work like he did. ( this was all coming from this crazy lady who threw cats at people mind you)

Tibetians are a very rational and skeptical people and seeing how no one had heard of this temple before they asked the crazy lady where it was. They where given dirrections by the diety and they went off in an expidition to find it. And they found it, it had been destroyed a very long time ago and had a statue of the diety in it, no one had known of these place prior and it was far away from where the woman was born. This woman had never heard of it nor had she ever been there, nor did any one near the place have any knowledge that it existed in the first place.

They decided it was authentic and she was trained to be a lhamo. She became a very powerful lhamo and was no longer mentally ill by any ones standards. She even got married and had a family and was considered by the dali lama to be one of tibets national treasures. She was flown all over the world to preform miraculous healings, that where extremely wrathful and frightening, she would bite people and pull their hair and talk in other voices she would suck black tar out of peoples bodies. It was quite amazing. These people would get the spirits, demons or withces that where causing them illness called into their bodies and the woman would nearly beat the crap out of them some times slapping them in the face all while possessed by this wrathful buddhist diety. Then she would do these very sweet blessings.

I bet the dali lama is totally irresponsible for thinking that this woman is a national treasure... man what a ignorant bald asshole he is...

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