Blood, beasts, ecstasy: the bodily codes of shamanism in the system of archaic biopolitics

Abstract

The aim of the work is to rethink the sacred functions of shamans with an emphasis on the social functions that shamans/ritualists performed in primitive and then traditional societies, and not only on the mystical content of early forms of religious ideas described by ethnologists and art historians. The article implements a theoretical transfer of the postulates of biopolitics (M. Foucault, G. Agamben) from the chronological context of the Modern Age to the archaic pre-state era, which has expanded the ontological boundaries of the concept itself; a rethinking of rock art monuments: they are considered not as mythological illustrations or aesthetic objects, but as visual evidence of the biopolitical governance of ancient societies; for the first time, a stable triad of bodily codes of archaic biopolitics (“blood”, “beast”, “ecstasy”), functioning as the core of the technology of zoē (“naked life”) governance, is identified and systematized. The article demonstrates that shamanism was not an early form of religion, but an effective technology for the direct bodily regulation of social and environmental processes under conditions of constant uncertainty. It is established that a triad of codes functioned as a single operational mechanism: “blood” ensured the redistribution of vital force and the semiotic marking of transitions; “beast” (zoomorphic transformation) served as an interface for accessing natural resources and diagnosing hidden threats; “ecstasy” acted as a technology for expanding perception, neurophysiological synchronization, and the socio-psychological harmonization of the collective. It is demonstrated that shamanic biopolitics fundamentally differs from sacrificial and ancestral cults in its decentralization, functional (rather than status-based) legitimacy, and focus on the direct modulation of life flows. Rock art is reimagined as a visual tool for population management, anticipating the institutional forms of biopolitics of the Modern Era.