Brought back to life by a shaman


On Tuesday in a book written in French about garlic and its various properties (in English, ‘The Magic of Garlic’), I came across a reference to a very peculiar rescue another Frenchman claims to have benefited after he suffered a stroke in his flat in Paris. Strangely, the author of the book about garlic (whose name I am not going to disclose here because his name is a pseudonym that means ‘strong helm’ in English and anyhow the book is no longer in print and it is being offered at an outrageously high price on the second-hand book market) was reluctant to give the name of his compatriot who was saved from the clutches of death by a shaman.  Mr ‘Stronghelm’ merely refers to him with the phrase ‘a distinguished scholar recognised worldwide as an authority on Arctic peoples and their cultures’*.                            Mr ‘Stronghelm’ writes that this Arctic specialist was brought back from the bottomless pit he came to experience after his heart had stopped by a shaman whom he had befriended in one of his scientific expeditions in the Arctic.  Apparently, this shaman had ‘travelled’ to his rescue after having seen in a vision that his friend was in great danger.

I wrongly assumed that this other Frenchman was the famous explorer Paul-Émile Victor. Typing the latter’s full name PLUS ‘attaque cardiaque chaman’ in a search engine yielded a list of results which quickly led me to the name of Jean Malaurie.  Moreover, an article in a French catholic daily, La Croix (the cross), entitled ‘Jean Malaurie, voyageur du monde’ and published a little more than a year ago (but available on the Internet Archive as well as on the website the friends of Mr Malaurie have set up in honour of this French explorer and advocate of the cause of the Arctic peoples, at http://jean-malaurie.com/?p=1199), confirmed the story.   However, it differs a little from the account given by Mr ‘Stronghelm’, in that Mr Malaurie, who after his heart failure in 1997 was ‘kind of levitating above a precipice’ (so writes the journalist, Mr Loup Besmond de Senneville) until [I am paraphrasing*] he remembered a prayer he had been taught by an Inuit shaman.  He then felt a hand on his face and was told not to go any further as the shaman would no longer be able to bring him back. The account of Mr Malaurie’s near-death experience stops here as the intention of this acclaimed French Inuit specialist was to have it appear in full in his memoirs, scheduled for the autumn of last year (he was 96 years old when the article in La Croix was published).

Unfortunately, Mr Malaurie’s memoirs have not been published yet, according to the websites I have consulted:

https://www.lisez.com/?q=Jean+Malaurie&neuf=1&s=

[No new entry in the French National Library’s catalogue for Jean Malaurie] https://catalogue.bnf.fr/changerPage.do?motRecherche=Malaurie%2C+Jean&index=&numNotice=&listeAffinages=&nbResultParPage=50&afficheRegroup=false&pageEnCours=1&trouveDansFiltre=NoticePUB&trouverDansActif=false&triResultParPage=0&critereRecherche=0&typeNotice=&pageRech=rsi

https://jean-malaurie.com/?cat=3.

Maybe I could try to read the following print interview of Mr Malaurie, as its title sounds a little auspicious:

Idées N° 7-8,  Jean Malaurie, notre dernier chaman, Emmanuel Lemieux, 26/09/2019

https://www.decitre.fr/revues/idees-n-7-8-jean-malaurie-notre-dernier-chaman-9782490625055.html#resume

Otherwise, I guess the best that I could do to satisfy my curiosity about accounts of people having been brought back to life by a shaman would be to read chapter 21 (entitled ‘Near-Death Experience (1929) Ivalo and Knud Rasmussen’) of the anthology of texts about shamans which was compiled by Messrs Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley (Shamans through time: 500 years on the path to knowledge) and published a few years ago (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/294914/shamans-through-time-by-jeremy-narby).

* My notes from page 94 of La magie de l’ail: ‘[...] d’un très grand savant français, un des meilleurs connaisseurs mondiaux des cultures de l’arctique. [...] grave attaque cardiaque [...] jusqu’à ce qu’un chaman avec lequel il avait sympathisé lui apparaisse et le tire hors du puits sans fond dans lequel il était en train de sombrer. Il s’est rétabli et se dit persuadé d’avoir été sauvé. Le chaman [...] la vision de son ami en danger et avoir « voyagé » pour le tirer de ce mauvais pas.’


Lausanne, 25th July 2020