shamanism versus mediumship

The point I was trying to bring out in my paper is that no matter how evil
is conceptualised, whether according to the idea of spirit possession, or on
the basis of another cosmological system that also conceptualises good and
evil, health or illness, somebody like Marechera has to use the resources
available to him, as an individual, to try to turn things around. My view
is that the "spirit possession" was a cultural symptom, that Marechera
recognised as telling him that something was wrong within the social life of
his community. So, it registered on that very primary level of personal
experience, in his consciousness. Where he took it from there did not have
to do with the community's cultural conceptions of spirit possession, but
with his own sense of having become acquainted with a quality of evil in his
community which had become concretised -- so as to be experienced in his own
body and mind as a destructive force. This wasn't a conceptual feeling
for him, in the sense that it would be if he were participating in a larger
social and religious system of mediumship and possession. He was rather
reacting to, in a much more narrow way, a concretisation of evil, felt
directly in his body and mind, as if it were a sign to him that he had
become sick because his community was sick. It is this immediacy of the
experience, which is without conceptualisations being attached -- that is,
Marechera's feeling, "I am sick because my community has been made sick" --
that is shamanistic, rather than pertaining to mediumship or other such
modes of traditional religion. The shaman feels his sickness without direct
cultural mediation. He experiences his illness initially as a puzzle, as an
overwhelmingly shocking sensation, during his initiatory madness. He does
not, however, conceptualise within an established system of religion,
concerning the meaning of his illness. It remains, rather, for a long time,
a puzzle, an enigma. It is only later, after much personal investigation,
that he manages to make conceptual sense of it all. His later
conceptualisations of his illness and its possible meanings will not be in
terms of the traditional paradigms of religious practice, therefore, but in
terms of his own highly personal and individual solutions, which he
developed in the pratical processes of learning to heal himself. So the
shaman is a highly individualistic practitioner of healing, following
formulas that he has trained himself to know on a personal and private
basis, rather than following more well established, known and shared
cultural rituals of healing.