Shamanising: male and female

Now I am coming closer to see why Nietzsche and Bataille both tend to attach the appellation of “masculine” to their forms of shamanism, since it is already de rigueur to associate masculinity with violence.

A Yang mode seems to be more along the lines of Bataille — choosing to destroy the public persona (and, in particular, one’s sense of emotional identification with it) in order to set free the inner identity.

Refusal of interpellation could equally be construed as a “feminine” mode of resistance that leads to shamanisation. By “shamanisation”, I mean a mode of awareness of the manipulative nature of society’s common mores. (Nietzsche was particularly attuned to recognising this quality of manipulation in conventional morality).

A Yin mode of shamanising seems to be to refuse interpellation, which produces a doubling effect when one’s inner self acknowledges a certain transcendence of one’s public persona.

But of course, this is to speak of Yin and Yang — feminine and masculine — and in the context of Taoism, these are interdependent and related.