Eighteenth-century theories of artistic genius drew on shamanistic and mantic models

Evidence

If shamanic rhetoric and behavior were to be viewed as art, some artists could be viewed as shamans. If ecstasy had been a sign of mantic inspiration, it was becoming an indication of artistic genius. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 245

Categorization

• XREF: The two-way traffic between shaman and artist — ethnography shaping genius theory, genius theory shaping how art is understood — parallels the reader’s noted double movement in colonial anthropology where the category being studied reshapes the studier.
• QUESTION: This framing of the artist-as-shaman — seized by external force, involuntarily driven to the instrument — is worth probing against modern authorship myths and how AI ‘creative’ tools inherit it.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 245