The modern cult of artistic genius was shaped by shamanic ideas of ecstatic inspiration.

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. Flaherty writes of the evolving theory of genius in eighteenth-century Europe that drew on the classical myths of Orpheus as well as the ethnographic descriptions of shamans, a theory that eventually focused on the extraordinary international phenomenon of Mozart. … That he was often likened to Orpheus by his audiences was, says Flaherty, part of the mythologization of the great artist, of his healing and “civilizing” powers acquired through inspiration. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 245

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Asad’s core thesis about how the secular remakes rather than abolishes the religious/sacred — prophecy becomes genius, a transference paralleling how Cooper shows Christian moral norms persisting within supposedly secular neoliberal governance.