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Shamanism and Neo-shamanism
by Chas S. Clifton
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Before the mid 1960s, shamanism interested only a few anthropologists and historians. Now travel agents are booking shamanic tours" to sites such as the ruined Inca city of Machu Picchu while alternative healers advertise "shamanic counseling" next to acupuncture, channeling, and body work. One ad in a Santa Fe, New Mexico, newspaper offers 11 shamanic soul integration process weekend workshops" led by a man calling himself a "Toltec nagual" and also advertising his master's degree in international management. Another healer advises the opportunity to: "Find your totality through a guided journey to totem animals who balance body and spirit." Meanwhile, a walk through any large bookstore will produce scores of titles with shaman, shamanic, and shamanism in them. In fact, "how I became a shaman" is becoming a distinct literary category.
Clearly, the rebirth of shamanism or, as it might better be called, "neo-shamanism" is one of the prime spiritual and religious events of the late twentieth century. It was unexpected. Before the 1970s, religious innovation seemed more likely to come from Asia in the form of yoga, Zen Buddhism, and other traditions. Like Wicca, neo-shamanism leaps into a non-historical realm which is not at all the same as prehistoric, but is a realm of cosmic significance and into a worldview that permits the archaic to mingle with the scientific. Like all changes, this one was prefigured, but too often the conventional explanation for shamanism's renewal focuses on the "psychedelic era" of the 1960s, which means mistaking the symptom for the cause.' But in an era when artists create "shamanic art" and anyone with a computer and a modem can claim to be a "techno shaman," what is shamanism really?
One of the bedrock definitions was laid down by the late Mircea Eliade, an esteemed historian of religion who taught at the Sorborme in Paris and later at the University of Chicago. In his book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, first published in France in 1951 and revised in the 1960s, Eliade compared the work of shamans in Asia, the Americas, ancient Europe, and the Pacific islands.2 When he began his research during the 1940s, he said, "shamanism had a rather limited interest even for specialists"; at that time only two works on Siberian and Central Asian shamanism existed.
Eliade used "ecstasy" in its original Greek sense: to be driven out of one's senses, one's body, one's "normal" consciousness. And he concentrated his analysis of shamanism particularly on the peoples of northern Asia: the word "shaman" itself comes from a Russian transliteration of a word used by the Tungus people of eastern Siberia. The Tungus word saman has in turn been traced back to the Sanskrit sramanas meaning an ascetic, someone who leads a life of religious self discipline, similar to a yogi. In this chain of meaning, Eliade notes, lies the history of Indian religious influence, particularly through Buddhism, on much of central and northern Asia.
But the group of practices we call "shamanism" is or was universal, discovered at some point in virtually all cultures. The ecstatic experience, he concludes, is a "primary phenomenon fundamental in the human condition and hence known to the whole of archaic humanity."4 Whether or not everyone has the capacity to be a shaman, all peoples have experienced shamanism, whether they do still or not and whether they call it by that name or some other.
Surveying many past and present cultures, Eliade assembled a definition of shamanism that is still appropriate. First of all, it is not a religion but a technique. Shamans are not the same as priests; they may coexist with priests or even fulfill priestly functions as well as shamanic ones. A shaman is more a mystic than a priest or minister.
Nor are shamans strictly medicine men/women, magicians, or healers. A shaman is not "possessed" and is not a medium or trance channeler; shamans control the spirit beings with whom they work, or at least they do not surrender to them. Like a medium or channeler, a shaman may appear unconscious when working, but upon returning, the shaman can tell where he or she has gone. The shaman is not the instrument of the spirits. Traditional shamans cure people through their trances, accompany the souls of the dead to the Otherworld, and communicate with the gods. "This small mystical elite not only directs the community's religious life but, as it were, guards its 'soul."'5
Nor are traditional shamans simply to be dismissed as mentally ill, epileptic, or otherwise unwell. The tribal peoples among whom shamanism flourished knew the difference. Even if epileptic seizures were interpreted as meetings with the gods, as in parts of Siberia, the significant difference is that the shaman can control his or her "seizure" and even bring it on at will. Although the shaman's calling is often signaled by a life threatening illness or a serious accident or injury at puberty and sometimes later in adulthood, once trained, the traditional shaman is a functioning, energetic, respected member of the community. Having studied scores of fieldworkers' reports, Eliade wrote, "I recorded no case of a shaman whose professional hysteria deteriorated into serious mental disorders."
Through dancing, singing, drumming, and ingestion of hallucinogenic plants, traditional shamans "went somewhere." In Arctic regions the shaman's performance more frequently ended in a cataleptic trance: the practitioner's body lay rigid and unconscious while the soul went elsewhere. Or the shaman would act out the journey climbing a ladder to the Upper World, for example. The use of plant agents produced different sorts of trances, but, again, the shaman was expected to report back on the journey and to show results, even as mystics in other religious traditions produced books based on their visions.
It can be argued that Western culture retained shamanic elements, but not shamanism itself (See "What Happened to Western Shamanism.") Therefore, I prefer to call the current revival neo-shamanism. Not only is it partly reconstructed and partly imported from other cultures, it differs in important ways from the traditional shamanism described by Eliade and other scholars. Perhaps the largest difference is the way neo-shamanism has been presented as a new self help movement, particularly by therapists trained in other methods who then discovered it. But although it is "neo" that does not mean neo-shamanism must be lesser. We can only do what we are historically capable of doing at this particular time and place. Therefore, neo-shamanism could be described as the type of shamanism that is possible and practical here and now. If at times it has been developed from books rather than from a person-to person tradition of teaching, we can only say: Books are our grandparents!
A watershed event in the rise of neo-shamanism was the 1968 publication of Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Offered as his master's thesis in anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, it became a bestseller for the University of California Press and in turn started a small industry of Castanedam explaining, Castaneda debunking, and Castaneda plagiarizing. Mircea Eliade himself referred to the sudden growth of the "para shamanistic underground movement" that began in the 1970s. Daniel Noel, a contributor to this anthology, edited a 1976 collection, Seeing Castaneda, in which he described The Teachings of Don Juan and its first three successors, A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, and Tales of Power, as works of "profound and lasting significance."8 One contributor to Seeing Castaneda, Joseph Chilton Pearce, said that the mysterious Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan presented "the most important paradigm since Jesus."
As paradigm, model, exemplar, whatever, Don Juan seized a portion of the American imagination. I well remember one of my freshman classmates at Reed College galloping down the dormitory stairs from his room with a paperback copy of The Teachings of Don Juan in his hand. I would really get into it, he promised, and I should just ignore the dry "Structural Analysis" that made up the book's second portion. Later that year Castaneda himself came to give a talk on campus a practice he soon abandoned, perhaps under the directive to "erase personal history." Of course, given subsequent stories of Castaneda's many tricks on would be interviewers, I have sometimes wondered if the soft spoken, round faced man with the South American accent, who sat in the Faculty Office Building lounge and told the stories that would soon see print as A Separate Reality, in fact was Carlos Castaneda. My friends had joked about expecting a beaded and feathered shaman who would walk without leaving footprints; for now, I will assume that the short haired man in the conservative suit, who looked a lot like one of my junior high Spanish teachers, was indeed Castaneda.
Castaneda debunkers included Richard de Mille, whose collection The Don Juan Paperslo pointed out possible published sources of almost everything Don Juan said. He and his contributors attacked the Don Juan material on grounds ranging from alleged anthropological inaccuracy to suggesting that Castaneda's descriptions of the Sonoran desert were ecologically impossible. But valid or not, authentic or not, the impetus provided by Castaneda's books set the neoshamanism wheel to rolling fast.
Another marker in neo-shamanism's progress was the 1980 publication of Michael Harner's The Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Healing. Wiccan's joined the rush to the bookstore and gave each other copies with the message, "Read this book!" Harner, an anthropologist who had edited a valuable anthology called Hallucinogens and Shamanism, had stepped across the line from academic study into practice, set up his own Foundation for Shamanic Studies," and began to offer a distilled version of different cultures' shamanic practice which he called "core shamanism."
But whether taught by Harner or, as was too often the case, by a recent graduate of a weekend workshop, one clear sign of neo-shamanism's "neo" character was the loss of any sense of community. No longer was the shaman seen as a religious expert who used alternative psychic states, nor did Castaneda's shamans ever help a sick or suffering person beyond their small circle of disciples. The same is true of the alternative view of Don Juan and the others offered by another UCLA anthropology graduate student, Florinda Donner.
Even if they would be healers, neo-shamans face a major change in their would be patients' models of disease. Traditional shamans, while often knowledgeable about herbal remedies, massage, and other treatments, see most illnesses as having spiritual causes.13 But even the modern Pagan community is ambivalent toward this idea as demonstrated by our actions when sick: whether with herbs or antibiotics, we primarily treat symptoms. The acceptance of a purely mechanistic model of disease by most modern people (who are mostly non Pagan), is a major barrier to any large scale rebirth of shamanism. That is not to say that people today do not recognize a mind body link. Virtually everyone admits the part that stress plays in illness; among my teaching colleagues, for example, the end of term cold or flu is commonplace. And some esotericists can assign a mental or spiritual cause to any bodily ill: back problems reflect a lack of emotional support, tuberculosis reflects selfishness or possessiveness, while birth defects are karmic, chosen by the individual while between lives. 14 But the majority of modern people do not currently accept "soul loss" as causing "disease," let alone the intrusion into the body of a magickal "object" sent by an angry sorcerer or by the spirits. As a culture, we are still groping from many different starting points toward a model of curing that incorporates spiritual as well as physical factors.
Blocked from its primary task of curing and freed from a tribal or traditional community, shamanism has been reinterpreted as therapy, as self improvment, as art, as a justification for the use of psychedelic drugs, and as a religious practice of its own. Even with those limitations, neo-shamanism is powerful and still offers "techniques of ecstasy." As one British participant in a recent workshop sponsored by Michael Harner's Foundation for Shamanic Studies put it, "But once I got over being too 'scientific' and let it all happen, it was great! Some of the experiences were profoundly emotional and moving. The Power Animal retrieval bit was unbelievable!"
For followers of Wicca, who drew power from and yet could feel uncomfortable with the sometimes negative connotations of the word witch, shamanism offered the lure of redefinition. The claim "witchcraft is European shamanism" was frequently made in the 1970s and on into the present. First, this claim reinforced Wicca's alleged link with pre Christian Europe, a tribal landscape with its own mysterious "wise ones" of whom the legendary Merlin was but the first among many. The modern Pagan revival owes much to novelists' visions. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Dion Fortune's The Sea Priestess are merely two well known examples. Likewise, the protoneoshaman Wulf and his apprentice Wat Brand in Brian Bates's The Way of Wyrd: Tales of an Ango Saxon Sorcerer15 replicate Don Juan and Castaneda in a story flavored with the few scraps of Anglo Saxon magical practice that survived Christianity.
Although the best known form of the Craft, Gardnerian Wicca, had emphasized ritual and spellcraft over trance journeying (which is not to say that trance journeying had no part in it), the new identification of Wicca with shamanism gave Wicca a touch of "primitive chic" and opened an important door for Neo-pagan Witches. In fact, the rise of neo-shamanism has benefited the Craft immensely. Particularly in the United States, where issues of religious freedom and church/state conflict are never out of the news (witness President Clinton's signing in 1993 of the Religious Freedom Act, written to further codify religious freedom after several key court decisions had favored government over individuals), many Wiccan groups and organizations have put immense effort into solidifying their legal status and fitting the statutory definition of a church, as determined by state and federal tax codes. These actions reinforced the religious freedom of modem Witches, who have at times suffered various forms of religious discrimination from police forces, courts, landlords, schools, and so forth, not to mention the more subtle discrimination of not being considered truly spiritual or a "real" religion.
But if we build boxes (organizations), we must put something into them. The neo-shamanic revival confronted the reinvented religion of Witchcraft with important questions: What is your relationship with the Other world and its powers? What are your "techniques of ecstasy," archaic or otherwise?
This book offers a spectrum of answers to those questions. And its contributors also offer answers to some other pressing questions; for example, how does a person start in shamanism? How do shamanic practices of solo trance fit in with traditional Wiccan rituals, which more often emphasize sacred sexuality, fertility (if only metaphorically) and development of a group mind? Like Michael Harner, Felicitas Goodman emerged into the world of practicing shamanism from the world of teaching anthropology. Unlike him, she grew up in Hungary, which has its own indigenous shamanic tradition. Because of her background and language knowledge, she has been able to teach widely in Europe as well as North America. Her contribution summarizes her and her students' explorations with the effects of body posture on trance, a subject further examined in her book Where the Spirits Ride the Wind.
One convincing argument for the existence of some sort of indigenous European shamanism in early modern times (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) has been witch trial accounts of the use of potent plant based drugs by the accused witches, records too numerous and detailed to be fabricated. Michael Howard, editor of one of the longest running British Wiccan publications, The Cauldron, offers his own thoughts on this survival and how it possibly tied in with traditions of the Wild Hunt and modern ideas of Earth mysteries in "The Unguenti Sabbati in Traditional Witchcraft."
In her analysis of common elements in Witchcraft and shamanism, Karen Goeller notes that, whatever the situation long ago, in historic times shaman and traditional Witch differed in their social roles and prestige. Nowadays, however, both practices are converging, for they offer similar kinds of healing to a materialistic, technological society.
The "core shamanism" taught by Michael Harner does not require the use of any psychoactive plants or drugs. Today's Witches may see it as lying closer to the path working techniques used by a variety of Western esoteric traditions. In "Seeing the Sun at Midnight" Kisma Stepanich offers ideas about attaining this type of inner vision.
Neo-shamans have been accused of stealing their practices outright, along with New Ager's who burn sage while offering English translations of traditional tribal prayers, hold vision quests, and smoke traditional style sacred pipes. Such cultural appropriation represents "the final phase of English occultist, offers one such imagined journey, while Evan John Jones describes how his coven uses masks as an aid to trance work inside the sacred circle. To make a mask, one might wish to encounter a power animal. G. A. Hawk, coauthor of Shamanism and the Esoteric Tradition, offers a core shamanic approach to finding that special creature. Oz, an Albuquerque Witch whose work also appeared in the first two volumes of this series here has written on one of the most crucial of the traditional shaman's abilities: communication with spirit guides.
In some cases, however, we are fortunate enough to take outer journeys that can parallel inner journeys. Ashleen O'Gaea, author of The Family Wicca Book, is an experienced caver and how better to enact a journey to the Underworld than a journey on one's own into a deep and tortuous cavern? (The element of risk helps make it real.) Her chapter, "The Second Gate," describes how modern Pagans make that transition from the daylight world.
Of all Western psychologies, the school of analytic psychology begun by Carl Jung has been most open to ecstatic and mystical experience, treating it as real and useful instead of a delusion or a psychopathology. Jung developed his own form of inner journey and dialog with those powers he called archetypes. Daniel Noel brings a strong background in Jungian psychology plus a long standing interest in shamanism to his chapter on the interaction of psychology, Neo-paganism and neo-shamanism, "Nobody in Here Now But Us Neos."
I spoke above of the problems neo-shamanism faces in determining which community it serves. As the writer of a recent magazine article about package tours to "power places" combined with short but intensive shamanic training sessions, observes, "a sacred vacation is just a vacation with a return ticket to Cleveland at the end of it. Even after experiencing the seven hells and thirteen heavens of Quetzalcoatl [sic], one must still come home to make peace with the culture of Beverly Hills 90210." In other words, the dominant culture is still alien to shamanic Journeys, packaged or otherwise, and too often the line between student and customer is blurred. The Pagan community, growing and young in traditions as it is, can offer an alternative, a place to come home to where these experiences can, we hope, be integrated in a world that does include computers, television dramas, fashion magazines, and freeways. Our mission, as always, remains creating such a community, one that will deserve shamans to serve it.
Notes
- A few of the works that either prefigure or help explain this era: Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper and Row, 1954); William Burroughs, The Yage Letters (San Francisco: City Lights, 1963); R. Gordon Wasson and V.P. Wasson, Mushrooms, Russia and History (New York: Pantheon, 1957); Gordon Wasson, Soma: Diz)ille Mushroom of Immortality (New York: Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1971) and other works; Martin Lee, Acid Dreams: the CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
- Mircea Eliade, trans. Willard R. Trask, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).
- I David Carrasco and Jane M. Swanberg, eds., Waiting for the Dazvn: Mircea Eliade it, Perspective (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1985). 15
- Eliade, 504
- Eliade, 8.
- Eliade, 31. Hysteria is not meant in a negative sense here but merely as a synonym for ecstasy.
- Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 61.
- Daniel Noel, Seeing Castaneda: Reactions to the "Don juan " Writings of Carlos Castaneda (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 19760.13 14.
- Pearce wrote The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (New York: Julian Press, 1971) about Castaneda's effect on his own life.
- Richard de Mille, The Don Juan Papers (Santa Barbara: Ross Erikson, 1980).
- The Foundation for Shamanic Studies. P. 0. Box 670, Norwalk. Connecticut 06852. Telephone 203 454 2825.
- Florinda Donner's works include The Witch's Dream (New York Pocket Books, 1985) and Being in Dreaming: An Initiation into the Sorcerer's World (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991).
- Eliade, 327.
- Louise L. Hay, Heal Your Body: Metaphysical Causations of Physical Illnesses (Los Angeles: Louise L. Hay, 1976).
- Brian Bates, The Way of Wyrd: Tales of an Anglo Saxon Sorcerer (San Francisco: Harper and Row. 1984).
- David Johnston. "Sacred rites exploited, Indians say," The Denver Post, 27 December 1983, pp. IA, 12A. (Originally published in the New York Times.)
- Chrystos, "Shame On," Cultural Survival Quarthly, Fall 1992, p. 71.
- Snyder, 13.
- Judith Hooper, "The Transcendental Tourist," Mirabella, January 1994. pp. 70 73.
About the Author
Chas S. Clifton lives in the southern Colorado foothills, where in recent years he has worked as a newspaper reporter, counted owls in nearby mountains for the Bureau of Land Management, and taught university writing classes. In addition to editing Llewellyn's Witchcraft Today series, he is the author of The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics (ABCClio, 1992). He is a contributing editor of Gnosis, and his column, "Letters from Hardscrabble Creek," is carried in several Pagan magazines.
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