The Relevance of Shamanism Today
Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Mark Nelson, author of the new Shamanism.
What is the relevance of shamanism today? The term shaman comes from Tungusic-speaking peoples of Siberia, which has led to criticism of the appropriation of terms like shaman and shamanism. However, we also use the termshamanism to describe cross-cultural beliefs and ritual practices, both culture-specific traditions, such as Andean Shamanism, and cross-cultural neo-shamanic traditions.
Shamanism has a long history dating from at least the Upper Paleolithic era (40,000 years ago), with researchers claiming evidence from earlier. Shamanism is the oldest spiritual practice we know of, and underlies our mythology, religions, and other spiritual traditions.
What evidence is there of this influence of shamanism? Archaeologists see shamanic symbols in rock art. Anthropologists such as Michael Harner saw common rituals in different tribal peoples. The anthropologist Felicitas Goodman researched artifacts showing postures that produced visionary experiences in people who adopted the postures. There is also indirect evidence, echoes of shamanic rituals, in religions, mythology, folktales, fairytales, literature, films, and other media.
I note in passing shamanism aspects of psychology. Carl Jung viewed spirit as a psychological reality that is an archetype and part of all archetypes. He had a muse he first met in a dream, called Philemon (after Ovid), who is clearly a spirit teacher.
A key shamanic ritual is the journey (usually taken to the lower or upper worlds). These find echoes in myths of descent to the underworld and ascent to heaven. Examples from religion include the Quran Sura 17, “Al Isra” (The Night Journey), and Sura 53, “Al Najm” (The Star), concerned with the night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and ascent to heaven to receive divine revelation. There is also a reference in Sura 6, “Ayah al-An`am” (The Cattle) to “…go down deep into the earth or to ascend a ladder unto heaven….” In the Bible and gnostic gospels there are examples such as the harrowing of hell, the ascent to the mountain for the final temptation, and Jacob’s ladder.
We see the influence of shamanism in magical traditions and Pagan/Neopagan practices. An example of this is the Chaos Magic tradition (from the 1970s) where magicians looked to recover shamanic practices by removing extraneous components:
“When stripped of local symbolism and terminology, all systems show a remarkable uniformity of method. This is because all systems ultimately derive from the tradition of Shamanism. It is toward an elucidation of this tradition that the following chapters are devoted.”—Peter Carroll, Liber Null
There are shamanic influences in folktales. The Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index), a catalogue of global folktale types, has sections showing shamanic motifs, including otherworldly journeys (F0-F199) that includes Journey to upper world (F10) and Journey to lower world (F80).
What about examples in modern works? This includes the work of artists like William Blake, the magical realism genre, and poets like Emily Dickinson and Ted Hughes. Familiar stories with lower world journeys include Alice in Wonderland. Stories with upper world journeys include Jack and the Beanstalk, The Arabian Nights, and The Wizard of Oz. You also see shamanic motifs in modern works such as the Shaman King manga series.
Neoshamanism developed in the 20th Century, due to writings of authors like Mircea Eliade. Although there is debate about shamanism, including of cultural appropriation, charlatan practices, and shamanic colonialism (where practitioners transplant cross-cultural practices to a cultural context), there is widespread interest in use of shamanic practices in neoshamanism, neopaganism, and other traditions.
Further Reading:
Mircea Eliade: Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton University Press, 2004).
Felicitas D. Goodman: Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences (Indiana University Press, 1990).
Michael Harner: The Way of the Shaman (HarperOne, 1990)
Emilia Pásztor, Herman Bender, George Nash, Dragos Gheorghiu: Archaeological Approaches to Shamanism: Mind-Body, Nature, and Culture (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, October 2017).
Our thanks to Mark for his guest post! For more from Mark Nelson, read his article “How to Use Shamanic Practices for Dreamwork.”
