Your Friendly Local Shaman

I’ve been writing a lot about shamanism lately, for a reason.

I’ve been reading a lot about shamanism lately, and animism, too. And the more I read, yes, the more I realize, we need this desperately now. This is what we are wired for. This is how our brains actually function. Not having this is why we are sick and depressed and anxious and angry and terrified.

Well. A major reason why. There are myriad reasons.

But this is a biggie.

Wrap your brain around this for a minute. Pretty much every culture that has ever developed on Planet Earth has been shamanic, and that was true until very recently. The British were shamanic until the 6th Century CE. No, really. Druids all over the place. Witches, faeries, dryads … the whole shebang, A mere 1500 years ago. Europe had been shamanic for at least tens of thousands of years before that, and probably over a hundred thousand. There is cave art in France from 40,000 years ago with shamanic themes all over it. Even now, in places like Mongolia and parts of Africa and South America, and in parts of the US and Canada, the indigenous cultures practice shamanic lifeways.

It’s not a religion. It’s a framework for being in Right Relationship with the environment around you, and for understanding our profound interconnectedness to every other lifeform on this globe.

Interconnected? The most essential symbiosis is the one our survival is most dependent on. Trees and other plants “breathe” carbon dioxide, and release oxygen as their waste product. We breathe oxygen and release carbon dioxide as our waste product. Plants were the first land lifeforms to evolve on Earth, because the atmosphere at that time was largely carbon dioxide. Plant life was thriving ebulliently, every square inch of land was covered in it. Trees, shrubs, flowers, fungus, whatever could grow, grew like gangbusters – until, oopsie daisie, we’re releasing so much oxygen that we’re struggling to keep breathing!

So what did evolution do? It made a new kind of life that could move itself about, who happened to need oxygen to live, and happened to exhale carbon dioxide. And once that kind of life got going, boy did it ever thrive! So now, we have the plants breathing in the carbon dioxide and breathing out the oxygen, and animals breathing in the oxygen and breathing out the carbon dioxide – and both are utterly dependent of the other to keep doing what they do so both can survive. Talk about your symbiotic relationship! Seriously, if the plants stop planting, we stop breathing. This is a symbiosis that we have no choice but to honor. It is not optional.

And that is just the first symbiosis, the grand daddy symbiosis of them all, really. We share our air with the trees, and they share their air with us. Isn’t that some kind of magic? I have to think so.

Urban Shamanism is kind of controversial, for some good reasons and some really thoughtless ones.

It is highly commendable that we are trying to avoid appropriation of cultural lifeways and “stealing traditions” from people we have already stolen so much from. Shamanism is associated with indigenous culture, and rightly so, but, as I mentioned above, even White people were in shamanic cultures up until a couple eyeblinks ago. And at this point, the benefits of helping people rediscover this gift for relationship and connection with the world around them far outweighs the risks that we will step on cultural toes – and honestly, most of the indigenous people I have talked to about it are completely on board with White people getting off their high-horses of Separation from Nature and rejoining the Gaian family. Just have some respect, please.

The other reason is … kind of silly, to be honest. There is a school of thought that says you can’t practice a shamanic lifeway in a city, because shamans belong in the wild. Seriously. I know. So easy. Folks, shamans belong with their clan, whether they are in the woods or not. They can go to the woods to get their wyrd on and talk to the rivers and the trees and learn their songs and bring those songs back to sing to their clans. They can journey to non-ordinary reality (aka norspace) to get information, medicine, healing chants, recipes, solutions to problems, ideas for growth and change … and bring those ideas back to the city where their clans are.

Additionally, are there not volumes in British literature about restoring the wasteland? Didn’t the Arthurian Saga, and the Mabinogion, devote massive amounts of ink to this very issue? We should be doing shamanic healing in the landfill, in the center of the city where the Spirits of the Place are wearing concrete shoes, in the devastated areas where industry has run amok. We need to let the land know it is still part of the meshwork, still loved and revered, even if it’s buried under concrete or a bunch of rubble. Our love should not be reserved for forests and rivers and meadows exclusively.

In the Arthurian Saga, the Goddess Sovereignty, who is the goddess of the land, presents herself as ogrely, loathly, and foul, a giant with moldy black stringy hair, rotting teeth, filthy fingernails, and a multitude of asymmetries designed to weed out the squeamishly unworthy. In countless stories, she appears as the guardian of a spring or a forest where three questing princelings are in need of passage or water or shelter – and the price of whatever they need is either a kiss or a shag. The oldest two princelings always refuse her, but the youngest puts the needs of his brothers before his pride and before his own discomfort. And as soon as the deed is going to happen, she transforms into the most beautiful woman the young prince has ever seen, and rewards him by making him king. In some stories she tells him, “I am under an enchantment; I can be beautiful by day and hideous by night, or hideous by day and beautiful by night. Which do you prefer?” And he thinks about it a minute and says, “I trust you to make the right choice,” because, so the story teaches, this is what all women desire, to be sovereign over their own bodies. Ain’t that some truth! But the cleverest part is, the loathly lady weeds out the princes who aren’t willing to put the needs of others before their own, so that those who are willing share their love even with the most loathly (and lowly) are the princes who get to be kings. And so, we must prove ourselves worthy of her, and offer our love to the abused and devastated places. And boy do we have a lot of those.

We have our work cut out for us, and no mistake.

So stay tuned for more shamanism and animism from me, as it seems to my mind to be the best way to start to heal the damage we have done before we get dumped in the evolutionary trash bin and Mama Nature starts over with some other species. Crows maybe. The make tools. They can hold things with their talons and manipulate them with their beaks … But boy those damned opposable thumbs are sure handy (pun not intended but if the shoe fits …).