What is shamanism?

Shamanism and shamanic practice is popping up more and more these days. What exactly is it? Well, "exactly" is a little difficult to quantify, but here is a road map based on where I've been on the shamanic road so far:

Simply put, the shaman is "s/he who knows" or "s/he who sees". The word "shaman" or "saman" comes from the Tungus of North Central Asia. It means, literally, "he/she who knows"; the shaman is the person who sees what others do not, who finds information from the greater world. The shaman acts as an intermediary between the ordinary world and the world of Spirit.

Entering a different state of consciousness in order to access information not ordinarily available in "ordinary" consciousness is to practice shamanism, to work with Spirit. By many accounts, it is an ancient practice practiced in some form in every culture so far studied. It isn't new, nor is it "New Age"; indeed, it is very "Old Age" with pictograms, records, and oral histories dating back tens of thousands of years. Check out religious historian Mircea Eliade's tome "Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy" for a mind-numbingly exhaustive survey of thousands upon thousands of existing sources, eyewitness accounts, interviews, etc. I had to read it as prerequisite for taking the two week shamanic healing intensive course last year; it's quite fantastic.

According to Eliade's work, entering a "shamanic state of consciousness" can be done in many, many different ways, with entheogens, hallucinogens, ecstatic trance dancing, ecstatic trance singing, sleep deprivation, or some sort of sonic driving mechanism like drumming or rattling. I use drumming and occasionally dancing, just because they're cheap and legal. And I love my drums. Once in the altered state, the shaman or shamanic practitioner interacts with big-'s' Spirit in the form of working with little-'s' spirits to ask questions, effect healings for self or others, to find out answers to questions, to help put things, people, relationships, souls back together again.

Shamans are healers.

This works because shamans believe a few basic things, most of which can be summed up by Tom Crockett's "five stones" of shamanism which I introduced a couple of posts ago:

• Everything is Alive
• Everything is Aware and Conscious
• Everything is Dynamic and Changing
• Everything is Connected
• Everything Responds

If everything is alive, we can certainly have a relationship with it. If everything is aware and conscious, everything is participating in Life as we know it, and can give insight and help. If everything is dynamic and changing, new conditions are arising all the time that we might need to know about. If everything is connected, we all affect each other, the earth, the cosmos. And it affects us, too. If everything responds, we can communicate and have conversation.

In a shamanic journey, the shaman literally communicates with anything; rocks, trees, water, mythic beings, the sun, cancer, AIDS viruses. In my first journeys to contact an Irish ancestor, I initially interacted with a red-haired female water entity. She showed me in no uncertain terms that she flowed West, and that she was very female. She turned out to be the River Shannon, which does indeed flow West. Only if all things are connected and if all things are alive, aware, changing and responsive could I have known this without every consciously knowing it.

How and why is shamanism done? Although this varies in form, the shaman does his or her work in a shamanic journey, a state similar to meditation that looks much like a self-guided meditation, fueled by one of the above methods. Time after time after time in Eliade's work, he reports near identical methods of healing and journeying to speak with the spirits. From peoples in Japan, Siberia, Tibet, the Pacific Northwest, Pacific Islands, Central and South America, Greenland, Iceland, Central and Eastern Europe to Native Americans, almost all methods share commonality, sometimes very closely. Regardless of background, the shaman journeys into a cosmology that is described as extraordinarily similar by all accounts: There is a World Axis that contains Lower World(s) and Upper World(s) and (most of the time), Middle World(s). The shaman works with a familiar ally with whom s/he has established a long and trusting working relationship to seek the answer to the client's question, find the cure, the remedy, or bring back an essential part of the client to initiate or effect a healing.

The shaman is the glue that holds a group together - by being himself consciously connected and in conversation with the world in a way that others are often not. I didn't understand this when I first started out with this practice; that's why I said at length in an earlier post that shamanism is teaching me community. I can't not do this for my peeps, for anyone who asks, really. It's almost like a compulsion, definitely a motivating force.

The flavor of what shamanism is like is described in an article by Tom Cowan of Riverdrum.com in the recent issue of Journal of Shamanic Practice (yes, we have journals!  Lots of them!) that talks about the language used to describe "otherworld" experiences.  Drawing on the work of many others, he states that since our western vocabulary consists mostly of nouns, and since language informs thought just as thought informs language, we may not have adequate language to describe what it is that we experience there.  He talks instead of the Algonquin verb-based language which might have better constructs through which to understand.

An example might be that English speakers would look at a garden and say, "Look at all the flowers."  The Algonquin speaker might say, "Look at all the flowering."  Another examnple:  we loo up at the night sky and say, "Look at all the stars."  The Algonquin speaker might say, "Look at all that shining."

Cowan, Tom.  Twisted Language. The Journal of Shamanic Practice volume 2 issue 2 (Sept 2009): 11-16.

This captures the essence of it for me:  when I journey, I am immersed in the being-ness, the becoming-ness, the unfolding of it all, and am able to communicate with that unfolding.  Shamanism is more about what the world is doing, how it is interacting with itself, and not about what it is. 
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