Unit 3: Shamanism

"The world of everyday life cannot ever be taken as something personal that has power over us, something that could make us, or destroy us, because man's battlefield is not in his strife with the world around him. His battlefield is over the horizon, in an area which is unthinkable for an average man, the area where man ceases to be man."
--Don Juan Matus

As we saw in Unit 2, Wicca is a nature religion that has at its core the worship of the Goddess in all her archetypal forms. The Goddess of Wicca is the Great Mother, Mother Nature, Creator, Destroyer, the Queen of Heaven, the Moon (the source of all magical power), and the innermost self. In our final unit we will turn our attention to another nature-based religion: shamanism. And though Wicca and shamanism both share many similarities, including a reverence for the primal forces of nature, the differences between the two are profound. Wicca's outlook is naturalistic, the shamanic outlook is supernatural. In Wicca, the forces of nature are worshiped and revered just as they are, whereas in shamanism nature is surpassed--overcome--through the exploitation of extraordinary forces within the human psyche. Wicca concerns itself with community, whereas shamans belong to the same class of individuals as mystics in that they are separated from the mainstream of their community by training and intense spiritual practice. In Jungian terms, if we think of Wicca as representing the Great Mother, the feminine aspect of the psyche, then shamanism is the Hero, the male power of the spiritual warrior.

In "Shamanism," from his book Contemporary Paganism (2000), professor Graham Harvey points out that shamanism has often been described as the world's oldest religion, and evidence suggests it has existed for thousands of years before religion as we know it was created. The magnificent Paleolithic cave paintings of southern France dating from as early as 35,000 b.c.e. are often cited as evidence of shamanic art and ritual. Evidence of shamanic beliefs and practices shows up all around the world, from Australia to Alaska, Polynesia to Scandinavia. Noted French anthropologist Mircea Eliade described it as "the most archaic and most widely distributed occult tradition in the world." His 1974 book, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, is still the basic text on the subject.

As we will see in Carlos Castaneda's classic book on the subject, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1969), becoming a shaman involves learning the lore of the spirit world under the training of an elder shaman and a tutelary spirit. Shamanic initiation produces a healer who effects magical cures, a soul-guide who uses magical flight to enter the underworld or ascend to the stars, a sorcerer who communes with the animal spirits in their natural language, and a fierce adversary who may engage in psychic battles and take psychotropic drugs to access dangerous occult realms. The shaman, who is typically male, acquires an assortment of helping spirits, which take the form of animals, birds, insects, fish, plants, or spirits of the dead. Each has a specific function and helps him in performing his duties.

The shaman lives in two worlds: ordinary reality and non-ordinary reality. Non-ordinary reality is a unique altered state of consciousness often called the shamanic trance state. This ecstatic state sets shamans apart from other religious and mystical adepts, and the ability to enter the trance state at will is essential to shamanism. Over the millennia, shamans discovered a great array of methods for inducing their visionary states: drumming, rattling, chanting, fasting, sensory depravation, sexual abstinence, sweat baths, and staring into flames. Some societies employ psychotropic drugs for this purpose, as we also will see in The Teachings of Don Juan. But this raises an interesting question in itself: are drug-induced experiences genuine? Is there a difference between the drug-induced mystical visions achieved by shamans such as Don Juan and others, and the religious trances and visions described by the great mystics and saints of history? It is a question considered by Roger Walsh in his essay "Mysticism: Contemplative and Chemical."

Western interest in shamanism has spawned the so-called neo-shamanism movement, in which shamanic elements are adapted to Western life in an effort to regain a connection to the sacred, and as a means of personal empowerment. After all, as you shall see in The Teachings of Don Juan, above and beyond all else, shamanism is a path of power.