What is a Shaman?

By Sparrowhawk

Shamanism has become a bit of a fad since the 1980's. As the Western world searches for something that is missing in itself, it has turned to the East looking for a spiritual teaching and practice that might help us to understand ourselves more than the christian overview that has permeated our society for 2000 years now. There are very good reasons for this search. In the embedding of colonial christianity into our world view, most of our own indigenous knowing and connection to ourselves was cut off violently. Somewhere between 9 and 20 million indigenous Europeans where slaughtered in the christian inquisition. They were mostly women, mostly those that honoured the connection to the land and their ancestors, but often just people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Once the inquisition had gone through a village there was sometimes only 3 women left alive. It's a wonder we survived as a race at all. But we did. We survived as a race cut off from our indigenous roots, and we have been searching for them from the moment the christian church loosened its grip on politics. From the moment we realised that it did not fulfill any earthly need but promised only peace in death  if we followed it's rules, in fact. After 'world war 2', we had all had quite enough of death and glory. It was becoming obvious that dying for God and Country was not all it was cracked up to be, and many people found that the commercial glow of the 50's soon wore off. As  our own so-called culture offered little else, the children of post-war Europe went on their own quest for a better way. The other polarity beckoned as it does for most adolescents. They tried what their parents most disapproved of. So much was learned and opened up in those years. Most of what is good and bad about our current social stage was commenced in those years: meditation, organics, alternative lifestyle, energy and environmental conservation, animal awareness, women's rights, all were put on the agenda by the generation of change. Drugs became a big weight in the opposite direction as they turned from use as forms of 'enlightenment' to recreationally 'getting out of it'.  We did not find all of what we were looking for in the East and in drugs though. We found much that was good, but we did not find ourselves. 

Then the 80's commenced in a flurry of hope for the future. Many old ways were opened up for scrutiny. We began looking closer to home at the indigenous people in the land that we had overrun and settled: the Native American, Inuit, Australian Aboriginal, Maori, Mexican Curanderos. We tried to become clones of them. We went and lived with them in their places, learned their chants, borrowed their artifacts, wrote books about their ways and called them our own. In so doing we made them extremely mad. They felt 'strip-mined' yet again by the lost people of the West. But they taught us nevertheless. Still we did not find what we were looking for, though their ways were getting closer to our truth. We learned much about them. We were on the right scent but we did not find out who WE were.  

Somewhere in that time, we discovered shamans of all cultures. We found that they could travel between the worlds and bring information back for their people. Then a miracle happened. We found that way back, our own people also had a culture somewhat along the same lines as the peoples we had been pestering for knowledge. We found that quietly beavering away hidden in our own culture there were people who had held threads of our own ways hidden deep in the esoterica of christianity, though having nothing to do with christianity itself. We discovered the Western Mystical Traditions, and so our journey meandered back to whence it began "knowing itself for the first time". We experienced a huge growth in the followers of Wicca. The New Age Travelers attempted to restore a lifestyle of the hunter-gathers of Britain. All things Celtic came into favour. Thanks to the commitment of the Irish and Welsh, we still have something to search through, albeit sketchy and christianized, demonized and derided. But it's there.

And we had shamans too. We had Druids and Witches, Priestess' of Avalon, Merlin's and Pendragon's. At last we found something that had sat in our own consciousness and awaited renewal. We had begun the deeper journey into recalling and reclaiming ourselves. And out of this environment the New Celtic Shaman was born. Often a she, (women have less investment in retaining the current western model of culture for it has never served them well), but sometimes a he, they heard the call of the Ancestors.  One by one they honoured that call and began learning from whence they came. They began journeying the web of life to find what we had lost, and  restore it to the people so that they could stand beside our other indigenous brothers and sisters, and connect in peace and understanding. Wicca is currently the fastest growing spiritual movement among western women world-wide at the moment. As a result much of the old understanding of Earth as Womb, and connection to all life has been put back on the agenda in our lives. The balance between the sexes is being addressed on a deeper level than equal pay for equal work. Males as well as females are questioning their commitment to the further destruction of the planet for the purpose of more commodities making more money to buy more commodities. Middle class Europeans largely created the problem and until we find out who we really are and regain our own connection to Mother Earth, we cannot initiate the solving of that problem. For it is ours to solve. We have a responsibility to the other peoples of this world to clean up our  mess out of their backyards, as well as our own. But it has begun. There is a long way to go, but it has begun.

So, what is a shaman? They are people who are able to travel the web of life. They journey into the land of the Ancestors to reconnect and learn at their feet. They meet with the representative of the Animal and Plant Worlds to bring peace amongst us. And they are people who continue to plumb the depths of their own psyche, clearing out the infections of the current dysfunctional view of life, in order to be up to the job. They are people who know nothing but are willing to find out and be taught, not by this world, but by the worlds of the alternative realities that live all around us. Their job is to serve the land and the people, and in so doing are served. Their primary function is to connect up that which has been disconnected, and that's just about everything. Until enough reconnection to ourselves is achieved, we have no hope of reconnecting en masse to the rest of the planet. That's a big job. Many are needed. Shamans are what can help that happen. But they are just people. Just like you and me, but open to finding that which was lost. Are you such a one??