By Scott Mead

Just as the world that the shaman operates in, the term shaman is a vague, almost undefinable concept. To the layman, this witch doctor is a mythological being who has potions and bat's feet, to the anthropologist the shaman is an individual with a special ability to communicate with the supernatural world. Evidence of shamanic practice have been dated as far back as the Upper Paleolithic and from all four corners of the earth. (Halifax, p.3) Many scholars believe this method of interacting with the unseen world has been with us ever since man had self-realization. Shamanism was the way of life for the hunter-gatherer bands that roamed the earth. Life and death, the forces of nature, and the struggle for existence were daily battles for pre-modern man. Although the techniques for dealing with the supernatural vary as widely as the cultures in which the practices are used, the shaman is always the doorway to the other realities.

Though nearly all of a shaman's characteristics and personality traits are socio-culturally based, three common threads exist between all shamans, irrelevant of time or circumstance. All shamans have had a divine calling, whether sought out or passively revealed. As a means of communicating with the otherworlds the shaman uses altered states of consciousness. These altered states of consciousness are achieved through various organic, ascetic, or rhythmic means. Finally, death, although admittedly common to everyone, is a precursor to a new life for the neophyte shaman. This symbolic death and rebirth process is where the shaman draws his power from. He understands and knows the cycle of life.

Signs that an individual is destined to be a shaman can start from prebirth and continue through old age. If a child is to be an initiate, the acting shaman will be made aware of this either directly from the spirit world or indirectly through a sign given to another member of the group. Of course, humanity can never be factored out of any equation and therefore we must acknowledged that not all callings are of strictly a divine origin but could very well be the swelling of a father's ego. However, because of the nature of their skill, which is regarded as a very personal ability, quack shamans do not last long. The forces are known and manipulatable, any failure in the process is directly related to the performance of the shaman, not to some unaccountable divine interference. Many times dreams are the messengers of the "the great task." Severe sickness and other near-death experiences also serve as agents by which initiates are introduced to the workings of the underworlds. Often, with the recovery from one of these situations comes the power to heal others. (Waal Malefijt, p.231) Among the Native American peoples, a youth will be shown in his vision quest if he is to be a shaman. The story of Lame Deer, a North American Sioux, is an ideal example of the uniqueness of shamanhood. He received his vision when he was sixteen in a very traditional vision quest. However, due to the pressures of metropolitan society he lost sight of his vision, and only after wandering through the white man's world for most of his young adulthood did Lame Deer return to his path as a holy man. He captures the essence of a shaman's life in a comment he made to his friend Richard Erdoes not long before his death:

I believe that being a medicine man, more than anything else, is a state of mind, a way of looking at and understanding this earth, a sense of what it is all about. Am I a wicasa wakan? I guess so. What else can or would I be? Seeing me in my patched-up, faded t-shirt, with my down-at-the-heel cowboy boots, the hearing aid whistling in my ear, looking at the flimsy shack with its bad-smelling outhouse which I call my home... It all doesn't add up to a white man's idea of a holy man. You've seen me drunk and broke. You've heard me curse or tell a sexy joke. You know I'm not better or wiser than other men. But I've been to the hilltop, got my vision, and power; the rest is just trimmings. (Halifax, p.70)

It is rare to have "shamanship" passed down through families. Only in societies where political power and prestige accompany shamanhood do we find this tendency. Even in these instances the neophyte must show some desire for and basic skills with dealing on the spiritual plane. (Waal Malefijt, p.233)

As we are all aware, some more keenly than others, though, there are multiple states of consciousness. Our daily, waking, interacting state is defined as the mundane. When we can look down on that realm from a better vantage point we are in an ecstatic state. It is from these positions that shamans find the cures and answers they seek. Probably the most archaic method of altering one's consciousness comes from drumming and rhythm. Nearly as old is the use of some plant or fungal concoction. Today, psychedelic drugs have been heralded as the key to self enlightenment and transcendence, yet they are not the important factor. The burden still rests on the spirit of the individual to open his eyes from such heights and, with knowledge and skill, use the information he has found to better his fellow man. Maria Sabina, a shaman from a small mexican village, was introduced to healing by the psilocybine mushroom when she was just a young girl.

I was eight years old when a brother of my mother fell sick. He was very sick, and the shamans of the sierra that had tried to cure him with herbs could do nothing for him. Then I remembered what the teo-nanacatl [mushrooms] told me: that I should go and look for them when I needed help. So I went to take the sacred mushrooms, and I brought them to my uncle's hut. I ate them in front of my uncle, who was dying. And immediately the teo-nanacatl took me to their world, and I asked them what my uncle had and what I could do to save him. They told me an evil spirit had entered the blood of my uncle and that to cure him we should give him some herbs, not those the curanderos gave him, but others. I asked where these herbs could be found, and they took me to a place on the mountain where tall trees grew and the waters of a brook ran, and they showed me the herb that I should pull from the earth and the road I had to take to find them...[After regaining consciousness] it was the same place that I had seen during the trip, and they were the same herbs. I took them, I brought them home, I boiled them in water, and I gave them to my uncle. A few days later the brother of my mother was cured. (Halifax, pp. 131-2)

Nature is much more alive to those who have true vision. Maria Sabina's story is but one of an ageless record of shamanic practice.

?The source of a shaman's power is his knowledge of the workings of the otherworlds. The only way to secure this power is to experience these other worlds. That includes death. Because with death is rebirth. This death ranges from a quite literal physical death to a purely psychological experience, with one extreme being no more valid than the other. "The crisis of a powerful illness can also be the central experience of the shaman's initiation. It involves an encounter with the forces that decay and destroy. The shaman not only survives the ordeal of a debilitating sickness or accident but is healed in the process. Illness then becomes the vehicle to a higher plane of consciousness...The shaman- and only the shaman- is the healer who has healed himself or herself; and as the healed healer, only he or she can know the territory of disease and death." (Halifax, pp.10-11) When deaths are more symbolic, as achieved via drugs, asceticism, etc., they often follow a particular pattern. The initiate watches as his body is dismembered his flesh ripped from the bones and often consumed by demons. The demons which eat of his flesh are those ailments which he has the power to cure. "The flesh removed from the bones is scattered on all paths of the underworld; they also say it is distributed among the nine or three times nine generations of the spirits that cause sickness, whose roads and paths the shaman will in future know. He will be able to help with the ailments caused by them; but he will not be able to cure those maladies caused by spirits that did not eat of his flesh... The territory of disease has been revealed to them, and they can now guide the suffering across the terrain of sickness and even death." (Halifax, p.14) The Biblical account of Jesus' life, and life after death, is a very close approximation to the initiation of a shaman. Most Christian theologians would cringe at the thought that Jesus may have been a shaman who delved in mysticism. But how could it have been any other way?

Like anything worthwhile, shamans have an important purpose. He or she sets the equilibrium for the society. When things fall out of balance the shaman enters the otherworlds and sets things right again. For this reason people look to the shaman for daily guidance. This type of guidance is all exemplary. The shaman usually does the same physical labor as all the others, eats the same, lives the same. He or she is the same until there is turmoil, at that point the shaman is the rock to which others cling. "As the shaman is one who is in dynamic relationship to the 'axis of the world,' the shaman is also the one who balances and centers the society, creating harmony from which life springs." (Halifax, p.15) In this position there is no role which the shaman may find him or herself. Disputes between families molds him into an arbitrator, droughts change him into a rainmaker, his knowledge of nature makes him the source of where to hunt game or find food. Many times he or she is the keeper of the mythology and other important cultural information. In any capacity, the life of the shaman is one of self sacrifice and the reverence of truth.

Works Cited

Halifax, Joan, Ph.D. Shamanic Voices: a survey a visionary narratives. Arkana Books, 1991.

Waal Malefijt, Annemarie Religion and Culture Waveland Press, 1968.