Ishtar wrote:I'd like to add an addendum to my previous post on shamanism, as I want to be clear about what I mean when I say: "Shamans say such and such" or "Shamans see such and such..."
I do also see and experience these things myself, but if I say 'I', that might give the impresson that it's just me - and who's to say that I may not just be a bit of a nutter who goes wandering off with the fairies. So I say "shamans say..." which they do anyway. It's all recorded in a book that provides the nearest thing we have to any kind of scientific or empiric evidence for shamans and shamanic technques and that is Mircae Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
Eliade is dead now, but he was professor of Professor of History of Religions at Harvard and has a chair there named after him. His book on shamanism was first published in France in 1951, and basically it's a compilation of scholarly reports from anthropologists who studied shamans and shamanic cultures from all the over world - from Siberia to South America, and India and Tibet to Australia. Finland and the Eskimos. This was the first time anyone had brought all this information together in one place and published it.
These anthropologists wrote their reports on shamanic practises using the usual objective way of remaining outside the action as a neutral observer. So for a long time, few really understood what actually happened when the shaman went into trance; we had only had their reports of what they say happened, and some of them were very forthcoming on this to these anthropologists.
So the by-word was 'non-involvement' and to study these shamans in the same way we may study rats in cage in a lab ... until another anthropologist, Michael Harner, who was working with a tribe in South America, decided to change all that. He realised that in order to really understand shamanism, he needed to learn to go into trance himself and have a practical inside and subjective experience of where the shaman actually goes.
Harner's first shamanic journey was such a revelation to him that it transformed his life. Over time, he went from being an anthropologist to being a shaman and also founding the American Foundation for Shamanic Studies: http://www.shamanism.org/. He is almost single handedly responsible for the sudden surge in interest in shamanism among us previously non-shamanic folk, and the training of thousands of shamans.
The British branch of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies is called the Sacred Trust, and it is with them that I'm undergong my training. I'm just about to start the second year of their two-year Shamanic Practitioner training course. Here's the link to the Sacred Trust: http://www.sacredtrust.org/
I should add that before I started the course, I already had a very thorough understanding of what shamanism was about from my years of study in India and also back here in the UK. I just didn't have the practical experience.
So I hope that's demystified what can seem to be a very mystifying subject!
Ishtar -
I think I first read Eliade about thirty years ago.......
So, I go out to the woodpile and pick up my axe.
Instead of splitting wood,
I split the wind with my axe.
The wood is nonsensical.
I split the wind.
"Cold mountain is a house
Without beams or walls.
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is blue sky.
The rooms all vacant and vague
The East wall beats on the West wall
At the center nothing".
From "Cold Mountain Poems"
Twenty-four poems by Han-Shan
Translated by Gary Snyder
john
