What a Shaman Ain't

Ranting about a half-assed loan word with more baggage than substance

I’m not a fan of the term shaman. I use it, kind of a lot, but I’m not like, thrilled about it. It’s a term that comes from a pretty specific culture (traditional Siberian societies) and was recruited to describe similar-but-not-identical roles in other cultures, cultures as disparate as Andean, Central American, North American, now even various European and African traditions, Korean, Chinese… it’s kind of become a catch-all for any traditional role that looks ceremonial or woo to we Moderns.

These roles have all gotten flattened and mushed together, but they were mostly pretty different, though admittedly overlapping. They combined things like healing, mysticism, journeying to spirit worlds, energy work, exorcisms, helping with mental health crises, divination, petitioning gods and spirits, affecting the weather, guiding the ritual life of the village, traveling to foreign places to share knowledge… many more roles and duties as well.

And nowadays, a new role has been added to the repertoire of meanings of this word. A role that goes something like “eager 20-something who went to Peru to do psychedelics and dance in a headdress so they could come back to Amsterdam or New York or wherever to run cacao ceremonies and crystal bowl sound healing sessions.”

I’m being mean. Sorry. …Not sorry enough to delete the paragraph, but like. A bit sorry.

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Cards on the table, the problem of the underlying “shaman” archetype is something I puzzle over a lot mostly because it’s an archetype that seems to be a core part of my own being. It seems clear to me that I’m here to embody certain things about that underlying archetype… which is made difficult when the underlying archetype gets so obscured and bent and cloudy.

The same way that I think the Healer archetype has been largely chased out of medicine, leaving the field run by people who don’t embody that archetype, and thus interfered with the process of healing in our culture — there’s a dynamic at play where the actual Shamanic archetype has mostly been buried under a certain set of indigenous-wisdom-larps that obscure the real thing and interfere with the role as it wants to emerge in our time and place.

Carl Jung is one of my go-to examples here. I believe that he provides us a much clearer look at the work of the shamanic archetype as it fits itself to a particular time and place.

Jung himself said that all of his work, everything that was unique and new in Jungian psychology, came from his engagement with inner imagery when he “threw a schizophrenia” in his late 30s and was immersed in the archetypal realm of the collective unconscious. If you haven’t read The Red Book, you may not fully understand what this means — and if you’ve never done any journeying yourself, you may not fully understand what he wrote in The Red Book.

Jung was caught up in an underworld journey, approached and overcome by archetypal presences — and even this language is part of Jung’s genius. In other times, we might have simply said he was approached by the gods, by spirits, by guides and entities, angels and demons. But Jung understood the time he was living in, the society he was living in. He made conscious effort both to hide his direct experiences (the Red Book was a private document, and wasn’t published until 2009, decades after his death) and to express the fruits of those experiences in the language that would let them take root in the wider culture — the language of scholarship and academia. So he didn’t talk about journeying to other worlds, he talked about the practice of Active Imagination and the Transcendent Function to effect Individuation and an acquaintance with the Collective Unconscious.

It’s not that Jung ignored previous and other expressions of this archetype — he went to see and study the traditions of Native American tribes, he studied and wrote about eastern religions, kundalini yoga, taoism, etc. He was very interested in the many ways that humans had accessed these areas of direct experience, and how they’d brought wisdom back from there.

But he also recognized that for Europeans in the early 1900s, the proper way to bring back wisdom and healing from other worlds wasn’t to put on another culture’s robes and do their dances and chant their words in the names of their gods. He recognized that if he was to do what he was here to do, he had to do it in a way that met the needs of his people, his time, his place.

This is especially important with the shaman archetype, because it is very much an archetype that’s all about the collective. It’s about bringing things to your people. You can’t really do that if you’re simply copying the paths that were suitable for some other people in some other time and place.

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At this point, it’s probably good to inquire a bit into what I actually think the underlying archetype of the shaman is.

As near as I can tell, this archetype is kind of a chimera. It’s not actually a single archetype — it’s a family of archetypal combinations. As a first clumsy iteration, I might say that someone who’s expressing archetypes that synergies with one another around at least 3 of the following archetypal functions fits into this family of chimeras:

• Healing/wholing people, whether physically, psychologically, or energetically

• Journeying to other realms (whether you believe that to be spiritual realms, psychological realms like the collective unconscious, or whatever else — they Go Somewhere)

• Bringing back knowledge or wisdom from the places they journey

• Dealing with the presences in those other realms, in ways that benefit the world and community around them

• Holding knowledge and skills about healing, journeying, wholeness, realms, and so on, so they can be a resource to people who come to them with questions.

• A difficult-to-describe move like “gardening the collective energy” or their people. Perceiving and managing the flow of the community.

• Perceiving, managing, and holding knowledge about gods, spirits, egregores, etc that affect the community.

I’m definitely missing and overlooking some things, but this would be my starting point for a vague definition. People whose Calling brings them to develop along 3 or more of these vectors belong to this archetypal family.

To point out the obvious, one of the huge huge huge differences between traditional cultures and our own is that “our people” and “our community” mean insanely different things for us — and thus helping, healing, and managing them is pretty much an entirely different task for modern members of this archetypal family.

I was about to write more on this but it’s actually too huge of a topic so I’m just gonna leave it there for now.

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Okay, where am I at?

I don’t know. We’d probably scoff at someone who feels the Warrior archetype strongly in themselves, and then runs off to the islands of Greece to learn traditional spear handing and phalanx formations, rather than joining the marines and learning to handle guns and drones and whatnot. We’d probably scoff at someone who wants to be a farmer in middle America, and trains for it by going off to rural Denmark to dress in old school peasant rags and learn to use wooden ploughs and pray to Odin for rain.

And yet, when someone feels a shamanic calling, and runs off to learn how traditional Amazonian cultures handled such a thing, we mostly just go “yeah that tracks” and leave it there.

Feels weird to me.

On the other hand… what else is one supposed to do? It’s not like our culture has any real path for helping such people figure out what they’re doing. Even the place I started this rant with, the word shaman — we’re so divorced from the value of this role that we don’t have our own word for it. We just took someone else’s word, then took someone else’s methods and training for it and left it at that.

I think in some ways, this is what I’ve been chewing on for years, trying to fix for years. I made a somatic resonance course and an imaginal journeying course; I’ve run cohorts on rediscovering the archetypes inside you, on returning to your dreams to communicate with the unconscious and the realms it opens into; I’ve written on metis and the heart and the places where reality tries to transmit wisdom through us. I’ve been trying, for myself and for the other people stumbling along beside me and behind me, to mark out some of the major trailheads on this path; been trying to save some time and trouble for the others, to help them get through some things in a few months that took me a couple years to piece together, because I had so few people who could show me what I needed to see.

But everything I’ve made is basically a beginner’s beginners primer written by a beginner for even earlier beginners — and now that I’ve hit harder and stranger areas, I’m right back to where I was before all that: no path to follow, just a lot of conflicting maps that all go somewhere that isn’t quite where I’m going. I have to look through all the maps to get a feel for the region and do my best guesswork for forging ahead where I am going.

I’ve seen some glimpses of it, but mostly by triangulation, not example.

As in, Jung provides a good example of how someone in Jung’s situation can forge ahead with integrity and integrate this archetype. Rob Burbea provides another good example, of how someone in the situation he found himself in could skillfully do what needs to be done. Philip K. Dick, in his own way, provided an important though in my opinion more chaotic and uncertain example. James Hillman wasn’t quite the same thing, but he was somewhere in the region, and did much of the job well, though it’s also interesting to see in him the places where I view deficiencies — even if they’re only deficient because I’m looking with eyes that are trying to do something he wasn’t trying to do.

There are a few more of these — and none of them are really examples of how to go where I’m going. Only examples of how someone in a specific situation can navigate well within the situation they find themselves in.

I’m trying my best to navigate well. But it’s hard when even the words and language for the landscape I’m navigating are half-assed loan words with more baggage than substance.

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Where am I at where am I at where’s the rant going, ummmmm.

Okay yeah, maybe shaman is worse than useless as a term for the underlying archetype. And any attempt to form a neologism or pasted-on label would also be worse than useless, as it would also bend the expression of the archetype into a particular direction before the expression has actually even taken a form that works in our time and culture.

Soooooo. I’m getting the same message for this that I’ve been getting about basically everything lately: stop thinking about it, stop trying to plan things or look ahead, strop trying to shape things — the way you are right now, you’ll only interfere with things and leave them malformed if you try to impose yourself on them before you’re ripe. Stay in the present, stay in the body, let yourself be changed, and then see what needs to be done.

It’s good and necessary advice. And it also keeps making me itchy, because following it leaves me feeling like I’m sitting on the sidelines during the most intense turning point of the game.

Anyways. Yeah. I don’t like the word shaman. And I don’t have a better one. And I’m just gonna keep finding what this thing that I am is.