The Shaman Turns One

It is as difficult to explain what shamanism is as it is to define the context of my experimentation with the world of the shaman.

Peter Viebsky, a cultural anthropologist, provides a rich introduction to the complexity of defining shamanism.

“Shamans are at once doctors, priests, social workers and mystics. They have been called madmen or madwomen, were frequently persecuted throughout history, dismissed in the 1960s as a ‘desiccated’ and ‘insipid’ figment of the anthropologist’s imagination, and are now so fashionable that they inspire both intense academic debate and the naming of pop groups. Shamans have probably attracted more diverse and conflicting opinions than any other kind of spiritual specialist. The shaman seems to be all things to all people.”

The word shaman itself has received a great deal of debate in some areas of anthropology. According to Viebsky the word shaman comes from the language of the Evenk, a small Tungus-speaking group of hunters and reindeer herders in Siberia.

On the one hand the word replaces another term, witch doctor, which carries with it stereotypical images and historical misunderstandings of the spiritual role of the shaman. On the other hand, however, the term comes from a specific culture and is tied to the beliefs of that culture (the Siberian shaman).

Alice Kehoe, an anthropologist critical of the term, describes the challenge of New Age and modern Western forms of Shamanism. According to Kehoe the problem is that these groups not only misrepresent or 'dilute' genuine indigenous practices but do so in a way that reinforces negative cultural stereotypes.

Common words that are used in a variety of sources to describe the shaman include spiritual healer, guide, storyteller, and mystic. In a pseudo-new-age-styled text designed to teach shamanic principles, Sandra Ingerman captures this sentiment by stating “when many of us think of the word ‘shaman,’ it brings to mind a spiritual healer steeped in secret knowledge and mysterious powers.”

Although I truly appreciate that there are numerous books designed to teach the western world this ‘secret knowledge and mysterious power,’ I fear that these are merely an ethnocentric approach to gaining wisdom and insights without doing any of the hard work of understanding the complexity of a culture other than ones own.

Who knows, I could be wrong.

Each night for the past year, give or take, I put a compact disc of shamanic drumming into my computer and set it on a virtual replay cycle.

My computer monitor fades to black and then reemerges with hallucinogen-like images of rainbow colored lines and circles and stars and swirls. Over and over, dancing in harmony with the rhythm’s played on my crisp and clear Bose speakers.

Magic never sounded so good.

Perhaps the magic is indeed the medium; a young and beautiful multifaceted gift from God. As I hold my infant son in my lap, we rock back and forth allowing our hearts to beat in unison with the drumming and the dreaming and the drifting.

My wife smiles and leaves us alone to our bonding, pleased that only one of us will emerge from the experience awake, the other to rest peacefully through the night.

Truth be told, however, I am much too seasoned and cynical to take the leap of faith into the other world, the outer world, the under world. But I hold on tightly to my son because part of me believes that one night he will indeed transcend and if I am lucky I will get go along for the ride.

Postscript: Now that my youngest has traveled the sun in one full circle, it will not be much longer and I will not be able to get away with reading him Mircea Eliade and pretending it is a bed time story.