It went against what my teacher wanted me to do, but I’m very glad I listened to my inner instinct and started hunting down the shamanistic crisis. I learned the phases. I learned they’re not all according to the same plan. And I learned that when my powers came alive last year, I was a full fledged shaman. A baby. Ready for training. I was in what many call the “resting phase” when my butterfly wings were still drying, and I was fragile. Vulnerable. A tasty snack without elders to protect me, as per tradition.

I can tell you when I was captured. I was minding my own business, enjoying the view from Saturn’s rings. I thought I tripped. I had fallen face first into the rocks, and catlike hoped no one saw me. I called my friend and laughed about it. The next day I noticed the tether on my right ankle, the same one I had tripped by. I didn’t trip. I was lassoed. In fact, the entities that lassoed me had chased me for a while, but I was always too fast for them. “Damn angels,” I used to mutter. But they weren’t angels, not in the holy sense.

That is the day I was fully hijacked, as my father had warned could happen. But he wasn’t here to protect me, and the family had been misaligned away years before anyway. I had no one left. By design, you’d think.

There are two types of shaman: horizontal and vertical. I know this from a brief conversation with Dr. Terryl Janik, who dropped information that put me on the path to learning the dark side of shamanism that no one talks about. It’s a sordid path filled with assault and victims covered in blood. It’s a tale covering the sick symptom of an imbalance. The yin and the yang, as it were.

So dear readers, let me tell you about the two sides of shamanism that thrived in the Northeast Woodlands of the United States before Christianity ever set foot on the shores. If it weren’t for Frank Speck and others of his day, we might not know as much as we do. If you are an awakening shaman soul in the United States, perhaps this post will help you restore some of the lore: things that have been stripped from us but other parts of the world continued to carry. It doesn’t matter if you’re White, Black, Orange or Purple. The art doesn’t care what color you are. If it did, it wouldn’t have survived so worldwide in so many forms.

Those of you who know traditional shamanistic paths from other parts of the world, from the Mongolian Böö and Udagan to the South American curanderos and machi, may recognize some of it. After all shamanism, and yes I’m using the anthropological blanket term for my own purposes, is the oldest and most worldwide of religions. It spread from wherever the origin points actually were (you can argue about that elsewhere if you please) and kept to humanity because humanity is literally evolved to need it, to do it, to be it. Well. One of the Algonquian words is pawwaw.

We used to make totems, or fetishes, for our spirits as they still do in parts of Mongolia. The Ulcha carve their totems, or sewen. In Siberia they have ongon. In the Kongo they have minkisi. These little totems, of which the words for have been lost for the most part, acted as houses and representations. They were home base for helper spirits. They held a shaman’s power. They were friends, companions.

A new pawwaw would find a place where a spirit resided and sing to coax it out and be a friend. I suppose that’s a form of taming it, but I don’t see that in the same way as many people do. My dog is my friend, but he’s tamed and subservient. The spirits are co-workers and family. You’d woo them as you’d woo a beautiful maiden, sometimes beating your drum and singing for days. Or you’d play your flute. You’d even take a tiny bow and play it: the first Native American style mouthharps¹. The icaros of the Amazon, the mbira of Zimbabwe, and the khomus of Siberia have similar methods.

There were initiation rites, as well. A young Penobscot boy might drink a white tea and fast for several nights, then spend a period of time isolated as his new shaman wings dried and became whole. Similar rites exist all over the world, with Alaska coming to my mind first. Another very strong parallel is that a pawwaw would come about in a variety of ways, the same ones that hold true worldwide: sickness, death, the spirits coming for a crisis, a strong dream, and any other number of supernatural events.

There’s another very important parallel; the reason why I’m writing tonight. It’s where things went askew a long time ago, before the United States became a thing. When my direct ancestors—men and women both—were strong spiritual leaders and grand sachems. Probably when other direct ancestors were walking the tundra with their staffs and disciples towards the next village to foretell prophecy and get a good meal. This would be the light and dark of shamanism, the balance between two halves: sorcerers and dreamers. Vertical. Horizontal.

Yes, there are two different types of shaman. Other parts of the world divide them into the White and Black shamans of Mongolia, the curanderos and brujos of the Amazon, the machi and kalku of the Mapuche, or the nganga and ndoki of Central Africa. And more, I’m sure of it.

But only in part thanks to Harner, who admitted he’d provided only a baseline, many here don’t understand this. They think that shamanism is about drum-beating and, I’m sad to say, gatekeeping when someone comes with an astral problem that’s too big for them to understand much less handle. They snap, “Stay out of the astral!” They tell people what spirits they can and cannot work with, going so far as to try to break apart loving relationships while probably knowing full well they risk breaking their fellow practitioner’s power. They travel into the dream while imposing cookie cutter standards on how a person goes. They insist everything must happen in lucid dreaming and softly, for healing and mental health only.

They are only one half of the equation, and if I had to use a movie reference to get my point across then let me remind everyone that Darth Vadar’s purpose was to rebalance the Force because the dreamers were out of control.

What I’m saying is that of the two halves of shamanism, Harner’s core shamanism taught only the side we used to call dreamer. So let’s start with the dreamers. Let’s talk about what they do. We already know the methods in the American Northeast and probably other parts (including Alaska). I’ll just stick with the general stuff: the stuff that’s so prevalent to the point of pain in parts of the West.

The dreamers are healers. They’re what many reading this post are familiar with. They seek lost objects or people using their astral sight. They’d peek at places far away to locate the enemy or where the game has gone. They make herbal cures. They do the soul retrievals. They can psychopomp, guiding the dead to rest so they don’t stick around and become a problem for the living. They master the art of lucid dreaming and work primarily in the dream, or the astral to some of you. Anthropologically speaking, these are the practitioners who work horizontally to keep the community running. I like to remember it this way: you lay horizontally to sleep. At least, as a general rule.

It’s safe to say that most of the Western paths create horizontal shamans. Dreamers only admitted here! It’s palatable in a society that increasingly wants to strip away our ability to defend ourselves. Experienced practitioners will advise protections, but only in the form of armor and an entourage of spirit bodyguards. Did I mention they’re only half of it, yet? I’m saying it again. Not everyone can drum into the dream the way they do. Not everyone even sees the world the way they do. Not everyone lays horizontal on a mat to work with the spirits. There are those who need to stand: the sorcerers.

It isn’t that a sorcerer has to actually stand in order to get into the dream. They can drum, they can meditate. Or, like me, they must dance or be moving their body somehow. The Ulcha drum, dance and sing at the same time, if you like complications. They’re mostly healers same as anywhere else. One distinction is that they stand. They’re vertically bent. What makes a sorcerer is that he’s a spiritual warrior. It’s how he rolls.

I also have to step to the side a bit on that as well. Being a shaman doesn’t mean you’re going to fit into a perfect mold of horizontal or vertical. Some shaman in Mongolia will work as a white shaman one day but then work as a black shaman the next. If you try to pour yourself into one of two boxes, you’re committing the same sins as the Western practitioner. You’re going to have things you’re good at and things you aren’t, just like with any other life skill.

The pawwaw sorcerer could throw hexes and call spirits to do battle. He sometimes was strong enough to do things visible to the naked eye, like moving small things with his mind or working with the weather. His dances were legendary. His songs could strike fear into the wicked. His antics and boasts were village entertainment as he acted as the spiritual equivalent of the brave warrior. They’d fight each other for shits and giggles to test their mettle, throwing their spirit helpers at one another, and sometimes they’d get serious. (As a matter of fact, this still happens in parts of South America today with the brujos.) He could also psychopomp and heal.

I’m very aware that over the past couple of generations, the term sorcerer has become a bad thing. It’s not just because of the notorious assault sorcery that can happen in South America, where certain shamanic practitioners—like the Kanaimà cults—will literally cut up a victim alive to eat their power and life force. It goes further back, at least in the Northeast when the first Europeans had come with their ships and diseases.

To the Puritans and the Jesuits, anyone doing this kind of heavy spiritual lifting was immediately branded a Satanic witch. Well, let’s be honest. The spirits were also demons to the Europeans. Anything they didn’t understand was evil. Then the people began to get sick. The sorcerers couldn’t fight it while the dreamers also didn’t know what to do. One by one, villages dwindled into nothing.

Social shift happened, the thing that unbalanced everything. The sorcerers became the source of all evil. They were blamed for everything bad, even feats a dreamer was more likely to do. Where once a wealthy family would have employed a personal “house sorcerer” to protect the family, it became wise to avoid anyone like that altogether. “I’m a dreamer!” became the common protest (of which I even heard my father say) because by the 1900’s, if you were born vertically and the spirits began teaching you… you would simply disappear.

Now when we say the word sorcerer, we’re talking about the killers and monsters. We’re not talking about the glory days that echo in movies and fantasy stories. We’ve forgotten that a sorcerer wasn’t a monster, he was a warrior with a very very important job: he protected all of us from the spiritual predators. The real monsters. He battled for our lives.

Maybe he wore spirit armor the same way shamans in Mongolia still do. Maybe his drum was his voice and not a horse. Maybe his spirits were the strongest. Or maybe he was a simple man, like my father, who warded the yard and batted away the monster from his daughter’s bedroom with a shout. Either way, I’ve noticed that everyone is so centered on “Sorcerer Bad” and even “Sorcerer Myth” that the ecosystem is out of whack.

We need our sorcerers. We need to remember how to re-balance the energy around us. I had a notable ayahuasca shaman tell me the other day that wicked forces had been attacking us for a long time now. It got so bad she wrapped herself up and stopped allowing anything to touch her. I myself have been dealing with a hijacking since sometime last year, all the while trying to get people to hear me that it’s not shamanic crisis… because I’d become full-fledged before that. Dreamers have told me “you must need a soul retrieval” when I need someone to fight for me, at least long enough for me to get to where I can pick up my spear and join the war. We’re so uninformed and out of whack without the memories of our brave warriors, we can’t even tell when things have gone wrong. We think it’s right that our legs are being lobbed off and our entrails are strewn across the sky. Pro tip: it’s not.

My father once told me that our family had fled because of our power. That there was a curse following us. That we’d faced bad juju. Now that I’ve had to read and regain things the family had lost, I understand. I came from a family of sorcerers, and I am just as vertical as the rest. It came from both sides, too. My multicultural heritage blended so that I and my brothers didn’t have a chance to be normal. We were always going to stand on the outside. Then when we were attacked, plucked one by one, we fell. All of us. Me included.

Why? Because sorcerers in this day and age are rare. I’d hate to think I’m the last pawwaw, and especially not the last sorcerer. In my line, though, I am. Society took care of that. The forces that will take a young pawwaw down ensured it. But sitting here tonight writing this for all of you, I’m desperate that you hear me. I don’t have to be the last one. I don’t have to be the only one. I’d rather I weren’t.

I’ve had a very hard life. Then when I finally came out the other end, because of my vertical bent, I was immediately lassoed and trapped. I was attacked. Both spiritual and human predators came to feast, because a sorcerer’s power is like Essence of Gelfling. I sit here with thorns in my eyes. Blood pours down my cheeks. If I must be blinded, I’ll do it standing. Vertically.

If you’re trying to do things horizontally and it’s not quite right, consider that you might be vertical. Consider that you’re not meant for the cookie cutter passive way of being. I know I used to look at those people with envy. How easy it seemed for them, that they weren’t being attacked. That with all the protections I was taught to put out, it still wasn’t enough. It hurt that in their pettiness and ignorance they brushed me aside when I needed an elder, someone to keep me alive while my wings unfurled. But tonight, it’s suddenly very important to me that I’m vertical. That I was meant to be a spiritual warrior.

It’s important that my gifts are hands on. That I can slice a spirit in half, fire harpoons across the world, and change my shape into gigantic centipedes that make even dragons tremble in fear. I can pull poisons or rebalance you. I can walk you across the water of the dead without fear. I embrace the dark while working for a brighter morning. I’m needed this way.

You might be, too. Let us be sorcerers together. Let us defend people from the forces that made an experienced shaman curl into a permanent ball. Let us stand. We’re not meant to lay down. Without us, the wyrd is unbalanced. We are the yang to the yin. We belong here.

It’s not a safe job. You will get scars, and the dreamers will probably still look at you sideways when you don’t fit the mold. But if you’re built to stand, lying down will only kill you faster. You’ll be more than a sitting duck. You’ll be a pig with an apple in your mouth.

History books tried to bury us, and the neo-shamans try to meditate us away, but the ecosystem doesn’t care about weekend retreats. It needs its immune system. It’s time we remembered how to fight. So if you’re out there getting chewed on while someone tells you your soul is just ‘resting,’ stop lying on the mat. Stand up. The unseen world has enough tourists. It’s time the vertical shamans danced to the beat of their own drums once again.

___________

For reading if you like that kind of stuff:

• Kathleen J. Bragdon (Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650, 1996)
• William S. Simmons (Spirit of the New England Tribes, 1986)
• Caroline Humphrey (Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Daur Mongols, 1996)
• Frank G. Speck, Penobscot Shamanism (1919)
• Piers Vitebsky (The Shaman, 2001)
• Kira Van Deusen (Flying Tiger: Women Shamans and Storytellers of the Amur, 2001)

1. Bruno Nettl (Native American Instruments / Music in Primitive Culture) ↩︎