Odin wasn’t telling me to build a time machine, which is great because there’s no way I could’ve. I’ve realized that one thing he meant was for me to personally go back to when shamanism was the spiritual path no matter the spirits I encountered. It means I throw out the temples, the chains. It means going back to a time when we sat around the fire or hearth and the shaman was your entertainer.
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.
When you approach one of these many shamanic people, you really need to check what they are offering. With the exception of a few, I have seen a lot of love and light, angels, “all is good.” They offer snake oil services, and every last one of them that I have approached so far has gone, “Oh God. You were attacked by monsters. Oh, dear. Yeah. You need, like, a psychiatrist.”
We of the West live in a world where shamanism has been making a quiet comeback. Michael Harner in The Way of the Shaman outlined some of the reasons why. It’s offers a (usually) safe drug-free way to touch the divine. Holistic health method work well alongside the path. The spiritual ecology at the time the book was published provided fertile ground.
Language studies, music, and telling stories are my mundane focuses. I used to act as well, but in life you sometimes have to choose. I’d act again if the chance came, but for now I concentrate on things I can reach. I was taking a Montauk language class. Good people. Montauk is classed as Algonquian-Y, […]
01 – The Obligatory Introduction Agh Now that I have the blog built and I’m ready to go, all the fanciful paragraphs I’d thought up have flown away like so many scattered flutterbies. Where do I go from here? Well, let me start by telling you who I am. I’m Spearcarrier – I recently started […]