But the biocentric part of me says that humans are also not the center of the universe. It means understanding that the spirits, the land, the animals, and the Wyrd all have their own sovereign agency. You respect their domains. You don’t walk into someone else’s hall and demand they cater to you—like I learned the hard way with Bragi. You respect the ecosystem.
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.
It’s a deep statement which cuts right to the heart of my own rocky beginnings in this mess. It’s been nearly a year since I was thrust into this, and for much of it, I felt I was being pushed into becoming something I didn’t like. “Embrace the darkness,” a voice once told me in the middle of an attack. I kicked back hard. The thought of becoming something dark and unforgivable was not an acceptable outcome.
This isn’t me deciding last week things were fantastic. This is me having always lived the fantastic, and sometimes being confused when people who pray to their gods or cast a spell can’t go as deep into it as I am or do. Do you believe in your gods? I have asked. Yes or no. Do you believe in fairies? Yes or no. Turns out that for many it’s no, they just don’t accept it about themselves.