Harner - The Way of the Shaman

To Sandra, Terry, and Jim

Wallace Black Elk and William S. Lyon

Black Elk: The Sacred Ways of a Lakota

Percy Bullchild

The Sun Came Down

Carl A. Hammerschlag, M.D.

The Dancing Healers: A Doctors Journey of Healing with Native Americans

Jamake Highwater

Ritual of the Wind: North American Indian Ceremonies, Music and Dance

Ptolemy Tompkins

This Tree Grows Out of Hell: Mesoamerica and the Search for the Magical Body

Alberto Villoldo and Erik Jendresen

The Four Winds: A Shamans Odyssey into the Amazon

Grateful acknowledgment is made for use of copyrighted material from the following sources: Spirit, Spirit: Shaman Songs by David Cloutier. Copyright 1973 by David Cloutier. Reprinted by permission of the author and Copper Beech Press. The Hand Game of the Flathead Indians, by Alan P. Merriam. Journal of American Folklore 68, 1955. Copyright 1955 by the American Folklore Society. Reprinted by permission of the author and the American Folklore Society.

I also would like to acknowledge the research assistance of Bruce Woych and Karen Ciatyk, and the advice of my editor, John Loudon, as well as that of my wife, Sandra Harner.

.. Aboriginal medicine-men, so far from being rogues, charlatans or ignoramuses, are men of high degree; that is, men who have taken a degree in the secret life beyond that taken by most adult malesa step which implies discipline, mental training, courage and perseverance .. they are men of respected, and often of outstanding, personality .. they are of immense social significance, the psychological health of the group largely depending on faith in their powers .. the various psychic powers attributed to them must not be too readily dismissed as mere primitive magic and makebelieve, for many of them have specialized in the working of the human mind, and in the influence of mind on body and of mind on mind.

From Aboriginal Men of High Degree by the late Australian anthropologist A. P. Elkin (1945:78-79)

Ten years have passed since the original edition of this book appeared,

The return of shamanism has perplexed many observers outside of the movement, so I would like to suggest a few of the factors contributing to this revival. One reason for the increasing interest in shamanism is that many educated, thinking people have left the Age of Faith behind them. They no longer trust ecclesiastical dogma and authority to provide them with adequate evidence of the realms of the spirit or, indeed, with evidence that there is spirit. Secondhand or thirdhand anecdotes in competing and culture-bound religious texts from other times and places are not convincing enough to provide paradigms for their personal existence. They require higher standards of evidence.

The New Age is partially an offshoot of the Age of Science, bringing into personal life the paradigmatic consequences of two centuries of serious use of the scientific method. These children of the Age of Science, myself included, prefer to arrive first-hand, experimentally, at their own conclusions as to the nature and limits of reality. Shamanism provides a way to conduct these personal experiments, for it is a methodology, not a religion.

The Age of Science produced LSD, and many who have come to shamanism had already conducted experiments. albeit informally, with psychedelic drug trips, but found they had no framework or discipline within which to place their experiences. They searched in the books of Castaneda and others for road maps of their experiences, and sensed the secret cartography lay in shamanism.

The Age of Science also produced the NDE (near-death experience) on a large scale, due to a new level of medical technology that has permitted millions of Americans to be revived from a clinically-defined state of death. Near-death experiences, although unplanned, have turned out also to be personal experiments that tested, and commonly changed, the NDE survivors previous assumptions about reality and the existence of spirit. These people, too, searched for maps, and many have turned to the ancient shamanic methods in the course of their search.

Shamanic methods require a relaxed discipline, with concentration and purpose. Contemporary shamanism, like that in most tribal cultures, typically utilizes monotonous percussion sound to enter an altered state of consciousness. This classic drug-free method is remarkably safe. If practitioners do not maintain focus and discipline, they simply return to the ordinary state of consciousness. There is no preordained period of altered state of consciousness that would tend to occur with a psychedelic drug.

At the same time, the classic shamanic methods work surprisingly quickly, with the result that most persons can achieve in a few hours experiences that might otherwise take them years of silent meditation, prayer, or chanting. For this reason alone, shamanism is ideally suited to the contemporary life of busy people, just as it was suited, for example, to the Eskimo (Inuit) people whose daily hours were filled with tasks of struggle for survival, but whose evenings could be used for shamanism.

Another factor in the return of shamanism is the recent development of holistic health approaches actively utilizing the mind to help healing and the maintenance of wellness. Many of the New Age practices in the Specific techniques long used in shamanism, such as change in state of consciousness, stress-reduction, visualization, positive thinking, and assistance from nonordinary sources, are some of the approaches now widely employed in contemporary holistic practice.

Another important reason that shamanism has wide appeal today is that it is spiritual ecology. In this time of worldwide environmental crisis, shamanism provides something largely lacking in the anthropocentric great religions: reverence for, and spiritual communication with, the other beings of the Earth and with the Planet itself. In shamanism, this is not simple Nature worship, but a two-way spiritual communication that resurrects the lost connections our human ancestors had with the awesome spiritual power and beauty of our garden Earth. The shamans, as the late distinguished scholar of shamanism and comparative religion Mircea Eliade points out, are the last humans able to talk with the animals. Indeed, I would add that they are the last ones able to talk with all of Nature, including the plants, the streams, the air, and the rocks. Our ancient hunting and gathering ancestors recognized that their environment held the power of life and death over them, and considered such communication essential for their survival.

Now we, too, are starting to recognize the power of life and death that our environment holds over us. After incredibly reckless and merciless destruction of the other species of the Planet, of the quality of air, water, and the earth itself, we are returning to an awareness, however slowly, that the ultimate survival of our species depends on respecting our Planetary environment. But respect alone is not enough. We need to communicate intimately and lovingly with all our relations, as the Lakota would say, talking not just with the human people, but also with the animal people, the plant people, and all the elements of the environment, including the soil, the rocks, and the water. In fact, from the shamans viewpoint, our surroundings are not environment, but family.