Get The Ugliest Shaman You Can Find
Why We Need Old Nature Wisdom — Not Strip-Mall “Shamanic Practitioners”
“Shamanic practitioners.” That’s the term. So…you know you’re dealing with over-educated liberal, self-important WASPs from the start.
I’m talking about “core shamanism.” This was visited on modern America by Michael Harner and some other anthropologists — i.e. yuppies with PhDs who decided to run “workshops” and train a bevy of disciples (like good academics would) in their personal take on hunter-gatherer religion. It’s a grab back of techniques and not much else: Bang on a drum. Do a “soul retrieval.” Invoke the ancestors or a spirit animal. Repeat — because the first 10 soul retrievals apparently didn’t quite get the job done, and you do charge by the hour. Also, get a domain and build a giant social media following.
The above summary is jaded, yes. But it’s jaded not because I hate what these “practitioners” think they’re doing. It’s jaded because they don’t realize what they’re actually doing. They’ve squashed shamanry into the mold of Protestant consumer capitalism, and have no clue whatsoever they’ve done it. They think they’ve got ancient wisdom, but it’s just glossy web sites, talk therapy, and smarmy, saccharine affirmations all over again. It’s so White, so over-educated, and so American that it’s painful.
(Of course, I write this on Medium, which is ironic. People here seem to eat up anything saccharine and corporate. If shamanism could “level up” your productivity 10x, or was used by Steve Jobs, we’d be having shamanism “bootcamps” by the droves.)
America has an obsession with positivity. It goes back to prosperity gospel, where if you believed the right creed, riches would follow. The right creed morphed into just believing the right happy thoughts. Which meant grinning all the time and trying to banish negativity from your mind. It’s even in modern medicine, with Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT): unthink your wrong thoughts and you’ll freed of your demons.
This is all fine… if you think America has basically got the right approach; that it has the right modes of thinking, the right spritual approaches, and the right values to take care of people and the world around them. But… you know… environmental destruction? Late stage capitalism? Empty consumer culture? America doesn’t have a great record for deep, nature-oriented spiritual awareness.
But presumably deep, nature-oriented spirituality is why people look for alternative, indigenous religion practices in the first place. Right? To tap into something older, deeper, more organic? More in tune with nature? More elemental than a strip mall and an internet terminal? That’s what I thought anyway.
Core shamanism would fit perfectly in a strip mall, though, right next to the yoga studio and the tanning salon. It’s smarmy, glossy, self-affirming, commercial — and entirely too easy. It all just comes off like a scam: Pay someone cash and over the fucking internet they’ll do a ritual to find your lost soul in another dimension? And to think: people got mad at the Catholic Church for selling indulgences! This is just a get-rich quick scheme that smarmy, right-thinking WASPs have convinced themselves is legit.
You know what it reminds me of? Every self-help asshole who tells you how to “find your true path.” After all, it worked for them. And what’s their path? 100% of the time it’s telling other people what their path is. Funny! It was never their true path to be a plumber, or to be a broke hermit artist living in a camper van. No, it’s always becoming a rich asshole selling a Ponzi scheme. Thanks. Nice advice.
Anyway. What the hell are these shamanic practitioners even doing? It’s just self-help mumbo-jumbo, dressed up with some drums. Listen to some podcasts and you’ll get opening prayers too, just like you would at sporting events (if you live in certain states). Are we really trading de facto Christianity, and prayers to Jesus, for this? Prayers to ancestors before we have a business meeting? I thought all this old way of doing things was meant to be an antidote to modern evils, sectarianism, and scientism. But instead we’re just recreating modernity, and reinforcing it, with some different terms and phrases— just like we (WASP Americans) did with pop Buddhism/yoga. An empty, smiling shell of commodified pap. I wasn’t even surprised when a car ad recently talked about off-roading into the desert to find your spirit animal. Shoot me now.
You may be getting suspicious about me, so let me diffuse it now. I’m not a Christian and I never have been. (I have no deep-seated personal hang-ups about it.) I believe in a spirit realm. I think we can have relationships with nature, with inanimate objects, and with various aspects/entities of that spirit world. I think think the world needs old religion — really old religion. And old wisdom. We need to get a lot closer to the land, and care about it in a radically different way. This will all have to get mixed with modernity somehow: we can’t all go live in band societies, after all — or forget about computers either.
But this self-help pop “shamanic practitioner” bullshit? This is none of the above. It’s glossy American feel-good pap. It doesn’t reject consumer capitalism — it’s the embodiment of it. It’s shallow, trendy, easy, and empty. I want no part of it, and neither should you.
Addendum.
Is there anyone I do trust? Anyone doing old religion right? Probably, but they don’t have glossy social media accounts. They live in the fucking woods raising chickens, and barely charge you for their services. What they do is not fun for them, it’s just what they have to do — because a fucking wolf god told them so. They don’t make you feel happy, or that you got your money’s worth for a service. They try to restore order where it’s needed. Those people — they’re probably doing it right, however imperfectly.
Also, these people have a community. They’re local. They don’t exist on the internet; or only barely. This is good. The internet is a shit-hole of capitalism, grasping ego, and porn, in case you hadn’t noticed. If your shaman has a Linked-In profile, run the other way fast. If they have a website from 1992, they might be alright.
Also, if your shaman looks like an actor, then they probably are. Get the ugliest, weirdest, most off-putting fucking shaman you can. What do you want? Real shit, or fakery? Ah, the latter? You and everyone else around here. You and everyone else.
