There would be many more questions one could raise, but despite the fact that the hypothesis of ‘Upper Paleolithic artist shamans’ is rather tenuous, it has had a tremendous impact – Lewis-Williams and Pearson have traveled with their neuropsychological model into the Neolithic, some scholars have started to use the magic word ‘shamanic’ for prehistoric rock art images or just geometric forms in different parts of the world.
Would love to hear your answers and thanks for your time.

What is a Shaman remains a fascinating question for some of us; for me, it is connected to my own questions about my relationship with spirits. I am still early in a process of learning about the spirits that are drawn to come through me to help and heal. And my relationship with ‘dark’ spirits that feed like mosquitoes on strong emotions and pain. I consider myself a family shaman (not speaking of it openly), working on the energetic present, past, and future of my spouse and children. My limited energy is best focused close to home. Yet even within this limited realm, I have found there to be spirit energy along ancestral lines that is much more than I can heal and acceptingly compost back into the smooth fabric of life supporting dream. So I try to get out of the way and let the helping spirits do the work.

All of the above is prelude to this perspective: We are all shamanic beings (plants, animals, and all of creation included) whether we know it or not. Every thought and interaction has spirit dimensions. We are all living a remarkable shamanic adventure with daily initiations, quests, and heroic journeys. Armed with humility, acceptance, and gratitude: Fare well Sisters and Brothers!

Some people have these complex relationships and are not concerned with being considered shamans by themselves or others. One such is a Grandmother in the Santo Daime tradition who brought the Umbanda rituals, beliefs and influence forward into the syncretic SD mix. As a little girl a powerful shaman had a profound influence on her, and while she is now an elder, or a Madrinha in the SD church, she doesn’t present herself as a shaman. She incorporates many different beings from the spirit realms during large ceremonies where healing is administered to others, calls into the ceremonial works the Umbanda spirits from that tradition, Saints from the Catholic tradition and spirits of the Amazon forest where she lives. There is absolutely no question when your working with her that she is masterful and competent in her relationships to the spirit world. She would qualify in any category Steve has listed above and yet isn’t interested at all in the question of what she is, but only concerns herself with individual, personal, community and Global healing.

http://www.grandmotherscouncil.com/about.html#maria_alice

Although the element of collective shamanism is often used to refer to those doing works in the SD tradition, that doesn’t make everyone involved a shaman, but it is also very possible that together they are performing as an individual shaman might, affecting many of the same outcomes as a shaman would, and using many of the same methods, only doing so together and as a group. It’s collective shamanism, and it’s shamanism of a new kind, and it has many elders within it who would easily qualify as a shaman should they choose that function and relationship to their community as an individual. In my experience with them the room is not full of shamans, but instead can, at times, and even without an elder present, affect clear shamanic outcomes for the benefit of those present.

I don’t think we need to soften the definition of a shaman in any way to encompass shamanic style relationships with spirits. I don’t think simply applying shamanic techniques to a situation classifies that person as a shaman and yet that all those applications may have very beneficial outcomes. I don’t think that having classic types of shamanic experiences signifies one as a shaman either. I think those experiences come with the territory when practicing indigenous animist spirituality and that the spirits interact in similarly archetypal and informative ways.

One important element I didn’t see mentioned above in the list is initiation, both by an existing shaman as he or she passes the mantle to the next generation and everything involved in that transfer, and also the all important initiation undertaken by the spirits themselves on the one becoming a shaman. With both it is only undertaken after much training has taken place and the elder, or spirits, or both together decide it is time. When the gift of a lineage is bestowed in this way then you have a shaman with all the attendant responsibilities to his or her community, and one with a conscious relationship to the guiding and helping spirits who will dictate how that relationship should be carried out.

To begin with, it is great to have you back posting after your break, with your trademark sharpness and eclecticism, and, it seems, a renewed appreciation for your visitors’ contributions. Your writing is outstanding. It is unique and quirky, but at the same time it shows your commitment to accelerating the flow of information and being useful within the global evolution we are all experiencing. I am grateful that your blog exists.

Congratulations on your book’s publication. I can’t wait.

This is a follow-up to my comments from last year under “Who Is a Shaman?” I hope this place is appropriate for it. If not, please post it where you think it belongs.

[Digressing: is there any way to index – by date? by topic? alphabetically? – your now abundant list of articles?]

I think the question of whether the ayahuasca-derived organized religions deserve to be called shamanic hinges on another issue: is shamanism something that happens only in traditional cultures and disappears in the modern world, or is it a universal product of all human societies? I do not know if any learned opinions about this question exist. Maybe you do…?

You can guess where I stand on the issue. I think that, beyond all the culture-specific activities and the local color, shamanism is simply the set of all the practices that seek to affect life by consciously acting in the invisible – “astral” or “spiritual” – realm. Within that definition, in North America, traditions like Christian Science, Religious Science or even “Think and Grow Rich”-type systems could be viewed as forms of Western shamanism, albeit primitive ones from the point of view of a practitioner from a “primitive” culture. The notion of “treating” a problem by changing the way one perceives it strikes me as eminently shamanic.

Are there shamans in New York City? I don’t mean shamans from South America leading workshops or dabblers who put that word in their resume. I mean people who act upon the collectively created reality called New York City the way a traditional shaman affects his village’s culture. Here again, I’d say the answer depends on whether one believes that there is indeed an invisible, astral or spiritual realm. Questions within questions within questions… An Amazonian Russian doll.

My own answer is yes (and yes and yes). There is a fabric which is made of the combined worldviews of human beings. We call that fabric the world. We all influence it through our thoughts and perceptions, and the only pertinent distinction is whether we do so deliberately or unconsciously. In that perspective, the person who reads the “Daily Word” in the morning and sets out to spend the day with a – for example’s sake – grateful attitude IS a shaman. Obviously, I cannot prove it because it depends on how one defines the term. But I offer as supporting evidence the fact that it would not occur to a member of a traditional culture to do that kind of thing. On the other hand, our society does not acknowledge this hypothetical person with a special name or function and that scores a point for “no”, because the question “who is a shaman?” is essentially a sociological or anthropological one.

I am a Daimist. As I posted here before, I believe the main difference between something like the Santo Daime and shamanic use of the tea is the collective “current” in the ceremonies (“corrente” in Portuguese) which has no equivalent in traditional Amazon cultures. Yes, the moral ambiguity of the shaman’s role gets lost in the Daime’s Christian manicheism. Yes, some specific practices like darts and phlegms are not part of it. But the attitude towards the invisible, the visible and their interrelationship is the same. And let me assure you, Santo Daime people take the issue of healing or curing quite seriously.

Sorry for being so long-winded. I had to get it off my chest.

http://www.neip.info/downloads/edward/chapter6.htm

A chapter from an e-book on the NEIP website dealing directly with the continuities as well as discontinuities between mestizo shamanism and the Santo Daime practices. The rest of the e-book is interesting too, but this section is right on the topic of who might be, should be or shouldn’t be called a shaman.