The Depth Psychology of Shamanism

I have a strong interest in both astrology and shamanism. And at the moment it's the latter that I'm writing more about. And I have a shamanic blog that's been on a bit of a backburner, but now I've started putting a lot more on it and building a (free) subscriber list. So if you are interested, go to www.shamanicfreestate.blogspot.com and you can sign up at the top right of the page. Meanwhile, here is one of the articles from that blog:



In 1997, I was organising some shamanic journeying at a small festival in the UK, and the space was packed for each session, like 70-80 people. The word shamanism had a buzz to it, and I think it still does, even though it can also be a cliché.

But the buzz was genuine, and I think it was about people wanting a taste of the Otherworld, something which has almost become a race memory, because it has been so squeezed out by religion and then science. But it is still there in us, this desire for an untrammelled experience of Spirit, that feels ancient, and that is not hedged around by dogmas of what is and is not possible.

It is Spirit that ultimately teaches us about Reality, not humans and their books. Shamanism – a recent, western phenomenon – is about that return to a direct experience of Spirit, that connects us to a universe that is so much more than the literal, material universe of modern science.

That taste of the Otherworld is, for some, enough as an accompaniment to their regular existence. For others, it is not enough. Or we may think it is enough, but the spirits have other ideas!

And this is where the idea of the 'shaman' comes in. A slightly problematic word, as it carries connotations of spiritual stature, which ain't a good thing to claim. And a shaman is technically also a healer and diviner, a spirit consultant.

But the spirits can drag us kicking through that initiatory journey without the end result being a healer. You may end up as a counsellor, or an artist, or a stand-up comic - or as Mozart: what was it that spoke through him if it wasn't the Otherworld? Or you may be nothing in particular that you can put a name to! You just have that look in your eye that says I've been somewhere else.

As Leonardo da Vinci said: “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”

Or as the Ancient Mariner said:

 

"I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange power of speech;

That moment that his face I see,

I know the man that must hear me:

To him my tale I teach."

The Ancient Mariner

The archetypal event has become, for us, the shaman's illness, which will often bring him or her to the gates of death or madness, and once she has accepted the wishes of the spirits to be a vehicle for them, he recovers.

And I think this illness, this trial, this ordeal, needs to be interpreted broadly within our shamanism, even though the original definition was quite specific. And I think we need to be quite broad too about 'the spirits'. Yes, some of us will have guys upstairs that tell us stuff, or who work through us. For others, it may just be this other place in us, and when we speak or act from it, there is some kind of deeper wisdom or insight there, that may not even make sense to us at the time, but we learn to trust it. The so-called 'mid-life crisis' (which can go on and on - see The Middle Passage by James Hollis) has a resonance of this type of ordeal.

--------------------

Ad Break: I offer skype/FB video astrology readings, by donation. Contact: BWGoddard1 (at)aol.co.uk

---------------------

As an astrologer, I encounter these trials in the form of Neptune and Pluto acting on people's charts. I had my own experience of Pluto for much of the 90s: after 10 years running Buddhist institutions, I was unable to do anything for several years. Anything I tried to do wouldn't work. And it was like the plug on my life-force had been pulled. I realised that it is not 'I' who lives, it is something from deeper within that calls the shots, and it was saying we're not going to let you carry on in that wilful way, we're going to fuck with you until you listen to us. And there was this deep, magical pull towards that other voice. 

Abdominal Surgery

At the same time, I felt like I’d had major abdominal surgery, and that I’d been brought about as low as I could be, to this faraway place. And after a few years I had a dream telling me to pursue shamanism - as well as something else, which was a trick dream that catapulted me out of my old life.

And since then there has always been this place within me that is a kind of dark wisdom, that I can forget about sometimes, but when I'm coming from there I am aligned with my life. It is the glittering eye of the ancient mariner. And in the last few years it's been happening all over again, but under Neptune's rule, and I'm still in the thick of it, so I can't say too much. But it's been like this overwhelming call that I haven't quite known what to do with.

Pluto with his hellhound

The classic story behind Pluto, who is Lord of the Underworld, is that one day he abducted Persephone, daughter of the nature goddess Ceres, who went into mourning and the earth went into permanent winter. Eventually it got sorted, but Persephone was by now Pluto's wife, and spent half her time in the underworld.

So this is a good way of understanding the shaman's illness. There is another side to life, beyond what is presented to us by society, and you can be taken there forcibly by the demands of the spirit, which has no regard for conventional niceties and sanities. And in a deeper kind of way, you grow up, move on to the next stage - as did Persephone, in becoming Pluto's wife.

A traditional society understands this ruthless dimension to Spirit. As Holger Kalweit writes in Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men: 

“The suffering and exhaustion that accompany a vision quest do not correspond to the mild and gentle style of modern psychotherapy. Westerners do not want to have to exert themselves to solve their problems.” (p102)

And Goethe understood what happens if you resist the call:

“And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”

So this initiatory journey that the shaman undergoes isn't just about acquiring magical powers under duress. I don't think it is like that. The main emphasis is on the development of psychological depth, in the sense of moving beyond the narrow, conventional self that tells us how to live, and whose rules are shared by the other members of society. That kind of living is 'normal', it gives a kind of psychological security to many people, and it is necessary for the stability of society.

But that ain't what the shaman lives by. No, he/she has another loyalty, a deeper loyalty, that is not to the rules and 'shoulds' of the tribe, but to the spirits, to the daimon, to the Otherworld, to the Jungian Self. And that other place to which we have our loyalty is more real, for it recognises that the world isn't what it seems, it is not to be taken at face value, for it is only one pole of existence, the other being the spirit world, and these 2 poles are profoundly interconnected. The world is not an absolute, it is fluid.

So it is this loyalty to the Otherworld that is the real qualification to be a healer - or whatever. It is the shaman's wholehearted response to the imperatives of the Otherworld and its values that make him/her a shaman. Once you have that new basis to your life - that look in your eye - then the spirits will allow you to be a healer, or require you to be.

Of course, this is a kind of ideal scenario, because we are human, and we fuck up, and sometimes people have real healing abilities who seem in other respects to be such messes.

But the principle remains, and it is the 'depth psychology' of shamanism referred to in the title. It involves a radical turning about, so that the guiding principle of our lives becomes not what society expects, nor is it based on our personal desires, but on a commitment to something beyond us, that also is us, and that is more real than a purely conventional notion of existence ever can be.

It is a completely different basis for living, and that is why the shaman's illness can take him/her to death's door: the conventional, which is so deep-rooted, has to die. It can almost be like I cannot continue to live like I have been, so how can I live? And the answer is there within, and always has been.

Modern vs Traditional Shamanism: Ponderings from the Front-line

I've been blogging about this Shamanic thing since January this year. 3 days after my Dad died, to be exact. A few weeks before, in my last conversation with him, he said twice that I must be thinking of retiring now. Well I'm some years off that yet, I hope, and he was in a morphine-muddle. But it was interesting in that for him, material achievement, and the social status that comes with that, was all. And it was as if, in my last conversation with him, he was releasing me from that shadow that has always hung over my life. Because for me, it is the soul-making that has always mattered.

And then after he died, I had dreams, and in one there was a young polar bear. And then a few weeks ago, I spent 5 days on my own own in a yurt in Wales, and the polar bear was there the whole time, adult now, protecting me. And I was reading about the Medicine Wheel, and as I left the site, I was shown by the owner how the whole place was dedicated to medicine wheels, one for each element. I hadn't known!

And when I got home, I built a wheel of stones, about 18ft wide, outside my caravan, and then I painted the stones. And I am with that wheel a lot, it represents a dream for the future, but for now that dream is taking care of itself. I just sit and wonder.

Some people say I shouldn't be saying this personal stuff, that I shouldn't talk about the polar bear. They are right, but only up to a point. I love that she is there, and I want people to know about these things, because they can happen, maybe already do, in their own lives.

And I feel like I'm at an interface, trying to work out what this shamanic thing is about, for myself at any rate. In the 90s I did lots of the things many of us have done - shamanic journeying, healing work, sweat lodges, trance dance, pipe ceremonies, being buried, medicine wheel, vision quest, ayahuasca in the jungle.... and I loved all of it. And it was with westerners. And I ended up teaching some of it.

--------------------

Ad Break: I offer skype astrology readings (£60 full reading, £40 for an update). Contact: BWGoddard1(at)aol.co.uk

---------------------

And then in the noughties I began having a Canadian Indian come to stay with me, and I began learning (informally, around the breakfast table) in quite a different way. Unfortunately, he was also quite dismissive of all that 'New Age' stuff (as he called it) that we do over here, and it faded from my life. And I was also teaching myself to write and to practise as an astrologer, which was a great adventure in itself. And I was also slowly sorting stuff in myself that would, eventually, give a bit more depth to what I had to offer.

But now all that 'New Age' stuff is coming back at me. I love it. And I also have in me something of the more traditional spirit. Something, not all, by a long chalk. I'm not being modest. And I want to put those 2 things together. That is the interface I am at. I am trying to work it all out, and I'm using this blog to do so, so it needs to be treated as work in progress. In fact, I hope to always be work in progress.

And there are certain things I think as I try put together what I learned from the Canadian guy (and another Indian who more recently came my way) and modern shamanism.

1/ This thing is essentially about becoming a balanced human being. It is not about becoming a healer or a teacher or about being able to talk to spirits or about getting 'qualifications'. We may or may not end up doing stuff that helps people in various ways, but I think it gets diluted, and creates a superficial attitude, by being presented in course-form that most people can attend, as an 'add-on'. And it's not the main thing, either.

2/ Change takes a long time, and it's not under our direction. It takes a whole lifetime. Traditionally, it is the guys in their 80s and 90s who are the elders, who are seen as really having something to say. In our culture we want quick change, and we want something to show for it, an identity, perhaps. So this can be very hard for us to understand. As well as being more real, this perspective takes the pressure off us to 'achieve' or to try and 'be' someone.

3/ Shamanism requires an engagement with nature that we have forgotten. Everything is grounded in our relationship to the natural world. That is what we pray to, what we are grateful to, what we feel to be sacred, what we are part of. If we approach nature in this way, she will respond. Her messages may be symbolic, like when an unusual event occurs. But not everything that occurs is symbolic. And we will feel cared for.

We started to lose this being in nature thousands of years ago, and I think in our short lifetimes we can only ever get part of the way back. I recommend The Dream of the Cosmos by Anne Baring, who traces, through the gods and goddesses we have worshipped, our gradual distancing from nature, and evokes very well what that closer relationship would have felt like.

4/ A good teacher does not make claims. Nowadays it seems very common for shamanic healers/teachers to present themselves in terms of their connections to spirit guides or their childhood experiences, as if they are 'born' seers, or as visionaries, or as having experienced the shamanic illness, the closer to insanity the better.

It is an authoritarian way of functioning. The teacher becomes the one with the special vision, and everyone is meant to look to that. This way of presenting oneself has become embedded, but I also think it is untraditional and egotistical. My Canadian Indian friend never presented himself like this, as having 'special' experiences that qualified him. No, he used reason and experience. One of the guys I learned off in the 90s, Leo Rutherford, also declined to operate in this way. But he was an exception, it is that common.

Maybe it is because our religious history in the west is authoritarian. It is the priest who has the hotline to God. It seems to me that is what we are replicating. Like a bunch of Old Testament prophets mouthing off what 'the spirits' have told them. Even with their hotline, Christian priests don't do this, why do we?

If the spirits tell you something, and you want to persuade others of it, you need to use reason, not the 'authority' of where it came from: if you say 'the spirits told me', many people will then take what you say on board, but for the wrong reasons.

A good teacher presents themselves as an ordinary person who has some worthwhile things to say. He/she will, if they are the real thing, be substantial within themselves, have their own inner knowing. But that is for the pupil to spot, not for the teacher to boast about. 

Of course, we may well have unusual or profound experiences that we'll want to talk about, and there will be times when it is important to do so. But I think that needs to that occur in the context of relationship, not in the context of presenting your services to people you don't know.


5/ A bit of contact with indigenous people doesn't make you an authority. A little knowledge is dangerous. This is the other side of the interface. On the New Age side, we want quick results, we treat shamanism as an add-on, and do not understand the profound relationship with the natural world we need to build. On the Indigenous side, we can think that a few weeks in Peru with some 'elders', or inviting a few over to run some events, counts as an initiation on our teachers CV, and gives us an authority to speak on what shamanism is and isn't. It becomes another 'claim'.

Real teaching, or learning, is being-to-being, it is about developing an inner attitude towards oneself and towards the world, that one gradually absorbs from someone else. And this takes personal relationship, and it takes years. And one may learn something of the traditional attitude through that. But even that does not make one an authority. It can become yet another identity. You may not be a born seer, you may not have had the shamanic illness or the prophecies from spirits. But you have had a bit of contact with the 'real thing'. And that is also another trap that I have observed - another way of becoming stuck.

6/ Let us get away from the emphasis on talking with spirit guides or other forms of non-ordinary awareness, as though that is what shamanism is about. I don't at all want to undermine those of us who do, it can be profound.

It's probably got to do with origins: the shaman is originally a guy from somewhere in Siberia who can talk with the spirits and do healing work and offer counsel on that basis. That, I think, is why we have that emphasis in shamanism in the west, even though it has come to mean something much broader: the whole western attempt to engage with, and be inspired by, indigenous ways.

Many of us our drawn to this project. Only a minority will have that natural leaning/ability to talk with spirits. I certainly don't, and I spent years feeling inadequate on that account! I'm good with words in this reality, crap in non-ordinary reality. When called on, something takes me over and I seem able to do some good work from that place, or rather what comes into me is able to. I guess that is shamanic in the formal sense.

But it's not the main thing. The main thing for me is becoming a balanced human being, and having a strong relationship with the 'spirit' side of existence is central to that quest. And we all have that relationship, and it is very important to find and develop our own particular relationship with that spirit side.

If you're going to run courses in shamanism - and why not, if it doesn't include a qualification - then I think they need to be grounded in this very broad approach to spirit.

That is why I like the Medicine Wheel - it is an approach to the whole human being.

7/ Rationality and discernment are needed as to what is and is not 'spirit'. When I learned shamanic journeying, we were told over and again that the spirits know you perfectly, and that we need to learn to trust what we get told or shown in our shamanic journeys.

I don't think it's quite like that. Shamanism came in on the counter-cultural wave of reaction to western one-sided rationality. And I think that rationality can need reclaiming. What is needed is a sense of attunement to Spirit, and if you're having a bad day, what you see in your shamanic journey may well be bilge. Just like someone who functions psychically, if they haven't trained themselves well, personal stuff and moods will get in the way.

So far from blindly trusting 'the spirits', we first need to develop self-awareness, and that takes time. It is ridiculous to ask someone to trust everything they get shown in a shamanic journey. What they need to find out is what they can trust and what they can't.

And it's the same with prayers and calling on Spirit for help. I read someone the other day saying you need to 'know' you will be answered. Again, that is blind faith. It is our Christian heritage. If you are wanting 2 plus 2 to equal 5, that ain't going to happen. You need to ask and to pray from a sense of attunement to Spirit: then you will be answered, but quite possibly not in the way you intended!

There is This World and there is the Other World. A solid grounding in This World is needed as a basis for navigating the Other World. Practices in self-awareness are, I think, needed alongside practices such as shamanic journeying. The dis-identification of the North of the Medicine Wheel, the bodily awareness of the West, the awareness of the emotion of the South are all needed to encounter the Spirit presence of the East.

8/ I think that shamanism needs to find ways of integrating some of the understanding of ourselves that western psychology, particularly perhaps the transpersonal forms, has developed. Many western Buddhists have found that Buddhism is not necessarily very good at addressing the particular psychological issues that we in the west have. And I think the same can be said for many indigenous ways, acute as their psychological understanding can be. At the same time, we can bring to psychology some of the transformational methods that it does not have so much: energy work, putting back bits of soul, ceremonial work. This is a big subject.

9/ How long are we going to keep looking over our shoulders to the indigenous people for authority and for authenticity? Especially when the great majority of us have no direct experience of them, certainly in the matter of what counts, which is personal relationship.

What we DO have is our own inner knowings, and that is what any tradition worth its salt promotes. Religion goes in the opposite direction, encouraging reliance on the teacher, which as I have said is what many teachers are doing when they advertise their 'special' experiences.

And I think if we do look to indigenous people - and remember some of them can be dodgy too - then it is the spirit and attitude we need to look to, and if we encounter that, it is a great gift.

But quite possibly not the letter. I will never the learn the letter of a pipe ceremony done traditionally. But I have been around them enough to get at least some of the basic attitude, and it is a beautiful and helpful and connecting ceremony, and currently I do them on my own and kind of make it up as I go along.

So I think absorb the indigenous attitudes where you can, if you have the chance, but ultimately it is our own inner knowing that matters, and that will go on to create a distinctively modern shamanism, which I think is the thing that the world needs more than anything.

This World, The Otherworld and the Self

Modern Shamanism is an attempt to re-create the spirituality of

indigenous peoples. It is hard to say how successful it is in that. What I think we can say is that if we listen to nature, listen to ‘the spirits’, listen, perhaps above all, to ourselves, we won’t go far wrong. It is this listening, this paying attention that is timeless. It is in itself a transformative, magical act.

It is also what has been lost. Nature reminds us of who we are. Yet there is little space for nature in urban life. And the voice of the collective is also very powerful, telling us how to live our lives, what makes us a ‘good’ person, what makes us a ‘bad’ person, what is sense and what is nonsense – and listening to ‘spirits’ generally comes under the nonsense, if not sectionable, category.

Shamanism could be seen as the act of listening to ourselves at all levels, and with that comes something that is uniquely ourselves, and with that comes the power to live.

The connection to the spirits that is made in shamanic journeying and other practices is also the connection to the imagination and the intuition – a level that is both deeply ourselves yet beyond us, connected to the whole web of life and matter.

Shamanism gives an initiation into the Imagination – capital ‘I’, a connection to the Otherworld, without which we are not fully human.

So the creation of an individual self lies at the heart of Shamanism, a self that does not exist without a deep connection to something beyond itself. It is hard to know how much room there is/was for this individuality in indigenous societies. No doubt it depended. But the pressure just to survive can demand conformity. In the West, we have been part of a large collective for a long time, a collective that for 1000 years has veered towards fundamentalism, whether of a Christian or scientific materialist bent.

Fundamentalism occurs once you think there is only one reality. I once asked a Chippewa-Cree friend if his people got fundamentalist about their own creation myth, and he said that was difficult, because they had several creation myths, some of them contradictory! For this reason I think it is good that children are taught both evolution and creationism: both these ‘isms’ can think they are the only reality and, like the Chippewa creation myths, it shows children that there is more than one way of looking at things. (Personally, I prefer creationism, because it at least has a transcendent reality.)

Shamanism itself can of course veer towards fundamentalism, just like anything can. At the heart of that veer is our very human need for certainty – ‘this is how it is’ – and we look for it in creeds and teachers or in a rigid sense of our own rightness, or the rightness of our spirit guides. Here's a test: how do you respond if someone disagrees with your 'spirit guide'?

This is where the ‘this world’ aspect of shamanism needs to come in. It is not enough to have a deep connection to the Otherworld. We need an understanding of our own psychology and the ability to dis-identify from it. In the American Indian stories you get Wisahitsa, a character who is always getting into trouble because of his own self-importance. So the Indians (as they call themselves, not ‘Native Americans’) spoke to and were helped by the spirits, but they were also, it seems, trained in human psychology.

So Shamanism needs to involve the cultivation of both the ‘this world’ and the ‘otherworld’ aspects of the personality. You could say that shamanism needs psychology, while psychology needs shamanism.

Part of the beauty of shamanism is its emphasis on direct experience. There is very little in the way of a particular worldview that can be turned into an ideology. The key is not to take things literally. Don’t, for example, take the idea of the upper world, middle world and lower world literally, as a cosmology that if embraced strongly will somehow bring one closer to the world of indigenous peoples.

Literalized reality presses very strongly upon us these days in the form of ‘facts’. Science doesn’t have creation stories like every other tradition before it, it has ‘facts’, how things ‘actually’ happened. My Chippewa Cree friend saw evolution as a story, not a ‘fact’, and that is how I try to treat all of science: a set of stories, useful stories in many cases, but still stories.

What we have lost is the reality of the inner world. Shamanism is an initiation into the ‘inner’ world. When that world is awake, the outer world becomes more relative: it is a manifestation of mind, of consciousness, it does not need to be taken so seriously any more.