In recent years there has been a considerable revival of interest in the West in shamanic practices, both those conserved by indigenous peoples and more syncretic forms such as Michael Harner’s “core shamanism“, Wicca and various nativist revival movements.
Whilst I certainly don’t have the anthropological knowledge to discuss this at length, however, it seems to me that Harner’s notion of a traveller between worlds who typically seeks to effect individual healing, which seems to owe an uncomfortable amount to Mircea Eliade‘s unreliable speculations, clearly fails to cover the entirety of the phenomena we have come, for perfectly comprehensible reasons dictated by a respect for, and the study of, actually observed cultures, to refer to using the shamanic label; and indeed it runs the risk, if used as an interpretative filter, of distorting the rest. Eliade’s shaman is in essence an intercessor, and Harner’s inherits this characteristic which owes a great deal to Eliade’s more than debatable assertion of a primary division of the world between sacred and profane. Whatever the role of technicians of the spirit realm in indigenous communities, others within those communities emphasize healing by means of plants, ordeals or personal journeying; they also fulfil ritual functions within the community, intervene in matters of collective interest and play at times a prophetic role as well. The shaman, as we now conceive of this role, is anyone devoted to healing and protection of the tribe and its environment as well as of individuals within it, and different persons may embody different gifts and vocations within this overall nexus. Eliade’s and Harner’s accounts easily tend to denature this more complex reality.
Whilst the revival of interest in indigenous healing technologies is salutary from numerous standpoints, it seems obvious that simply applying shamanic wisdom to urban Western society is in any case anything but a trivial affair. It is also a perverse objective: we cannot just bracket off ten thousand years of development of an alternative model of society, whatever the woes it has, in many ways, brought us. A more balanced appraisal of it is needed, and in any case we are called to work within it. So if we accept the need nevertheless to draw inspiration from this ancient paradigm, what could the role of the shaman look like in the very different and ever-shifting modern environment?
I think we need to look around us and take some fundamental facts as a starting point. Firstly, although many of us are indeed estranged from the natural world and its healing powers, and there is no doubt that we need collectively to recover this connection, we nevertheless have developed a vast range of healing modalities unknown to primitive societies and many of which do have value. These range from the interventions of clinical medicine through psychotherapies, group rituals and therapies, bodywork, music and dance just to name a few. These modalities are expressly designed for, and function in, the intellectual as well as material environment within which we live and, while we may also seek to change that environment, doing so is a project of another order entirely. Secondly, the tribe has gone global and features multiple allegiances. Moreover, post-modern tribality needs to be global because local communities no longer have the resources to function as a tribe. It also derives considerable benefit from this harnessing of technology: without today’s metatribal technologies there is little doubt that our tribal instincts would be frustrated or détourned even more than they are. So we need to function in our local communities but we cannot depend upon them for our spiritual life. Identity has become process-based and the work of each individual.
Within this global tissue of tribality, the shaman’s role must also be fundamentally transformed relative to the archaic prototype. The modern shaman must speak the language of modern tribes; she or he must doubtless be more specialized also, but nevertheless the shamanic role retains, it seems to me, a federating ethic and disposition which has much in common with the ancestral model: a passion for healing knowledge and an ethic of service based on matching resources in the environment to individual human needs, exercised based on compassion, with the greatest possible degree of humility and openness to the unknown and the astonishing. The shaman is a sort of spiritual guide, devoted to the immanence of lived experience and therefore beyond any ideological creed: however enthusiastic she or he may be about certain practices, this stands in contrast to the role of guru as popularly understood. The shaman is a person who may be a prophet but is above all a friend, who knows that your spiritual journey is yours alone, a sacred enterprise into which (s)he ventures, if at all, only with the deepest of awe and reverence. For the urban shaman in the 21st century, there is no recipe, but only respect of the deep mystery, which no human mind can grasp, of how all these human streams, whatever their provenance and course, eventually flow together and into the ocean.
The enterprise of building a shamanism for modern technological society involves major cultural reengineering and is not even called to be a consensus exercise. However, the nascent figure of the urban shaman is all around us, perhaps not always self-conscious and often unperceived, but ready to be sought out and available to those who are spiritually hungry and in need.