Last week I wrote about witches. This week, I’m going to take a look at their second cousins, shamans. Witches and shamans share some similarities, like a belief in the power of nature and the ability to communicate with spirits. But there are also differences.
In the book Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path of Knowledge, editor Jeremy Narby features the first-hand accounts of over sixty anthropologists who have studied and lived with shamans from around the world. Shamans are usually men, sometimes women, who are often seen as healers and spiritual guides within their communities. They perform their work not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of members of their tribe.
As a rule, through different types of ritualistic practice, shamans are able to journey to a spirit world. Narby writes that in this unseen world, they can tap into the knowledge of “guardian spirits” or “spirit guides and teachers.” (Though some can access this knowledge by simply looking within.) With this knowledge, they return to the real world to help cure physical ailments and spiritual and mental illnesses.
Are spirit guides real? Researcher Graham Hancock has met them.
In the book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, Graham Hancock writes that “only a thin veil separates the world of everyday reality from supernatural other worlds where powerful spirits dwell.” It’s veil he has been able to peek behind and see the spirits first-hand.
Hancock has studied shamans in the Amazon and Africa, and particularly their use of the hallucinogenic ayahuasca to enter the spirit world. He has used ayahuasca himself many times which, in his words, “obliged me to confront face to face what the shamans contended with on a daily basis.” He has come to believe that:
The spirit world and its inhabitants are real, that supernatural powers and non-physical beings do exist, and that human consciousness may, under certain special circumstances, be liberated from the body and enabled to interact with and perhaps even learn from these “spirits.”
As reported by Hancock and in Shamans Through Time, shamans usually first connect with their spirit guides when they are young. Hancock says the guides bestow upon the shaman “power and teach him the requisite skills to shamanize: to travel freely and at will in the spirit world, to negotiate with its inhabitants and return to earth equipped to heal the sick, influence the weather, control the movements of animals, and find out the truth of hidden things.”
The Weird Tale of the British Shaman
A more modern type of shaman is found in The Accidental Shaman: Journeys with Plant Teachers and Other Spirit Allies. Author and British shaman Howard G. Charing believes “there is far more to reality than what we have been taught or shown.” It’s easy to see why.
Charing claims to have gained his shamanic skills after being visited in his home by extraterrestrials, “blue skinned beings” not of this universe. Through a futuristic-sounding surgical procedure, the alien beings inserted “invisible implants” into his head. The result, according to Charing, is:
A heightened sensitivity and receptivity to people’s thoughts, along with an understanding of the influences and circumstances surrounding them.
He is now able to connect to “a higher level of wisdom and awareness” which enables him to help cure his clients of maladies that Western doctors cannot resolve. Like traditional shamans, Charing has the ability to help individuals release deep-seated emotional and psychological trauma that may be contributing to physical symptoms. He also is involved with a practice called “soul retrieval,” where he helps to locate a person’s “life force” when it has left the body due to a traumatic event.
When a thirty-year old German woman with a severe case of asthma came to him for treatment, he took a “shamanic journey” and had a “conference” with his spirit guides. He then had an out-of-body experience where he discovered the root cause of her problem. He was taken to Germany where he discovers the woman was born in a small town where a factory manufactured poisonous gas during World War II.
In his mind, he finds the woman as a young girl of 8 or 9, hiding in a cellar there, even though she was born many years after the war. He asks her to return with him from “her dismal hiding place” and is able to then return the energy or life force to her body. Days later, the woman reports that she is able to breathe normally again, her asthma gone. What happened? In Charing’s words, “Her lifelong breathing predicament was directly connected to the poisoned atmosphere of this town.”
It all sounds pretty weird, doesn’t it?
I agree. But I also know it can be easy to dismiss spiritual phenomena that are not part of our everyday life or the lives of who we know. The fact is, even today, shamans exist and there are those who still believe in their ability to heal and cure. Perhaps the role of the shaman is best explained here, when Charing quotes the Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina:
There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In