[This one gets a little rambly.]<\/p>\n
These last weeks have seen a bit of traffic on a subject near and dear to my heart:the relationship between modern neo-Pagan animism and magic, cultural appropriation, and the word and figure of the \u201cshaman\u201d.\u00a0 It \u201cbegan\u201d\u2014so to speak; I don\u2019t know that any of the authors read one another\u2014with Alison Leigh Lilly and an interesting vision<\/a> of where a combination of steampunk aesthetic and neo-Pagan praxis might lead (and the follow-up<\/a>).\u00a0 Next were Lupa Greenwolf\u2019s posts (one<\/a> and two<\/a>) on her own discomfort with, first the word, and then the militant and un-self-critical reaction to her use of it.\u00a0 Finally, VVF weighs<\/a> in heavily but thoughtfully on the other side of the issue.<\/p>\n This is an issue that I, too, struggle with.\u00a0 I since first being introduced to shamanic visionary techniques by a friend in St. Louis\u2014fortunately, after I became at least tangentially aware of issues of cultural appropriation\u2014I have always avoided the title \u201cshaman\u201d.\u00a0 I don\u2019t come from a culture that awards that title.\u00a0 Actually, strictly speaking, no culture does: \u201cshaman\u201d is a bastardized Anglicization of the Siberian word \u201csaman\u201d<\/a>.\u00a0 It was adopted in the late 19th Century as a catch-all term for indigenous religious healers and, over the course of the 20th Century, came to be associated with particular types of trance-induction and spiritual mediation.\u00a0 It was in that latter sense that I was first introduced to and familiarized with the word, and\u2014because that was what my sources told me the word for the kinds of magic that came most naturally to me was\u2014came to describe my visionary practice as \u201cshamanic\u201d, or \u201cshamanic witchcraft\u201d.<\/p>\n But there are anthropologists who don\u2019t even think it\u2019s a real thing (damn, why don\u2019t I have my full library with me so I can fucking cite that?\u00a0 please forgive me and use your favorite search engine): that \u201cshamanism\u201d is a social construction created by Western scientists as a way of understanding and conflating certain kinds of indigenous religious and magical practice which have no Western analogue (well, unless VVF is right about fairies, or unless you count theurgy).\u00a0 This argument carries more weight the more research I do.\u00a0 Yes, it\u2019s helpful to create categories of like things so that we can better understand similarities, but \u2026 At the very least, one must simultaneously acknowledge that the categorization is alien to the system being observed.\u00a0 Better practice would require a more proactive attempt to first understand the \u201cshamanic\u201d practices as the people to whom they are native understand them.<\/p>\n A number of my religious\/spiritual\/magical practices are rooted in what is known in some circles as \u201ccore shamanism\u201d\u2014that is, the use of drums, dance, rhythm, and\/or drugs as techniques of achieving certain states of altered consciousness, stripped of their original cultural context and any elements or trappings that are most obviously cultural appropriation.\u00a0 This is the work advocated by, for example, Michael Harner and Roger Walsh.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not called to work with remains and spirits of animals, as Lupa is; nor am I as well known either she or Allison.\u00a0 These two facts shelter me from an awful lot of the bullshit, allowing me to work my way through these issues in relative peace.\u00a0 But my magical talents seem much better suited to exploring the Otherworld than anything else, and when spirits appear to me as animals and refuse to give me names, calling them \u201ctotems\u201d and referring to them as Wolf or Leopard are pretty much the best I\u2019ve got in terms of precise language.\u00a0 And, though there are problems with it, as someone who identifies as a writer first and foremost, precise language is kind of a big deal to me.\u00a0 Hell, the pursuit of precise, accurate, and affirming language is a huge part of my feminism\/anti-racism\/social justice effort.\u00a0 When my need for precise language pushes me into dangerous territory, all I can say is \u201cI\u2019m sorry.\u00a0 I\u2019m working on it.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ve spoken before<\/a> on how uncomfortable I am with the the parts of neo-Pagan practice that dance around and over the borders of cultural appropriation, and of my personal relationship with those elements of practice. Increasingly, I find myself referring to my magical practice as \u201cvisionary\u201d rather than \u201cshamanic\u201d. \u201cVisionary\u201d has it\u2019s own problems\u2014there\u2019s these pesky associations with leadership and hierarchy, for example\u2014but at least it doesn\u2019t reek of colonialism. At the same time, though, I\u2014like Lupa<\/a>\u2014struggle with the idea of bowing down to people within my own community who seem more interested in being the morality police than in actually serving social justice.<\/p>\n The more research I do, the more I come to understand that, while many of the techniques have been lost, \u201cshamanic\u201d practices are not absent from the Western tradition.\u00a0 Witches with flying potions, fairy familiars like those VVF talked about, Hellenistic theurgy, astral projection and pathworking.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m not a theurge.\u00a0 I may worship the gods of ancient Hellas, but I don\u2019t buy the ideas of a fallen\/impure world from which one MUST ascend to reach the gods.\u00a0 Some gods are Up There, sure; and some are Down.\u00a0 But there are plenty of them Right Here With Us, too.\u00a0 I don\u2019t to much pathworking because it\u2019s too structured: I don\u2019t like having my conclusions fed to me the way much of the pathwork I\u2019ve seen seems to do.\u00a0 And I\u2019m just not very good at astral projection (yet).\u00a0 But the fact is, I have the raw materials from which to build a cultural context for my visionary work.\u00a0 Until some spirit teaches me better ones, though, I\u2019m pretty much stuck with the \u201cshamanic\u201d techniques I learned from Harner.<\/p>\n And, as long as I\u2019m stuck with Harner\u2014and Wood, and Walsh, and all the others\u2014I\u2019m pretty much stuck with the word \u201cshaman\u201d, no matter how much I dance around it.\u00a0 No matter how uncomfortable it makes me.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t really know how I feel about that \u2026 let alone how I should feel about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [This one gets a little rambly.] These last weeks have seen a bit of traffic on a subject near and dear to my heart:the relationship between modern neo-Pagan animism and magic, cultural appropriation, and the word and figure of the \u201cshaman\u201d.\u00a0 It \u201cbegan\u201d\u2014so to speak; I don\u2019t know that any of the authors read one … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[52,54,76,164,223,245,265,296],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scholarship","category-witchcraft","tag-contemporary-shamanism","tag-cultural-appropriation","tag-ethics","tag-michael-harner","tag-roger-walsh","tag-shamanism","tag-talking-to-spirits","tag-white-people-steal-shit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-94","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}