FEATURES
Hardcore Shamanism Pt. 2
/ Dodie Bellamy
02.05.07
Please read Pt. 1 first
Shamanism, Inc.
As normal life regained its focus, more doubts began to trickle, then flood in, culminating in one big what the fuck am I doing here? The following Saturday Beth Murray called. Beth is a homeopath and a poet—one of those rare people I feel I could tell anything to—so I confessed I’d gone to the shamanism workshop. It turns out Beth studied shamanism with a woman in Berkeley! Beth’s journeys had also been dramatic, but she’d had enough misgivings to withdraw from the path. She suggested I read Michael Harner’s Way of the Shaman, the book that started the neoshamanism movement. I looked up the book on Amazon. Most customer reviews were by blissed out white people, but a handful of whites and all the native Indians were livid. One sour reader wrote: If lying on your bed listening to a drumming tape or shelling out several hundred bucks to attend a workshop makes you a shaman, then watching Yentl makes you a rabbi. I find Harner’s website. His organization, the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, shares not only the same initials as the Foundation of the Sacred Stream (FSS), it offers a comparable range of workshops and training programs. I learned that Harner has been “recognized as the pioneer in the revival of shamanism since 1961 when he chose to immerse himself in tribal spiritual traditions and accept initiation in Upper Amazonian shamanism rather than restrict his study to more traditional academic techniques.” After a few more minutes of trolling around on Harner’s site, it finally sunk in that Harner, not Gucciardi, invented core shamanism. What other faulty assumptions had I made?
Shamanism, Inc.
As normal life regained its focus, more doubts began to trickle, then flood in, culminating in one big what the fuck am I doing here? The following Saturday Beth Murray called. Beth is a homeopath and a poet—one of those rare people I feel I could tell anything to—so I confessed I’d gone to the shamanism workshop. It turns out Beth studied shamanism with a woman in Berkeley! Beth’s journeys had also been dramatic, but she’d had enough misgivings to withdraw from the path. She suggested I read Michael Harner’s Way of the Shaman, the book that started the neoshamanism movement. I looked up the book on Amazon. Most customer reviews were by blissed out white people, but a handful of whites and all the native Indians were livid. One sour reader wrote: If lying on your bed listening to a drumming tape or shelling out several hundred bucks to attend a workshop makes you a shaman, then watching Yentl makes you a rabbi. I find Harner’s website. His organization, the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, shares not only the same initials as the Foundation of the Sacred Stream (FSS), it offers a comparable range of workshops and training programs. I learned that Harner has been “recognized as the pioneer in the revival of shamanism since 1961 when he chose to immerse himself in tribal spiritual traditions and accept initiation in Upper Amazonian shamanism rather than restrict his study to more traditional academic techniques.” After a few more minutes of trolling around on Harner’s site, it finally sunk in that Harner, not Gucciardi, invented core shamanism. What other faulty assumptions had I made?