Earth Needs Shamans
Earth without sufficient shamans is rather like a big blue melon going bad in the back of God’s refrigerator. I’ll never forget this old cartoon hanging on the wall of my dad’s office. “This has really started to go bad… maybe I should toss it,” God says, poking the rotting fruit.
Years later, I would read these incisive words written by Graham Hancock and the message would be completed: “The rot sets in from the moment that any culture begins to devalue its shamans as madmen.”
And therein lies the rub. We have pathologized our original priests, the expert men and women who provided much of our “second sight,” and the result, ironically, is planetary psychopathology. We have disgraced our godly go-betweens and gone sick in the process.
Without sufficient shamans, there can be no healthy civilization and there can be no healthy planet (at least with humans around). Our institutions become corrupt without the counterbalancing, vitalizing input from select, ordained, highly skilled medicine men and women.
But how are we to select people for such a high office? Traditionally, it was the person who became afflicted with “the madness of the gods” who must answer the call to become a shaman. He or she would begin displaying very odd behavior that in our society would be regarded as patently psychotic. Their initiation was often a slow, grueling, terrifying ordeal.
Take this excerpt from historian Erwin Ackerknecht’s tribal ethnographies, for instance: “He who is to become a shaman begins to rage like a raving madman. He suddenly utters incoherent words, falls unconscious, runs through the forest, lives on the bark of trees, throws himself into fire and water, lays hold on weapons and wounds himself, in such ways that his family is obliged to keep watch on him. By these signs it is recognized that he will become a shaman.”
Sounds an awful lot like a “schizophrenic” breakdown, doesn’t it? And how does one account for the fact that the percentage of “schizophrenics” in our society (about one in one hundred) is roughly equal to the percentage of shamans in today’s remaining tribal societies?
“He is sick from the gods,” as the South African Bantu tribespeople put it. He has dropped into another world and supernatural powers have entered his system. But it is not enough to be sick. One must develop oneself into a high-functioning, well-adapted community member through the courageous act of self-healing. According to Dr. John E. Nelson, “A shaman must be able to handle everyday reality better than his fellow tribesmen. He must know how to enter non-ordinary states of consciousness for the sake of prophecy or healing, and then return at will.”
It’s a much different story than the one we’ve been told regarding psychosis, and because such ancient wisdom has eroded over time, it can take years of following obscure clues to uncover. It has immense implications regarding our current state of affairs and how we might approach them from an entirely different angle.
Many will dismiss these ideas as the ravings of a madman, versus someone who was struck by the “madness of the gods” and then cured himself. Because I’m “reporting from outside the cultural envelope,” as Terence McKenna phrased it, I’m a menace to this factory farm civilization, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Such is the true function of a shaman or, in my case, like so many others, a shaman-in-the-making.
The shaman does not concern herself with trivial matters. The shaman sets out to discover the secret causes of maladies. The shaman serves life at the deepest levels.
To cite Graham Hancock once again, “The materialist paradigm upon which all the progress and achievements of Western technology have been built would face catastrophic implosion if the shamans were ever proved right.”
Let’s hope the shamans are proved right in our lifetime, and that the current life-destroying paradigm implodes gradually, with ample safety nets for those who wish to learn the new and simultaneously ancient ways of living.