What is a Shaman and What is Shamanism?

Do you like music? And do you care about nature and our environmental crisis? Then you should care about shamanism. Which is one of humanity’s oldest spiritual (spiritual meaning full spectrum nature which then allows for direct experience with the mystery) practices. Older than organized religion, older than written language, and in many ways, as old as consciousness itself. It is as old as the hills. Found in various forms across nearly every continent and culture, shamanism is less a "belief system" and more a spiritual methodology - a toolkit for navigating the spiritual world, healing the psyche, and restoring balance between humans and nature. 

First thing to note here, is there is always a denigration of shamanism from empire - which is the human administration of the darkness of the world composed of anyone who's down for conquest, commodification of the elements, their extraction, not to mention lying and authoritarianism - from kings to dictators. So due to the way our country, the US of A was founded, with some good and a lot of bad, most modern day Americans know little to nothing about shamanism because, while the US was founded with a secular and also freedom of religion attitude, the dark side of extremely Abrahamic religions of Empire tried to kill off all the Native American shamans due to their spiritual power. Through much of South America, and in Mexico, which is ground zero for psychedelics by the way, and has a beautiful history, before being colonized by the psychotic Spanish conquistadors, and now having to deal with drug cartels, there are more reference points on shamanism because their indigenous cultures we're not quite as genocided. As there indigenous people have been the gatekeepers of this ancient technology for the human spirit. 

So what the hell is a Shaman? To answer that question, you must first understand three basic things which the modern day empire doesn't want you to know, let alone even think about, let alone even have the lexicon to grasp. The first is that you are a spiritual being having a human experience. That in no way means we disrespect or discount both the good aspects of organized religion or science and the scientific method. As today you'd be hard pressed to find a scientist who doesn't dispute the intelligence in nature which 50 years ago was rarely the case. But the most free and open society should allow for full freedom to find value in all of these things. In fact, we think of other very old esoteric practices such as astrology and alchemy as ancient sciences. The second is related to time and that due to the processional cycles of the Earth, that we must understand time is not linear but cyclical. So our species evolves and somewhat de-evolves. Increasing in consciousness and decreasing in consciousness, over thousands of years. So during the dark ages, where the church exclusively ruled, was a bottom barrel low point in history, but if one goes back in time, what is ancient is actually more advanced. Think of the phrase, "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away..." This is most evident by ancient megalithic monuments such as, speaking of Mexico, Teotihuacan otherwise referred to as The City of The Sun which our species could not rebuild now. Instead we currently build Chick-fil-A's and corporate office parks. Speaking of the sun, the third key principle is that we are a part of nature, and if evolving, will as a society have a veneration for nature. One of the main points of that type of relationship is not just a scientific grasp of animals and plants but also their ability to teach us things. For example cannabis, our relationship with it, which ultra-regressive empire and its Rockefeller for profit medicine built a 50+ year war on some drugs to denigrate because of how much it can rock the boat. Yet alone around the dogmas and stigmas of psychedelics, which are more properly contextualized as enthogins, are in reality actually teacher plants that are designed to interface with human beings and one's ability to do so is their birthright.

Shamanism, is not a belief system; it is a map of the experiential terrain of consciousness—a map that predates civilization, religion, and even history itself. It is the original science of the soul, the primal technology of the sacred. When we speak of shamanism, we are invoking a tradition older than time, a kind of meta-language through which human beings have for tens of thousands of years accessed the invisible dimensions of being—not through faith, but through direct encounter.

So shamans are basically medicine people who usually, but not always, work with teacher plants and animals, through their ingestion by both themselves, and the people they are working with. They are medicine people for both the mind and the body who, while working with such teacher substances, from nature, act as an intermediary between the human world and the spirit world. Which again, you are a spiritual being, is absolutely real. 

Shamans don’t gain this role by self-appointment or simple training. Traditionally, it’s considered a calling—often following a personal crisis, illness, or "initiation by ordeal," which breaks down their ordinary ego and opens them to the unseen. They are often called upon to: Heal physical or psychological illness, seek guidance from spirit allies or ancestors, mediate natural and supernatural forces, and/or perform rituals to cleanse individuals, communities, or land. All those things we just said, many people are like, hua? What? I don't get it? This is nonsense right? Because we've become so disconnected from who and what we are as a species.

You see, the shaman is not a priest. The priest deals in doctrine, intermediates between the divine and the flock, speaks in absolutes. The shaman, on the other hand, is a technician of the sacred. A voyager. An empiricist of altered states. The shaman goes into the domain of the ancestors, of the spirits, of the archetypal landscape—not to preach, but to bring back medicine, to retrieve lost soul fragments, to diagnose the illness in the village or the dissonance in the individual. The shaman heals not through words alone, but by navigating the deep symbolic language of dreams, visions, plant intelligences, and myth. Why? To teach something utterly profound—that reality is not fixed, not dead, not inert. Reality is alive. It is a dialogue. And we are meant to participate in that dialogue, not as passive consumers, but as co-creators. The shaman understands this and learns to walk between the worlds, to keep the conversation going.

So when we talk about reviving shamanism, we are not talking about returning to some romanticized tribal past. We are talking about reclaiming our birthright as multidimensional spiritual beings. In a world gone mad with reductionism, materialism, the cult of the machine and weasley utra watered down big religions, the shaman reminds us that spirit is real, that healing is possible, and that the deepest truths are not found in books, but in visionary ecstasy, in communion with nature, in the silent language of the heart. And in the next part of this series, we'll get specific about how it works.