Trance, the drum and the journey
Where the word shaman comes from and what the Siberian shamans did; the Sámi noaidi and his painted drum, burned and confiscated by missionaries and returned in our own time; Eliade's ecstasy and Harner's core shamanism; the drum journey to the lower, middle and upper worlds, practised safely; the honest debate about borrowing from living Indigenous traditions. Then deeper: the helpers and the power animal, the three worlds and the world tree, the shaman's sickness, the coat, the mirror and the rattle, soul loss and soul retrieval, the shamans of the Americas, and Korea's mudang and Japan's itako.
12 lessons · about 2.5 hours of reading · 1 free
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Where the word comes from, how it reached Europe, what Siberian shamans did with drum and costume, and why "shamanism" is a scholars' word.
The Sámi noaidi, the painted drums with their pointer for divination, the missionaries who burned and seized them, and the drums coming home.
How an anthropologist's workshops turned the shaman's journey into a method anyone can learn — the drum, the three worlds and the helpers — and what the critics say.
A first journey step by step — the question, the drum, the way down, the return and the record — with the safety rules that matter.
Plastic shamans, the Lakota declaration and the UN's rights of Indigenous peoples — and how to practise trance honestly without taking what is not yours.
The spirits a shaman works with — the Nanai ayami that chooses its shaman, the Inuit tuurngaq, the familiars of Europe's cunning folk — and how Harner's "power animal" grew out of them.
The cosmos the shaman travels — upper, middle and lower worlds joined by a tree, a pole or a mountain — in Siberia, the Altai, the North, the Maya lands and on the Sámi drum, and Eliade's axis mundi.
How shamans were called — by illness, dreams, inheritance or election — from Siberian dismemberment visions to the Korean sinbyeong and the itako's buckets of ice water, and what it does and does not mean today.
The shaman's tools and what each was for — the iron-hung coat, the drum ridden as a horse, the Mongolian toli mirror worn as armour, the Amazonian leaf rattle, the itako's beads of jawbones — and how to make a kit of your own without copying anyone's.
The free soul and the body soul, sickness as a soul gone missing, the fright-illness susto of Latin America, the shaman's journey to fetch a soul back, and the modern practice Sandra Ingerman built from it — with the cautions it needs.
The Inuit angakkuq and the journey to Sedna; the Amazon's ayahuasca, icaros and plant diets, and the tourism that followed Harner's teachers; María Sabina and the mushroom velada; the Mapuche machi; the curandero — and why many Native North Americans refuse the word "shaman".
Korea's mudang — over 200,000 of them, mostly women — their possession rites, their persecution under Confucians, Christians and colonisers and their return as a symbol of the nation; and Japan's blind itako, who speak for the dead on Mount Osore.
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