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Shamanism and Research
So, in the past weeks I've been trying to do research on European shamanism - both celtic and norse. I've read web pages by supposed scholars, and excerpts and reviews of books available on Amazon. I'm still trying to weed out the crapiest ones before I start buying books.
There is little that hasn't been tainted by either Christianized interpretation, or pseudofeminist neopagan wishful thinking and cultural syncretism. I swear, I get more valid and valuable information out of my own UPG and practical experience. No frills, no cultural appropriation, just what works.
I realize I'm fortunate - I don't have to go through a huge song and dance to reach "elsewhere". For me, it's like flipping the mirror on your car at night - flip, and there it is, there I am.
I don't have to go around to the barrows of the dead to look at the future that may be, in all of it's twisty probabilities and permutations. I look at it directly, as a matrix of events, lives, choices, natural phenomena, and energies. I can even try to show sections of it to others. I've been able to do it for at least 20 years, with my ability to interpret getting better all the while.
So, it has occured to me to try and write up the concepts and methods that I use, used to learn this stuff, and why and where it came from. I already have a list of terms that need defining, that once defined and understood, encompass 90% of what I do in a shamanic context.
My challenge is to "map" these terms against European shamanic/religious terminology, and maybe a bit of "modern" psychology of religion. Should I even bother? Probably, lest some twit think I'm some sort of IRAB Plastic Shaman. But man, the bibliography is going to be a bitch.
Do you think anyone would want to publish my drivel?
There is little that hasn't been tainted by either Christianized interpretation, or pseudofeminist neopagan wishful thinking and cultural syncretism. I swear, I get more valid and valuable information out of my own UPG and practical experience. No frills, no cultural appropriation, just what works.
I realize I'm fortunate - I don't have to go through a huge song and dance to reach "elsewhere". For me, it's like flipping the mirror on your car at night - flip, and there it is, there I am.
I don't have to go around to the barrows of the dead to look at the future that may be, in all of it's twisty probabilities and permutations. I look at it directly, as a matrix of events, lives, choices, natural phenomena, and energies. I can even try to show sections of it to others. I've been able to do it for at least 20 years, with my ability to interpret getting better all the while.
So, it has occured to me to try and write up the concepts and methods that I use, used to learn this stuff, and why and where it came from. I already have a list of terms that need defining, that once defined and understood, encompass 90% of what I do in a shamanic context.
My challenge is to "map" these terms against European shamanic/religious terminology, and maybe a bit of "modern" psychology of religion. Should I even bother? Probably, lest some twit think I'm some sort of IRAB Plastic Shaman. But man, the bibliography is going to be a bitch.
Do you think anyone would want to publish my drivel?
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I've been researching Norse magic off and on for years, as you may know. In academia, there was a black hole on the shamanism aspect because Lapp shamanism was (a) extinct and (b) not generally agreed to fit the definition; and the Norse practices were excluded because the role of the practitioner was different. Germanic would be the only society with both priests and shamans . . . plus it has at least one other strain of magic. So most academics counted seið as by definition not really shamanism, and/or viewed the similarities as signs of borrowing from Finnish/Lapp.
Strangely enough, this means the best grounding in the academic terminology and the terms in which the debate has been framed is still an ancient monograph in decidedly quaint English, to whit: Louise Bäckman and Åke Hultkrantz, Studies in Lapp Shamanism, Acta Universitatis Stockholmensis/Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion 16, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1978. Example of the quaint English: "nuclear" for "crucial" or "core," throughout. This unprepossessing looking thing starts with a super-fantastic survey of the definitions, approaches to, and terminology of shamanism in differing academic fields (such as the use of "ecstasy" or "trance"), proceeds to define shamanism with reference to multiple cultures and not just Siberia, and then sets the Lapp record--including the Historia Norvegiæ account of a séance--in this definitional context. Frankly, I'm suspicious that any later academic works add much, although there is one very recent one on seiðr that I need to hunt down in case it does.
I have a xerox. There is a copy shop near your place. Wanna copy?
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If only to add to your knowledge of the effects of datura/jimsonweed . . .
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