Can Modern Shamanic Practitioners Lead Us Into Deep Connection With Nature Or Are They Just On A Grift?

This is Jungle Svonni, he is an indigenous Sami Shaman from Satmi. Satmi is a region in the extreme north of Europe and Russia, part of which is inside the Arctic Circle. Satmi spans Northern Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway. The Sami people's language, singing traditions, culture, and dress have been at times banned, and like North American indigenous people, they were, in the 19th  & 20th centuries, forced to go to boarding schools as part of Nordic assimilation policies.

Jungle Svonni spent several years alone in nature, living off the land. In his own words, he explains that this is how you find nature connection.

Link: YouTube short, Jungle Svonni explains how he spent years in the wilderness, living off the land. This, he explains, is where we find nature connection.

And I have to say I agree with him. The starting point for the Indigenous Shaman has always been nature. By the time precolonial indigenous people were 18-25, they would have mastered the necessities of their environment for survival and the customs of their clan to navigate the social complexities of their communities.

So,

Can Modern Shamanic Practitioners Bring Us Into Deep Connection With Nature?

From what I hear and see on social media: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok advertising, modern industrial capitalism Shamanism is a synch:

"There's a tree, go and sit under it, ask it what it wants."

That's about as close as you can get from someone with a big podcast and following who calls herself a Celtic Shamanic practitioner. 

"We are not being shaman, we are using their tools"

Western industrial capitalism's shamanism is mostly culturally misappropriated indigenous rites, rituals, and practices, the meaning of which is often lost on those doing the crime. Nature has minimal participation, it gets a nod, but little more. 

"We don't know what our ancestors did"

We don't need to know what our ancestors did, there are contemporary shamans in the Amazon, China, Russia, Africa, North America, Canada and Satmi, and they all start their practice with deep nature connection.

What is Celtic Shamanism?

Celtic shamanism appears to be a form of neopaganism. It's a new-age practice based partly on neo-druidry, a 17th-century invention. John and Caitlin Matthews have contributed a body of historical fantasy and fiction to the modern interpretation of Celtic culture and have been recognised by OBOD (Order of Bards, Ovates & Druids). Historically, all we know of the Celts is that they didn't write anything down, and what the Romans recorded.

That being what it is, modern ancient Celtic shamanism is primarily a ritual-based cult that has been sanitised and made safe for the Western palette and public liability insurance. Celticism is rife with Utopian Golden Age propaganda.

Are The Celts Our Indigenous Ancestors?

According to an Oxford Study, they arrived from Spain, just after the Bronze Age collapse. They were an Iron Age culture. Britain had rich deposits of Iron. The Celts were responsible for large-scale deforestation. Though the believers in the Celtic Golden Age will tell you that they worshipped trees and it was the Romans who deforested the south of England. The Celts were mining and smelting Iron without coal; therefore, they were using wood and charcoal. They also increased the land under cultivation of grain. The Celts were skilled arable farmers.

"In the late Iron Age (about 100BC), woodland was cleared at an unprecedented rate, and some heavier soils were drained and made into farming land. Most of the land was under management across the south of Britain with very few areas left untouched."

Source: https://www.roman-britain.co.uk/

Celtic society was stratified, perhaps even proto-feudal. For Example, Boudica was royalty, but her aggression towards colonial Rome was less of a rebellion and more of an act of revenge. However, some historical fiction about Boudica will try to paint a picture of the Roman invasion as almost amateurish. Balearic slingers are portrayed as inaccurate in their delivery when historic records reveal that these ancient mercenaries were highly organised, mobile light artillery and were deadly accurate. But it is, after all, historic fiction.

"Celtic Shamanic Dreaming" is a modern construct. A spiritual trance practice which is locked behind a paywall. The teacher who invented this process and the associated initiations has made statements about the English landscape which have no foundation in fact:

On describing coppice wood rotation: "Last cut in the time of our grandparents" as a description for hazel coppice which in reality remains at optimum productivity when cut every 7-8 years. An observed hedge described as "not having been laid for hundreds of years". Most hedging species don't live for more than 80-150 years unless the hedge is laid every 7-8 years. The pattern in the landscape is that coppicing and hedging are very similar activities with similar outcomes.

Modern industrial capitalism shaman claim authority on the subject of connection to nature, but struggle to articulate their understanding of the connection between land and nature in any meaningful way because the assumptions they make are fundamentally wrong. They reject learning real wilderness skills because they claim they are too difficult, and anyway, "we don't want to go back, I want people looking forward". The concept of learning skills that connect us with nature is rejected with a distraction:

They are too difficult or they are going backwards.

Conclusion

Western Industrial Capitalism's neo-pagan shamanic practitioners do not start their journey in nature. They define shamanic practice as being a threefold principle of Journeying, dreaming and rituals to be able to connect more fully with whatever you hold to be true. Which essentially means you can make any old nonsense up about nature and hold it to be true, but this separates us from reality, and most importantly, it separates us from the 6th mass extinction, which is an ongoing phenomenon.

This explains how Western capitalism's shamans can repeat mantras like "A future we could be proud to leave to the next generation". This ignores the fact that the global temperature is 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels and is rapidly rising. The next generation, inherits climate chaos, global famine, severe weather, heatwaves & mass extinction. But worse, the people claiming Eldership are frauds with an obsession with ritual magic and wishful thinking.