The History of Modern Shamanism Steeped in Genocide and Fascism
I'm not bothered about what people want to believe, I am bothered about the gtifters who are misleading their followers and misrepresenting nature and the Ancient English landscape.
You can call yourself whatever you like: Shaman or Shamanic Practitioner because as we see below in the following text, it has very little meaning. Shamanism has been sanitised, laundered, and distilled down to a series of practices and ideas by white European intellectuals.
I am increasingly averse to this term. I prefer the term Earth Spirituality. Because in the rain and sunshine I among the Nettles, I am extracting fibres for tinder from this most sacred plant, not because it can get me high, but because it is the base of the fire, vitamins in spring and seeds in autumn. Its role role is to teach me about connecting to nature through skills.
The Dark Colonial Genocidal History of the Siberian Indigenous Holocaust
The modern English word shaman is a direct borrowing, via Russian and, Dutch & German, from the Evenki (or Tungus) language, a Tungusic language spoken by a widespread indigenous community in Siberia and Manchuria.
It was documented by Tsarist Russian "ethnographers", and Dutch and German explorers who painted the Indigenous medicine men as devil worshippers & lunatics. Primarily because the indigenous people were in the way of resources that the Tsarist government wanted, namely furs from the region. In the 17th century, Dutch Explorer Nicolaes Witsen is believed to have made this illustration based on descriptions, but without ever having encountered an indigenous Tungus shaman.
Anyone who imagines that the Russian Revolution was about the liberation of the masses should think again. The formation of the USSR was a colonial, modernisation and industrialisation drive, something that Tsarist Russia had been unable to achieve to the same extent. Lenin wrote about this in his memoirs. Soviet Russia's attitudes to its indigenous people were one of genocide, labour camps and further othering. Indigenous shamans were no longer devil worshippers, they were accused of fraud and being con-artists- thieving the money of ignorant peasants for conjuring tricks and fakery.
Under communism, honesty and loyalty to the state were seen as virtuous. The conman was the criminal archetype. The indigenous shaman was the ultimate criminal boogeyman.
Industrialising communist Russia needed oil, and the Tungus were on the land where the oil was. The Tungus have faced demonisation, discrimination, labour camps and genocide.
Modern White Man's Shamanism & Its Roots Fascism
The earliest roots of modern, neo-Shamanism could be argued to come from the works of J.G. Frazer. Yet his accounts of magic and medicine people came from adventurers and missionaries. Frazer has been largely discredited today because much of his research was neither primary, nor trustworthy. However, his hypothesis that modern humans evolved from magic, through religion to science fits perfectly with the narrative around modern shamanism.
His monumental work, The Golden Bough (first published in 1890). He categorised societal development through stages, from magic to religion and to science, and discussed practices like magic, soul beliefs, and taboos, some of which are characteristic of what is now understood as shamanism. Frazer is a marginal source, almost unheard of by most. His work seems more interested in the enlightenment.
Would you be surprised if I told you modern Shamanism has its roots in Fascism? Blood, Soil and Individualistic Spirituality. Because the 1930s - mid-40s Fascists distrusted organised religion.
Mircea Eliade was a fascist, though the extent and nature of his involvement are debated. He wrote "Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy". Alot of his research it could be argued looks almost identical to Frazer, except for some reorganisation and recatergorisation. I am not suggesting that he plagiarised Frazer, more likely, he sanitised some of Frazier's work by stripping it of all ethnocultural context. The Nazis were anti-organised religion, yet fascinated by Yogis, Hindu Mysticism, Sufism, Magic and Magical Objects. Traditionalism was a central idea of Nazi philosophy. The appearance of Runic symbolism on SS insignia indicates the Nazi fetishisation of the Norse culture, especially because of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan superhumanism. The Nazi belief in a master race of Nordic blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan superhumans who used magic and held great power was an evolving fascist mythology.
The Nazis searched for occult artefacts, primarily to find evidence supporting their theories of Aryan supremacy and Germanic heritage. They sought relics believed to hold power, such as the spear of destiny, the Holy Roman crown jewels, and artefacts from supposed ancient Nordic civilisations like Hyperborea and Atlantis. The Ahnenerbe organisation was tasked with locating such items, which included attempts to find mythological and historically unconfirmed artefacts in locations like Tibet and the Crimean Peninsula.
"Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy" was not published until 1964, but it was the first work on shamanism that hypotheisised the idea of a shamans role, devoid of whch culture it came from. The people and how they lived are missing. The context of the sorcerer in the natural community is missing. The description is of rites and rituals. It's the predecessor of the pic'n'mix spirituality
Mircea Eliade has been accused of selective sourcing and overgeneralising the work of other thinkers, such as Hegel. His work has also been called out for essentialism, a central idea of fascism: Accusations that over-generalise by attributing a common "essence" to all "religious" or "traditional" societies, which some critics link to fascist essentialist ideas about races and nations.
In later life Mircea Eliade moved to to the USA and the Universitynof Chicago where he was a huge name in religious studies in the 1960s and 1970s, but there was a scholarly backlash against his top-down comparative and structuralist and his invocation of universal homo religiosus, the archaetypal transculturalis methods and his invocation of universal homo religiosus, the archaetypal transcultural religious person. A new generation of scholars who still respected his work began to critique parts of it, such as Jonathan Z. Smith(1938–2017).
Mircea Eliade always played down his role in 1930 & 40s Romanian Fascism. He was known to be an active member of the Far-Right fascist group the Iron Guard. He was secretive about his past, yet some of his academic work was criticised for its "traditionalist" approach and lack of academic rigour through generalising other philosophers' work. His work on shamanism has been purged of ethnicity. It is the perfect tool for the individualist to seize upon ideas of indigeneity devoid of real connection to land. Mircea Eliade empowers the Fascist to claim indigeneity and individualistic spirituality and symbolism in the same way that the liberal New-Age Celtic Shamans claim the Celts to be the English indigenous ancestor, and therefore, as inheritors of the belief system, they too claim indigeneity, also devoid of deep connection to nature.
In 1960, he wrote, “To think like a materialist or a Marxist means giving up the primordial vocation of man." He admits that he has “[taken] a position against the myth of the Earth Mother.” Who does his talk of “primordial vocation” offend? That significant group of Marxist-influenced religion scholars who reject all talk of “the Sacred,” “the transcendental”, or “the supernatural,” and who instead want to interpret all “religious” activity as human power games.
I don't reject the transcendental or the notion of belief, while remaining steadfastly Marxist. After all, Marx said of religion that it was the "opiate of the masses". But Mircea Eliade rejects not Marxism, but Russian Bolshevism. Most Fascists don't read Capital, they reserve their criticism of Marxism for the State Capitalism of the USSR and its colonies of satellite states around it. The Soviet repression of indigenous people is little different to the manner in which Europe's Fascists exterminated Jewry, immigrants, Roma and anyone they didn't like or deemed sub-human. Mircea Eliade's minimising and secretiveness about his wartime past make him an extremely suspect individual who has served the interests of keeping American academia on the Right and diminishing indigenous spirituality to a commodifiable product.
The Final Commodification of Shamanism Was Through The Invention Of Core Shamanism
Core Shamanism had ambitions to be defined as the universal global earth-based religion predating the world's organised religions. If you like Frazers' era of magic, but the inventors of Core Shamanism would hotly reject this. Instead, they claim that Core Shamanism is the modern inheritor of all shaman traditions from around the world. The term shaman remains the name for a Ivenki or Tungus healer and mediator between worlds, attached to one small community now extinct almost. Core Shamanism embodies the pic'n'mix spirituality of the New Age. Anthropologist Michael Herner studied 2 Amazonian Hunter-Gatherer communities. He lived in a community, ate with them, and lived in their Hunter-Gatherer communities for nearly 2 years. He took Ayahuasca with them & experienced visions and hallucinations
“Where does your ayahuasca come from?” is a question many drinkers of the psychoactive Amazonian brew would just as soon not ask of their suppliers. But Thiago Martins e Silva, a devotee of Santo Daime, a religion whose rituals are based on the purifying power of this drink, and trained forester in Brazil’s northern Accan state, wants them to find out."
I am unsure about whether Herner was well-intentioned or saw a gap in the market he could exploit. I think Herner was probably sincere in his intentions without fully understanding what he was doing. By creating a core structure and defining what shamanism might look like, after all, every religion has its core structural beliefs and expectations of its adherents. Compared with organised religion, which is primarily familial and community-based, shamanism has remained essentially the fascist based ideology of individualism, wellness and self-development. Essentially, Core Shamanism is New Age ritual magic, drumming, "journeying" (Astral Travel), Healing(?), and belief in "whatever you think to be true".
But there is a much darker side to core shamanism. The role of the medicine/holy person has been dumbed down. Herner asserts that indigenous shamans know very little about plants. I suspect that Herner was more interested in the beliefs and spirituality than the skills of everyday life of the people he was studying. He states that the entire community took Ayahuasca, and he described every single member of the tribe as a shaman, but his assumption misses the point of how Ayahuasca works for people (tribe) with a deep connection to nature, because this is where they hunt, gather and live. Herner's Ayahuasca experiences were profound because he had been with the community for some time, immersed in nature. So while he recommended spending at least a year in the Amazon, for anyone planning to take Ayahuasca, no one does.
Core Shamanism is a modern non indigenous construct which is also used to transfer the "wisdom" of "ancient" ways back to indigenous people who have largely lost their culture. However, what is less publicised is that many indigenous communities have been helping other indigenous communities regain that lost knowledge and at the same time rejecting Core Shamanism for the neocolonial sham that it is. Indigenous people know they are being platformed alongside plastic medicine people, they tolerate it because they get the opportunity to get the message out about their struggles. But frankly? It's embarrassing listening to a Shamanic Practitioner talking nonsense about woodland management while "journeying". You can look up optimal hazel coppice rotation on Google, you don't even have to go outside.
Core Shamanism is devoid of nature, because Herner said the shamans didn't know about plants, but he also said the whole community were shamans. Which actually means some of them at least knew about plants. Of course, the other aspect of Herner's invention is that in the USA, he would have had to study the plants and their uses. By excluding plants, Herner excludes an important body of skills and knowledge. Skills and knowledge he probably didn't have. So the question is, was this intentional, or was there a cognitive bias which triggered the Dunning-Kruger effect?
Herner must have witnessed fires being kindled, animals hunted, plants being used to kindle fire, make cordage, shelters repaired and built. The Amazon is one of the most difficult places on earth to Kindle a fire because it is so damp, and nutrient cycling is so rapid.
Michael Herner, anthropologist, it seems was primarily interested in the indigenous spiritual practice and using a similar methodology to Mircea Eliade, "essentialised" it to core principles, stripping it of its cultural relevance. This re-invention of fascist shamanism was laundered through American anthropology. You can learn the basics in a week. Herner's assumption that the entire community were "shaman" is an expression of his ignorance of the connection that these people had with the forest and the insight that Ayahuasca gave them into their environment. He may have spent nearly a year with each tribe, but what he seems to have missed is their deep connection due to their reliance on nature.
Sandra Herner, psychologist, added to the Jungian aspect of Core Shamanism. I simply wanted to acknowledge her contribution, without critique. The fact remains that tye phrase "connect to the web of life" is intentionally vague because Herner hasn't a clue how to, in exactly the same way that every other neo shaman cannot tell you the process for connecting to nature.
Core Shamanism is the "wisdom-cult" of collapse denial. Since being separated from its deep connection to nature, it has become sanitised of culture. It has become a framework to which every budding cult leader can attach their own flavour. This is how we get Celtic Shamanism, Wiccan Shamans, Buddhist Shamans, and Heart Shamans. You could even have Punk Shamans, but more disturbingly you can have White Supremacist or Fascist Shamans. No Core Shamanism Practitioner will openly accept that their practice of Shamanism has its roots in the writings of a fascst. But what they fail to address is that Mircea Eliade said that shamanism could be reduced down to a set of techniques. So when Shamanic practioners declare "We are not being shaman, we are using their tools" what they mean is they are following the Herner/Eliade model of Shamanism.
"Connect To The Web Of Life
Herner asserts that Core Shamanism helps practitioners to connect to the "Web Of Life" but neither Herner or Eliade included the techniques for that process, and the reasons have already been outlined above, but by not including that technique it allows people with next to zero knowledge of nature to say things like "connect to the spirit of the land" or "go and sit under a tree and ask it what it wants" and dissmiss that as connection to the "web of life".
Leaving A Future We Could Be Proud To Leave The Next Generation.
There is a belief in Core Shamanism that if you believe something hard hard enough it can be manifest. This is of cours magical thinking and an avoidance of the reality of our prediccament.
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