Blue Fox Shaman

Fox has given me the luxury of being able to just sit with you from time to time, dear reader. I don’t have anything of value to give you that you could not anyway give yourself. I don’t need to make money by selling you something, thank the Great Mystery! I really am nothing more than a traveller sharing tales of that other country–what I’m calling “non-ordinary reality” after Castaneda. If, someday, you make it there, I hope you’ll think of us. We’d love to hear about it! And if you’re a fellow traveller, welcome to our humble abode! Welcome all!

This time, I thought I’d share why I call myself a shaman. Actually, why Fox calls me a shaman, because it is important that one be called. But take heart, those in whom the longing to travel in those realms arises, although you haven’t yet attained it. That feeling, that voice itself, is the call. All you need to do now is to follow it until you emerge from the dark lands and stand on the border of that country from which the shadows fall.

The reason Fox calls me her shaman is that she wants to emphasize a return to Nature for me, and for all of us in the West. As a matter of fact, we’ve always been like this, longing for an ancient Way that holds respect for the Earth and all She symbolizes. I mean, since civilization arose, we’ve had a romantic notion of a time before cities were built, and our lives were spent mainly indoors, cut off. A time when people loved and respected their Mother and lived in equality with one another. I have good evidence of such conceits as early as the Classical Era in Ancient Greece, and I imagine they go back even farther. (Perhaps the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?)

There’s only one problem with this notion–since everything we do we must justify, either by past precedent or present success, there is this tendency in the West to turn to gold any past culture we can safely assume kept people working and living outdoors most of the time. (Take Marie Antoinette’s example.) But the more we know about these past cultures, the less they live up to the hype. Fox says she is not surprised; that humans, and especially domesticated ones, are sheep who have a nasty habit of turning on their shepherds, and each other, domesticated in very slip-shod fashion, indeed. Apparently, human culture comes from the Chimpanzee line, rather than the Bonobo, alas.

What all this is getting to is, as if you didn’t already know, we are rapidly destroying ourselves and our planet, and a little humility toward the Earth from which we arise, and into which we will all eventually subside, could mean that our species continues. And this humility also extends to respect for one another, in all our diversity. These things are harder to do than many realize. They take work and commitment! I’m of the opinion that genus Homo has pretty much run its course and has already begun its inevitable decline. Fox says she still holds out hope.

Anyway, I’m off my soapbox now, and I hope that I have deftly painted myself into a corner with the golden brush of Shamanism, and that you are standing here with me.

The other reason that she calls me a shaman is because of this notion of the journey to “Whatchamacallit Land” (non-ordinary reality) that is a prominent feature of Shamanism. But here again, we’ll confess to playing fast and loose with the terminology. To cut to the chase, a real shaman enters a trance (in the strictest sense) and their “spirit” leaves their body and travels in (physical?!, spiritual?!) space to, well, that place (whatever each culture calls it). Once there, they fight with, or cajole, other spirits in a bid to attain their, and their clients’, ends. But, unfortunately, I’m a materialist, and so is Fox, and so I can’t really be a shaman according to this criterion. (And if you’re not thoroughly confused by now, congratulations! I certainly am.)

I might call myself a “Postmodernist Shaman”. I might hope, by doing so, to send you all off to look up what both of those terms mean individually, and whether they could possibly be mixed without causing an explosion.

From Postmodernism I’d like to take the idea that we can, and must, establish first principles with the acknowledgement that we do so arbitrarily, and that we can, and must, re-evaluate those first principles, and the entire logical edifices we have constructed upon them, in light of their successes and failures in the “real” world. (Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to conceive. Ha! The proof of the logical pudding is in the eating. And I’ve got a lot more clichés where those came from.)

From Shamanism (or, at least our modern Western view of it) I’d like to take respect for the Earth, as we mentioned, and also one of the results it obtains, if not its methods of obtaining it–the otherworld journey to obtain information. Allow me to set aside that other aspect of this with a broad stroke (apologies for the curtness!)–the whole notion that anyone can “command and it will be so” is such a Heaven thing (in the sense of the I Ching’s Heaven/Earth dichotomy where Heaven = Mankind = The Social/Cultural Animal par excellence). Of course, when you are The Emperor and you give commands to your underlings, you expect them to be carried out, to the letter. In other words, when we don’t know how else to solve a problem, the best fallback, in a pinch, is to coerce or cajole someone else into doing it. Voila! The idea of “spirits” is inextricably embedded in, and ultimately arises from, our cultural apparatus, which is part of our evolutionary heritage and ingrained in us down to the sub-conscious level. (Heaven = The Spiritual Realm.)

Yes, sorry, I’m reducing this particular aspect of Shamanism to Performance Art carried out to induce the Placebo Effect. But if it makes you feel any better, I so reduce most of modern medicine to the same thing. And I’m not knocking either one–whether it’s soul loss or migraines, we don’t have anything better to throw at it, currently. My hope is, and its many successes promise, that technology/science/mathematics will continue to solve more and more such problems. Meanwhile, I should be fair when evaluating all cultures.

So, what remains in the shaman’s bag of tricks besides that? As I said, the other-world journey undertaken to gain information and, frankly, hope. We two (Fox and I) do that through a combination of internal dialogue, divination, and some visualization for added spice. Trance, real trance, tends to be rather hard on the body. (Most practitioners enter it through some combination of stress-inducing techniques and drugs, despite the current disavowal of the latter by New Age shamans.) Besides, language is a better vehicle of information exchange than pictures, despite the other old cliché. Why else do you think it evolved?

Mathematics and language have the advantage of flexibility, namely the ability to construct more complex concepts, along with rules of logical inference, and, ultimately, predictions of outcomes, all based on the use of abstract symbols and applied metaphors. If we do a good job of assigning symbols to “actual things” the results can be spectacular. (Besides, can you really “understand” pictures like that dream you had the other night without carrying out a dialogue, even if just an internal one, about it? And what is the “meaning” of the Mona Lisa’s smile, and why would you, how could you even ask me that?)

Where does all this leave me? I’m the proverbial buggy-whip manufacturer. You know, the one who produces an absolutely necessary commodity at just the time that it is becoming passé. Big discount on buggy-whips, today only… But really, there is much value in the journey. (Have you heard of the Pearl of Great Price? Well…)

I’m going to leave it there for now. I hope you see that the next, obvious question you may want to ask me is how (maybe also why) I carry out the other-world journey to bring back information and, sometimes, hope itself. If you think you need that too, then let the journey begin!