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Why the Term “Shaman”?

Just a quick note for those who are getting this from places other than Livejournal–there is a syndicated feed through LJ if you’re on there, or, of course, the RSS feed buttons on this page. A special note to LJ folks–I can’t LJ-cut feed posts, so you’re just gonna have to deal with some looooong posts on your f-list.

Still filling in some of the background information as I go along. While this topic isn’t *quite* so controversial as yesterday’s discussion on the Animal Father, the word “shaman” is pretty loaded these days.

I’ll go ahead and say that yes, I realize that the word “shaman” is Siberian in origin, from the Tungus language to be specific (though the Wiki article, which seems to be reasonably researched, raises the possibility that the word is even older than that). However, it came into popular use via anthropologists who initially got it from Siberia, and who used it to refer to the people in various societies who all filled some (or all) of a number of particular roles in that society. (Hey, at least it’s pretty much replaced “witch doctor”–Oo ee, oo ah ah, ting tang, walla walla bing bang!)

These days there’s a lot of debate, particularly in the neopagan community (as well as indigenous cultures, particularly Native American tribes) as to what a shaman is. Semantics, of course, are a big part of this–some of the arguments made by Native Americans (who have varying opinions on the topic ranging from “It’s okay” to “this is cultural genocide) include the claim that a tribal “shaman” will never use that particular word to refer to hirself. However, semantics aside, there’s also the question of how legitimate shamanic practices outside of the context of their cultures of origin really are. Is Michael Harner’s core shamanism true shamanism? For that matter, is any form of neoshamanism really shamanism? Is it “okay” to call yourself a neoshaman as a qualifier?

In my opinion, this is something each person has to decide for hirself. I believe, for myself, that honesty is the best policy. There are parts of my research that speak to me spiritually, but have academic flaws (such as Joseph Campbell’s works). And I try to be open about what parts of my path are pure UPG. And I also try to make myself aware of the implications of the word and concept of “shaman”. But that still doesn’t answer the question…

Why the term shaman?

Because it fits?

The system that has appealed to me the most over the years has been shamanism. I’ll admit that many times I refused to use that word because of the connotations, particularly given my European mutt status. However, I’ve finally decided to just quit dancing around the issue, and this is the result.

In order to determine whether or not the term fit, I had to learn what shamanism really *is*. I’m still learning, of course. A decade and change isn’t enough time to learn everything one needs to know about spirituality, particularly since I’ve delved into several wells of inspiration and information. In recent years I’ve become more familiar with the differences between traditional shamanism and neoshamanism, and found that most of what I’ve been working with is the latter. However, while I consider myself to be a neoshaman, I also think it’s invaluable to learn about traditional shamanism as best as I can (which usually means falling back on anthropological texts, since I’m not just going to walk onto a reservation and yell “Well, here I am! Now come teach me!”).

This means that I’m essentially starting from scratch, though the *amount* of scratch I have available to me is greater than when I got started with paganism in general way back when. I already have some concepts that I know work into my personal microcosm and my understanding of the macrocosm. But I’m going through a complete restructuring, putting what I already have and what I’m learning as I go into a particular system.

What I have at this point is vastly incomplete. As I mentioned in the ever-important FAQ section, this is a work-in-progress. However, I don’t have a problem at this point with calling it therioshamanism. Just because I’m not what I’d call a shaman yet (though perhaps neoshaman in training is a better term?) doesn’t mean that I can’t work towards that concept, building a (neo)shamanic tradition for the cultural context I exist in. “Shaman” is something I *aspire* to. I want to have a handle to grasp, a concept to build around.

It’s also why I’ve already given a name to what I’m doing. It’s cliched, but names do have power. Giving something a name makes it more “real” to me, and it also gives me a concept to build around. For instance, when I write a book, I feel much more confident about the project once I’ve come up with at least a working title. In the same way, therioshamanism is (neo)shamanism under construction, hence one of the reasons for this blog.

Along with the name, I’m also exploring what tools, techniques and other focuses (foci?) I’d like to incorporate. This will no doubt change over time as I practice more and figure out what works for me *now*. Yes, I’ve been practicing for over a decade–but as I mentioned in this post, things that worked for me a few years ago aren’t as effective now. Therioshamanism marks a new stage of my life, a refining of what I’ve collected over the years. I intend (and am already experiencing) profound internal change, as well as increased awareness and involvement with the world around me–human community and otherwise. However, it’s also important, every now and then, to reevaluate what techniques work best for attaining the altered states of consciousness (and other important experiences) necessary for what needs to be done. This means that I have been spending more time looking at the trappings of what I’m working with, but not to the point of ignoring what the trappings are supposed to *accomplish*.

Some people scoff at those who are focused on the outer trappings and tools. For my own part, I learn best by starting at the outside and working in. The tools and toys are shiny new training wheels; or, rather, you could think of them as the pommel of a Western saddle–something for the newbie to hang onto while s/he learns to ride, and for the more experienced rider to grab in case of an emergency.

And since I’m starting from scratch, yes, I am playing with my toys again, the various ritual tools and accoutrement. It also means that I’m focusing on things like books. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on inside. It’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, only it transcends physical limitations, and when a piece fits together on the outside, something snaps into place internally as well. I’m paying attention to both the microcosm and the macrocosm, even though the latter is much easier for other people to observe. Additionally, I am an animist. The tools themselves aren’t just dead objects; there are spirits in them that I work with. Much of what I incorporate into my practice involves working with the spirits in animal parts–fur, leather, bones, etc. So for me, they’re no more a crutch than any other spirits I work with. They just happen to inhabit physical forms.

(Plus, I fully admit, I *like* working with ritual tools. Magpie syndrome–“Oooooh! Shiny!”)

So don’t assume that just because somebody seems enamored of the external trappings, that they aren’t getting anything internal out of it. Kind of like training wheels, the person may be using them to keep from tipping over, but s/he’s also learning to keep hir balance. it takes people different amounts of time to get used to it. Eventually the training wheels come off–but then later we learn to drive, and that starts a whole new set of checks and balances…

Where does this leave me? In the midst of a lot of reading and meditation on where, exactly, I’m going with therioshamanism.
I do know that (neo)shaman is what best fits what I’m constructing, and so I use that term out of familiarity. And there is a purpose–it’s not just carte blanche, anything goes. But I need to figure out (since this is, after all, my personal path) what external trappings best create the conditions and experiences to work on different levels of reality and involvement with other forms of consciousness. So I try on different techniques on for size, including many that I’d never even considered (or heard of, in a few cases) before. Shamanism is a LOT of things, depending on the culture–the Sora in India, for example, do a lot of work with trance possession and mediumship, which is very different from the more common concept of soul-flight. I have to figure out what composes *my* shamanism before I can really do anything with it.

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Who is the Animal Father?

You’ll see references to “the Animal Father” throughout this blog. This is my personal conception of deity that I work with in Therioshamanism right now. Allow me to explain.

I believe that the Divine is infinite, or about as close to infinite as it gets. As a pantheist, I believe that the Divine is within all things, and that all things (physical and otherwise) compose the Divine just as cells compose a body. I also believe, as a polytheist, that there are numerous individual deities from pantheons around the world, and that they are individual, independent beings that reflect qualities of the cultures they come from*. Finally, I am an animist, and I believe that everything has a spirit of sorts (including deities); that spirit (or soul, if you will) is the spark of the Divine manifest in each thing.

I don’t believe the Divine can be limited to one human perception of it. We “create” or “discover” (depending on how you view mythology) individual deities that represent a very small facet of the Divine. We gravitate towards deities that resonate with our values, beliefs, and ways of seeing the world. Likewise, deities may call to people they resonate with. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all religion–or a one-size-fits-all view of the Divine.

I also have no problem with UPG (Unverified Personal Gnosis). While I think it needs to be treated with care and a lick of salt, I do not believe that the only people who can converse with the Divine and have Divine revelations are clergy. I am a pantheist–everything is Divine–and the Divine is imminent, which means we all can talk with “God/dess”. IMO, the idea that Divine revelations are rare and reserved only for the holiest people is something that has been used to control the masses for centuries–if you don’t let people think for themselves (even if it’s to decide they want to stay within the parameters of a given religion) they’re much more malleable. As with anything, I think it’s important to question our perceptions, but I apply that to anything, from religion to politics to love to determining whether we want to live in a certain place or not.

I do think that Unverified PERSONAL Gnosis is, well, *personal*. It’s not about huge proclamations for everyone in the world, or even everyone in your apartment building. It’s a personal message from the Divine, and it’s important to question what we think we’ve perceived to make sure there wasn’t an error in communication somewhere along the line. So therefore my personal mythology about the Animal Father is something I limit to my worldview alone.

I do still, of course, acknowledge the Divine overall, and it is my relationship to the Divine (basically, everything that is) that determines things such as ethics. All people decide what their personal ethics are–even if it is a *choice* to follow a particular set of rules laid out by someone else. I simply take more into account than what one particular sliver of the Divine says.

So, anyway, the Animal Father–who is he? Well, this particular cave painting has always struck a very deep chord with me. It’s been speculated, by Joseph Campbell and others, that this is a representation of a paleolithic deity, the Animal Master (to use one of Campbell’s terms). He is the keeper of the animals, the deity that paleolithic hunters and/or shamans appealed to in order to have a successful hunt. You can still see this concept in various indigenous religions; a well-known example is Sedna from Inuit mythology. The shaman must travel down to her home deep in the ocean and comb her hair to convince her to release the whales, seals and fish to live on. So the concept of a deity that watches over the wild creatures isn’t so far-off, and while there’s no proof that such a deity existed all the way back to Paleolithic times**, my experiences say otherwise. The deity I speak to, whether he actually is a remnant of an older time, or simply a new mask of God that has been given to me by the Divine using ancient imagery, speaks to me on a fundamental level. Alternately known by people as the Sorceror, the Antler Shaman, Animal Master, etc., the name he gave me to use is the Animal Father.

“So aren’t you just making up a deity?” Maybe I am, though I prefer to think, as I mentioned above, that the Divine has simply given me a particular mask to understand it through. People have been “making up” deities for millenia. Again, allow me to remind readers of the correlation between the personalities of deities, and the cultures they come from. You can learn a lot about a culture by observing its pantheon, as well as its religious precepts. Anyway, I believe that this is an aspect of the Divine I have been given, rather than creating it myself, a process that has hardly originated with me.

Beyond that yes, I’m aware of the pitfalls of creating own’s own religion primarily from scratch. Yes, I’m aware of the possibility of self-delusion. Yes, I do keep close tabs on myself. No, I don’t think that my religion has to apply to other people. It is, after all, *personal*. However, this is something I’ve been actively working with for over a decade. I may not be perfect, but I’m not just leaping into this, either. I’m basically organizing things I have discovered are true for me, and this is a recent revelation that works in nicely with the rest. I don’t think I’m the first person to go through this process, though many people do so via committees. I’m not a committee kind of person.

This is what works for me, and while it may be incomprehensible to a lot of people, it makes perfect sense in my mind. (Reading Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell may help you understand my mind a little more, by the way.)

So enough of that–back to the Animal Father himself; he is personified by that particular cave painting, though he is NOT the cave painting itself, any more than Jesus *is* the cross with a statue of a person on it. There’s a difference between deity, and representation of deity. My primary focus in my spiritual path is with animal totems; I’ll explain my conception of them in more detail in a later post, but the short version is that totems are archetypal beings that represent all the qualities of a particular species–both the natural history, and the human mythology and lore created around the animals. I work with other animal spirits as well, but that’s the main group. So it’s not surprising that I ended up with a(nother***) deity that has a strong influence over wildlife in general.

From talking with him, I’ve found that the four animals that compose his image are: red stag, dire wolf, cave bear and cave lion, all paleolithic animals contemporary to his original time period. I’ve assigned each one to a solstice or equinox for the purpose of celebrating the turning of the seasons. Stag is Autumn, Wolf is Winter, Bear is Spring and Lion is Summer.

Our relationship is to mutual benefit. He’ll teach me what he has to share about working with totems and other animal spirits, as well as spiritual/shamanic practices in conjunction with a closer relationship with the land, and I provide him a connection in this world. As the wild has slowly declined (particularly in France, his place of origin), so has his influence over the physical realm. While I don’t see myself as some great propher or guru of the Nature God, I’m not adverse to a relationship with a deity that includes practical ways of helping this world as well as other layers of reality (without having to go around and tell other people that their religious beliefs are wrong/evil/etc.).

So that’s a very basic rundown of what’s probably one of the more (relatively) far-fetched parts of my religion. When it comes to deities, most people are comfortable going with one crowd or another–safety in numbers and collective consensus. I don’t believe that my quest to seek my own version of “truth”, to include my personal view of the Divine, is any less valid. Unorthodox in several ways, to be sure, but in the end, the best determinant of whether something is true for a person or not is how well it meshes with a *healthy* perspective. This view of the Divine supports my assertion that Nature (along with everything else) is sacred, and that it’s important to be aware of the impact I have on other living beings, to include nonhuman animals. In fact, being pagan in general has taught me that everything *is* interconnected, and that there needs to be a balance between my own needs and the needs of others. It’s also demonstrated that the connections others have with me can be harmful or helpful, and that just because I’m connected to a person, it doesn’t mean that I can’t weaken a harmful connection to lessen the damage.

* To repeat an anonymous quote, “You know you have created God in your own image when your God hates the same people you do”.

** Recent speculation about Neanderthal burial sites, in which specific items such as flowers were buried with the dead, indicates a very possible belief in the afterlife even that early.

*** My matron Goddess for the past decade has been Artemis; however, she has temporarily lessened her influence to allow the Animal Father to come in and work with me more.

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Ritual Restructuring

Today I did the first celebratory ritual I’ve done in years. Until recently, I’ve seen celebration as a casual thing. When I first got into neopaganism, I celebrated the eight Wiccan sabbats, but after a couple of years I started simply noting what was going on outside at that time of the year, wishing folks “Happy (insert holiday name here)”, and not much else.

Last spring, I read The Witches’ Sabbats by Mike Nichols, an excellent, concise text on the origins of these holidays. That got me wishing I had something to celebrate again, and that holidays were more special than simply wishing people the best. The desire to celebrate has been ruminating since then–not long after I read that book my contracted job ended unexpectedly thanks to forces beyond my control, a couple of months later we moved from Seattle to Portland, and I ended up with a new job that took twelve hours out of my day, five days a week. Things got pretty crazy for a while.

However, this autumn I’ve really been feeling Deer/Stag energy quite a bit. This is a high time for the deer family, as they’re in rut, and fighting and sex seem to be the key themes. Everything that deer in general have been doing over the past half a year or so has culminated in a few weeks of posturing, bashing antlers together, and getting it on. For me, this translates into preparing for the long, cold winter ahead, as well as fertility–but a longer-gestating fertility than the quicken-and-go fertility of spring. I have a few projects that I’d like to ideally come to fruition next summer or so, and so I wanted to put some energy towards that, as well as acknowledging the changes going on outdoors this time of year. (I did some hiking yesterday, though I’ll be playing catch-up with a post on that later this week.)

Now, my usual ritual structure has been pretty generically neopagan for most of my practice. It goes something like this:

Cast circle
Call quarters (directional totems, in my case)
Say stuff about the ritual
Do some magic
Make offerings, if appropriate
Tell everyone they’re welcome to stay or go, but I’m done (stick a fork in me)

I’ve been pretty much solitary, so this has worked just fine for me all by my lonesome. This also means that I can adapt the ritual format as needed at the last minute. However, the general structure above has been pretty standard for me.

Well, when I went to do my ritual today, I found that the structure just wasn’t quite meshing with what I’ve been working with lately. I felt like I was talking too much, doing too much extraneous “stuff” that really didn’t have any meaning for me any more, or that simply felt distracting. So, time for an overhaul.

I’m keeping most of the circle casting process. Yes, I do recognize all space as sacred. However, the casting allows me to formally evoke the directional totems and my various spiritual friends, family and guardians. It also helps me to get into the right headspace for ritual, completing the process started with the initial banishing-by-broom (yes, I do still like to purify the ritual area by sweeping it–more, these days, to help clear my mind than to clear any crud out). However, I’m going to stop doing a verbal “greeting”, and instead go directly to the internal connections I have with each directional totem. when I evoke them, there is a simultaneous internal/external reaction. Externally, the totem arrives from wherever it is totems go when they’re not hanging out in ritual circles (I could say the Lower World, but I don’t keep tabs on the totems. How do I know they aren’t just throwing huge parties behind my back without inviting me? *dejected sniffle*). Anyway, at the same time, there’s a corresponding part of myself for each of them that flares to life (or maybe just attention) when I sense that the totems are here. I actually go through a very brief energetic shape-shift as each totem arrives, temporarily taking the shape of the animal to greet the totem. I also draw the corresponding elemental energy of each totem’s direction into the ritual area.

These two occurrences–the arrival of the totem, and the bringing of the elemental energy, are the two most important parts of the circle casting for me. So I’m probably going to drop the speeches, as well as tracing the pentacle in the air, and stick to a more minimalist experience. I’ll probably say a silent invitation and greeting, but I’ve been calling on these totems long enough that I feel comfortable being a little less loud about things (though the process is still formal).

I’m also probably going to reduce my use of the long-speech-at-the-beginning-of-the-ritual format, at least for celebratory rituals. Again, I will probably make a silent prayer, but most likely just cut to the chase. For example, the crux of today’s ritual was dancing in my deerskin and headdress to bring forth the Deer/Autumnal energy and to celebrate both the positive and negative aspects of preparation, fertility, and uncertainty over the months to come.

I’ve been doing a more bare-bones approach with my magical rituals for a while, but the celebratory ones are something entirely different for me. It’s been a long time since I’ve done regular celebrations, and I’m not the same person I was back then. I’ve got a better idea of how my magical work may change, but restructuring celebratory rituals may take me longer to figure out. As usual, though, it’ll be a matter of trial and error, seeing what works and keeping it, and discarding the rest. Today’s ritual, while enjoyable for the celebration it brought, was also a valuable experiment, and showed me some areas that could use some updating.

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First Post, Post Move-In

“Lupa. You already have two blogs. Why do you need more?”
“Because I have too much spare time on my hands?”

Well, okay, what is this for, anyway? I have my personal blog, and my book review blog.

Blogging is a big thing for me. It allows me to keep in touch with people (at least through my LJ), and it also helps me to get information out (such as my book reviews). This one goes along with the latter benefit; it’s a way for me to record and make available information on the path I’m creating. This benefits those who are curious about my spirituality (and about what others are doing in general), but it also helps me to organize my thoughts on what I’m doing.

I do have a collection of blank books that I record rituals, meditations, and other spiritual material in. However, I admit that I’ve gotten spoiled by computers. I can type a lot faster than I write (and come up with a lot more legible result!). Additionally, it’s tough to get people to comment on my dead-tree journals, whereas here I can get feedback from folks. While this doesn’t, of course, replace talking to people in person, and actually *doing* the work at hand, I am a (slightly later) child of the internet age, and so I’ve gotten quite comfortable with the blog format.

All of the posts prior to this one are things I wrote prior to setting this blog up so that there’d be some context for people to work within. The best place to go from here is the Therioshamanism FAQ, which will give you a much more detailed explanation of what I’m doing.

Where will this lead? Who knows? While I have some idea of where I’m going, this is an entirely new stage of my life. So I expect this to be a journal of growth–which means it’ll probably include some mistakes. I probably won’t post the *really* personal stuff, but I want to let readers get an idea of what path I’ve been walking, and how I’ve progressed. I know I’ve enjoyed learning through observing other peoples’ experiences, and I hope that I can now return that favor.

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Environmentalism

This isn’t really a religious thing per se, but it has had a profound effect on me and who I am overall. Ever since I was very young I’ve loved being out in the woods, exploring. I was the kid who brought home grasshoppers, box turtles and garter snakes, and who preferred muddy jeans to skirts. There’s always been something sacred about Nature to me, and it’s the place where I most easily connect to the Divine.

We have a tendency to protect that which we see as sacred. So it’s no surprise that being a pagan and being an environmentalist are closely intertwined for me. While the Divine is in all things, it manifests most strongly (for me) in Nature. That doesn’t mean that I can ignore problems plaguing humanity directly, but it does mean that I am hyperaware of the fragility of world ecosystems. If someone wanted to dump toxic waste in a churchyard, I’m sure plenty of folks would be pissed. (I know I would be—IMO, all religions are deserving of respect.)

And this is a definite strong thread running through therioshamanism. It isn’t just about running off into the otherworld with power animals; it’s also very much attached to the physical here and now. We need a place to come home to roost after soul-flight and journeying, and personally I like this particular henhouse. As a good friend of mine put it, what good is magic if you can’t bring Kether down to Malkuth?

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Experimental Magic

I borrowed this term from my husband and fellow magician, Taylor. While it’s derived somewhat from chaos magic, experimental magic is focused particularly on taking magic in new directions and seeing how far it can be pushed and worked with. This has influenced me to be more adventurous in my path, and to allow myself to accept things that may be purely UPG, but which demonstrate a definite positive effect on me and the entities I work with. I do consider myself to be an experimental magician; while I don’t paradigm-hop as much as I used to, I do still like to explore new areas of familiar topics.

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Chaos Magic

Chaos Magic

If you’re not sure of what Chaos magic is, chaosmatrix.org is a good place to start; spiralnature.com also has a nice selection of essays. Basically, no, chaos magic isn’t about being all evil and scary, or about Tiamat-worship, and it’s not the same as Discordianism. In this case, Chaos hails back to the original Greek definition of the term, the vast void that contains all potential for reality. Chaos magic is, in part, about tapping into this potential (though not necessarily in a literal manner). Check the links above for a more thorough overview.

This particular system gave me both good and bad influences. On the good side, it made my approach to magic a lot more flexible. I wouldn’t have done nearly as much experimentation with magic as I had without it, and I also probably would have a much more dogmatic approach than I do now. However, one of the negative effects is that for a while it shoved me almost purely into a psychological view of magic, in which deities and spirits were merely figments of my psyche. (Not that Chaos magic will do this to everyone, of course). I have since gotten over such a solipsistic viewpoint and am much happier for it.

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Wicca and Neopaganism

Or, if you want to argue semantics, neo-Wicca. Wicca by way of Scott Cunningham, mostly. His Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner was another early book for me, and while I never really considered myself a (neo)Wiccan, the basic concept did affect my early ritual creations. To this day the broom and the athame (which I now just call a ritual knife) are integral parts of my ritual structure, and I still cast a circle, though I call on directional totems rather than watchtowers. And that’s really about the long and short of the influence Wicca has these days—a few ritual components.

Now, neopaganism in general is another story. I’ve been a neopagan for over a decade, and the eclectic combination of both old and new myths, rituals and other material has been a strong influence on the general “feel” of my path. Granted, I do take care as far as scholarship goes, and I’m not blind to the fact that we do have our fair share of nuts and flakes. However, I do sometimes think that “neopaganism” gets a bad rap, particularly by people who are doing their damnedest to try to prove their paganism is older, or more correct, or less flaky, or has fewer artificial additives and sweeteners, etc.

Personally, I like being a neopagan. I have no problem with it. I am under no delusion that what I’m doing here is some sort of paleolithic reconstruction–how much can you really rebuild out of a few cave paintings and artifacts and the mythological equivalent of a few burnt sticks? Additionally, since I’m not working within any culture except that which I live in now, I don’t have to worry about the constraints of any other culture or society.

I am, however, careful about what I apply to my path. I don’t accept just anything that sounds good. I realize that a good bit of what I’m working with here could be considered fluff by the uber-non-fluffies. Foo on that. I’m honest about my sources, and my personal spirituality and magical practice aren’t dependent on what someone says on teh intarwebz. I figure as long as I’m not running around saying “Hey, I’m a Neanderthal Pagan!” or some silly thing like that, then I can work quite safely within a neopagan (and neoshamanic) framework.

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Neopagan Totemism and Animal Magic

This has been my primary focus in my path ever since I got started studying and practicing magic back in 1997. Ted Andrews’ Animal-Speak was my first book on anything even remotely pagan, though I have over the years read most of the books on the topic. Again, my path has been largely based on UPG, though I do use certain techniques that are common among totemists and pagans in general, such as the guided totem journey.

While totemism is a significant part of my practice, I’ve been known to experiment quite a bit with animal magic in general. For example, my first book, Fang and Fur, Blood and Bone, featured chapters on such topics as creating new species on the astral plane for magical purposes, work with a physical familiar in the modern day and age, a controversial but well-balanced (or so I’ve been told) chapter on animal sacrifice, and a chapter on working with animal parts in magical practice. (I avoided the dreaded totem animal dictionary as well.)

The animal parts are a particularly important aspect to my practice. About as long as I’ve been pagan I’ve been creating artwork utilizing leather, fur, feathers, bones and other animal remains. In my animistic worldview, although the soul of the animal has fled, there is a spirit that stays in each remain, and it is that which I work with. Rather than leaving them to be made into coats and taxidermy mounts, I “rescue” them and make them into more honorable things—ritual tools, sacred jewelry, and magical artwork. I talk quite a bit with the “skin spirits” as I call them (even though they reside in all the parts of the animal) to find out what they want to be. I also say a prayer over each completed project, and perform a triparte purification ritual with an offering.

I’ve also been working with more diverse totems. To me, a totem (in a neopagan totem sense) is an archetypal being that represents all the qualities associated with a particular species, both the natural history and the human lore. I’ve been working, for instance, with “food totems”, the totems of species that humans usually think of as food and nothing more, such as Chicken, Pig and Crab. I do this not only for my own enlightenment, but to create a stronger relationship with these totems, and to learn what I can do to help both them and their physical children. I have written a couple of offsite articles about this if you’re interested.

My current writing project (or one of them, anyway) is a sequel to Fang and Fur, called DIY Totemism. I focus specifically on neopagan totemism, address some of the problems with the current state of totemism in the neopagan community *coughdictionariescough*and approach the topic from some original angles. While it won’t be the sum total of my totemic work in the development of therioshamanism, the fact that a lot of the research I’ve done for it (practically speaking—I won’t write about things I haven’t actually tested in my own ritual space) parallels my personal path development creates a mutual influence.

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Neoshamanism

Neoshamanism is, quite literally, new shamanism. It is derived from indigenous shamanic traditions, with the understanding that the term shaman originated from Siberia and was initially used by anthropologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to denote any sort of a holy person, mystic or other sacred individual who used trances and rituals to serve the community. Neoshamanism isn’t based in any particular culture (other than, perhaps, modern American mainstream culture, or neopaganism), though some neoshamans, particularly plastic shamans, may do their utmost best to convince others that what they read in a book makes them an authentic Native American shaman. Core shamanism was created by Michael Harner, an anthropologist who studied both theory and practice with shamans in a number of indigenous cultures. He took the techniques he learned out of their cultural context and made them into a bare-bones magical system. Ironically enough, many people who learn core shamanism try to plug it back into traditional cultures and say that Harner’s works are traditional.

I am a neoshaman. I wasn’t trained by any particular indigenous culture (or by anyone else, for that matter), and the techniques I use are primarily derived from core shamanism and from UPG (Unverified Personal Gnosis). Harner is an influence, among several other sources (a bibliography of written source material can be seen here). Additionally, totem-specific techniques, such as those in Ted Andrews’ works on totemism were an influence. However, the bulk of my practice is based on intuition and conversation with the spirits. Since I am not the 2,000 year old (wo)man, I can’t really say I’m anything but a neoshaman.