The shaman might encounter a spirit animal or an ancestor spirit with knowledge of healing, both figures being helpers. These people would find themselves speeding along in a different world not a world created by the shaman’s imagination, because the experience came to them-they were some place else.Īccess to this different world could be gained beneath the ordinary world, beneath the earth, under water or ice, or reached high up on a mountain or in the clouds. In times past, people drummed or sang, and the music would become so powerful that shamans would lose the ordinary sense of being present in the world. To access the power that spirits can give, shamans make a spirit journey. All are cultures in which corporate economies have less power. Furthermore, shamanism is now recognized to exist widely in Africa. Such a sense still lingers on among hunter-gatherer peoples in the Arctic, northern Asia, central Australia, around the Pacific, and among Native Americans. In the shamanic view, spiritual connections between people are already in place and that is just how things are. It can be viewed as a healing or helping technology-the technology of the sacred, as it has been called-acts and experiences instead of a set of beliefs or customs. Among such people, shamanism is neither a religion nor a science, but an activity in a world that is ordinary yet spiritual. The word “Shaman” derives from saman, taken from the Tungus of Siberia where it means “spirit healer.” Shamanism, or working with spirits, is found today in many parts of the globe among people who live by what Lévy-Bruhl, in 1910, called “the law of mystical participation,” that is, the sense of a spiritual connection that exists between everyone and everything in the universe.
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