BACK TO BASICS….

 I try to be honest around this Shamanism thing. It is not about any allegiance to a teacher or a book or a particular indigenous way, or about a recent tradition such as 'core' Shamanism. Shamanism is about being true to who we are as humans, in the most fundamental way possible: as beings with a body, who are part of the natural world, a natural world that is alive, inspirited. What could be more true than that? This is why I am a Shamanic guy: because it brings us back to what is most true about ourselves, a solid foundation on which to be human. It is about an experience, not an idea.

Shamanism has got a bit of a bad name because of the pretensions around it, the usual stuff of people imagining themselves to be teachers of something that they don’t really know, not on their pulses, but thinking they do. They are in a hurry to build an identity, a name, for themselves, which is exactly the wrong way to go about it. It shouldn’t be about personal ambition. It is something that needs to come towards you, not something you seek. Usually when you have quite a few years behind you. There are always plenty of people happy to put such teachers on a pedestal, and who am I to criticise, I did so myself when I was younger, and breaking free of it was an important part of my path. So maybe it is a necessary part of how things work?

When it comes to the 'Spiritworld' (an artificial, but maybe necessary, distinction from 'Thisworld') I am the first to say I have no clear idea of what it is that I am doing. In another way, I know very well what I am doing. But you have to feel and experience your way in, I can say nothing other than go there and trust it.

I get quite pissed-off with the aura of mystique that some so-called teachers create around the Spiritworld, like it's this dangerous place, and they will initiate you bit by bit, stringing it out over years, collecting their money along the way. And maybe claiming vicarious authority via some indigenous people they've been 'working' with. No, the Spiritworld is simple, yet deep, and it takes time, but your spirits will gradually take you there. 

I journey in an embodied way, and as far as I can see, it is the way that it is done in Siberia, where they dance it. It is the same territory, but in general more powerful (though not always) to our lying down and journeying method. Our 'core' way (which is quite a way from the true core, if there is one) is safe. It works for the majority, who want shamanism-as-religion. I don't want to be patronising, and maybe I am being, but damn it: there is a difference.

I don't want to say that indigenous people have the goods and we don't, which some people imply, and that is another power trip. We have the goods too, there is no doubt about that. Don't bow down to indigenous people. But to allow the spirits to course through your whole being, and to do healing work on that basis: well that requires a letting go, a freedom, on a deep level, and not many people are ready for that. It is something we move towards.

On a recent event I ran on 'Embodying the Spirits', a number of people found a demonstration of the way I work disturbing. It is not for everyone. Our Christian heritage, with its demonisation of the body, has not helped. That is why, as I said 'core' Shamanism is often the safe starting place.

As for other teachings, be it sweatlodge or pipe ceremony or ayahuasca ceremonies or vison quests or anything else, I say this: remember they are always a means to an end. Yes, approach them with respect, and understand the depth of symbolism and teachings within them. But we are not from those cultures. Our tradition-free culture has its downsides, but we also have the freedom, advisedly (once we have been at our own coal-face for a while), to be creative, to re-invent.

I am not part of the mainstream of how Shamanism works in our culture. Covid finally drove that point home to me. I am not an anti-vaxxer, I am not anti-establishment, as though being that constitutes some kind of 'insight'. No, Medicine people work with the secular leaders, not against them. They do not have the underlying attitude of mistrust and superiority towards authority that characterises the 'counter-culture' of the modern West, which I would venture to call childish. Nor are they partisan, favouring one political party over another. We try to be elders, seeing all points of view.

I find myself in the non-religious minority. I started this group (on Facebook, UK Shamanic Community), and I admin it. I love to be of service to people. I hope people feel free to express themselves here, outside of allegiance to any particular way of viewing Shamanism. I will say if I don't agree, but it will never be personal. I hope I won't come across too much as trying to define what Shamanism is and isn't. I want to be on the side of keeping it open.

I could give up on 'Shamanism'. I sometimes wonder if I should. But dammit, there is always that minority of genuine seekers who can't stand the BS any more than I can, and I will never give up on my connection with you. You are my tribe. Come and visit me in Devon, or let's talk on Zoom.

CAN INDIGENOUS TRADITIONS BE OUT OF BALANCE?

For the last month or two particularly, but really for the last twenty years, I've been sitting and pondering with the way I do healing work. I don't do much of it. Someone said to me recently that you need to do healing full-time to become good at it, and that accords with the indigenous tradition he is exposed to. I can only think there is something imbalanced in that tradition. Maybe that is the kind of thought we don't think very often, but when you look at the major traditions like Christianity and Islam and Buddhism, it's not exactly difficult to find things they've got wrong, particularly on an institutional level. So why wouldn't it be the same with some indigenous traditions?

I have encountered indigenous fundamentalism plenty, and why wouldn't I, because humans are humans wherever you go? Often we seek simple certainties, and justify it with terms like 'tradition' and 'lineage' and 'elders', when what we really mean is 'authority'. Let's be specific, these guys who think you need to be a healer full-time to be the real deal are Huichols, from Mexico.. Just for the sake of discussion. Maybe this guy has misunderstood, though I doubt that. Maybe there is machismo involved: machismo is a perennial male thing of which I know Indians are capable. Amongst the Chippewa Cree, I have been told, some of the men will lead one sweatlodge after another, without a break, to prove they can, until they can do no more. And, of course, to do that is to miss the point. I was around one of them, he certainly knew his stuff, but he would regularly drive himself to the point of exhaustion. Quite unnecessarily, in my opinion.

When I've done some astrology, or some serious talking with someone, or some healing work in which something shifts profoundly, I need time and space afterwards to re-group and rest. Such work draws deeply on me. I love it, it moves me to tears, it provides a central meaning to my life. Beyond the immediate need to rest, I can only average a few such encounters a week, at most. They change me, such work goes deep, it continually expands who I am and what I can do. Of course I can go the extra mile if necessary and do a whole bunch at once, like I have done at festivals in the past, but after that I may not be fit for much for a week afterwards.

There is also the need to live a regular life in this world to stay balanced. This is my main point of contention. From what I have read, healers/shamans usually lead regular lives on top of their calling. They have to earn a living, they probably have a family. They are not Catholic priests. We all know where that kind of one-sidedness leads. Spiritual bypass, in a word. The ego-identification with a spiritual calling, and our regular humanity being channeled down twisted pathways. I cannot think of anyone who has set themselves up as a teacher/healer as their main thing when young, say 30s or 40s, for whom it hasn't become an ego-building thing, and that doesn't seem to change as they get older. This twists everything.

We need ordinary life, because we are here to incarnate, not to transcend. For us, this is the great medicine of shamanism: it is an earth path, the sacred is to be found in the natural world, not somewhere else. We humans are nothing but the natural world, not something beyond.

So do not treat this healer calling as a profession, it is something we do as and when, as Spirit sends people our way. It is to be quietly cherished. Trust whoever turns up, and trust it when no-one is turning up. I ended up talking about something different to what I intended, more on the way I do healing work next time. But I trust what I end up writing about.

ALPHA MALES and PRIMATE HIERARCHIES

(From Frans de Waal's latest book - highly recommended)

 "The role of dominant male primates shouldn't be dismissed or cast in a negative light, as if every one of them were a tyrant. There are indeed males who terrify everyone, but they aren't the rule. In our closest relatives, the majority of alpha males that I have known didn't harass or abuse the members of their society. They guaranteed peace and harmony by keeping order and checking the behaviour of up-and-coming young males. The security that an even-handed alpha male provides, especially to the most vulnerable, may make him immensely popular. And when he loses his position, which inevitably happens one day, he simply steps down a few rungs on the ladder and lives out his life in peace.

Every primate group has one alpha male and one alpha female and not an alpha individual (either sex) followed by a beta individual (either sex), then a gamma, a delta, and so on. The reason is simple. Hierarchies are largely sex segregated. In the same way that young primates and children prefer to play with members of their own sex, social hierarchies mostly involve one or the other sex. Females worry about where they rank relative to other females, and males do the same relative to other males. Competition occurs primarily within each sex, and hierarches help regulate and contain it. 

We have no reason to assume, as is often done, that males are more suited for leadership than women. Men's greater size and strength doesn't make them better leaders, even though these qualities still subconsciously bias our judgement. In other primates, both sexes astutely exert power, and female leadership is not hard to find. Females also have a hand in the hierarchy among males, in the same way that males have one in the hierarchy among females. Moreover, many alpha individuals, regardless of sex, care about more than rank. They defend the underdog, settle disputes, console distressed parties facilitate reconciliation and promote stability. They serve their community while at the same time safeguarding their position and privileges."

THE SHAMANIC ROOTS OF ASTROLOGY

Astrology is a sky-based path, shamanism is earth-based. Between them they encompass earth and sky. To call astrology a path, however, is I think misleading, just as it is for shamanism. The idea that we are on a path is modern and linear and rational. The purpose of shamanic ways is to live in balance, moment by moment, with the natural world. It doesn’t have to be going anywhere: that experience of balance is where the sense of meaning, of a properly-lived life, comes from. It is the same with astrology: it shows us how to live in accord with the will of the gods. It is not going anywhere.

Shamanism is based on the experience of the cyclical nature of life on earth, of the seasons returning and repeating, of life itself continually dying back in order to emerge renewed. Astrology is primarily based on the cyclical nature of the heavens. Both ways place humans in the context of cycles of the natural world. We are intimately, viscerally connected to those cycles. It is why I have some reservations about the idea of ‘evolutionary’ astrology – a modern linear model, sitting uncomfortably within an ancient cyclical model.

The experience of belonging to nature is something we have been forgetting for the last 2500 years, as we have incrementally distanced ourselves from the natural world. By the early 90s, this distancing from nature (via Buddhism) had personally made me ill, and shamanism was a sweet and irresistible corrective to this.

Astrology easily retreats into intellectualism, partaking of that downgrading, even demonisation of the body that we have inherited from Christianity. Last night, with the writing of this article in mind, I had a dream about an academic astrologer from the Cultural Astronomy and Astrology faculty who was horrified at the idea of entering a sweatlodge. Point noted.

Astrology began to lose its direct connection with the sky 2000 years ago, with the arising of the astrological chart, and moved in the direction of mathematics.

In shamanic cultures, everything has a spirit. Everything is alive, rocks and water included. This is a natural and immediate experience for indigenous peoples. I think the onus is on science to show that rocks do not have consciousness, rather than for humans to have to prove that their direct experience is real. You could say that consciousness is the subjective pole of which matter is the objective pole. Which is why science will probably never be able to explain consciousness, because science is a technique for examining the world as object, rather than as subject.

It is not just everything on earth that has a spirit. Everything in the sky also has a spirit, and that was how astrology began. Stories from the sky spirits about our lives on earth, and how to live them well.

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I offer Zoom astrology readings, by donation. Contact: BWGoddard1 (at)aol.co.uk. My books, Surfing The Galactic Highways and The Medicine Wheel are available for pre-order on Amazon (or by post from me now.) You can find my astrology blog at www.astrotabletalk.blogspot.co.uk

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If you work shamanically, then you may have the experience of spirits, of presences around that want to help. If you are an astrologer, then some of your helping spirits are in the sky. There are dozens available to you. We may attempt reduce the planets to ‘principles’, to ‘archetypes’ that are ‘really’ projected outwards from the human psyche. But astrology is not fundamentally rational in this way, nor does it originate from a culture that saw the individual as autonomous and separate in the way that we do. For indigenous peoples, the self is relational rather than autonomous. This modern rationalisation of astrology as a ‘projection’ of the human psyche onto the sky assumes that the individual is not also the universe itself. Any half-way decent mystic will confirm that each of us is also the whole universe.

So the planets are helping spirits in the sky, who are intimately connected to us. A good astrologer will be able to tell you what they are saying. They will feel your sky spirits in their body.

Shamanism has helping spirits. It also has the Great Spirit, the great mystery at the heart of things whose designs are infinite and beyond our grasp. The helping spirits give us whispers of that vaster intention, they are a medium for it. It is the same with astrology.

I want to say something about the outer planets from this kind of perspective. You could say that the outer planets came in as God went out. They represent a return to a less authoritarian and more fluid way of experiencing the ultimate nature of the universe.

The inner planets, from the Sun through to Saturn, represent our conscious endowment, the different forces that we grapple with and try to bring into balance on a day-to-day level. They are not under our control, for they are gods. They are much bigger forces in whose dance we partake. We approach them with awe.

A fortiori the outer planets, who are in no sense to be managed, but surrendered to. They are the Great Spirit showing itself through three different ‘transpersonal’ lenses. My job as an astrologer is often to talk about this attitude of trust and surrender that is required. It goes against the prevailing cultural attitude of rationality and planning and will – even what might be called ‘responsibility’. It is a case of “Not My Will But Thine”.

Major outer planet transits always have the nature of an initiation into a new type of consciousness. We cannot carry on as we were, much as it is our human instinct to do so. We suffer because we are trying to continue as before, even though it is no longer working. There is something new that we cannot conceive of, because we have not experienced it, that we nevertheless need to remain open to, and allow it to change us from the ground up. These transits also drag us firmly out of the modern sense of the individual as autonomous, and into the indigenous relational self: the self as part of the human community and part of the universe itself. Our life works best when it is seen as serving that greater whole, rather than focussing on what I want for ‘my’ life.

Uranus, Neptune and Pluto: creativity, ensoulment and renewal respectively. That, at least, is one way of describing what it is they want us to surrender to, to trust in, and to allow to transform us. And surrounding it all is mystery. We do not know why this is happening, or what the larger design is. Well, we may get glimpses.

But really our task is to learn how to be with these transforming forces, and to be open to whatever outcomes are necessary. And the processes can go on for years, for the changes are deep. This is one of the gifts that astrology brings: stories from the heart of the universe that show the meaning of what can be very difficult and long-lasting periods of our lives.

I guess my purpose in writing this is to set astrology in something of its original context, of the shamanic cultures from which we all come, which were the norm for 99% of human history, and the same in principle the world over. In our rush to rationality and technological progress, we have separated ourselves from the natural world, and that is something we need to find our way back to, for it is reality. A natural world that is inspirited, and that will help and guide us, if we listen. Astrology is shamanic in this sense, for it is based on an original experience of the universe as alive, with spirits that speak to us, in this case from the sky.