mNewbie from Anvir Singh Shamanism: Eternal Religion A wide range of introductions to us to various shamans, new Hans and primitives. We met a cigarette-loving tribal therapist among the people of Mentawai in Indonesia, and since 2014, anthropologist Singh met a professor of psychiatry and medicine at Johns Hopkins. We will meet currency managers and “heedling wizards” who have a capricious spiritual traffic flow with global markets.

Here is a panoramic survey: Singh completes field work, leg work and drugs. (“Then, with the immediateness of awakening, my trip ended. I realized the surroundings. People were watching us through the doorway. Vomit was everywhere.”) But his book lacked what I needed, i.e., the claims of New Han Yiism and its visionary luggage, about how conspiracy theories and the dangers of burning circulated and got into trouble. In other words, this has not taken us to the United States now.

So who Or what Is it a shaman? Singh gives us a convenient definition: “The Shaman is an expert who participates in invisible reality through an extraordinary state and provides services such as rehabilitation and divination.” You can use drugs, inspiration, dancing, fasting, meditation, and any drug that floats in the boat, and you can achieve a non-trivial or changing state through drugs, dancing, fasting, meditation. Once there, you may fight demons, fly over the sky, fall into the underworld, recruit help from power animals, or communicate with the souls of the dead. You may experience a horrible supernatural ordeal, a violent self-inflict or scattering. It is crucial, though, that you will be stronger. You return from another realm with strange new features. You can heal. You can predict. (I had a certain resistance to Singh's description of Jesus as a shaman - one of the things I like about Jesus is how dazzling it was to distribute his message in an unelected situation, how dazzling it was, and how straightforward and inclusive it was, but I got it:

Of course, the shaman's progress is archetype: it is a hero's journey, full of excitement and overflow. Religious scholar Miriade Shamanism: Ancient Techniques of Ecstasy"Sometimes find themselves in despair. They have to go 'meet in day and night', or find a door on the wall, or climb the sky through a momentary open but instantaneous passage." This reminds me of Luke Skywalker, who was rotated from the celestial body by troops, putting two proton torpedoes onto the hot exhaust port (the passage briefly revealed), the otherwise reliable death star. After Yopo's experience, "Santic snuff" (its main psychoactive compound seems to be Bufotenine, unfamiliar outside of South America), Singer was told that a similar escape moment of danger and opportunity, in a trip was "you need to focus on your goals." Experienced users advise him “The transition point is fast, and if you don’t focus, Yopo will take you away.”

Ultimately, Singh is interested in the specific content of the tr state or in the psychological map of the shamana samanaks, rather than in the shamanism as a world historical phenomenon, almost a function of human consciousness. For him it begins in the same place where religion begins: under the trembling conditions of life, in the nature of our contractual nature with our contract with existence. He calls it "a convincing technology to deal with uncertainty." Shamans plead for us on behalf of us, opposing accidental and constant happenings. He can negotiate with chaos because he inserts the invisible grid behind it.

You can see all of this connection with conspiracy theories and further - mental illness. Hovering beyond our daily dates is another order of reality, fiery, supercharged and abundant entities. The shaman has already obtained the coordinates. He quarreled or was quarreled by the monsters in this area and their upbringing spirit. So he has the power. He can change the weather. He can absorb infection. He can turn the curse and eliminate discomfort.

To connect to the neo-Hanmani paranoia, try listening Mysterious Apocalypse Programhosted by Qanon Shaman Jacob Chansley, the 2023 podcast. In a plot called "DC Deep State", Chansley and his co-hosts explore/hatred "the current deep mystical culture." Here, in a hurry monologue, is the most baroque trap of conspiracy theory: adrenaline, golden owl, 33rd level Masonic. In this story, the ruling class is invaded by demons from the very beginning. Chansley said: "In fact, it goes back all the way back to Sumer, Egypt, Babylon, Canaanites, Persians, Greeks, Romans, yes, Aztecs, even British people."

A healthier way to fight against the spiritual war is art. For example, anyone who sees DC Punk Rockers’ brains at its peak knows that the ex-Man HR is a Shaman: the mouthpiece of divine nature, brought by the weather. For Ted Hughes, a devout reader of Mircea Eliade, there is the power of shamanism - great poetry, derived from healing and prophecy, derived from special consciousness. Hughes wrote: “In a shamanic societyVenus and Adonissome longer poems by Keats, Oisin's Wandering,,,,, Grey Wednesdayall will give their authors the magic drum. "Huce saw William Butler Yeats in his shamanic teachings on the public side of his inspired: "His outspoken political rhetoric shines at some point. TS Eliot also responded to the "tribal disaster" of modernity, who "retained his own shaman more fully and perhaps stronger than any of his contemporaries. ”

In the pagan stirring of the 60s and 70s, the American Neo-Hanmanism, like many other things, emerged in many other things in the United States. Carlos Castaneda's big sales Don Juan's teachings: Yaqui's way of knowledge- One of his "Anthropology or novel?" Creation - Published in 1968. Michael Harner Shaman's way Arrived in 1980: A How-to Accuide Guide in which Eliade’s painful shamanic voyage blind and dismembered and organ replacements can be replaced with a program that can be followed in a living room in Jane Fonda style. (“No need to stop, increase the shaking rattle to about 180 times a minute.”) Singh goes to the Burning Man to check out Salmandorm’s rehabilitation classes and is struck by the shift in attention: individuals rather than tribes, mental states, not physical illnesses. He wrote: “Traumatic and harmful thinking patterns usurped positions that were often filled by witchcraft, against taboos and resentment.”

Is this the last game of shamanism? Or is the other world of shamans just finding new containers, new metaphors? Hana's Shaman's way A useful difference is proposed between the shamanic state of consciousness and the normal state of consciousness: the shaman can switch between the two; he can lift Jack's bean stalk and then go down again. These days, the rest of us tend to be trapped here or there. Look at our politics. Look at the state of our brains. Different reality, untranslated and incompatible. Castaneda, falls from his first trip to Peyote The Doctrine of Don JuanHe was very upset at the return to reason: “The sorrow of this irreconcilable situation,” he wrote: “I was so strong that I cried.” It required some very agile shamans to guide us out of our predicament.

This article appears in June 2025 Printed version titled "The Return of Shaman".