The term 'shaman' seems a bit abused through popular connotations. We think of Jim Morrison of The Doors, we think of archaic cultures long since receded into forests to disappear. Were one to proclaim a shaman it would only seem to beckon another dismal New Age snake oil salesman. Yet, as PBS goes through a fund raising drive, and the series hosted by Bill Moyers and presented by Joseph Campbell on The Power of Myth, a television viewer might sense a lack of mythological thinking spread across modern times, myth itself disappearing along with its story tellers into the literal nature of the information age's news cycle and our addiction to it. A broad lack of mythological thinking, and by implication, a lack of comforting and constructive rituals, like those of passage, seems the very sign of the times.

Here from Mircea Eliade and Joan P. Couliano's The Harper Collins Concise Guide to World Religions:

"Visited by the spirits, the shamans first went through a period of deep depression and psychic illness that would only give way when, having crossed the desert of death, they returned to life and learned how to control the spirits in order to perform ecstatic journeys whose purpose was usually curative."

And one imagines that myths themselves, with their own curative powers to the individual psyche, are come about in a similar fashion. Myth is a response in the form of creativity and story telling to that which an individual discovers which is of depression and illness and quite possibly social ills.

That is a guess, but to me it holds water. Remarque went through WWI, and he came out of it to write the mythical story that is All Quiet on the Western Front. Shane MacGowan fell out of Irish culture into the modern city of London and the down and out life that awaits the non professional and came up with song, having passed through his own nervous breakdown.

Modern myths in modern forms suggest a kind of a rite of passage, the going through of something that then either forces or enables the person to make art. Perhaps the period of artistic creation is itself a kind of break down, a refusal to enter and completely be at one with modern society, a refraining, such that allowed a Joyce or a Hemingway the time to create in some form.

And so, if one has written or created, what form has he or she now taken? Art has come through the effort, and the creative person is 'in society but not of it.' A shaman of a certain sort.


As an addendum, what is that shaman 'professional life' about now? What accolade is that in the modern world? Don't we, critically trained, insist on so much questioning and placement, that a poet is only a poet, Joyce is only a prose experimentalist, MacGowan only an intoxicated singer, Hemingway, a self-destructive macho fisherman, Bob Dylan only Bob Dylan, so much so that we, in our own times of strange instantaneous unsifted mass culture rolling over us constantly, are distracted from the point, the basic point, that the works of the shaman, the artist, the myth spinner, actually have incredible curative powers, and that indeed such is our salvation, just as Jesus Christ came not to save us so much with the particulars, but to save us with a thoughtful mythos fiction. (A sign of the modernity of his times, that he couldn't simply do the 'shaman' thing and go on his way.)

What does a shaman do, after the initial work, which is very very hard and time consuming and not good for the retirement account? Does he set up a shingle, 'lobbyist to the spirits'? Does she become a 'consultant?' A menu planner? What was left for Joyce but all the support and, on his own time, Finnegan's Wake?

So removed from myth are we, what do we do? The pirates have taken Dionysos hostage, and it is only the old helmsman who gets the god, and says to the rest, 'don't mess with him... well, (having seen them all turn into dolphins) I might have told you so.'

Joseph Campbell, making an interesting point that could have gotten better traction in the last twenty five or so years since, noted that it's the same God the three religions of Beirut and Jerusalem share, the same message, and yet the literal 'translation' manages to offer ways of one group to offend the other and even hate each other. The inefficacy of today's shaman, or, who knows, maybe the inability of people to let go... Ot is it mass culture itself, or is it individuals... the preaching of hatred... Have we become too politicized, too factionalized, too sectarian to even be able to back off and ponder the shaman within us all?

Embarrassing stuff, even to mention, but it has to come up, one way or another.