Joan Halifax Elucidates the World of the Shaman for us Wanna-be's

 

Shaman: The Wounded Healer – Joan Halifax (1982)

 

            Sometimes the good books just keep coming!  Whether through synchronicity, plain coincidence, or just dumb luck, this amazing book found its way to my hands, and I am exceedingly glad it did.  Joan Halifax has managed that most-rare of feats, to write a slender volume packed with information and wisdom that is able to elucidate exactly what a shaman is, how they come to be, how their visions and experiences are seemingly universal, and how shamans themselves communicate about the experiences they endure for the betterment or benefit of the tribe around them.  It is eye-opening and quite a departure from the many other ethnographic and historical books I have read about shamanism and the role of the shaman in their respective cultures.

            In a very real and basic sense, the shaman is the one tasked with experiencing pain, death, and rebirth in order for them to understand and act upon the various otherworldly forces and powers that threaten, disrupt, or wrongly influence the tribespeople.  This is why this book is titled “the Wounded Healer.”  Only someone with the experience of death and rebirth can travel the worlds above and below ours.  Only they can talk to the spirits, travel through space and time, and come back to our mortal coil safely with their consciousness intact.

            Joan Halifax describes the various symbols which seem to be near-universal among shamans worldwide.  Some of them, such as the eagle, are emblematic of the shaman’s spirit rising to the world above.  Other symbols, such as the swan, or the water lily, serve as stand-ins for the shaman, for they not only inhabit, but thrive, in all three realms.  The Swan is just as comfortable flying in the heavens, walking around on land, and swimming on and in deep waters, just as the shaman is comfortable existing in our world, the underworld of demons and primal forces, and the aboveworld of the divine and beneficent spirits.  One universal symbol of shamanism is the World Tree, which serves as the Axis Mundi, or center of the world.  The roots of the World Tree reach down into the primordial lower world.  The trunk rises through our corporeal world, and the top of the World Tree reaches into the heavens.  It is this World Tree that shamans “climb” in their journeys and initiations.  The pictographs and artwork showing the World Tree are found everywhere humanity exists.

            One of the most profound statements in this book is a quote from an Iglulik Eskimo (Inuit) shaman told to the explorer Knud Rasmussen,

            “The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls.  All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, souls that do not perish with the body and which must therefore be (pacified) lest they should revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.”

            It is this truth that runs through all shamanistic activity.  If we have souls, then everything has souls, and because of that, everything has its own consciousness.  Shamans do not claim that a stone is as intelligent as a human, but they do claim that the stone has its inherent right to exist just as we do, and that it carries a form of consciousness which is far older than short-lived human creatures.  The same is true for everything we see around us, including mother Earth, and the Universe itself.

            Shamans know that the process of creation, the birth of the Universe and of Life, is always ongoing.  They also are aware that the process of destruction, of the end of things, is also constantly occurring.  They do not see Time as a linear, step-by-step process, like a recipe, or a list of Ikea furniture instructions.  Everything exists in the ever-present Now, and only our faulty human senses show the world to be past, present, and future.  This is how the energy of creation can be harnessed by the shamans, and how they lose the fear of inevitable destruction that we all experience as the fear of death.  It makes for a powerful, if lonely existence. 

Most shamans lead solitary lives, devoted to their calling, and do not interact much with the tribes they protect.  The wisdom and experience gained by their shamanistic initiations and study distance them from the everyday people they serve.  Many people fear the shaman and their powers, yet they are an invaluable and requisite part of human society.  Our modern world, with its emphasis on technology and scientific advancement, has turned its back on shamans, but even so, individual humans seek out and explore the shamanistic way.  Something in our nature is drawn to the unknown, to the rarely explored, and many of us are especially attracted to the inner life of the mind.  The shamans are still all around us, separating themselves from the day-to-day static noise we call human endeavor, exploring that which cannot be seen, and holding the forces of the universe at bay for the rest of us.