Who Can be a Shaman? Who Must be a Shaman?

Pasaquan and the modern Shamanism of St. EOM, Eddie Owens Martin.

While not religious, I am fascinated by religion. This mode of thought and experience is obviously instinctive, patently irrational, and strenuously defended and rationalized via theology, apologetics, and other formerly respectable modes of thought, not to mention jihad and other sorts of brute power. We are (mostly) in a much better position today than in the old days when every political system had its state religion, and woe betide anyone caught thinking crosswise. Yet in the even earlier days of our species, religion was much more free-form, and while the instinct of religion is/was shared universally, its expression varied widely among far-flung, isolated peoples. We may generally call it shamanism. The first ingredient was an acceptance that some people care a lot more about spiritual matters than others do. Typically this is because they are misfits, maybe mentally disturbed, and have a heightened appreciation of the unreality of this reality that we think inhabit. Mind-altering drugs provide a glimpse of this widened perspective, and naturally comprise a central part of many shamanistic sacraments.

It is striking how the shared appreciation of an alternate reality, whether though official scripture, traditional dogma, or via ecstatic worship practices or mind-altering drugs, contributes to social bonding and personal psychological healing- which are the ultimate positive impacts of religion. Maybe the starkest naturalistic reality, now that we have evolved to appreciate its full horror, is incompatible with psychic health. Maybe an alternate, colorful, humane, and supportive reality is essential, and is particularly binding and healing if everyone shares it, almost regardless of its particular nature or irrationality. But on the other hand, even religions of intolerance, war, human sacrifice and cannibalism have sustained long-lived cultures, so the binding may take precedence over the humane-ness.

Ideologies and value systems are in play as well. Societies run on particular views of what is right, who counts, what is meaningful, etc. While these touch on empirical reality in some respects, their values and social apparatus are relatively untethered, free to valorize some, deprecate others, and place values on obscure things and odd activities. A misfit will be, by definition, more likely to suffer under the ambient ideology and prone to seek an alternative. Whether the shaman supports the current culture or seeks to subvert it, her work is critical in framing a social ideology that most other members of society hardly even know exists, and are not generally capable of shaping or grappling with consciously.

At its best, shamanism provides more than a narrative or theory about the unseen forces that run the world. It also centers the society with a purposeful narrative of its existence and the essential part each member plays in its continuance. It can heal individuals via the power of this social cohesion- as even medical science is beginning to recognize- since even without any objective medicine whatsoever, the rituals of care, support, and confidence are themselves powerful expressions of our social nature and aids to healing.

But what about today? We are heading into a post-religious world, where neither shamanism nor mainline theology rings true, capitalist ideology reigns, and social atomization is in part the result. It was jarring and intriguing to run across an odd TV program about an autodidactic shaman in Georgia, Eddie Owens Martin, who died in 1986. As a gay man in rural Georgia of the early 1900's, he fled to New York and led an underground life, which led to a career in fortune telling. Eventually he inherited a property in Georgia, and moved back on his own terms, using the proceeds from his fortune telling to build a spiritual retreat / theme park, with ornate decoration throughout.

St. EOM painting from Pasaquan

The connection between fortune telling and other facets of free-form shamanism are obvious. Martin, who renamed himself St. EOM, was obviously a charismatic person, and attracted helpers who attended ceremonies and helped with the painting. There was a hair theme, where Martin thought that he received messages from the gods through hair that had to be pointed upward. After he went bald, he resorted to pointing the ends of his extensive beard to the sky in order to maintain this connection. And what about all the symbology? It seems to consist of benevolent faces and highly colorful geometric designs, as are common in other spiritual and ceremonial settings. It looks like an effort to capture positive and healing material from the archetypes, which are partly eternal, and partly influenced by the culture of the day, where multiracial themes of harmony were coming to prominence.

All this reminded me strongly of two other shamans of the day, Carl Jung and Walt Disney. Where Martin was a spontaneous and demotic shaman, Jung come at it from a scholarly, indeed logorrheic perspective, producing book after book of memories, dreams, reflections, and rationalizations by which he straddled the scientific and credulus approaches to spiritualism. Most evocative was his Red Book, which features highly colorful dreamscapes full of pregnant symbols and meaning, harvested from his forays into the inner world of his own fixations and archetypes.

Lastly, Disney obviously shared the fantasy and dream motivations of Martin, though seemingly without much of the spiritual baggage. Disney was also moved in some mysterious way to make these fantasies concrete by creating theme parks where this positive message of colorful suspension of reality was given relentless and popular expression. These are demotic shamanism on a vast scale, drained of any deeper significance other than the lightest symbology that fleetingly speaks to part of us that hopes for an escape from the humdrum and pressing constraints of reality.

• Another healing fantasy in glorious animation- Secret of the Kells.
• Private schools- the real scandal is that they exist at all.
• Slavery.
• Crytocurrencies are a criminal accelerant- and should be banned. Not to mention being an environmental disgrace.