When is appropriation appropriate?

Part one of a series in DIY Shamanism

Anthropologists describe a condition among “primitive” peoples called “loss of soul.”

In this condition a man is out of himself, unable to find either the outer connection between humans or the inner connection to himself. He is unable to take part in his society, its rituals, and traditions. They are dead to him, he to them. His connection to family, totem, nature, is gone. Until he regains his soul he is not a true human. He is “not there.”

It is as if he had never been initiated, been given a name, come into real being. His soul may not only be lost; it may also be possessed, bewitched, ill, transposed into an object, animal, place, or another person. Without this soul, he has lost the sense of belonging and the sense of being in communion with the powers and the gods. They no longer reach him; he cannot pray, nor sacrifice, nor dance. His personal myth and his connection to the larger myth of his people, as raison d’être, is lost. Yet he is not sick with disease, nor is he out of his mind. He has simply lost his soul. He may even die. We become lonely.

Other relevant parallels with ourselves today need not be spelled out.

James Hillman, Insearch

Before we take the first steps toward piecing together a personal shamanic practice to address the problem of soul loss that is the root of what’s been termed the modern malaise, I thought it might be good to get something out of the way which always seems to be a sticking point for some folks — my use of the “problematic” word shamanism.

Whenever I use this term in the context of talking about my personal practice, inevitably there is someone who takes issues with it, claiming that it is cultural appropriation. Since I’ve already written an apologia of sorts in the intro to my latest book Traumadelic, I’ll simply post an excerpt of it below the paywall rather than rehash my argument here.

Frankly, I’m tired of justifying my use of this word and find that the people who take issue with it are invariably white-identified, university-educated North Americans who have never experienced shamanism for themselves. From their standpoint, us displaced European mutts should only look to “our own traditions” to find healing and spiritual fulfillment.

This presents quite a dilemma to those of us for whom the only tradition we can find a direct connection to is the Christianity (or Atheism, or Scientific Rationalism) of our most recent ancestors. While I do think it’s crucially important that we sincerely investigate the cultural tradition(s) of our lineage and try them on for size, what are we to do when, as Jung put it, we find that the cultural myth no longer fits?

Even Jung, although he has often been described as a modern shaman, admonished Westerners who sought answers to the meaning crisis from outside their own traditions. It’s ironic that it was through his investigation of global traditions that he found justification and inspiration for his many of his psychological ideas and practices. Perhaps the most obvious example is his use of the Eastern mandala as an image of the Self.

“In the course of my investigations of the collective unconscious, I discovered the presence of an apparently universal symbol of a similar type — the mandala symbol. The mandala is an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the wholeness of the self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man.” — C.G. Jung

“Und here is zee mother complex.”

In Jung’s lifelong search for a homegrown tradition that would be suitable as both framework and image source to present his radical psychological theories, he eventually landed on Alchemy — a subject that he researched for many decades and which he made the subject of his last major work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, completed when he was 80 years old. The smack-my-head irony is that Medieval European Alchemy was a complete hodge-podge of Egyptian, Greek and Islamic ideas and practices. There seems to be no escaping the fact that Christianity did such a good job of cutting us off from our pagan roots that there is not much left for those of us who yearn for an integrated mind-body-soul practice that connects us to the living world.

Sure, if we look hard enough we can find the seeds of pre-Christian belief and practice in our language, folk stories and songs, old wives tales, ancient myths, and even Western Christianity itself. But regrowing a culture from a handful of scattered seeds takes time, and while I appreciate people like Stephen Jenkinson who are willing to take on a project that he admits won’t bear fruit in his lifetime, I don’t share his aversion to looking to living traditions outside the broadly Western European in order to find inspiration and instruction on how to tend to my garden here and now.

I always thought it a shame that he made fun of “the shanti shanti yoga people” knowing that his respiratory condition could probably benefit from a yoga therapy practice, if he’d just allow himself to try it. It’s been my experience that if you stick to any hardened moral position you either have to become a real ascetic or risk becoming a hypocrite. Jenkinson, for all his moralizing about borrowing from other cultures, drinks from a mate gourd, dresses like a gaucho, and has a house filled with indigenous art.

I don’t know if my openness to syncretism and eclecticism is characterological or karmic, or if it’s because the times we find ourselves in are, by all accounts, far more desperate than they were when he came of age. All I know is that I need something more substantial than grief to get me through the day.

The belittling and condemnation of Westerners who go to the East to learn its meditative arts or to the South to learn its shamanic arts is a shadow vestige of the old-school Christianity that made everything outside its orthodoxy heretical, pagan and demonic. I might be going out on a limb here, but to me it seems like a kind of weird inversion of white supremacy and their racial purity taboos.

To cut ourselves off from the vast array of non-Western time-tested “techniques of ecstasy” available to us now seems to me both masochistic and just plain dumb. And it’s unnatural. Humans have always stolen and shared ideas, tools and techniques amongst one another. It’s evolutionarily intelligent. I mean, could you imagine depriving yourself of the nourishment your mind, body and soul get from music, books, film, poetry, dance or cuisine from cultures other than your “own”? When it’s acceptable for every other form to be appreciated, studied and appropriated, why should our physical and spiritual well-being suffer just because of some moralistic hangup about borrowing spiritual and healing artforms? Even Jenkinson has recently alluded to resorting to non-Western healing practices in an attempt to treat his Parkinson’s disease. Why wait until it’s too late?

“Why should our physical and spiritual well-being suffer because of some moralistic hangup about borrowing spiritual and healing artforms?”

Unless we can build a time machine and go back to visit our pre-Christian ancestors, there will be no way to reconstitute a purely Western practice that meets all of our spiritual needs. And even if we could go back to retrieve the shamanistic practices of our distant ancestors, a lot of us European mutts would still be faced with the question of which lineage to choose. Do I pick my Irish ancestors? The German? The Dutch? The French? Each of those are branches on my family tree, and all would certainly bear some good fruit. But picking one cuts me off from the others. And picking bits and pieces from all of them leaves me with the same problem of putting it all together in a coherent way.

The shamanic attitude and approach solves a lot of those problems. The thing I love about shamanism is that it’s about using whatever works. The traditional shamanic practitioner who is employed in remote rural villages doesn’t have time to quibble over moral dilemmas of ownership and appropriation. They are called into action when there is an immediate need for soul retrieval, for bodily healing, for spiritual guidance, for making restitution with the spirits of the land, or going to war with the dark forces that are threatening his village. These are some of the very pressing needs that are facing our global village right now. As I see it, any solution to the meaning crisis will require great leaps of faith and a radically creative attitude and vision.

There’s pretty good evidence that the shamanic practitioners of all global cultures (including the European) were the first artists. The earliest music, dance, textiles, pottery and cave paintings all seem to have sprung from the shamanic vision. And like every artist worth their salt, the shamanic practitioner is a kind of bricoleur, someone who pieces together their art from whatever materials are readily available. Just take a look at a shaman’s altar sometime and you’ll find a work of spiritual bricolage.

The wildly eclectic ritual altar of Ines Cortes, a mushroom shaman in Huautla de Jiménez, Mexico.

Picasso said, “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” What I think he meant is that nothing comes from nothing, everything is borrowed from somewhere, and to make something great, you have to make it your own. Just about everyone knows how goofy it is when an artist (spiritual or otherwise) borrows something of someone else’s and doesn’t have the artistry to transform it into something new. It’s the difference between Rappin’ Rodney and Eminem. Or white rastas vs. The Clash.

The same rule applies to a DIY shamanic practice. Nobody reading this far wants to be a Plastic Shaman or Pretendian. I think there is a way to learn from and be inspired by living traditions, extract the essence of the techniques they offer, and through your artistic spiritual practice, transform them into something new and authentically yours. And besides, I hope it’s very clear by this point that I’m not talking about becoming a literal shaman. It’s more about taking on the creative spirit and attitude of a shamanic individual as a way to approach your spiritual life.

Crystal palaces, unicorns, angels and anacondas in the ayahuasca visions of Peruvian artist/shaman Pablo Amaringo

According to Jung, the main reason Christianity stopped working for so many of us is that it “has neglected to develop its myth further in the course of the centuries… a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows.” The outer form of the religion stopped reflecting and meeting the inner needs of the modern person, and it’s led to a spiritual problem.

“Whenever there is established an external form, be it ritual or spiritual, by which all the yearnings and hopes of the soul are adequately expressed — as for instance in some living religion — then we may say that the psyche is outside, and no spiritual problem, strictly speaking, exists.” — C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Whether you call it the Malaise of Modernity, The Meaning Crisis, or Soul Loss, the evidence is all around us and, to echo Hillman in the epigraph to this article, it “need not be spelled out.” It’s clear to me that those of us who feel this loss and yearning for a meaningful living myth needs to take up for him or herself the task of piecing together their own creative soul recovery practice. Call it The Art of Soulful Living.

Like the traditional shaman who crafts a “living religion” out of the materials at hand — the flora and fauna of their surroundings, the spirits who come to them in visions, the Coke bottle that washes up on the shore — the shamanic artist takes whatever elements speaks to their soul and bricolages them into something that is an authentic expression of their physical, mental and spiritual needs and longings.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to sketch out a framework for a DIY shamanic practice that will help you pull together what you’re already working with and perhaps fill in a few gaps. In the meantime…

Go Deeper

• Download my free eBook Soul Recovery: Depth Psychological Perspectives on Psychedelic and Shamanic Healing

• Watch my episode with Mary Antonia Wood, author of The Archetypal Artist:

Below the paywall you’ll find an excerpt from my book Traumadelic: Re-Visioning Psychedelic Psychotherapy