My anaesthetist friend has a work colleague, also a specialist doctor, whose uncle turns into a crab. This is a given. The specialist doctor, who is from the Solomon Islands, explained it to my friend during a tea break at work. Well, it was more like he just dropped it into the conversation as he described his family back home. There is my sister who has twins, and here is a photo of my grandmother, and there's my uncle who turns into a crab. We are of a family that is related to the crab, and some of us become crabs from time to time.
As my friend tells the story, he was struck by how this man, highly educated in the North world, had retained his animistic beliefs from his home culture. The two worlds that would normally get divorced over irreconcilable differences, existed on good terms within him. Nobody else in in the tea room thought the uncle really turned into a crab. Maybe the uncle thought he turned into a crab, or had some sort of special relationship with crabs, or was a kind of ethnic crab furry, or the whole thing was an elaborate anthropological metaphor for crabbiness. But here in the hospital tea room, among the educated, nobody could see a man turn into a crab.
It is important that we see when people turn into things.
So, here I am, and I will provide this service for you, and it will cost you money. It is fair that you should pay, because it cost me money to gain these skills and tools, and it cost me time, and time is a cost because it is time I could have spent doing other things. In other words, in providing this service I am selling my labour. For a fee, I will undertake a difficult and perhaps dangerous journey to find portions of your soul that have gone missing, and return them to you. For a fee, I will teach you how to navigate safely in Non Ordinary Reality. And you will understand that payment is my due, because this is how it works in our society. You pay to see a doctor or get your hair cut, and my Shamanic skills are just as valuable.
Shamanic practitioners in the North world are sometimes criticized for charging for their services. There is an idea that a true Shaman would never ask for money, that spirit flows in generous abundance and the skills of a true Shaman are basically priceless. Indigenous Shamans, this idea goes, are too pure to charge money, and in their societies money is valueless anyway.
This is a romantic and idealized view of indigenous cultures. It others indigenous Shamans and it manages both to denigrate them, as if they were not worthy of payment, and exalt them, implying they are somehow more pure than we are. It is also not accurate. Among the Shuar people, a Shaman actually bought the practice from a previous Shaman. In South Korea, where spiritual and financial successes are linked, Shamanic practitioners make a living selling blessings and working with ancestors.When a young Shaman becomes an apprentice, they go to a shop and buy their equipment just as you would buy your tools of the trade here.
There is an uneasy and close relationship between modern North world Shamanism and the New Age or alternative wellness community. Wellness practitioners have no trouble selling their products and services. A growing number include some work they call Shamanic as part of a portfolio of healing modalities, such as Reiki or sound healing. Wellness influence culture is well beyond me, but some of it seems to be very lucrative, and the ratio of wealth to woo is a wonder and a worry. I am naturally sceptical of much of this. With influence comes the peril of cultishness and sheer grift. When I say the relationship between Shamanism and the wellness community is uneasy, it is my own unease I am experiencing. I'm sure most practitioners and their clients are able to segue quite nicely between modalities and feel comfortable making financial transactions. I can't. I can't magic up a relationship with a deity or power I don't have. I can't believe one impossible thing before breakfast, let alone six. I try to do only what I can and not pretend.
I feel strongly that Shamanism thrives best within a supportive culture. Imagine, if you will, a ceremony among the Yakut people, where everyone is gathered to witness a great miracle. The Shaman bellows like a bull, and from his head grow great horns, and he stirs up dust with them, and he runs around on all fours as he shamanizes. The thing is, the Shaman not only grows great horns, but the people see the horns. The people work alongside the Shaman to make the ceremony. The Shaman needs the drummer, the assistants to help him come back from the worlds to which he travels, the ones who guard the fires and sing and chant and most importantly, they see the horns. It is the Shaman's job to shamanize, and it is our job to see the horns. It is much harder if no one sees the horns.
It is much harder if no one sees the crab. If you turn into a crab, and you come from a long line of those who work with Crab, and understand Crab, and dedicate a part of the human psyche to Crab, it is more than helpful that somewhere in another country, a bright nephew with an academic education, can still see the crab.
In my culture, terminally late capitalism, we don't see the crab, or the horns. There is no communal support for a real Shamanic practice, and real Shamanic practice is communal. All the desperate scary solitary stuff, all the ordeals and initiations, all the lights and sirens, are in the service of the community. The problematic and intersticial relationship between the Shaman and the community, where the Shaman can be feared even as they are sought, revered even as they are shunned, still relies on there being a community. Without the community, Shamanism risks solipsism, or just becoming another New Agey wellness grift, or another layer in the stack of beliefs that mark the endless search for a perfected and healed individual self.
Nevertheless, late capitalism is what we have. This is my community, for wherever I intersect with it. And of course it is full of human people, who have the needs and wonderings of people everywhere.
I paid money and time to get the skills I have, poor as they are. My main teachers now are the great spirits I work with, and while I love them dearly my relationships with them need frequent attention. They are my friends, after all.
However, I want to work for a democratization of Shamanism. You can have societies where Shamans have a priestly role and are great leaders. But you can also have societies where uncles just turn into crabs. I imagine a society where I can go to my cousin who fixes my boots, and my children who bake me a pie to last three meals, and my old friend who shamanizes for me, who travels to another world and brings back wisdom and healing, in return for something else, which may be intangible. Here, Shamanism in some degree is as common as crabs.
I want to model this, in a small way. This is why I have decided not to do money. If I have to hire a venue I will not be out of pocket, but otherwise I will do this important mahi for koha. Koha means the human people I work with decide what it is worth, and it may be worth cabbages or a trouser hem or whatever. In the Terry Pratchett Discworld novels, the witches live in hereditary cottages and work for food and clothing. I can see how that would work. Not grifting but gifting, a network of giving.
The picture is of the Rune Gebo, which is the Rune of the gift, of hospitality, marriage and ceremony.
wonderful
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