Author: A Solitary Pagan

WE CAN HAVE COUNTLESS CEREMONIAL tools and power objects for ritual use, but there are two specific tools that play an essential role in shamanic ceremony: the drum and the rattle. These instruments are ancient and resonate with us on a primal level. When we use drums and rattles, we are using tools and tapping into ritual practices that have been part of our genetic coding and ancestral memory fo...

If you are feeling unsure or self-conscious, use this as a basic guideline to allow your soul song to come forward. You will need a drum or rattle and a quiet place. If you do not own any ceremonial tools, you can get creative. Fill a small jar with dry rice, dry beans, or even pebbles to use as a rattle. Find a quiet space where you can be undisturbed for 15 to 20 minutes. This can be indoors or ...

You feel most at home in nature. The shamans of a culture are the bridges between nature and humans, serving as translators between the mountains, oceans, rivers, animals, and people. You may sense that nature is talking to you or that you get your most tuned in downloads when you are surrounded by the natural world.

You’re very sensitive. You may feels things others don’t feel, see things others don’t see, hear things others don’t hear, smell things others don’t smell, and sense things others don’t sense. This may make it hard for you to be out in public, where you may feel accosted by over-stimulation of your senses. If you embody the shamanic archetype, it’s likely that you’re the kind of person others may ...

You feel a sort of spiritual calling to ease the suffering of people, animals, and nature. Many health care providers are called to medicine the way priests are called to the priesthood. But you don’t have to be a health care provider to have the shamanic archetype. It may transmute itself into healing service to animals, sacred activist causes, or conservation of Mother Earth.

Physical ailments that fall under the category of “shaman sickness.” In the indigenous cultures, shamans who have been called to service but haven’t yet said “yes” to the call often wind up struck with physical ailments. In modern culture, these shamanic sicknesses may fall into difficult to treat categories like chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic Lyme disease, chronic pain disorders,...

Anyone who seeks a deeper connection to Spirit can study Shamanism and use these elements in their personal practice. But as humans existing in a world where privilege, oppression, colonialism, and cultural appropriation still exist, we need to keep these topics at the forefront of any discussion about Shamanism. I urge anyone bringing Shamanism into their personal practice to do so from a place o...

EVERY PERSON WHO INTEGRATES SHAMANIC practices and/or ceremonies into their lives is a shamanic practitioner to some degree. Shamans are shamanic practitioners who have dedicated their spiritual practice to helping others in their community. Not every shamanic practitioner is a shaman, in the same way that not everyone who works on healing themselves is a healer (and not everyone who receives medi...

THE ORIGIN OF THE WORD SHAMANISM IS A BIT COMPLICATED, and at times, a bit fraught. Throughout the history of humankind, every tribe has had their healer or healers, and each culture has their own term for these healers. They have been known as curanderos, pajés, strega, mães de santo, and countless other names. The term shaman originated from an indigenous tribe in Siberia but was not used global...

Do you sense that you’re meant to participate in the global shift in consciousness that is currently underway. We can all feel it, this impending shift that New Agers have talked about for decades. But those with the shamanic archetype don’t just feel it, they feel it pulling them, like a magnet, towards leadership positions that help facilitate this transformation of human consciousness and evolu...

The Shaman is one of the most ancient and one of the most enduring figures in human evolution. Shamanism is the source of both Magic and Religion, and as Mircea Eliade put it, is “an archaic technique of ecstasy”. Its structural elements can be traced well back into theUpper Palaeolithic era, and these elements are essentially similar throughout many different cultures, in different frames of time...

Shamanism shows a remarkable survival, and there are many examples of shamans co-existing with other religious or magical systems in a given culture. Most of the world’s healers are shamans, for example. As societies evolve into more complex forms than that of the hunter-gatherer, the roles that the shaman fulfils is taken up by others. From shamanism arises theatre, religion, magic, art, dance, m...