What is Core Shamanism and where are our lost western SHAMANIC roots? :
The practices of western shamanic technique has a deep and ancient root hidden away from western culture, yet as shamanic techniques have roots through all cultures this information is still embedded within our bodies.
We have lost our connection to this ancient wisdom.
This does not mean the connection can’t be re-membered.
This is very concise and well writen page from The Foundation Of Shamanic Studies Europe detailing:
‘What is Core Shamanism’.
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Sourced from the above linked article -
“Core Shamanism consists of the transcultural, universal or common principles and techniques of shamanism. It is a coherent system that is terminologically as well as conceptually consistent and taught worldwide. Core Shamanism is based on decades of research by the anthropologist Michael Harner, his colleagues and successors.
Core Shamanism offers a practice-oriented approach to shamanic work that focuses on the essence. It is not bound to any particular cultural group or perspective. Rather, Core Shamanism enables especially those people who have lost their shamanic roots (like so many people in the Western world) to reconnect with those roots.”
- The Foundation Of Shamanic Studies Europe.
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Within Anthropology research, Depth Psychology and Jungian Analysis there is an underlying reference to the perspectives and mechanisms of Shamanic Praxis.
There is a huge difference in the fact that Archetype does not exactly reference Spirit and sacred cermony and research is not made within altered states of consciousness in other modalities as it is with core shamanism.
But it is important to note that at the end of Jung’s life what he began naming as the “Collective Unconscious”, he ended up calling “Objective Psyche”.
Calling the Collective Unconscious, Objective Psyche is recognising the meta-physical as serpate from the human perspective.
The human perspective is not central with the words “Objective Psyche”.
The existence of a psychic objectivity to which we are all connected, to which our psyche is evolved from and to which our entire existence is born from is (for me) an animist and shamanic thread.
All spiritualitiy practices are connected to this space we just connect through different methods and use different terms and wording.
A state of beingness, transcendental states, awe states...
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The work of Peter Kingsley, [ “In The Dark Places Of Wisdom” ] was important for me as it helped me get closer to understanding where our ideology changed during the development of westernised consciousness through ancient greece, between Parmenides, Empedocles, Pythagoras, and Socrates into no longer recognising the other side of the veil - altered states - as wisdom portals towards an Objective Space.
With Socrates, we favoured rationality and logic and the value of darkness and incubation, the important unknowing and knowings of the somatic conciousness - dance, trance, and thetha states - dreaming, music, meditation, got lost or pushed aside.
Peter Kingsley’s books are a poetic and hauntingly beautiful journey into the forgotten Iatronmantis - a Greek word whose literal meaning is most simply rendered "physician-seer," - the shamans of ancient greece - whose work occured in altered states and who understood incubation to be a vital form of wisdom seeking.
In this video Peter Kingsley is talking to Murray Stein.
Around the 52nd minute mark there is a beautiful reference to the term “shamanic” as:
“Enchantment like that, is the oldest form of Medicine.”