Engaging the Spirit World

By Lupa Greenwolf

Animism--the belief in spirits--is considered to be an integral part of many pagans' paths. We call on these beings when we create our rituals, when we work magic, and even in our everyday lives. For some, though, spirits are the very center of their practices. 

This book collects writings from a variety of practitioners, exploring animism in nature, in technology, and even within the human psyche. Speaking from both theory and practice, the authors present personal experiences to demonstrate concepts, and provide ideas and tools for the reader to work with. 

Featuring essays from Dawn M. Allenbach, Kali Black, Veronica Cummer, Kenn Day, jaymi elford, Taylor Ellwood, S. Kelley Harrell, Raven Kaldera, Erynn Rowan Laurie, Rhiannon Louve, Lupa, Bari Mandelbaum, Paleo, Pia Van Ravestein, Andrieh Vitimus and Mel White.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Immanion Press
• Release date: Aug 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536594867

Book preview

Table of Contents

Introduction

Shamanism

Ancient Spirits, New Era by Raven Kaldera

Remembering the Tradition by S. Kelley Harrell

Post-Tribal Shamanism by Kenn Day

Shaman and Scholar by Raven Kaldera

Perils and Possibilities of Modern (Neo)Shamanism by Lupa

Explorers of the Endless Mansions by Mel White

Totemism

Kin to the Lightning by Veronica Cummer

Animistic Spirits of your Body by Taylor Ellwood

Feral Magick by Kali Black

Spirits on the Move by jaymi elford

Other Animisms

A Word Among Letters by Erynn Rowan Laurie

Kitchen Animism by Paleo

Global Implications of Animism by Rhiannon Louve

Embodying the Sacred by Bari Mandelbaum

The Heart of Wonder by Dawn M Allenbach

Shinto, Paganism and Holistic Awareness by Pia Ravestein

Pragmatic Tree Spirit Magic by Andrieh Vitimus

Ecopsychology as Modern Animistic Practice by Lupa

Introduction

I would be lying if I said this was an easy anthology to put together.

Back in 2007, when I was still in the technical writing field by day, and trying my damnedest to do my own writing at night, I had this great idea for an animism anthology. I had already seen my first anthology, Talking About the Elephant: An Anthology of Neopagan Perspectives on Cultural Appropriation (Immanion Press/Megalithica Books, 2008), to the very brink of its birth, and was feeling a rush of inspiration. At the time, my place of employment was about a mile away from the transit line out in Hillsboro, OR, and so every morning I walked to work from there, and in the evening had another half hour walk back. These were my thinking times, and one spring morning I was thinking about how pervasive animism is in neopagan and other religions, and yet how it wasn’t talked about as a specific phenomenon all that much.

Additionally, as a neoshaman in the process of creating my own path from the best parts of a decade of assorted spiritual and magical practices, I was curious about all the ways in which animism had been adapted to techno-centric, post-industrial cultures. What place did the spirits have here amid our computers and media? Additionally, what other animistic practices were either being changed to meet 21st century needs, or even created from scratch, as with my own Therioshamanism? I wanted to know what people were doing now, in the present, that brought animism out of the past and dusty anthropology texts.

I ended up with a pretty good selection of essays to choose from, on the three specified topics of shamanism, totemism, and general animism. I perused ideas, asked for clarifications, edited grammar and spelling, and was well on my way to having a second anthology put together.

And then graduate school happened.

Right after the call for essays went out, I was accepted into a local college’s Master’s-level counseling psychology program. I must have had this idea that being able to live on student loans instead of working full time would give me all this time and energy for finishing the anthology, writing a book a year, and maybe even picking up one of those skills I’d always wanted to learn, like playing the guitar or spinning poi.

Let me tell you right now: graduate school will EAT YOUR LIFE.

Needless to say, this project ended up sadly back-burnered for the majority of my time in my program, and it wasn’t until the last couple of months of my internship in which I managed to get the last few straggling essays finalized, and send the manuscript off for approval. I am forever appreciative of the writers, as well as my publisher, for their patience in this derailing adventure.

So what have we been waiting for, anyway? I’m rather pleased to present a wonderful potpourri of essays, both theoretical and practical, displaying a wide array of themes, approaches, and traditions (old and new) surrounding the spirits and how we work with them. In fact, other than a few essays on shamanism that have a sort-of general theme of What is shamanism like here and now?, every one of these essays is on an entirely unique topic, and even the shamanism essays are nowhere near being cookie cutter copycats.

And that makes me incredibly happy. I love that in a time where globalization is widespread and the internet has allowed an unprecedented flow and trade of ideas and communication, that I got so much variety. And yet, even in this, I know that we’re still a narrow sliver of animism, we essayists of this anthology. The anthology cants heavily toward new or reconstructed animistic practices as opposed to well-established indigenous ones, and the essays are largely presented by people of Caucasian, English-speaking, neopagan or related backgrounds. This is due, no doubt, largely to the fact that I relied primarily on the internet for finding people to write for this project, and especially on forums and other areas frequented by neopagan folk. (I had the same issue with Talking About the Elephant, for what it’s worth.)

Still, for many of us, this is what is most immediately accessible. Most readers probably won’t have a connection to any indigenous culture, and may at best know about their animistic practices through books (however inaccurate some may be). If what you see here sparks more interest, though, I encourage you to look further. Just as these essays are pushing boundaries on the level of creativity within a postindustrial, subcultural level, so can all of us work to increase our understanding of other cultures’ animisms (to whatever degree we are allowed to access that information).

More importantly, though, is what you do with the information. How you work with the spirits is ultimately your business. You may already have a full-fledged practice, or you may be just starting out. If you find something here that inspires you, I hope you can use it to further develop your own way of spirit work. On the other hand, if there’s something you disagree with, may it help you be able to increasingly clarify what it is that you do, and perhaps even communicate it to others.

Either way, may this be of value to you and yours.

Lupa

Portland, OR

July 8, 2011

Shamanism

Ancient Spirits, New Era:

Becoming A Shaman In A Time Of Uncertainty

Raven Kaldera

I walk the stone labyrinth laid into the turf of my back field, my drum a hollow booming echoing off the trees. Standing stones jut up from the corners like jagged teeth. The labyrinth is no mere decoration; it is my door to other worlds. Tonight, I walk to the realm of the Dead, to find a dead ancestor for a friend. Perhaps he will be there; perhaps he will have moved on and I will come back empty-handed. Perhaps I will divine who else my client can speak to. Perhaps that voice will come through me as I fade away, and speak to him in its own words. Whatever it takes, I will do my best for him, and whoever else comes to my door.

Because being a shaman isn’t about me. It is about rendering service to others, and nothing more. It is about being a doorway for the Gods and spirits, not a path for your own personal delight. It is about being a sacrifice for the world.

She came to me long ago, starting when I was only four years old. Perhaps she was there before, even, but I don’t remember. Tall, imposing, wrapped in veils of darkness, she told me: You are mine. For this lifetime, you belong to me. Someday I’ll come for you. I told no one – what intelligent child in a precarious household tells such things? – and anyway, she was no imaginary friend. She frightened me, but I dared do nothing but obey her. As I grew through my teens, the orders would come: Learn to sing. Learn to sew. Learn to play the drum. Learn to draw pictures. Learn to grow plants in a garden. Learn to spin and weave wool. Learn to meditate. As I look back, I realized that even then, I was being trained, honed, herded into the right direction.

Later, the orders would become more bizarre and difficult. I was raised a girl, but the intersex condition that dogged me – congenital adrenal hyperplasia – eventually got me put on high-dose estrogens in my teens in order to stop my body from hormonally masculinizing. She didn’t approve of that. You’ll stop that, and undo the damage, as soon as you’re allowed. She did, however, tell me to bear a child, which I did ... with a great deal of medical help. You need to pass on the bloodline. One is enough. Then I was sterile again, and off of all medications, and the bleeding started. So did the dead people. They crowded around me, talking to me ... not, or not merely, the wandering spirits who needed to be laid to rest. I’d seen them since my childhood, laid a few myself in my teens. These were long dead, and tried frantically to tell me things that I couldn’t yet understand.

I hemorrhaged, off and on, for years. My immune system crested and crashed; the estrogens had triggered a case of lupus, for which I would not get a proper diagnosis for another decade. I finally bled to death in a hospital room, and was brought back by the grace of medical science ... or was it by the permission of the dark goddess who had claimed me? While I lay a hair’s breadth away from expiring, I dreamed that she hung me up like a butchered animal on a singletree and took me apart. Some things were brutally thrown away – you don’t need that any more – and some new things were added. My psychic wiring was ripped out and reinstalled. A hole was cut into the back of my head, through which Gods would eventually enter and possess my body. She tore out my heart, and then put it back again. To this day, my body will still contract with the full-sensory memory of the knuckles of a skeletal hand clacking against my ribs as it reached into my chest cavity.

Because, you see, I’d seen her face for the first time: half woman, half rotting corpse. I’d played Rumpelstiltskin games with her for years: Are you Hecate? Are you Kali? I’d found the Neo-Pagan demographic years before, and learned about death goddesses, but they were all interchangeable, right? Only this goddess seemed to be very specific. There was nothing vague about her presence, nor did she shift shape to any other cultural presentation. Once I’d seen her face, I broke out the books and identified her: Hela, the death goddess of my Germanic and Scandinavian ancestors.

It bothered me some, the ancestral connection. I hadn’t been drawn to the Norse/Germanic pantheon, nor to that reconstructionist religion as it is practiced today. In fact, I’d avoided it. Should I go join the Heathens? I asked, but the answer was No. I have other teachers for you. And they came, one at a time, the Gods of her family – my family, now. Our blood is in you, they said. Loki the Trickster, who would teach me how to walk surefootedly between worlds. Lady Death’s own mother, Angrboda the Wolf-Witch. The great snake, alien and nonlingual. The enormous and terrifying bound wolf, who nonetheless taught me a great lesson about myself, and my own rage. Gerda, the bride of Frey, who introduced me to a hundred different potential allies ... the spirits of the herbs in my own walled garden. Mengloth the healer, who teaches me how to use them. The Nine Sisters, fierce undines with fangs and claws who taught me the mysteries of Water; blizzard-thurses who showed me Air; and lessons in Fire from a looming, grumbling figure who claimed to have touched off the Universe with his flaming sword.

Once I was firmly on the track, it didn’t take me long to research out who these Gods and spirits were (and I do not dare the hubris of deciding who is a God and who a spirit; those are arbitrary human divisions based more on politics than the reality of the entity when it stands before you), but the experiences I was having did not feel like the sort of thing described by the Wiccans, or any of the Neo-Pagans for that matter. I was meeting families, tribes, nations of spirits of all levels. They taught me things, and expected me not only to remember them, but to use them regularly. They put me through ordeals, and I was expected to cope. They leveled taboos on me, and I would be punished if I disobeyed them. My treatment varied from that of a younger brother to that of an outright slave, but it was personal  - and not like that of a worshiper. I not only had the God-Phone, it never shut off. They moved in and made every aspect of my life their own. Very shortly, little of Me was actually left.

The most drastic order, of course, was the sex change. My intersex condition was still threatening my life, and the Word came down from Hela: Make the Change. I took testosterone, and was taught by the spirits how to shapeshift my astral body in order to make the medicine work faster. In six months I grew a full beard and a thick pelt of body hair (a gift from the Wolf), my musculature and fat deposits changed shape, and I passed easily as male. A bilateral mastectomy was yet another ordeal for me, as I came out of surgery and discovered that none of the painkillers worked. We taught you how to do this, my teachers said. Breathe, drum, let yourself go into the pain. Find the vision point. You can’t stop it, so use it. Don’t let it go to waste. Later, I would learn the word in my belated studies of Old Norse: ergi/argr, gender-deviant, sexually deviant, consorting with spirits and magic. I was all of those things. I would also read about the gender-crossing shamans in so many cultures, and recognize myself again.

At around the same time as my sex reassignment, I stumbled on Mircea Eliade’s book Shamanism, and that led to other books on the same subject. For the first time, I had a word, a description, a mirror for what was happening to me. Or something of a mirror, anyway; I found that it was a shallow, distorted, incomplete version of the reality of the shamanic transformation and lifework. It would be the same whenever I would do research on the scanty background context of this ancient world. It didn’t matter what the books said; what mattered was what the spirits said. Often I would walk past a book on the library shelf again and again, not knowing that it held some vague description of what was befalling me at the moment ... until it was done and I’d learned that lesson, and then suddenly the book would become visible to me. The spirits brooked no interference with their teaching, and for someone as analytical and left-brained as me, assumptions gleaned from academic theories often became stumbling-blocks to actually learning the reality. But that’s not how the book says it ought to be! In the wake of that lesson, I learned where my priorities were to be. Anything written by academics, or ancient Christians, or even other Pagans expounding on those sources, was irrelevant next to the teachings direct from the Source.

This is why the entire first half of this essay is simply bringing the audience up to understanding my voice in this complex conundrum. It is the voice of pure experience, and I am not allowed to make it anything else. It’s a hard voice to trust, certainly. Why should we believe you? What proof can you offer? Who do you think you are, that your word should mean anything? You’re just some white guy, not even born into an indigenous culture. The answers are not easy: there’s no intellectual reason to believe me, and I have no proof. As to who I think I am ... well, after some time reading the descriptions that terrifyingly enumerated my experience, I began to think that I am, indeed, a shaman. I am living proof that the spirits can seize up even a modern, rational, educated white Western person, and make them into something that is neither modern nor rational.

My long skirt, embroidered with runic prayers, swirls around my ankles. Once I began to look male, the skirt became part of my ordinary wardrobe, for balancing gender. Ergi gives you power, and I am ergi, always, no matter what my outward form. Slowly, over time, all my clothing becomes handmade and embroidered with sigils of power. Learn to sew, they said. Learn to sing, that you may sing charms and praises to the spirits. Learn to spin, so that you may spin spells. Learn to garden, so that you may speak to the plant spirits and gain their aid. Learn to endure pain, so that you may use it. Learn unusual ways to have sex, so that it will not have the normal social connotations, so that it will be just one more tool for your Goddess to exploit. Grow up dissociated from your body by gender dysphoria so that you may learn to leave it easily, to shapeshift that astral body without thought ... and then, once you’ve become adept at that, relearn the long slow painful path of being entirely in the body once more, for you cannot heal what you cannot touch.

Learn to make fire with flint and steel, so that the fire spirits may be propitiated. Learn twenty-seven different forms of divination, so that as the clients come, you may know how to help them. Learn to be a channel for the Gods that need to talk to them. Learn to speak to Gods outside your pantheon, for you never know who may come to your door. Your tribe is spread far and wide, and therefore you must be versatile.

It was the taboos that I didn’t expect. Perhaps the Celtic word geas might be a better term, yet that has connotations of a vow, and there were no vows needed here. I was given power by each deity or spirit that I worked with, but their prices were high ... things that I must do or not do, often seeming arbitrary, and if I failed my own body would pay the price with illness ... just like in the tales about shamans. No working a day-to-day job. (I protested, and my lupus was cranked up until it was, indeed, impossible.) Now heal yourself. (I’m still working on that one, although I am making progress.) You may only wear these clothes. You must live in the country, far away from people. Here, here is your wife. Marry this one. She will bring you luck. Here, here is a second lover who will support you. He will be your assistant. No one shares your bed unless we say that it is right. (I tried, and new lovers that I took developed sudden mental illnesses.) Here is what food you are allowed to eat, and what you are not. Only clean food, with no poisons, because it interferes with your signal clarity. (I disobeyed, and developed allergic reactions to all manner of chemicals.) You must use herbs to heal yourself and others, but only those herbs whose spirits you’ve met. This is your life forever. You can never quit, you can never go back, or you’ll die.

Having already experienced that once, I take Hela quite seriously when she says this. Calling me a slave is not inaccurate. I am Hela’s property, with which she makes change in our world. The nonconsensuality of this path is what horrifies and shocks people the most, especially Pagans who were raised with the idea that the Gods would never ask anything of anyone that might inconvenience them, and certainly not that would eat up their entire life without their consent. Again, the accounts of tribal shamans – especially from the cold northern circumpolar regions, where life is harsh – say exactly that. Tales abound of reluctant shamans being pursued and besieged, of coming near to death, of finally giving in and accepting their new lives; sometimes, the tales tell of shamans who rebel and are killed. We do not escape the spirits, or our calling, alive or sane. Yet I can say from experience that even the hardest things asked of me turned out to be the right things to do, and that the more I dedicate myself to this job, the better things get for me.

Much of modern neo-shamanism seems obsessed with the toolkit, the techniques of magic that spirit-workers all over the world use to do their work. It’s the impressive bit, the part that promises Power and Influence over one’s world. So-called core shamanism, in fact, posits that since this toolkit of altered states, mind and body techniques, and energy-moving is used to one extent or another by spirit-workers everywhere, it is the true core of shamanistic practice, and the cultural contexts are just irrelevant trappings that can be cleanly shunted aside.

The real truth is that they couldn’t be more wrong. Shamanism is spirit-work, meaning that it is magic that deals primarily not with crafting and aiming energy (like thaumaturgic magic), nor with sacred symbols (like theurgic magic), but with actual entities. Entities that may be cranky, or demanding, or vicious, or terribly nonhuman, or who may not see any reason to help you without a good deal of work on your part. Entities who can hurt you, and if you break a deal with them, they have the lawful right to do so. The spirits are the