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Frequently Asked Questions
Steve Beyer

What is the wilderness? What’s so special about the wilderness? What is wilderness survival? How does all this relate to survivalism? What are primitive skills? Are wilderness survival and primitive skills the same? Why bother? What is wilderness spirituality? What is animism? What is pantheism? Is wilderness spirituality pagan? What does this have to do with shamanism? What is a vision fast?

What does this have to do with shamanism?

A shaman is, essentially, a person who maintains a special relationship with the spirits on behalf of a community. Because of this relationship, a shaman can see things that others cannot. The shaman may be able to find lost objects, know where game is plentiful, discern who has cast a curse, diagnose the cause of an illness, persuade the animals to give themselves for food, or heal the sick by retrieving a lost soul or by removing intrusive objects from the body. To perform these services, the shaman may travel to the realms where the spirits dwell, or call the spirits to the place where the ceremony is performed, or let the spirits take control of the shaman’s own body. Shamans contact the spirits through a wide variety of means – dreaming, fasting, drumming, dancing, ingesting psychoactive plants and mushrooms, and undergoing states of pain,, deprivation, and isolation. A productive relationship with the spirits is usually achieved only after great and arduous training, sometimes after a life-threatening accident or illness. Such relationships with the spirit world are considered demanding, dangerous, and exhausting.

Thus, to me, being a shaman means being a member of a shamanist culture, which most of us are not. I am uncomfortable with the idea of trying to separate some form of abstract shamanism from specific indigenous cultures and beliefs. However, I don't think you have to spend very much time alone in the wilderness before you come to believe that

• this Earth, and very specific places on the Earth, are home to a variety of non-human persons, including not only animals and spirits but also such entities as plants, trees, rocks, clouds, and water;
   
• these non-human persons may be helpful, harmful, callous, malicious, indifferent, or tricky, and from time to time it may be helpful or necessary to enter into relationships with them through various means;
   
• it is possible to talk to these non-human persons, to visit the places they inhabit, and to enter into long-term personal relationships with them;
   
• you can enter into relationships with these spirits using many of the same means as traditionally used by shamans – dreaming, drumming, dancing, ingesting hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms, and fasting in solitude.

I would not call this shamanism, much less anything as serious as core shamanism; but there is in the wilderness certainly a call to shamanize, to enter in spirit into harmonious relationships with the spirits and creatures who determine whether we live or die. In the wilderness we can journey to the spirit world, explore with what maps we can find and are able to use, and seek to open ourselves to the beauty and fear, comfort and sorrow that the spirit world has to offer.  And we can express these harmonious relationships with our gratitude, our offerings, and our songs.

It may be that the spirit world is the same as the soul, or the sacred other; it may be that in meeting the spirits we are meeting ourselves. What counts is that the spirit world both gives and demands, changes us and is itself changed in meeting us. Native American writer Elizabeth Cook-Lynn says that indigenous people people know that “the spiritual presences in the universe love us. They hate us, too. They are jealous and unpredictable. But, after all is said and done, they know us and have regard for us. The universe is, therefore, obliged to us, according to Sioux legends, because of the interrelatedness of everything in the cosmos. It is not that there isn’t danger here in human life and heartbreak and misery. There is. But to suggest that there is not reciprocity between the spirits and the universe and humans is an indefensible idea.”

For More Information

Wilderness Drum programs Schools of wilderness counseling and spirituality Wilderness ceremonies Sources of wilderness spirituality Magazines on wilderness spirit and preservation Wilderness videos Getting closer to the natural world The imaginal world Myths and symbols of the vision fast

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