Shamans have been men, women and people of other genders, mostly men in hunting societies and more often women, with possession more prominent, in farming ones. Hunter-gatherer peoples usually gave men and women different roles whilst valuing them equally, often without rigid lines, many animist cultures recognised more than two genders, and homosexuality was usually not an issue. In Therapeutic Shamanism the ranking of one gender over another, and the persecution of sexual difference, belong to the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer.
Were shamans men or women? #
Both, and others besides, depending on the society. The gender of shamans seems to vary strongly with the nature of their society, as the anthropologist Piers Vitebsky notes. The classic Siberian shaman, journeying across the cosmos and battling spirits, is very much an image of the male hunter, and that image carries on into herding societies such as those of Mongolia and Central Asia. Female shamans become more prominent in crop-growing societies, as in South and Southeast Asia, and in Korea almost all shamans are women, apart from a minority of men who dress as women; where women shamans predominate in eastern Asia, the soul journey tends to be absent and the role rests on controlling spirits in trance.1 Cross-cultural research by the anthropologist Michael Winkelman found the same divide. The shamans of hunter-gatherer and pastoral societies were predominantly men of high standing, whereas mediums, found mostly in agricultural societies, were predominantly women of low social status.2 See What is the difference between a shaman, a priest, a medium and a medicine person?
None of this means the spirits favour one sex. The shamanic teacher Christina Pratt, in An Encyclopedia of Shamanism, stresses that the spirits and the practices are equally available to men and women, to all races, and regardless of sexual orientation.3 Therapeutic Shamanism agrees, and teaches it to everyone in the same way.
How did hunter-gatherer peoples see men and women? #
As different and equal. Hunter-gatherer cultures tend to give men and women different roles, with men tending to be the hunters and women the gatherers, though how strictly varies enormously from culture to culture. Even so, there is usually equality and mutual respect between the sexes, so that they tend to be neither patriarchal nor matriarchal, but egalitarian, with no one section of society holding power over another.4 In a healthy tribe the masculine and the feminine are honoured and respected equally; in most such cultures the gender roles were not rigid, and what mattered was not biology but honouring both equally, because inequality leads to dysfunctional groups.5 For the wider picture of hunter-gatherer equality, and the debate about it, see What was hunter-gatherer life really like?
That changes with the Fall. With the first city-states, around six thousand years ago, men seize power and oppress women, and patriarchy is born.6 The sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this that grew up alongside justified it, elevating ‘god’ and the masculine and denigrating ‘goddess’ and the feminine, so that the subjugation of half the human population came to look like the natural order.7 See What is the Fall?
Did shamanic cultures recognise more than two genders? #
Many did. Animist cultures valued community and diversity, and many recognised more than two genders. The Bugis of South Sulawesi in Indonesia name five, and their fifth, the bissu, were priests who carried all of them at once and stood between the people and the gods.8 The Bugis are rice farmers and seafarers, not hunter-gatherers, so their system shows how far a culture can go in recognising gender, not how foragers lived.
In North America, many nations had their own words for people who lived outside the two categories of man and woman. Outsiders called them ‘berdache’ from the arrival of Europeans until 1990, when Native people adopted the name Two-Spirit. Traditionally this was about gender, a social and spiritual role, rather than about sexual orientation, and the roles two-spirit people held included mediators, name-givers, holy people, and doctors and medicine people.9 Such names come from peoples who lived in very different ways: hunter-gatherers such as the Gosiute of the Great Basin desert, and farming peoples such as the Hopi and the Mandan.9 In north-eastern Siberia, among the Chukchi, hunters of sea mammals and herders of reindeer, some male shamans became like their female spirits, dressed as women, did women’s work and spoke the language used only by women; among the Navajo, herders and farmers, such a person was called nadle, ‘one who is transformed’. Vitebsky notes that when such people became shamans they were regarded as exceptionally powerful.10
The numbers vary from people to people. The one system documented term by term at five genders is the Bugis one, and most of the others on record name three or four. The point does not depend on the number, because what matters is that a two-gender system is not a human universal.
How did shamanic cultures see sexuality? #
In hunter-gatherer cultures homosexuality was, at the very least, usually not an issue. In the macho and warlike city-state cultures that followed, with only a few historic exceptions, it has been ruthlessly persecuted, along with other minorities and the vulnerable.11
Repression has a cost of its own. What a person disowns in themselves goes into the Shadow, where it grows stronger and is projected onto others. Men with homosexual feelings that they repress are often homophobic, and religious institutions that try to repress sexuality often have high levels of sexual abuse.12 See What is the Shadow in shamanic terms?
The tide is turning. Among the signs of what Therapeutic Shamanism, following Steve Taylor, sees as a recovery from the Fall is the growing tolerance of people’s gender choices and sexual orientation over recent decades.13 See Who is Steve Taylor, and what is his idea of the Fall?
Does gender matter in shamanic journeying? #
Much less than in everyday life. A Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer has no gender. Panther, for example, is both male and female, and both old and young, because it is the whole species and not an individual.14 Human Lower-World GuidesHuman Lower-World Guide. A face put on the human Oversoul: the Ancestors met through an individual form, genuinely other than us, chosen from pre-Fall hunter-gatherer humanity. Related to as a teacher, never a master. Read the full answer are the Human Oversoul, all races, genders and ages at once, given a single face so that we can relate to them.15 And in the Lower-World a person is free to work with whoever they wish and to be whatever gender they wish; in journeying we can shapeshift into a bird, a tree or a waterfall, so shapeshifting into another gender is no problem at all. Finding Your Deep Soul has a journey for meeting the EldersElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this of a Lower-World Tribe, where some Tribes have Grandmothers and Grandfathers with their own practices, and how a person identifies in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer does not decide which they may visit.16
The sacred Masculine and sacred Feminine, Father SkyFather Sky. The sacred Masculine pole: pure consciousness, from which the Upper-World arises. Paired with Mother Earth. ‘Father Sun’ is the older name for the same pole, found in the first three books. More about this and Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, are something else again. They are principles present in every person and every being, and they do not mean male and female. See What are the sacred Masculine and sacred Feminine (Father Sky and Mother Earth)?
Is Therapeutic Shamanism open to everyone, whatever their gender or sexuality? #
Yes. Nothing in the practice depends on a person’s sex, gender or sexual orientation, and the Lower-World makes no such distinctions. The tradition it draws on honoured difference whilst practising equality, and the hierarchies of gender that came later are among the things the work helps people to see and set down. See What is Therapeutic Shamanism?
