The Foundation for Shamanic Studies is a nonprofit organisation founded by the anthropologist Michael Harner and his wife Sandra Harner, which grew out of the Center for Shamanic Studies they started in 1979. It teaches Harner’s core shamanism through workshops and longer trainings around the world, and also supports indigenous peoples who ask for help in keeping or reviving their own shamanic traditions. Therapeutic Shamanism is a separate approach, but it grew out of core shamanism and so owes a lot to the work the Foundation has carried.
How did the Foundation for Shamanic Studies begin? #
With small groups learning to drum. In the 1970s Harner, then an anthropologist teaching in New York, found that a steady drumbeat could take people into the shamanic state without drugs, and began teaching small groups how to journey. Demand grew, and in 1979 he and Sandra Harner started the Center for Shamanic Studies, in Norwalk, Connecticut, “as a vehicle for teaching shamanism.” A year later his book The Way of the Shaman came out and carried the work far wider.1
The Center later became the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, a nonprofit charitable and educational body. The Foundation’s own history gives the dates slightly differently in two places. An older account says the Center was folded into the Foundation in 1987, when Harner resigned his professorship, and a later update says the Foundation was set up in 1985 and that the Harners gave it the Center’s assets in 1987.2 Michael Harner died on 3 February 2018. The Foundation’s President is now Susan Mokelke, who was its executive director when his last book, Cave and Cosmos, came out in 2013.3 See Who was Michael Harner, and what is core shamanism?
What does the Foundation teach? #
Core shamanism, the practices Harner found common, or nearly universal, among shamanic peoples across the world, taught without the dress of any one culture. The Foundation describes its purpose as “the preservation, study, and teaching of shamanic knowledge for the welfare of the Planet”.4
The usual starting point is a two-day Basic Workshop, “The Way of the Shaman”, which introduces journeying to the Lower and Upper Worlds and is required before the more advanced courses. Those include a two-week healing intensive and a three-year programme of advanced training. Beyond journeying, the teaching covers 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 retrieval, extractionExtraction. Drawing a foreign body (an intrusion) out of a person and packing the hole with something healthy. The iron rule: only ever foreign bodies, never a part of the self: extracting a genuine part of self creates soul-loss. More about this, soul retrieval, divination and other practices.5 Workshops are taught by a faculty of trained teachers licensed to give the Foundation’s own courses, in many countries, and students are encouraged to keep practising on their own, often in local drumming circles.6 The Foundation also teaches Harner Method Shamanic Counseling, in which clients learn to journey on their own problems. See What is shamanic counselling?
The Foundation does not certify anyone as a shaman or a healer, and gives no degrees. Harner’s reason was that in shamanism the helping spirits, not any school, decide whether a person can heal, and that they can withdraw their help at any time.7
What else does the Foundation do? #
Two programmes look outwards, to indigenous peoples. Its Urgent Tribal Assistance programme, since renamed Urgent Indigenous Assistance, helps indigenous groups keep or revive shamanic knowledge, but only when they ask for it; its work has reached communities in the Arctic, Siberia, Central Asia, the Americas and China. Its Living Treasures of Shamanism programme, begun in late 1991, gives recognition and financial support, including lifetime stipends, to outstanding indigenous shamans living in threatened conditions.8
It has also run research. Its Mapping of Nonordinary Reality project collects and compares accounts of shamanic journeys with near-death and other experiences across cultures, and a programme led by Sandra Harner has studied the effects of shamanic healing on health.9
How is Therapeutic Shamanism connected to the Foundation? #
Through core shamanism. Therapeutic Shamanism is a branch of core shamanism, and takes Harner’s work as its foundation, including the idea of a shamanic practice rooted in no one culture and open to anyone, whatever their race or culture.10 It also follows Harner’s lead on words. Out of respect, the title ‘shaman’ is kept for people in indigenous cultures who live and breathe shamanism, and given by their communities, whilst a modern Westerner practising core shamanism is a ‘shamanic practitioner’.11
The debt is a warm one. Without Harner, it is unlikely that most readers of the Therapeutic Shamanism books would even have heard of shamanism, and his work has brought hundreds of thousands of people back to the shamanic path.12
Therapeutic Shamanism is not part of the Foundation, and teaches its own approach. It treats core shamanism as a starting point and builds on it, with what Paul Francis’s own GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this have taught him, with the tools of psychotherapy, with an understanding of what domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and 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 have done to us, and with Core AnimismCore Animism. The culture-neutral core of animism: the aspects of animist teaching that are (near-)universal rather than specific to any one culture: the Original Instructions, fierce egalitarianism, respectful right relationship with the other-than-human people, equal respect for the masculine and the feminine, treating all as sacred, living as a Leaver rather than a Taker. The parallel of Michael Harner’s ‘core shamanism’, and its necessary root: shamanism is a branch of animism, so a culture-neutral shamanism has to be grounded in a culture-neutral animism, with no borrowed regalia required. More about this, the culture-neutral heart of animism that stands to animism as core shamanism stands to shamanism. Where it differs from core shamanism, for example on what a Power Animal is, is set out in How is Therapeutic Shamanism different from traditional and core shamanism?
