Jonathan Horwitz is a shamanic teacher who has worked with shamanism since 1972, taught for Michael Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies from 1984 to 1993, and in 1986 founded the Scandinavian Center for Shamanic Studies with Annette Høst. He makes the point that a shamanic ritual is the vehicle for spiritual power, not its source, a point very close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s own focus on the core of shamanic practice beneath any one culture’s ceremonies.
Who is Jonathan Horwitz? #
A teacher of shamanism, trained in anthropology, who is based in Scandinavia. He holds a master’s degree in anthropology and has been working with shamanism since 1972. From 1984 to 1993 he worked with Michael Harner as a teacher and field researcher at the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and in 1986 he and Annette Høst founded the Scandinavian Center for Shamanic Studies, through which he has taught internationally ever since. He has written often for the magazine Sacred Hoop and was for a time European editor of the Journal of Shamanic Practice. He now lives with his partner, Zara, at Åsbacka, a home and retreat centre in the woods of southern Sweden.1
Harner was, in the centre’s own words, his “first significant human teacher of shamanic techniques”, so his work belongs to the core shamanism lineage. See Who was Michael Harner, and what is core shamanism?
What does Horwitz say a shamanic ritual is? #
A bridge. In an article written in the early 1990s, “Shamanic Rites Seen from a Shamanic Perspective”, he defines a shaman as someone who changes their state of consciousness at will to journey to “a ‘nonordinary reality,’ the world of the spirits”, meets their spirit helpers there to ask for help, power or knowledge, and brings it back to ordinary reality. A shamanic rite is any action the shaman makes to bring the power of non-ordinary reality into ordinary reality. Then comes the line he is known for, “The ritual is not the source of power, but the vehicle”. It is “the means, not the goal”. The ritual is the form, and the power and the spirit are the content.2
He tells, too, how he came to this. As a student of anthropology he had decided that shamans were “stone-age psychotherapists”, people whose societies had found a way to put their sensitive members to work for the group instead of pushing them out, yet he felt privately that there was something more.3
Why does he think scholars miss the point of shamanic ritual? #
Because they study the form and cannot see the content. For Horwitz, “the practice of academic distance in itself makes it impossible to fully understand” what happens in a shamanic ceremony, since the thing that matters, the presence of power, is not visible to an observer who does not share the shaman’s awareness. Words like ‘performance’, ‘audience’ and ‘role’, he points out, already put a filter between the observer and the shaman. Against one scholar’s claim that the shaman stays aware of the onlookers even in deep trance, he answers that the shaman is indeed aware of an audience, but that the audience is the spirits.4
The same point runs through his account of the shaman’s tools. A shaman’s objects are used “not because they symbolize certain powers … but because they contain those powers”, and in some cases are those powers. And shamanic work, for him, “has never been a matter of religious faith”; it has always been a matter of experience.5
How does his view connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, on the main point. Therapeutic Shamanism holds that if two shamans from opposite ends of the Earth sat down together, their rituals and ceremonies would differ, but underneath them would be a strikingly consistent core of knowledge and practice. People often mistake a culture’s ceremonies for shamanism itself, when they are one culture’s way of applying it. Horwitz’s line about the ritual being the vehicle and not the source says the same thing from inside the practice. See How is Therapeutic Shamanism different from traditional and core shamanism?
Several of his other points meet Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching too. For Horwitz, the key to shamanism is the shaman’s relationship with their spirit helpers and teachers, and it is the spirits who do the real work. In Therapeutic Shamanism the power of a practitioner comes not from the practitioner but from their ability to hollow out and let their 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 work through them; it is the Guides who do the healing.6 Horwitz holds that the ability to shamanise is something “all humans are born with”, which civilisation does its best to submerge. Nor does he consider shamanism in itself a religion. In Therapeutic Shamanism, too, shamanism is not a religion. In indigenous cultures everyone in the tribe lived and breathed it, and the shaman was simply the person who was better at it than others.7 See What is hollowing-out? and Is Therapeutic Shamanism a religion or belief system?
Where Therapeutic Shamanism puts its own weight is on animism. It treats shamanism as applied animism, one of the ways of living out an animist understanding of the world, and part of its departure from mainstream core shamanism is to put the practice back into those animist roots. See What is animism?
Is core shamanism, and Horwitz’s account of it, disputed? #
Yes. Some writers argue that a generic core cannot be lifted out of the cultures that hold it; the writer Rufus Malim, for example, calls core shamanism an invention of Harner’s and not a traditional indigenous practice in its own right.8 Horwitz’s article, written decades before Malim’s criticism, describes core shamanism from inside the lineage as a set of principles “not based on any one culture’s use of shamanism”, drawn instead from the practices found in shamanic cultures all over the world, such as sonic driving, working with spirit teachers and helpers, removing intrusions and restoring spirit power.9 The fuller discussion is in the answer on Harner. See Who was Michael Harner, and what is core shamanism?
