Michael Harner (1929 to 2018) was an anthropologist and shamanic practitioner who did more than most to bring shamanism back to the modern West. He coined the term “core shamanism” for the practices he found common to shamanic cultures across the world, taught without any one culture’s dress, and set it out in his book The Way of the Shaman (1980). Therapeutic Shamanism grew out of core shamanism and owes Harner a great debt, while building a good deal on top of it.
Who was Michael Harner? #
An anthropologist who became a practitioner. His early fieldwork was in the Upper Amazon, among the Shuar (then usually called the Jivaro) and the Conibo peoples.1 The historian Andrei Znamenski writes that a ceremony with ayahuasca among the Conibo “became for Harner a profound spiritual revelation that convinced him of the reality of spirits and triggered his conversion from an agnostic anthropologist to a practitioner of shamanism.”2
Harner taught anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York, where, as he later wrote, he ran a seminar in which graduate students “learned to do shamanic journeying”.3 In 1979 he and Sandra Harner started what became the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, which still teaches core shamanism today. The Way of the Shaman followed in 1980, and his later book Cave and Cosmos in 2013. He died on 3 February 2018.
It is The Way of the Shaman, “and Harner’s subsequent teaching over the last thirty-plus years, that is largely responsible for the current rebirth and renaissance of shamanism that we are now seeing in the West.”4
What is core shamanism? #
The shared heart of shamanic practice, without any one people’s cultural trappings. “Harner sought to distil out what is common and nearly universal in terms of shamanic practice worldwide (i.e. what is not specific to particular cultures). In doing so, he coined the term ‘core shamanism’.”5 Znamenski sums up the idea behind it: that a tradition, “if stripped of its cultural garb”, reveals practices found “all over the globe.”6
Harner was clear that this is a practice, not a creed. He called shamanism “a methodology, not a religion.”7 In Cave and Cosmos he set out its main ideas. Among them: “the Universe is divisible into three worlds: the Upper, Middle, and Lower”; illness has spiritual causes, including the loss of a spirit important to a person’s wellbeing and the presence of one that harms them; and healing is done only when asked for. As he put it, “A cornerstone ethic of the use of shamanic healing practices is to engage in treatment only at the request of the patient”.8 He also wrote that practitioners “are not, and cannot, be certified as healers for the simple reason that their helping spirits can abandon them at any time.”9
Each of these will be familiar to anyone who knows Therapeutic Shamanism. The three realmsThree realms. The Upper-World, the middle-world and the Lower-World: the cosmological map of shamanic reality. Rooted first in the Lower-World, then the Upper-World, and only then the middle-world. Read the full answer, soul-loss and Power-loss as the roots of illness, and the need for consent all sit at its foundations too. See What are the three shamanic realms? and What does consent mean in shamanic work?
Why the drum? #
Because it works, and needs nothing else. Harner came to believe that most shamanic cultures reach the shamanic state with a steady, repetitive beat, not with plants. Experimenting, he found that “a steady rhythm of 205 to 220 beats per minute worked perfectly to change consciousness”, which he called “auditory driving,” or “sonic driving”.10 Drum-led journeying became the centre of core shamanism, and it is the centre of Therapeutic Shamanism’s practice too. See What role do drumming, movement and other methods play in journeying?
What does Therapeutic Shamanism owe to Harner? #
A great deal, and the debt is acknowledged warmly, in a thank you to Harner at the opening of Rewilding Yourself, written in the year he died: “Indeed, it is unlikely that you would be reading this book, or even have heard of shamanism, if it were not for Harner. His work has brought hundreds of thousands of people back to the shamanic path.” For Paul Francis personally, core shamanism gave a gift that is priceless beyond measure: the means to go about finding one’s authentic, Deeper Soul. The thank you ends simply: “‘Thank you, Michael Harner’.”11
How does Therapeutic Shamanism build on core shamanism? #
By treating it as a foundation, not a finished house. Harner kept core shamanism relatively free of anything other than the journey itself: “This had the advantage of making Core Shamanism relatively culturally neutral and portable”. But “whilst this makes it a good starting point, if one is to deepen shamanic practice the journeying has to become integrated into a wider context”, one of relationship with the land, the AncestorsAncestors. The human Oversoul: the whole of humanity held as one Lower-World being. Distinct from individual dead ancestors (small a), who are not worked with in this approach. Read the full answer and the other-than-human Peoples.12 The task is this: “we need to take core shamanism and adapt it. It needs to be made relevant to the times and environment that we live in now.”13
What Therapeutic Shamanism adds is set out in detail elsewhere: what Paul’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, the tools of psychotherapy, 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 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 culturally neutral core of animism, which stands to animism as core shamanism stands to shamanism. See How is Therapeutic Shamanism different from traditional and core shamanism? and What is the Fall?
Why is core shamanism sometimes criticised? #
Mainly for taking practices out of their cultures. Core shamanism “does not appeal to everybody, and in the shamanic community it does have its critics.”14 Some scholars feel that a generic core is a contradiction. Znamenski reports the view of the writer Jürgen Kremer that “Indigenous mind is not generic; it is always specific.”15 The writer Rufus Malim calls core shamanism “an invention of Harner based on his research”, inspired by indigenous practice but not itself a traditional one.16
Therapeutic Shamanism takes the concern about appropriation seriously, and answers it in its own terms. Its foundations rest on core shamanism, “which is not culturally specific, but the birth right of all human beings”, and what it adds has come from Paul’s own Guides, not from any particular indigenous culture.17 Its other test is a practical one: does it help people heal, and live in better relationship with the world?
Did core shamanism reach indigenous peoples too? #
In some places, yes. Harner was very sensitive to cultural appropriation. For most Westerners, he thought, learning core shamanism is far more productive than imitating the practices of a single culture, because that culture’s symbolism and meanings will not be appropriate for them in the way they are for the people whose culture it is.18 Core shamanism was offered above all to people whose own shamanic lineages had been broken.
Yet indigenous people came to it too. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies says that Siberians, and some Native American, Sámi and Inuit people, approached Harner asking him to teach them core shamanism, to restore sacred knowledge lost through conquest and Christianisation. Andrei Znamenski describes the Foundation answering such requests, and how this fed the revival of shamanic practice in the Tuva republic of Siberia, where local practitioners blend what remains of their own tradition with core shamanism’s techniques. The Foundation also gives an honorary title, “The Living Treasure of Shamanism”, to non-Western practitioners known for reviving their traditions.19 (The Inuit were hunter-gatherers; the Sámi were hunters who later turned largely to reindeer herding; the Tuvans are herders.)
Not everyone welcomes this. Critics, as Znamenski reports, argue that it risks imposing on indigenous societies a quick-fix version of shamanism made for Western audiences, and the archaeologist Robert Wallis, for one, holds that local shamanisms are better restored from their own surviving traditions. Znamenski adds that practitioners in Tuva have themselves sought out these contacts, and that in places such as Khakassia, where the shamanic tradition was wiped out completely, there is no surviving tradition to restore from.19
Therapeutic Shamanism holds two things together here, as an ‘and’, not a ‘but’. The indigenous cultures that kept shamanism alive through dark times are owed a great debt of gratitude. They, too, have lost a great deal over the centuries, and picked up a good deal of hierarchical thinking along the way. See What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?
