The shamanic worldview:
There is practically no authentic indigenous culture that is not contaminated by the memes of general culture. Despite this, older anthropological studies reveal the nature of the so-called 'shamanic' belief system.
- In the shamanic belief system, it is believed that the apparent world is dominated by supernatural forces. These forces, acting on their own impulses or often guided, can be good, that is, beneficial, or not.
- Because they are hidden, these supernatural forces can only be manipulated through altered states of consciousness, of trance. This reality implies the recourse to specialists, capable of penetrating and acting successfully in this hidden world: the shamans.
- Success is not guaranteed; rivalry between shamans of various affinities generates a high degree of hierarchization based on their strength and their skill in maintaining good health and obtaining relative success.
- Generally, anyone, man or woman, can become a shaman through instruction and acquisition of magical powers and talismans obtained in exchange for benefits or gifts.
- Shamans thus prepared and strengthened launch their fluids, influences and magics — in the form of spirits of animals, plants, enchantments, breath and humors — finding their targets and according to their intentions, to heal, captivate, protect or bewitch.
The analysis of the shamanic vision and its processes shows several important and essential elements:
- Empiricism: the cultivation of a perception and a direct interaction with the mysterious through nature is part of shamanic doctrines.
- Universalism: everyone can become a shaman through the transmission of knowledge, the education of perception, learning and training.
- Realism: the shaman is not a 'superman', a hero; he is a warrior of the occult, but he is also an ordinary person, who may or may not succeed.
- Paradoxicality: the shaman is polar, human; although he lives in the mystery, although he is in contact with the mystery, he is an ambivalent being.
- Holism: there is in shamanism an amalgam of the 'sacred' with the 'natural', of the 'spiritual' with the 'material' and especially of the 'objective' with the 'subjective'.
Here is drawn, in indigenous culture, a theophany, the cultivation of an effective and everyday relationship with mystery, the outline of a unification in tune with the vision suggested by ecology, an integration of the 'metaphysical' as described by modern physics.
In relation to the dominant global civilization, the absorption and incorporation of shamanic values and elements occur through different movements, sociological mechanisms, subcultures, transforming and reinforcing various tendencies.
- A relocation of the sacred. Although understood as essentially 'supernatural', the sacred is redirected from a position of more absolute transcendence to a more immanent position, in a more plural, less hierarchical, polytheistic or panentheistic form, in fact. A more evident and close, encompassing sacred, more transactional and palpable, manipulable through a more easily accessible, practical natural technology. Nevertheless, an awakening of the religious forms prevailing before the appearance of the various forms of idealisms and imperialisms ('paganism'; 'neo-paganism'; 'neo-shamanism').
- A revitalization of messianism. Here, the more trivial figure of the shaman becomes giant and is transformed into a heroic figure. A hero, in a certain way close, with whom one can naturally enter into relationship through an infusion. In this process, the god-man is reborn, the divine messenger, the conductor of souls, the guide; new hopes, new churches and new cults.
- A search for oneness. Essentially humanist, naturalist, pragmatic practices, in which the expanded visions of reality are integrated with scientific, philosophical, psychological and medical knowledge of modernity. The 'sacred' becomes nature, the universe itself, a concept that implies the search for a revelation or mystical experience, an attempt to integrate basic dichotomies into a totality.