We occupy a living world whose essence is greater and more intelligent than we recognize. Whereas common people stumble through material illusions, a shaman transcends both humanity and illusion. Moving through a world of layers and traps, he exists outside the everyday realm. And yet, through his guidance, the Sleeping People slumber more comfortably and the Awakened Ones remain more aware.

Perhaps the most abused word in magic, shamanism technically refers to a specific type of Siberian spirit-worker. Over time, however, it’s come to define anyone who employs old-culture traditions to walk between the sublime world and its often ridiculous material counterpart. Dying – sometimes literally – to the life he led before he felt Called by the spirits, the shaman is reborn in a half-outcast state… mad by the standards of his previous society, yet aware of (if not always clear about) the true nature of Reality.

Because the shaman traditionally lives between the worlds of flesh and spirit, human and animal, matter and essence, sanity and dementia, conventionality and chaos, he embodies a living crossroads in which those qualities intersect. In many cases, he suffers from physical and/ or psychological ailments, a wounded healer whose infirmities render him more sympathetic to other wounded souls. A shaman often depends upon other people and spiritual allies whose aid and guidance help him survive his strange existence. In return, he grants his allies healing, insight, action in realms they might not be able to reach unaided, and a powerful intercessor with parties they may not address alone. A soul guide, a prophet, a medicine bringer and spirit warrior, our shaman walks a sacred… if often unpleasant… Path.

Thanks to noble-savage nonsense, shamanism has a trippy popular image that’s deeply at odds with the earthy and often bizarre nature of the shaman himself. In reality, shamanism is a gritty, anti-orthodox vocation, filled with deliberate contradictions and slippery concepts of sanity. A shaman often inverts ideas of propriety; cross-dressing, speaking in riddles, or acting in deliberately crude or obnoxious ways in order to shake up or demolish preconceptions. These tools – as well as the usual masks, dances, and trappings one expects from a shaman – form the instruments of shamanic Arts. Folks who expect the dewy-eyed dreamer of New Age romanticism are in for a shock when they meet true shamans… and that shock, too, is part of the shaman’s toolkit.

Although shamanism favors a naturalistic viewpoint, technoshamanic practices exist in the current era. Connecting with urbanized spirits (city-souls, electronic entities, machine-spirits, and so on) – frequently through computers, fast-food offerings, consumerism cast-offs, and other postmodernist talismans – the technoshaman blends ancient awareness with current technology, acting as a vessel to distill the essence of eternity into the power of today.

Associated Paradigms: A World of Gods and Monsters; Bring Back the Golden Age; Creation’s Divine and Alive; Divine Order and Earthly Chaos; Everything’s an Illusion, Prison, or Mistake; It’s All Good – Have Faith!

Associated Abilities: Alertness, Art, Cosmology, Enigmas, Esoterica, Expression, Lucid Dreaming, Medicine, Pharmacopeia, Streetwise, Survival

Common Instruments: Blood and fluids, bones and remains, computers, dance, drugs and concoctions, elements, herbs, household tools, offerings and sacrifice, ordeals, sex and sensuality, thought forms, toys, True Names, voice, weapons