Null Call: Advice for the vestigial shamans among us (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Null Call: Advice for the vestigial shamans among us (2021)

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83 pointsexolymph41 comments

This is one of the more nonsensical discussions of shamanism I've ever come across. It's as if the author read some New Age semi-cultural appropriation nonsense by some LA guru and based the article on that. Maybe some Carlos Castaneda material was added for good measure.

If you want to understand traditional shamanic practices as seen in both the New and the Old Worlds, you probably want to start with the ethnobotanical work of Richard Evans Schultes and similar work - not the work by the cultural anthropologists and sociologists, but that done by the experts in plant phylogeny and pharmacological activity who worked with native shamans around the world to characterize the plants they were using.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Evans_Schultes

It's true that the shamanic practitioners had a cultural-religious tradition, but the basis of their activities was using plants and plant extracts for various purposes - wound treatment, psychological treatments, etc.

It's also true that the psychoactive plants get the most interest in the shamanic context in western societies these days, but that was just one part of the native biological pharmacopia. The practitioners certainly didn't have knowledge of infectious disease or anything like that, but their use was based on experiment and observation, just as with modern scientific development.

At the very least, if you're going to write about the topic, start with the plants. Do a Google Scholar search (or Internet Archive Scholar) to filter out most of the woo, using a phrase like:

ethnobotany psychological psychoactive

That at least will give you a sample of some of the more reputable research in the general field, as well as some accurate historical narratives.

    It threw into perspective for me how psychosis must have been viewed in
    those times, before medicalization: a potentially valuable journey of growth
    and transformation, rather than just like, “well that sucks”.

It was viewed like that for a small proportion of people, who ended being crazy enough to be interesting, but not so crazy as to be dangerous. A much larger fraction were exiled and left to fend for themselves, resulting in their eventual death. It's important to not over-romanticize "ancient" or "traditional" societies. They were groups of people, trying to survive in a world just as harsh as ours (or even harsher, in many cases) with far fewer resources. They had to make difficult choices about who to give food, clothing and medicine to, because they did not live in some kind of utopia, they lived in nature, with all its harshness and brutality.

Yes, if the shaman candidate went out on their vision quest, and returned cured, they were accoladed and held in high esteem. But for all the ones that ventured forth, how many never returned?

What tribes did with people who couldn’t pull their weight is an empirical question that varies per tribe per time. But, I think you’re essentially correct, and far from being a gotcha, your observation that going out on the vision quest didn’t necessarily mean you were coming home, I think is exactly where a lot of power of the role came from. You go out to fight dragons, and most people die fighting dragons.

There's some historical burden of this analysis to that you could be ready to back up. Most people who experience psychosis don't experience it as a perpetual state, and they aren't particularly more dangerous while experiencing or any more dangerous while not.

It's certainly feasible that in many cases it would be chronic and severe enough to interfere with necessary responsibilities but that doesn't take us straight to "everyone who showed psychosis was exiled or executed." We know that some cultures did have explicit roles and accommodations for people who were way out there.

One of the graphics the author showed mentioned this but it didn't otherwise come up: look at the tradition of the holy fools in some slavic cultures. This got rolled into christianity but it appears to predate it in those cultures and straightforwardly includes people without obvious productive benefit for their society.

    Most people who experience psychosis don't experience it as a perpetual
    state,

Agreed.

    and they aren't particularly more dangerous while experiencing or any more
    dangerous while not.

Hard disagree. I have been in a mental ward. I have been in close proximity to people who have been undergoing psychotic breaks. Never have I felt in more danger for my safety, even though, ostensibly, nurses and other trained medical professionals were right there to deal with the issue. Being in close proximity to someone undergoing psychosis is a terrifying thing, and it's no surprise that traditional societies, in the absence of other mechanisms, would choose to exile people undergoing psychosis. And if the people never returned from their exile, well, that's a hard thing, but the great spirit must have had a different purpose for them.

Yes these aren't privileged experiences I have had them too. It is extremely frightening and is riskier than a lot of other activities. That's not itself evidence of how any particular culture treated people experiencing it or what they thought or expected of the experience.

This particular subject is one that has interested a lot of people, including historians and anthropologists, and there is a lot of history and anthropology on it. I'm neither, but from what I've read people who have professionally studied it mostly refrain from making generalizations of how it has been experienced through time and across cultures.

If you're going to say or imply that surviving these experiences, or being tolerated for experiencing them, was only "a small proportion" then you're making broad assertions. I'm curious what that is based on other than extrapolation from your own frightening experiences.

    If you're going to say or imply that surviving these experiences, or being
    tolerated for experiencing them, was only "a small proportion" then you're
    making broad assertions.

It's a broad assertion I feel safe making from what I've read, and from what I know of human nature, and the often toxic dynamics of small communities. Being different in a small tribe sucks. Yeah, if you're different in just the right way, you're venerated as a shaman or religious figure. But I feel absolutely safe in asserting that for the average mentally ill person, being mentally ill in a pre-modern society would have been worse, both in quantity and quality of life.

Maybe you wouldn't have been exiled, as such. But you would have been a marginalized outsider in an environment that was far more resource constrained than the environment in which we live today, and which rewarded conformity to a far greater degree.

You assume death is better than life for the "mad".

This is non-obvious, as one of them.

I assume no such thing. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm pointing out that the author makes this assumption, implicitly, by suggesting that vision quests and other traditional shamanic interpretations of psychosis are a better, more holistic way of dealing with "mad" people than modern medicine.

Yes, going out into the desert without supplies to perform a vision quest is certainly more romantic than a stint in a mental hospital. But it's certainly not safer.

Speaking as someone whose survival to $CURRENT_AGE was once so poor a bet that a couple of life insurance underwriters you've heard of refused to take it at any price, I feel okay about saying that, if life were otherwise reliably safe, your argument here would weigh more than it does.

How many of your relatives have died from bacterial infections? From getting kicked in the head by a horse? From being stabbed in a dispute? From drowning? From war? How often have you faced starvation?

If you're arguing that the modern world is anywhere close to the same level of danger as the ancient world, then you're sadly mistaken.

It's interesting that you seem to assume I could honestly answer "none" or "never" to all of those questions, but also beside the point, because the argument you're answering is not the one I made.

All of those things continue to be very relevant dangers in the modern world, too (well, except for the part about horses, but cars have certainly surpassed them as a substitute).

You can still die from those, but the odds of dying from bacterial infection have gone down dramatically.

Depends on what part of the world you're in.

It's not about safe.

It's about:

utility_positive_outcome * probability_postitive_outcome + utility_negative_outcome * probability_negative_outcome

You've made these two smaller in absolute magnitude, but also biased things toward negative (look up the side effects of neuroleptics).

You've also conveniently deprived those affected of their agency to have an opinion about this.

There's a lot of this article I agree with. Some of the key things I disagree with are:

1. That the shaman's job is sensemaking for the community

2. That the shaman's job is useless in the modern world

I think the modern world does not value the shaman, but they are still very much needed. There is something broken and incomplete about modernity that goes beyond inadequate sensemaking. There's nothing vestigial about shamans, though that's generally how we see them now.

One of the things I am exploring now is a reframing of "civilization". That perhaps, it is not some form of governance, or allocation of resources, or the material culture and technology. Rather, it is design, and shamans plays a key role. Understood as such, nomadic, tribal, settled cultures all have forms of civilization, because there's some form of design.

Example: there's a hypothesis that the cave paintings of animals contain symbols for counting moons, and together, used as a hunting calendar for the local area.

The modern shaman harnesses the power of etcd to transform engineering time into AWS bills.

There are obviously many things wrong with modernity. Keep going.

It is… not surprising that somebody that runs a content farm (1) would write a self-aggrandizing blog post comparing themself to some sort of religious practitioner with deep cultural value.

People that connect with this sort of self-congratulatory rhetoric will absolutely love what they find when they look up the phrase “indigo children”! This reads like he cribbed an old indigo children article from the 90s and search-and-replaced in a new term.

(1) Apparently it’s called Expertise? https://drewschorno.com/

Yes many people need narrative like that to make sense of the world.

And many other people will keep self-congratulatorily "revealing" it as old and worthless.

I find it baffling that the author asks himself a question that he already answered for himself (but dismissed the answer) a few paragraphs earlier.

The question: "What sort of roles should people who have received the call to this non-existent vocation be looking into to support themselves?"

The answer: "In the last few years our elites haven’t been doing a great job with this sensemaking stuff, and in many ways our shared reality feels like it’s coming apart at the seams."

The dismissal of the answer: "But there’s really not much you or I can do about that, now is there?"

To use the author's own words: Um, excuse me, what?

A major, and accurate, point being made is that this can only work with and for people one is personally close enough with for there to be mutual trust. This implies the problem isn't that current elites are doing sensemaking wrong, but rather that at the scale of a society like this one, there exists no way to do sensemaking right.

I'm sorry, I thought this essay was great. I think people are reading it too much as a scientific treatise, which it's not. This is more of a beatnik train-of-thought exercise trying to make sense of their own life experience and trying to draw parallels to some common pop-scientific theories relating to the "shamanistic hypothesis".

A question I still have that the essay only sort of touches on is why there are these "shamanistic tendencies". I've heard from many different sources that this type of shaman behavior is essentially selected for in our lead up to the dawn of civilization (8k-10k years ago) but I still haven't heard of a satisfactory reason of why.

This essay is making the argument that it's because the shamans can make sense of weird shit that happens. Another person in this thread is basically making the argument that the shamans are drug dealers of the tribe. Both could be true but it still seems a bit unsatisfactory to me.

You will stay unsatisfied forever because "Why..." is the wrong way to ask questions about evolution. It's too chaotic process.

> It claims that if you have one of the following conditions it is likely you and blood relatives have others:

"It is likely" is a pretty vague term, particularly for such a long list of different conditions. What are the actual numbers?

The word shaman has an interesting etymology. One theory is that it's derived from the Sanskrit word śramaṇa [1]. The sramana movement was itself a counterculture movement against the Vedic religion which had decayed and had been monopolized by the elites. Buddhism, Jainism and Ajivikas were born out this movement.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamanism

I've been skeptical of shamans among us in Western civilization, assuming we've moved too far passed that and lost it, but recently I watched "The Mindscape Of Alan Moore (2005)". Moore is certainly a shaman.

John Lilly gives a talk at Esalen: https://vimeo.com/474949741

I read a John Lilly book about 30 yrs ago and then made a mental note to revisit, so thanks for the reminder

I've been getting more and more into the idea of we've lost a lot of knowledge (whether truly understood or just accepted) of plants and their benefits. I have been more and more disillusioned with Big Pharma and the bullshit games they play. I am not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater as modern pharmacology has brought us some great things. But they are definitely guilty of some super shady shit to the point of my disillusionment and learning that a lot of what they do can be found naturally (if not as well refined).

So the moved too far past rings true to me

I understand how you feel, but whenever someone prefaces anything with "Big" I assume they're main complaint is with predatory capitalism. Pharma companies are very interested what they can learn from plants these days, so the scientists at those companies are doing good work, but maybe the accountants, lawyers and CEO's of those companies are not.

Take for example the federal schedule I list of items that includes marijuana which means no medicinal value. However, several states have now passed medicinal usage for marijuana. The federally scheduled status has lots of trouble getting changed for lots of reason, but BigPharma lobbying is part of it. Either the states are full of shit with their medicinal claims, or the feds are full of shit for saying there are no medicinal uses. I think we can all agree whose in the wrong on this, but because the wrong party supersedes, it be what it be, ya'dig.

Yes, BigPharma is a bit of a derogatory term. There are definitely good players and bad players. I'm still not sure if I'm happy about what is happening with the Oxy/Sacklers/etc, as in, did it go far enough. I'm not sure it did. So that's an extreme example of the negative side of BigPharma. Now you have a diabetes drug being shopped around as a weight loss drug. These types are so hoping better living through chemistry can work that they'll push anything in the inventory for any ailment as long as they can get away with it. These are my big issues with the BigPharma players. Do all pharma companies play that way? No, I don't believe they do, but until these asshats get out of the way, they are just holding us back. (I'll jump off my soapbox now).

> There was apparently at the time very little distinction between performance and medicine: even things like surgeries were performed in front of an audience, with the additional side benefit of healing the audience.

At which time? We still do surgery in theatres. As recently as 100 years ago, operating theatres were designed like lecture theatres, with rows of seats for the audience.

Pseudointellectual gibberish.

Considering the transformative effect of the sickness, perhaps the pandemic we have recently suffered will usher in a global wave of shamans. Or clowns! Hard to say.

Anyone got that book tho?

I would also be interested.

A quick google and quick search of archive.org didn't pop anything up.

Here's the WordCat record for it [0], and some seem to have it as an eBook so it could probably be requested via ILL if you have institutional affiliation. From the listings I'd guess said ebooks aren't official and that the book has no official digital copy - hence the 'illicit PDF' part mentioned.

[0] = https://www.worldcat.org/title/12724773

This one?

The Death and Resurrection Show by Rogan P. Taylor

https://archive.org/details/deathresurrectio0000tayl/page/n7...

> Once in the underworld, they learn about the specifics of the different disease spirits and topology of the characters there. They are torn apart by hellish forces, but they are reassembled into something new, and through their wit they are able to negotiate their own release. They ascend to the upperworld of gods to obtain special healing powers. Then, finally, they return to the human realm transformed.

And that's how I learned Scheme.

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