Dark Shamanism

Most of what i have written about shamanism, is either helpful or.. let's just say.. the light version of things, how shamans work, the help they can give, comunication with the spirits and with the spirit world, how they can heal a person in so many ways, their journeys and how they do it and why well and so on... but not everything in shamanism is pleasant or positive.

The shaman not only has the powers/skills to cure some one but also he/she knows how to curse, they can inflict illness upon an individual, by sending what is often called Spirit arrows while they are in trance. In order to take away these spirit arrows from some one, the shaman must have the knowledge and understand how they work and how they were sent. Once the shamans are able to find it, they will send the curse or the illness back to the dark shaman, cursing them in the same manner they cursed others. This might seem fantasy, a battle between good and evil extracted from a movie, but this is very real, i suppose there is always an evil side in everything as there is a good one, everything must have a balance. However, i may know much about shamanism, but in this dark side of a shaman i'm afraid my knowledge is purely theoretical, but if a shaman can find illness in someone and cure it, i'm sure he/she can do the opposite, i mean.. if  shamans can extract malevolent energy, it is likely that they can send it back. Lets put it in these terms, we often defend ourselves from other's and the harm they try to give us, in our defence, we can fight, verbally protest, sometimes with legal acts, when the law is on our side and so one.. so the shamans can do the same, but it is a kind of self defence in spiritual terms, a bit difficult to understand because our minds have been so closed and away from those matters for too long and society is closing it self in a routine quite monotonous and away from spirituality, and we are all running around the same places, doing the same things everyday, in our stressful city lifes. But speaking of self defence in spiritual terms and in shamanism, there is a very good exemple of this in the Jivaro tribes in the Amazon, they would captured the heads of their enemies and shrank the heads in order to trap the soul of that person in there, so the person couldn't take revenge, coming all the way from the other world, more powerful then ever.  To them, this is not an evil act or a bad thing to do, it's for their own protection and the protection of their communities, because they could turn quickly into violence.

People nowadays are very curious about shamanism, and we are going back to those studies, gaining knowledge or relearning our ancestral spiritual paths, trying to be more connected with the natural world and with ourselves, making somehow a link that binds our soul with others and with the world, but the kind of shamanism that suits us better is in fact the peaceful kind of shamanism, involving healing, herbs, safe ways to enter in trance, music and the list goes on, which is better in my opinion, because the world had and unfortunately still has too much violance, but lets not forget that shamanism had many sacrifices, and in some places still has, of both flesh and blood, the kind of tribal shamanism has always been that way, brutal, cruel, and it would give the sort of nightmares we don't want to dream about, but this is history and we learn from it, we can't just deny the truth, we have to understand it, go deep into that matter even if it makes you want to puke. Blood sacrifices are extremely common in tribal societies and are often connected with rituals in shamanism, there is a huge difference between our Western practice of shamanism and the darker ways of traditional shamans from these tribal societies, such as trying to put a malevolent soul into the body of an animal so it stops doing harm to the person the shaman is trying to cure, and after that killing the animal to trap that soul, in order to stop it doing evil to others.

So this post was to remind you all that shamanism isn't a trivial thing that you can play with. Lately it has been so publicized and trivialized, that all people think they can practice it and it is very beautiful and healthy. Well in some manners it is of course, and it can actually help a lot, it is also useful for our souls and our minds, it helps us to evolve, but we always have that tendency to cover up the bad side, people need to know the truth always and from there, make their own choices. It is the natural order of things, if a shaman doesn't know how to curse, how does he know how to heal it?

If you have any questions for me and if you want to see my traditional works, check my Facebook page and if you can, make a Like on it here: http://www.facebook.com/ArithHarger