Picture a shaman. Thinking scary mask, human skull rattle, thick grassy skirt and swirls of paint on skinny legs and bare feet?
Thinking of a superstitious belief in good and bad spirits and the need to placate or communicate with them? While modern practitioners of shamanism retain a sense of the ability to communicate with spirits in objects as diverse as plants, animals and even houses, these modern practitioners of shamanism don't look nearly as interesting as their forebears, says Jeffrey Rich. Rich is a computer software engineer who's also an orthopedic massage therapist and, for, for three years now, a shamanic practitioner.
Rich doesn't wear any special get-up when he meditates with the use of a hand-held drum. He wears chinos, lace-up leather shoes and a freshly ironed shirt with his reading glasses tucked in the pocket. And he considers shamanism a practice, not a religion - he himself is a Christian.
"Watching me journey is about as interesting as watching paint dry," Rich said as he settled near an ancient red oak tree to see what it had to say. "I just drum with my eyes closed."
Rich had "opened a sacred space" around him by lighting a candle, and then swinging pungent smoke from sagebrush twigs over his hands and drum. The ceremonies remind him, he said, of watching priests in the Episcopal Church he grew up in swing incense censors to wave smoke over the altar in the church, the priest and the congregation.
"As many things happen, I'll read or find or do something in my journey, and then find that the practice is used elsewhere by someone," Rich said.
It was the commonalities in shamanic practices among cultures isolated by oceans, mountains and forests that first caught the attention of Michael Harner, an anthropologist who is now a shamanic practitioner and the founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. Harner's 1980 book, "The Way of the Shaman," helped inform modern shamanic practices.
Rich, since being introduced to the practices three years ago by some friends, has seen similar synchronicities - practitioners drumming together who come up with the same images, messages he receives about his own practices that he finds, later, to be common to one or more traditions or to his own Irish heritage.
"Shamanism is a way to come face-to-face with the daily miracle," Rich said.
Natural drumming
With the introductory smudging complete, Rich began hitting his hand-held drum with the mallet and singing softly, using a tune he had been given in one of his meditative journeys. He shuffled in a circle to summon the teaching spirits from each of the compass directions, from above and below.
" 'Below' is not the underworld," Rich said. "It's more earthy, and it overlays this world."
The wood-spice scent of sage hung in the air when Rich finished his chant and settled on a quilt made for him by a friend. With his eyes shut, he continued to drum softly. The thrum of the mallet on the traditional skin head of the drum pulsed like a heartbeat. A dog, the pet of the household, lay in the grass and watched Rich for a while, then turned her head to follow the path of a squirrel in a nearby hickory tree. Nuthatches called to each other, and a distant crow cawed.
The rhythm of Rich's drum seemed somehow in harmony with a scarlet and gold-spattered leaves of a nearby sassafras seedling and the rustles of the squirrels overhead. After perhaps five minutes - clock time seemed to dissolve in the timeless pulsing of the drum - Rich's drumming increased in speed. He ended the drumming with several strong, long beats.
The faster beats, he said later, is the "call-back" beat. In a drumming circle, this signifies the time for those in meditation to come back to be anchored in the day-to-day reality. The strong, long beats at the end of the session thanks and releases the spirit teachers.
The practices can be used for a variety of purposes, including healing, divination and soul retrieval - recovering the bits of oneself a person might leave behind during times of great loss, trauma or even joy.
Rich uses drumming for personal prayer about once a week. He has also helped people with soul retrieval.
"It has reconnected me to the joy of deep faith," Rich said. "It is one form of prayer that makes me feel great - very, very in touch with the divine. It's a very in-spiriting practice."
God everywhere
Rich participates in a North Alabama circle of practitioners once a month. That circle, Full Moon Shamanic Circle, communicates through Meetup.com, but wouldn't be appropriate for beginners, he said, since their meetings involve no teaching. Rich, who just completed an intensive two-week healing course at Church of Earth Healing in Ohio, has arranged for shamanic teachers to give a workshop Nov. 14 and 15 for those interested in learning about the practice.
The shamanic practitioners he works with, Rich said, do not use hallucinogenic drugs and would never agree to send curses to someone.
"Those kind of shamans don't live very long," Rich said. "The curses attach to you as well."
To charges that shamans believe in a kind of pantheism, that God is in everything, Rich said the fundamental of shamanism is more of a pan-en-theism - that God's spirit suffuses everything, is everywhere, and that the correct state of mind can allow a person to communicate with the spark of divine that's here: in animals, trees, rocks, houses, mountains.
"It's something I wasn't getting in church," Rich said. "If anything, it has deepened my ties to the Christian faith."
On this day, after sounding the ending beats of his drum pattern, Rich blinks his eyes open and looks around him, a little like he is awaking from a short nap. The tree, he announces, is, in fact, a female spirit, strong and healthy and only middle-aged, despite her 15-foot girth. She likes where she grows, on the edge of a pasture, and she likes the happy laughing of people who pass beneath her limbs, he says. She likes it that the family has given her things, rocks and old mining assay cups they brought back from the Rockies and ended up setting on the stone wall at her base.
It's a happier journey than some he's taken. Once, with three other practitioners, he drummed to help figure out why someone in New Mexico had been plagued with dark thoughts after renting a house. All four practitioners came to the end of their drumming session with the same image: the spirits of an old man and an old woman angrily refusing to leave the house for the afterlife so they could stay and guard the history of abuse that had occurred in the house.
"Had I not experienced that, I wouldn't have believed it," Rich said.
In a series of subsequent journeys, the practitioners helped the spirits detach from the house and find their way onward, leaving the house peaceful.
"When I find myself experiencing that kind of thing, I think, 'OK, well ...' " Rich said, laughing at how outlandish such an experience sounds. "But when I do or learn something new, it feels very natural - like it was just something I'd just forgotten about."