Trance – The Sanctuary of Vindos

Shamanism is an ancient spiritual tradition dating back at least 40,000 years. It is not a religion but a body of techniques centring on altering one’s state of consciousness to access a spiritual reality and commune with helping spirits for the purposes of accessing guidance, healing and inspiration.

Shamanism is founded on animism. Animism, from the Latin anima ‘soul’ is the belief that the whole world is inspirited. Every mountain, hill, river, tree, plant, fungus, animal, bird, fish, insect and bacterium has a spirit. So does the man-made environment. Houses, churches, office blocks, smart phones, laptops, tools, all have spirits. Thoughts, feelings and emotions, such as love and jealousy, have spirits too.

In animistic cultures significant landscape features are often viewed as particularly sacred and are associated with spirits of place and Deities. For example we know the river Ribble in Lancashire has a Goddess, Belisama, as the Roman geographer, Ptolemy, in the second century, labelled the Ribble estuary Belisama aest.

Animistic peoples are often also polytheistic. Polytheism is the belief in many Gods. These include local and tribal Gods and Goddesses and Deities who oversee certain functions such as learning, parenting, hunting, war, life and death.

Whilst all shamanic cultures are animistic not all animistic cultures are shamanic. Shamanism takes the belief all things are inspirited one step further. Shamanic peoples also believe in the existence of a spiritual reality that is separate from but intimately connected with physical reality. This spiritual reality has its own landscapes and is populated with spirits who have their own ways of being.

Everybody has the abilitity to ‘shamanise’ – to interact with the spirits and Deities of the household, tribe, locality, and of the spiritual reality. However, there is usually a specific person who serves their community as a shaman – a specialist in interacting with the spirits who has received a calling and undergone a rigorous training.

I will pause here to note the term ‘shaman’ comes from saman ‘one who knows’ from the Russian Tungus people and indigenous cultures have their own names for shamans. The application of ‘shaman’ and the term ‘shamanism’ to these cultures is a Western development. In the West we only use the term ‘shaman’ to describe a person in an indigenous culture who communes with the spirits to serve their community. Westerners who practice shamanism refer to themselves as shamanic practitioners.

There are two main ways that shamans interact with the spiritual reality. The first is the spirit flight or shamanic journey wherein the soul leaves the body and journeys to the spiritual reality to travel its landscapes and commune with its spirits. The second is inviting the spirits to be with us in this reality. This might take the form of calling them to be present alongside us in the physical realm or into our bodies to dance with us, eat with us, or to speak through us, thus offering guidance directly.

Entering an altered state of consciousness can be done in many ways. These include: listening to repetitive music such as drumming or rattling, dancing, chanting fasting, silence and taking entheogens such as ayhuasca, San Pedro cactus, or psychotropic mushrooms such as fly agaric and liberty cap (which we have in the UK).

We all move through various states of consciousness throughout the day and many people are familiar with trance through going out and dancing to trance music. Where shamanic practice differs is that a shaman enters trance with will and intention and uses it to commune with the spiritual reality to serve to their community.

So how does somebody become a shaman? In indigenous cultures the role of the shaman can be hereditary or a person might be called by the spirits. This can happen when they come of age or may be triggered by a traumatic event such as a physical injury, a mental breakdown or a near death experience. This is often referred to as ‘shamanic sickness’. To outer appearances the person is seen to ‘go mad’ or fall into a depression. It’s common for them to remove themselves from everyday society, sometimes into the wilderness, to spend time alone. During this period their psyche, bearing its presuppositions, rules and norms of everyday reality is broken down and ‘dies’ and they are initiated into the metaphorical, mythic, dreamlike ways of being of the spiritual reality. Once this process is completed they return to their community ‘reborn’ and ready to serve as a shaman.

A shaman serves their communities in many ways. Some of these are very practical – using their skills of soul flight and communing with the spirits to find the herds when the people are hungry or to find lost pets or possessions. Shamans also use their abilities to heal. This can take the form of energy healing or they might work with plant spirits and herbal medicines. They are able to remove harmful energies and entities from people and places. Pyschopomping, helping the dead to pass and aiding spirits who are trapped in this world to move on, is also a shamanic role.

Whereas these ancient shamanic practices have been maintained in places such as Siberia, Mexico and the Amazon and amongst the Native American peoples, sadly shamanism has been lost from Western Europe. This is mainly due to the hegemony of Christianity. The Christianisation of Britain began in the fourth century when it was under Roman rule and the emperor, Constantine, converted to Christianity. This resulted in the taking over the sacred sites associated with pre-Christian Gods and and spirits and re-dedicating them to the Christian God, Jesus, Mary, the angels and the saints and labelling many of our indigenous Deities as ‘devils’. Our capacity to shamanise was taken away by the ban on communicating with our local spirits and Deities and replaced with the rule we can only commune with the Christian Deities through set prayers, attending church and seeing a priest. Rationalism, materialism, science, industrialisation and capitalism have also played a role.

Several years ago I had a vision of the world becoming as a whirlpool from the source. ‘Green moving swards of vegetation, trees, people, marching through a labyrinthine kingdom back into the void carrying houses and entire civilisations.’ Sometimes people got stuck. With bird-headed ones they came knocking on the back of my head trying to shout through me. I was on Psylocybe mushrooms and alone at the time and didn’t dare let them.

The practice of a person allowing spirits to speak through them is found in many world religions from Voodoo to Evangelical Christianity. It was likely to have been an important component of pre-Christian Brythonic polytheistic religion and survived into the 12th century as recorded by Gerald of Wales.

Gerald writes of awenyddion ‘people inspired’. ‘When consulted upon any doubtful event, they roar out violently, are rendered beside themselves, and become, as it were, possessed by a spirit.’ Their speeches are ‘nugatory, ‘incoherent’, ‘ornamented’. When ‘roused from their ecstasy, as from a deep sleep’ they cannot ‘remember the replies they have given’. He conjectures: ‘perhaps they speak by the means of fanatic and ignorant spirits.’ (1)

Gerald’s words provide evidence for a Brythonic tradition of spiritwork in which there exist ‘soothsayers’, referred to as awenyddion, who are possessed by spirits by whom they speak in the metaphorical language of poetry.

I first came across the term ‘awen’ for ‘poetic inspiration’ in the Druid communities and saw myself as a bard before my patron God, Gwyn ap Nudd, initiated me as an awenydd. I have served Gwyn in this role for over ten years by journeying to Annwn to bring back inspiration for my communities.

I have prayed for awen and for the Gods and spirits to inspire and come into me when writing in a similar way to the ancient Greek poets calling on the Muses and to William Blake asking the Daughters of Beulah to come into his hand. (2) I’ve also experimented with trance singing, letting go, just letting any words and tune flow. But, until recently, I hadn’t dared speak the voices of spirits.

This changed after a conversation with a fellow member of the Monastery of Annwn, who told me of his calling to channel Gwyn. It reminded me of the bird-headed spirits, who’d come knocking, whose desire to speak I had denied. I felt the time to offer my voice had come and journeyed to them.

I saw them as crows flocking in the sky in the shape of infinity then crossed bones. Their home appeared as the floating skeleton of a great raven. I offered to gift them my voice and they gave me some instructions. They would stand behind me. Then I must open the door and loosen my tongue. I tried it whilst in the Otherworld and received a prophecy about a distant son of Don.

Several days later on their prompting I composed a song to enter the trance state:

Crows, crows, the Speaking Ones
Y rhai sy’n siarad

Come, come from Annwfn
Come, come your will be done

Crows, crows, the Speaking Ones
Y rhai sy’n siarad

Come, come bring your words
Come, come you will be heard

Crows, crows, the Speaking Ones
Y rhai sy’n siarad

When I tried it the first time and asked who wanted to speak they told me they would take it in turns and each wanted me to make their words into an oracle. I did this by letting them speak out loud through me first then writing down what I could remember and putting it into more poetic form. (3)

On completion of the oracles I read them to the Speaking Ones and gained their approval. At first I wasn’t planning to make any of this work public but I was told they wanted their voices to be heard so I will be posting the oracles of these seven crow-guides over the course of the next week.

(1) https://awenydd.weebly.com/giraldus-cambrensis-and-the-awenyddion.html
(2) ‘Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poets Song…
Of varied beauty, to delight the wanderer and repose
His burning thirst & freezing hunger! Come into my hand
By your mild power; descending down the Nerves of my right arm
From out the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministry
The Eternal Great Humanity Divine, planted his Paradise’
~ William Blake, ‘Milton’
(3) As a note I don’t consider this to be full trance possession because, whilst working alone, I don’t dare let go of my conscious faculties fully. Also, for this particular work, I have been asked to record the words so need to be aware enough to remember them. During this process I’ve felt something other has come through, but that I’m not fully out of the way, and suspect my consciousness might have coloured some of the content.