While according to Pir Zia Inayat Khan, the current head of the Inayatiyya order, Sufis have often preserved shamanic traditions wherever they have gone, there is scarcely an organized religion that doesn’t have a beef with shamanic practitioners. Organized religions tend to have issues with mystics, too, which is how Sufis have gotten to be heretics, and the history with shamanic practitioners in many places has been very bloody. “Witch hunts” were intended to wipe out traditional healers in Europe and the Americas. In Tibet, the indigenous Bön shamanic religion and Buddhism competed and borrowed from each other, until the current Dalai Lama declared “the religious equality of the Bön faith”—which, incidentally, annoyed some people. All of which is supremely ironic: where did all the organized religions think they came from originally? Oh, right, straight from the Only Being, just like shamanic practices—what a coincidence!
Following the triumph of beating shamanic knowledge out of their fellow Europeans, missionaries of organized European religions have done what they could to rid the world of shamanic practices—and the people who do them—so that in many places besides Europe the practices have either gone underground or been obliterated altogether, with perhaps some vestigial survival hidden in folk tales, legends, and nursery stories—and even under the lives of saints. When they were murdered, all those healers and shamanic practitioners took with them not only their knowledge of healing, but also their wisdom: that beyond or by way of a particular plant or a particular ritual, it’s always the Love that does the healing.
Ironically, as Michael Harner has pointed out, when the missionaries of organized religions encountered shamanic cultures, they found people whose spiritual experiences were far more immediate and direct than their own, and then found themselves faced with the awkward task of converting those people to belief systems in which they were meant to require intermediaries and follow the rules. As Michael Pollan noted in speaking of the suppression of Native peyote use by Spanish conquistadores in South America, “You render the priesthood superfluous if everybody can talk to God on their own.” And yet, hiding out somewhere from the power structures overlaid on the direct experience of spirit—power structures that may not always have been divinely inspired—shamanic knowledge has persisted. How could it not? It lives in the marrow of our bones.
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