The shamMAN’s Path

We are All Plastic Shaman

I have refrained from speaking too much about the mythology central to my practice. I am saving that for a different book. But here, some mythology is necessary. Long ago, humanity lived as the Free Tribes. They practiced many paths and many ways. They were not unified, and did not enforce their views on other tribes. And then came the Hungry Empire. The Empire wore many faces throughout the centuries and flew many flags, but it remained the same at the core. The empire insisted that it alone knew the correct way for humans to live, and it sought to expand across the globe and to absorb or destroy all tribes who resisted.

Unless you are very lucky, you are almost certainly a cultural orphan. Your ancestral culture was almost certainly murdered by the Hungry Empire. A few cultures today have retained some substantial portion of their ancient culture. But you are unlikely to be a part of one of those cultures. If you are Native American, then you probably are in this narrow category. If you are Sami, San, or Aboriginal Australian, or Ainu, then you are probably in that narrow category. But if you are not in one of the surviving indigenous cultures, then you are an orphan. Modern revivals, such as Wiccan, are still orphans. They are orphans who have reconstructed their ancestor culture as best they can. But that culture has already died, and such practices are attempted resurrections. There is nothing wrong with such attempted resurrections, but they are not the same as being an actual surviving culture.

You are probably a cultural orphan. And you are scavenging a poor replacement from the wreckage.

And that’s okay

Embrace the scavenger. Honor what you use. You cannot help scavenging. But you can help appropriating. Don’t claim what you salvage as your own invention. Do use things unaltered if you can help it. Instead, learn from you scavenge and salvage, and build something of your own from what you learn. You are impure. You’re a scavenger. You are a Plastic Shaman. But you can still find the divine

The Ars Holstica: The Magickal Life

I divide the shamMAN’s path into four distinct viewpoints. These are four ways of looking at the world, for ways of interacting with the world so as to be a Craft Brew Magician- a shamMAN. They are the Ars Holistica, the Ars Peritiae, The Ars Modestiae, and the Ars Obscura. The Ars Holistica is the holistic perspective- viewing everything as a unified whole. The Ars Peritiae is the experience perspective- viewing yourself as the only expert who matters. The Ars Modestiae is the flawed perspective- viewing everything as imperfect and dismissing the need for perfection. And the Ars Obscura is the shadowed perspective- the view that more is yet to be known, that the best things still wait to be uncovered.

We begin with the Ars Holistica..

First, to be a proper shamMAN, you must live a holistic magickal path- The Ars Holistica. To do this you must erase the boundary between your regular life and your magickal life. Make your life your practice. You must muddy the line between sacred and profane, to do this. Find the holy in the muddy puddle. Make your walk to work your meditation. Make your Thursday meal into a sacred ritual. Link the sacred and the profane through symbolism. Make the profane sacred by taking the time to do it with deliberate intent and utter conviction. If you cannot make your daily life sacred through commitment, then remove that element from your daily life and replace it with something that you can give the proper weight and consideration.

Second, create meaning. Fill your life with symbolism and metaphor. Saturate your world with imagery and items which are pregnant with meaning. Wear bracelets with images of your favored demons. Get t-shirts printed with sigils and occult ideology. Put a picture of the Three Unknowable up where your grandmother places a picture of the Virgin Mary. Saturate your life with meaning. Breathe your ideology with every breath. Make remembering your path easy, by making it omnipresent.

Third, use bad Latin to make things sound important. Our brains like the exotic and the mysterious. Embrace that so that your brain remembers things and prioritizes them. Use Latin, or Mandarin, or something else to add weight and apparent profundity to the proceedings. Do you think I needed to use all this Latin terminology? Of course not. But it sounds good, and my subconscious thinks it sounds more mystical and so gives it the attention it deserves. Are you First Nations? Use the language of your ancestors (or a close relative if colonial governments succeeded in destroying your language). Chinese American? Pick an antiquated chinese script to use when composing your sigils. Ideally stick to something to which you have a cultural connection. I tend to stick to Latin, which has a long history of use across Europe (I’m Caucasian), or Finnish (my family is of Finnish descent). There is nothing to stop you from using something unrelated to your own culture, but the downside is that you will be unable to easily connect such a choice to your personal history. This can make certain tasks more difficult. But if you feel a strong connection, by all means go ahead. I know a number of lifelong martial artists who use the language of their chosen martial art as their language. It’s your practice. Nobody gets to tell you no.

The Ars Peritiae: The Amateur Life

Next we come to the Ars Peritiae. Here you learn how to be your own expert. We are conditioned from birth to accept the authority of others. We are conditioned to accept that others know more than us. What I have learned is that this is often not the case. Be cautious ignoring the advice of experts when you know that they know more than you. You doctor has studied for years to know more than you. Your mechanic has done the same. But also do not wait for experts before you take action. Build your own house. Your results do not need to be perfect. They need only to generate results which satisfy you. If you are getting the results that you want, what more do you need?

But how do you build your own house (metaphorically and literally)? Start by learning enough that you know how to start. Once you know enough to start, start. This may sound obvious. But the inverse is also important. Do not wait until you know how to finish before you begin, or else you will never start. You can learn as you go. Next, learn until you know enough to learn more. Learn what you need to do at each new step when you get to that step. A common piece of advice for writers is that you can write a whole novel one word at a time. You can live a life the same way. But start with what you know

Also, have a sense of humor. You will screw up. Things beyond your control will go wrong. Roadblocks will rise up that you did not anticipate. Detours will appear. All of this is fine. You can adapt and reach your goal despite all this strife. But your life will be much happier if you can retain a sense of humor. Laugh, and then adapt. Laugh, and then change course. Laugh, and then do repairs. There is no extra prize for being humorless. There are no bonus points being handed out to the person who never smiles.

The Ars Modestiae: The Flawed Life

Third we move to the Ars Modestiae. To be a shamMAN and a Craft Brew Magician is to accept that you are a screw up. You understand that you are building miracles with trash. And when you are working with trash and recycled odds and sods you will have breakdowns. You will make mistakes. You will have disasters. You will tie two barely functioning things together to make a third even more barely functioning thing. That is how this works.

Make mistakes, but make something. Make mistakes, but make progress. Make a little, but make it every day. Things will break. Examine those things. Learn what broke. Learn why it broke. And then repair or rebuild it. Make things even if you don’t have the parts. Work around what you don’t have. Make do with what you do have. But make something. In doing so, you will increase your competence and your capabilities. Making what you can, even if you can only make a little, will allow you to make more than you could before.

And do not forget. Be kind to yourself. It is easy to be cruel to yourself. You will have learned to be cruel to yourself through twelve years of graded tests and quizzes. You will have learned to be cruel to yourself from bullies and cliques and peer pressure. You must be kind to yourself if you are to scavenge and scramble, make do and build with junk, and make miracles out of trash. Nobody else is required to be kind to you. So be kind to yourself. It is the least you can do. And it is something that you have the ability to do. And always do what you can, even if it is very little.

And on that note, be kind to those who do you no harm. Do what you can, and you can always be kind. There is a kind of magick in kindness. Magick is causing things to happen by will. Kindness is a way of exercising your will that anyone can do. This does not mean: be weak. This does not mean: be a pushover. But be kind. This may seem unrelated, but trust me on this. The world will open up to you when you are kind. The world will work with you when you are kind. And even the tough bits will be more manageable if you have been kind. Everyone is trying to work with the trash that life has left them. Everyone is building with trash whether they realize it or not. So be kind. We are all scavenging the same trash pile.

The Ars Obscura: The Shadowed Life

Lastly, we come to the Ars Obscura. The occult literally means the hidden. Occult comes from the Latin word occultus: which literally means clandestine or hidden. And the Ars Obscura is the perspective that the best things are still hidden and must be uncovered. The shamMAN seeks out the obscured and the hidden. They dig into the darkness and embrace the mystery at the edge of understanding.

In their quest to push back the edge of the unknown, the shamMAN studies constantly. Study your own path directly. Study those who have come before. Find your absentee mentors. Compare the competing ideas and ideologies of those who came before you. Examine the disagreements. And then come to your own conclusions. But also, study things adjacent to your path and practice. What do your favored mentors study in addition to their central work? Study that. And then ask yourself what other subjects will add to your practice. Study that as well.

And keep notes. Do not rely upon your memory. Right down notes about what you have learned. Then write down thoughts about what you have studied. Compare notes on different subjects and write down your thoughts on the comparisons. Keep notes. And review those notes to learn more.

Treat all magic as experiments. Treat your practice as a science. Its all a science experiment. Its a baking soda volcano. We will go into more depth on this throughout the book. But control your practice by applying the scientific method to the very unscientific practice of magick.

So learn new things, the write it down. Then make a mess, but write it down

The shamMAN in Summary

So a quick summary for the reader feeling up to their eyeballs in jargon and nonsense. Magick is anything that results when humans apply story to reality, which is pretty much everything. Religion is magick. Movies are magick. Politics are magick. Therapy is magick. And so on. Magick is subtle and hard to pin down, because we are swimming in it. A human trying to describe magick is like a fish trying to describe the ocean.

Is magick real? Yes. No. Who cares? It doesn’t matter if you are getting results. This book is not about proving if magick is real by whatever metric you want to measure it against. This book is about changing your life, via magick. This is true even if magick is a lie.

Most people do not practice as diligently as they should, and most make mistakes or break rules all the time. If you do that, congratulations, you’re normal. You can still make this work. Most people are also making up things as they go along. Even when you try to follow a prescribed path, you must interpret. And no two people will interpret the exact same way. You can still make this work. Regardless how badly you are practicing magick, you can get results and improve those results by applying a scientific method to your practice. Write things down. Note what worked. Note what didn’t. And adjust your practice accordingly. You will get results.

And last, we are all frauds. You cannot help but be a plastic shaman, a shamMAN. Unless you are in the very small minority that is still part of an unbroken lineage (and you almost certainly aren’t), you are stuck scavenging a practice out of the trash heap of history. You can do this and get results. You can do this while respecting the practices and cultures of those who came before. Build a holistic practice where your practice and your daily life are indistinguishable. Maintain the mindset of the amateur and the learner, but act like the expert. Make mistakes, but make something. Build flawed things and then make them better. And never stop learning. Never stop pushing at the edge of Mystery.

Do this and you will build a satisfying practice, and a satisfying life.