Dead Men Walking:
Shaman Sickness.
The term “shaman sickness” is not one that you’ll generally hear outside of most spirit-worker circles, and that’s because we have only relatively recently learned to identify it again, after centuries of not understanding what it is that happens to shamans at the beginning of their careers. The term denotes a period of illness (often seriously life-threatening in some way) which is caused by the Gods and wights in order to completely remake someone and turn them into a shaman. The phenomenon of shaman sickness is found in tribal cultures around the world, with remarkably similar sets of traumas. It is the hallmark of the classic shaman in many parts of the globe.
Whether his calling be hereditary or not, a shaman must be a capable – nay, an inspired person. Of course, this is practically the same thing as saying that he is nervous and excitable, often to the verge of insanity. So long as he practises his vocation, however, the shaman never passes this verge. It often happens that before entering the calling persons have had serious nervous affections. Thus a Chukchee female shaman, Telpina, according to her own statement, had been violently insane for three years, during which time her household had taken precautions that she should do no harm to the people or to herself.
I was told that people about to become shamans have fits of wild paroxysms alternating with a condition of complete exhaustion. They will lie motionless for two or three days without partaking of food or drink. Finally they retire to the wilderness, where they spend their time enduring hunger and cold in order to prepare themselves for their calling.
To be called to become a shaman is generally equivalent to being afflicted with hysteria; then the accepting of the call means recovery. There are cases of young persons who, having suffered for years from lingering illness, at last feel a call to take up shamanistic practice and by this means overcome the disease …. Here is an account by a Yakut-Tungus shaman, Tiuspiut (“fallen-from-the-sky”), of how he became a shaman: “When I was twenty years old, I became very ill and began to see with my eyes, to hear with my ears that which others did not see or hear; nine years I struggled with myself, and I did not tell any one what was happening to me, as I was afraid that people would not believe me and would make fun of me. At last I became so seriously ill that I was on the verge of death; but when I started to shamanize I grew better; and even now when I do not shamanize for a long time I am liable to be ill.”
The Chukchee call the preparatory period of a shaman by a term signifying “he gathers shamanistic power”. For the weaker shamans the preparatory period is less painful, and the inspiration comes mainly through dreams. But for a strong shaman this stage is very painful and long; in some cases it lasts for one, two, or more years. Some young people are afraid to take a drum and call on the “spirits”, or to pick up stones or other objects which might prove to be amulets, for fear lest the “spirit” should call them to be shamans. Some youths prefer death to obedience to the call of spirits. Parents possessing only one child fear his entering this calling on account of the danger attached to it; but when the family is large, they like to have one of its members a shaman.
Shaman sickness is something endured by the classic shaman – another reason why, at least in this tradition, I’d like to see the word “shaman” reserved for those who have gone this route, and “spirit-worker” or “shamanic practitioner” (or even “seidhworker”, “vitki”, or “volva” when appropriate) used for those who haven’t. I know that I have no hope of instituting this definition outside of this tradition, and I don’t intend to try. However, those of us who work with the wights of this area of the world should understand that for us, this is the division.
There’s no need to feel like you’re not as good a spirit-worker if you haven’t gone through shaman sickness. Rather, you should feel grateful, because it kills people, sometimes quite literally. Every tribal culture whose spirit-workers go through such a spirit-triggered ordeal agree that not everyone survives it, and there is an attrition rate. Not going through this condition means that you retain the ability to make choices with your life. It might also mean that your “wiring” isn’t such that it could survive the transition, and the Gods know best about these things. Be grateful that you are still alive, and do the best work that you can with what you have.
When I first met other spirit-workers, many of whom had gone through or were going through shaman sickness, I learned that there were two distinct forms that it took (although sometimes, some people got hit with both at once at full volume). We jokingly, sarcastically referred to them as the One Road and the Other Road. The One Road is the Death Road, and it attacks through your body. Spirit-workers on the Death Road come down with physical illnesses, some of them life threatening; there may be months or years of hideous, painful, chronic illness that slowly wears you down and “kills” part or all of your astral body, not to mention bringing your physical body close to death. In fact, the “classic” end to this road culminates in a near-death experience (or in some cases and actual death from which the individual does not return), sometimes with a vision of dismemberment where one is actually taken apart and rebuilt by the spirits. Usually it’s not only one specific illness, but a cascade of them – or one which drags on, lowers the immune system or otherwise throws the body seriously off, and starts the cascade. Sometimes it may even start with a severe physical injury, and goes from there. One of the telltale marks of the Death Road is that if modern medical science manages to cure one of the illnesses, it will either recur in a more virulent form, or something just as horrid will take its place. Shaman sickness is remarkably resistant to modern treatments.
I walked the Death Road. Between a combination of medication-resistant lupus and secondary congenital adrenal hyperplasia, I sickened further and further for the better part of a decade, and hemorrhaged quite literally to death at the end. I still wonder if I’d had the luxury of knowing what was going on, and perhaps another human being who understood to help me through it, I might have gotten to the end much sooner. Certainly I’m well aware that I came close to not making it; my patron deity was very clear about that. Still, there was a certain level of physical death that I had to achieve, and there was not going to be any safe or easy way to achieve it. Most of what I went through was entirely necessary to make me what I am today.
The Other Road is the road of Madness. On this road, the death is of the personality that came before, and it can come about through a period of mental illness. The mental instability during shaman sickness is especially difficult, because the individual is legitimately experiencing contact with unseen (to most others, that is) entities – and they are also seeing and hearing them through a veil of insanity. Figuring out what is real and what isn’t can seem nearly impossible, especially since any mental health professionals that they consult are likely to be less than helpful. They may concur that there are brain chemistry problems, but they will neither believe in any of the spirit-contact nor understand the need to see the illness through to some end, whatever that is. Psychiatric medication may be prescribed, and the individual may end up in the hospital. In some cases, the spirits may drive the sufferer away from medical help if they think that it will retard the process, even if this has them sleeping on park benches for a while. In other cases, the sufferer accedes to the wishes of mental health personnel, but it doesn’t necessarily fix the problem.
Psychiatric medications for people who are on the Other Road are an ambivalent subject. As discussed above in the section on whether spirit-workers should use psychiatric medications at all, it will largely depend on the individual in question, and divination should perhaps be done in order to get a clear answer. On the other hand, if you are walking the Madness Road as part of a spirit-triggered shamanic rebirth, They may well prefer to you to experience it fully, without the buffering effect of drugs – at least for a time. And if a particular psychiatric medication interferes with you in any way – such as making it difficult to move energy or ground and center – it is unlikely that the spirits will allow you to take it, so as above, do divination first to find something appropriate. This advice includes any herbal remedies, but for the latter, it is imperative that a spirit-worker who utilizes herbal remedies should make an alliance with the Grandparent-spirit of that plant, or it may not be all that effective. (Spirit-workers can’t just make assumptions about the use of living things for their aid; we are held to a higher standard, even by wights that we haven’t met yet or whose existence hasn’t occurred to us.) Also, be aware that herbal remedies can interact in difficult ways with allopathic medications, so be careful.
You may also need to consider how much of the issues brought up by shaman sickness are chemical and how much are trauma that no chemical can help, and that needs to be worked through by itself. If, for example, there’s a large chemical component that is preventing you from making any headway on the emotional things, you may be able to bargain a deal where you temporarily go on medication long enough to throw yourself fully into working out your emotional issues (assuming that you are not taking one of the anti-empathic meds that simply repress your emotional issues so that you don’t have to look at them). Of course, you’d then have to dedicate every day to making yourself emotionally stable enough to go off the medications and deal with the rest of the shaman sickness process without going under. Other tools of modern psychiatry that some modern spirit-workers swear by for “getting ready to survive shaman sickness” are DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming).
While one might think that the Madness Road is, if not easier, at least less life-threatening than the Death Road, that would be incorrect to assume. A spirit-worker on the Madness Road may commit suicide out of pain and despair, or do something stupid that gets them killed, or go so thoroughly mad that they burn out their own gifts and live practically catatonic for the rest of their (usually short) lives. One of the big dangers of the Madness Road is being too crazy to realize that you’re all that crazy, especially if you’ve actually got wight-contact going at the same time. It’s also common for your judgment to be entirely off about all the important things in your life, even the simplest ones.
What the spirit-worker going down this road desperately needs is a sane, reasonable person that they trust who shares the same or at least a similar world view to them to be their reality check. This “reality check” should give them feedback as to their apparent sanity based on their behavior as a human being, not based on some socially acceptable scale of belief. They should understand that talking to the unseen or doing odd ritual behaviors is, for this spirit-worker, not evidence of insanity. However, being unable to hold a sensible conversation or negotiate reasonably and rationally over some mundane matter might be, as might losing one’s empathy or ability to see the world views of others, or becoming paranoid about the motivations of your loved ones and attributing unrealistic and sinister motivations to them, regardless of all evidence to the contrary.
It is important to remember that the mark of a shaman who takes the Madness Road is that they only suffer from those extremes during shaman sickness, and then they recover. A functioning shaman may have odd social behaviors that are the result of his bargains with the spirits, but s/he is fully aware of how they look to others, and can communicate patiently and sensitively past that hurdle. They are able to have healthy relationships and negotiate sanely with others. They need to be sane, in order to do their jobs – not just because the job is so stressful, but because it requires them to understand and empathize with many different clients. They need to be able to live in this world as well as in the Otherworlds, or they are ineffective. This means that in order to function as a shaman, they need to come back from that illness. It’s important to have faith in the rights who guide this process, as they understand how to bring someone back from it, but it’s also important to have a human support system who can help you with regular infusions of reality about how you look and sound to “normal” people.
At the same time, there will still always be a faint air of insanity about people who have walked the Madness Road, even when they are acting completely sane and normal, just like there will be a faint aura of “death” around those who have walked the Death Road – and for people with the Sight, they may be able to see and smell Death in their auras. (That “smell of death” is difficult for most non-Sighted people to interpret, and they may end up associating it mentally with “evil” or “wrongdoer” or just “creepy”. Even if they are lawful and upright people who never harm anyone, people may just “feel” after being around them for five minutes that this is someone dangerous or harmful.) That’s because shamans don’t ever really come all the way back. One spirit-worker, however, pointed out to me that walking the Madness Road has one significant benefit: A shaman may well be asked to deal with people who are broken in all sorts of ways, and having spent time insane can give insight and compassion in those cases. When one spends time delving into damaged psyches, it’s good to know the territory intimately.
I remember seeing a beggar in the New York subway during my sickness. He was shirtless and filthy: he had open sores on his skin and was staring down intently at the concrete, his cupped and dirt caked hand extended in front of him while his shoulders were hunched like he was getting ready to spring. He was also sitting in a full lotus position: to this day I’ve rarely seen another American who was able to do that. And I realized that in India he would have become a sadhu, and people would have known exactly what was going on with him. But in our culture he was just “mentally ill.”
I wonder about the distinctions between schizophrenia and shaman-sickness. One possible distinction might be: “You recover from shaman-sickness; schizophrenia is a chronic and degenerative condition.” But this leads to yet another question. How many cases of “schizophrenia” are just untreated, or badly treated, cases of shaman-sickness? If I had received “psychiatric help” during my 1994 episode of shaman-sickness, I might well have decided I was insane. I would never have listened to the voices: I would gladly have taken whatever medications were required to silence them, and today I’d be living in a welfare hotel and collecting a disability check – or I would be yet another suicide statistic. Winding up on the streets self-medicating with marijuana was one of the luckiest breaks I ever got: things could have been a whole lot worse.
I got better once I stopped fighting the voices and started listening to them. I also noticed that my spirit-voices spoke in complete, coherent sentences (or at least clear thoughts and images). The neurological noise, by contrast, tended to be garbled words or sentence fragments repeated inanely. I still get those when I am tired or under stress: I treat them as a warning buzzer and have managed to work with and around them. I’m still given to logic-leaps and mental tangents which are common to schizophrenics and creative folks alike, but I’m able to dial it back to “charmingly eccentric” instead of “drooling nutcase.” But the scars are still there. This is one of the things which can make the whole question complicated: “in contact with the spirit world” and “bug-fuck-nutty” are not necessarily mutually exclusive, even after shaman sickness has run its course.
Shaman sickness doesn’t happen to every spirit-worker, but when it does it can be pretty frightening. First, though, I want to distinguish between Kundalini sickness and shaman sickness; they are related, but not the same thing. Kundalini sickness is what happens when you are changing the way your body runs energy from 110 to 220 volts. Kundalini energy is basically this coiled energy that sits in the base of the spine and comes up. Working on that channel connects your genitals to your brain, and has other benefits like making your brain work better. Upping the voltage makes your core go from idle to forward motion within your energy system, but when that comes up, it comes up quite violently. It can break things, if you’re running too many volts for your wires – or too many amps. Your wires will melt, things will get damages, your capacitors will burn out, and you can really seriously damage yourself. You can damage your kidneys, you can give yourself migraines, you can fry your nervous system permanently.
A woman that we know actually died from it. She had a site dedicated to the dangers of Kundalini sickness. As it stands, it’s quite easy to prevent it from happening. You just need to do your Kundalini exercises carefully, drink lots of water, know that it can happen and back off if it starts to happen instead of doing more. It requires your whole body, eventually. It is a kind of natural modification that slowly rewires everything for 220 instead of 110, as it were. You can go through months of not being able to eat, puking everything up. People go blind for minutes or hours at a time. There are weird wandering depressions.
Some of the symptoms of shaman sickness are related to Kundalini sickness. Some of it is just that the spirits have to get you close enough to death to receive their modifications. Part of it can happen just because they have kickstarted the thing, waking your energy body. There are all sorts of blockages in your energy system because you haven’t been using it properly and they will smash through it. Then once they’ve done that, they start to kill it off. They make sure it’s all working, and then they just drain the life away from it. It’s terrifying, painful, and depressing. I certainly thought that I was dying. There can be psychotic breaks, despair, long drawn-out illness. You can’t get healed. You have to hit bottom somewhere.
I don’t know if you can help it along. There are things that would slow it down, but I’d be more interested in trying to speed it up. Certain meds can slow it down, and so can fighting it, but that will just kill you in the end. I think accepting it speeds it up. Ordeal work can speed it up. The problem is that speeding it up can bring you too close to death too fast, and that can kill you too. The knowledge doesn’t come from people, it comes from solitude and suffering. The Inuit will stick you in an igloo for months without much food, for the initiatory ordeal. Of course, maybe that’s for the safety of the tribe as well. Because part of your karmic record has to be cleared away, you act out every imbalance that you have, with grotesque violence. So I was just horrendous to be around during that period. You’re a source of bad luck, and certainly a source of bad vibes.
We ended up having a full-on funeral for a very large part of who I was. A part of me was laid to rest and chose to die, because I had become so sick and dysfunctional. I was depressed, I had terrible asthma. That part of me – she was so sick and hypervigilant, she gathered all of that into her and took it to the grave with her. And now she’s feasted as a hero; she’s one of my ancestors now. It was rough, though; it still upsets me to think about it.
How do you choose what part of you gets to die? First you have to know who they are. This requires a lot of meditating and introspection. They need a name, they need a history. Write a saga about them. Write the end of the saga “And then they died to save me.” And they need to be ready. Just because you want them to sacrifice themselves and go die now doesn’t mean that it’s the right time, and that they’re going to want to do it. They have to want to do it. You can’t just kill them, because you become what you kill and you have to take the karmic load. It’s actually much better if they can do it themselves, because then you who are left don’t take the karmic load. If you kill them, you still have the karma. If they kill themselves, they take it with them. It’s easier on what’s left. Of course, some of them don’t go down easy. You can ask the spirits to kill them, because then the spirits will take the karma. But then you have to make sure that the spirits will take only them and leave the rest intact. Or you can ask your deity to kill them. Then you have a proper funeral and mourn them, really mourn them.
So I don’t know if that has to happen to everyone, but I suspect it’s not that uncommon. But that’s a big undertaking, to decide that this is what’s needed. If you are going to do that, you need to talk to other shamans. If you can’t, do lots and lots of divination, and get confirmations from omens, so that you can get a clear idea that the divination is correct. “I want to see a freaking billboard that has her name on it somehow, or I want to drive past something with a huge grave on it, or something. I want that level of clarity.” Because if you do kill a piece of yourself off, there’s no going back.
Of course, I don’t think you should even contemplate it without advice from your patron deity. What I’m concerned about it someone going to a workshop and saying, “Oh, I saw my totem animal guide and it told me that I should kill myself.” You need to have a long-term established relationship with a patron of some kind. They can trigger the shaman sickness without showing themselves to you, or you can be too thick-headed to notice that they’re there. Usually in anthropological tales, the spirits come first. Those who go through it without hearing their spirit patrons end up dead.
But mainly it’s about letting go. Meditations on emptiness. Meditations on letting go. Relaxation exercises. Dissolving work. Letting go as hard as you can.
Having a good support system is really important. This can also be tremendously difficult to achieve when the people closest to you are alienated at times by your behavior and inexplicable changes. You’re in the process of dying and being remade, and your loved ones may not recognize or like who and what it is you are becoming. ***
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