How Many Ways are there to Contact the Hidden Realm?

Chavin Lanzon Stela

by David Warner Mathisen

Three recent posts have advanced the argument that the world's ancient scriptures and traditions share a common, unifying, and shamanic worldview: 

• "The shamanic foundations of the world's ancient wisdom"
• "Humanity's shared shamanic heritage"
  and
• "Outlaw drums: evidence of the suppression of the shamanic worldview."

Together, they provide evidence that cultures around the world and across the millennia, from ancient Egypt to the steppes of Mongolia, and from the far northern boundaries of Scandinavia to the southern continent of Australia, at one time shared a worldview characterized by the understanding that our familiar, material, "ordinary" reality exists in conjunction with and is interpenetrated by another reality: the seed realm, the hidden realm, the realm of the spirits, the realm of the gods. 

This shared shamanic worldview was characterized not only by an awareness of this other realm, but by the understanding that it was possible in this life to deliberately undertake journeys to the spirit world in order to obtain knowledge or effect change that could not be accomplished in ordinary reality. 

There is also abundant evidence that this worldview has been deliberately stamped out over the centuries and that practice of shamanic techniques of ecstasy (or transcending the boundaries of the static, physical, ordinary reality) has been discouraged, stigmatized, and even prohibited by law in some places right up to the present day or very recent decades, and that the tools used to cross the boundary to the other realm -- the shamanic drum in particular -- have been outlawed, seized, and deliberately destroyed. 

The extent of this persecution of the shamanic worldview across both geographic space and historical time leads to the possibility that those responsible for the campaign are not persecuting this worldview because they believe that it is false, but rather because they know that it is true, and that there actually is knowledge which can only be obtained and change which can only be effected through shamanic techniques.

Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy, first published in 1951, was the first text to attempt to attempt to map the outlines of the entire broad landscape of the phenomenon of shamanism, and to attempt simultaneously to situate the shamanic worldview within the history of human religion. As such, it contains many first-hand accounts describing shamanic technique from parts of the world where the old traditions were still relatively undisturbed.

Let's examine the various methods recorded in Eliade's work by which men and women from traditional shamanic cultures were able to journey to the world of the spirits and to return.