{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.04032258064516129, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0069124423963133645, 'mean_word_length': 5.030092592592593, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Research Note: Neo-Shamanism

The purpose of this research note is to enter a gentle point of criticism regarding an aspect of how neo-shamanism is currently studied academically and to suggest a correction. To this end I will use Jenny Blain’s Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic as an exemplar of good, but improvable current practice. The aspect of her book that concerns me is this: on the one hand, she accepts (rightly, in my view) that an accurate shorthand way to characterise the ontology of most practitioners of seidr is ‘‘animist’’ (Blain 136). The point of animism is surely that it entails a more-than-human world, to borrow David Abram’s term (emphasis added). When it comes to emphasising seidr as ‘‘community practice’’ (Blain 139, 147), that community is now acknowledged to include spiritual as well as human entities. However, inclusiveness stops short of fully recognising what Roy Willis (191), in his study of African healers, described as ecological spirits—or rather spirits as ecological. Thus Blain quotes herself and Wallis as indicating that ‘‘Techniques of trance are embedded in specific social relations’’, adding a few pages later that ‘‘The learning is not only from human seidworkers. The teachers are ‘the spirits’, especially ancestors and Landwights, and including the deities who themselves perform seidr, Freyja and Odinn’’ (Blain 146, 149). There is a nod here to non-human spirits of place (‘Landwights’). What seems to be missing, however, is an awareness of the ecological dimension of the ancestors and deities. This lack is facilitated by essentialising or fixing them as anthropomorphic. Contextualising them more fully would reveal that ancestors, too, have ancestors and that the latter have their being in a ‘culture’ which, as Tim Ingold has clearly shown, itself rejects the Cartesian split between culture and nature, which denies subjectivity to the latter. Indeed, surviving hunter-gatherer societies still live in such a world. Ancestors’ ancestors are also ever more firmly rooted in place, as are deities. Is it possible seriously to imagine Freyja or Odinn apart from the North-West of the Old World or indeed from certain specific places (with whatever balance between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’) in that part of the world? Nor are deities without their ancestors. Sean Kane has shown, by following myth past the Neolithic with its anthropomorphic gods into the Mesolithic and Paleolithic eras before animals, humans, and gods became hierarchically organised, that ‘‘The proper subject of myth is the ideas and emotions of the earth’’. More specifically,