Western Shamanic and Earth-centered Spirituality:
A Rich Inheritance, Nearly Forgotten...
Huge numbers of people living in the west derive from ancestors in Northern Europe, England, Scotland, Ireland or Wales. If you tell these contemporary westerners that their direct ancestors embraced an Earth-centered spirituality with probable shamanic elements, they often don’t know what to do with this information.
That is for a very good, though dark reason. The west's spiritual past has largely been forgotten due the combined efforts of Catholic (and later, other Christian) programs of religious replacement that set out to erase western spiritual history from public memory. Roman political and Catholic religious intolerance destroyed most of the native religious practices. The spiritual places, teachers and priests, and spiritual ways fell before the invaders. History was indeed, written by the conquerors.
Over the last fifteen hundred years, the native spiritual centers in Europe and the British Isles were targeted for systematic destruction. Cathedrals, monasteries and churches were then constructed on top of these the ancient sacred sites. A conscious and intentional program of eliminating the native spiritual past was astoundingly effective.
The Church and the Romans did not only raze the native religious sites, but the spiritual leadership and its practitioners were hunted and executed. It became a deadly endangerment to be associated with Europe's spiritual wisdom, practice, or ritual. Disinformation was then widely spread about the land’s native spirituality, while the evangelists of the Roman Church's replacement religion was glorified. Authorities even went so far as to associate native European spirituality with ‘devil worship’ and evil, which is ironic, since Satanism has absolutely nothing to do with the shamanism or the native spiritualities the Church was trying to extinguish. Satanism is actually, a Christian heresy! ‘Evil’ became simply, whatever that was not Christian.
It is largely for these reasons that Europe and its descendants find themselves today, alienated, often unknowingly, from their own spiritual roots. As a consequence of this forgetfulness, the west is now riddled with misunderstandings about Earth-centered spiritualities and shamanism.
Today, many people whose families derive from Europe are sensing that something went wrong, and are seeking out their nearly-forgotten heritage in a quest to rediscover a healthier spirituality. Surfacing among European descendants and throughout the world, there a conscious or intuitive sense of the social and ecological problems of a theology that desanctified the Earth.
I encourage you to look seriously at the basic shamanism class Level 1, especially if you have been having thoughts such as these. As a person and as a potential practitioner, you can rediscover a grounded, Earth-centered spiritual life. It is, after all, our global spiritual past!