The Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.shamanism was, for a decade, the internet's most sustained forum for practitioner-level shamanic writing. Unlike sites that aggregated definitions or sold courses, the newsgroup drew independent practitioners from across the world — Scandinavia, France, Britain, Iceland, Australia, the United States — who wrote with unflinching honesty about the inner life of shamanic work: the spirit helpers, the difficult journeys, the long nights, the commercial pressures, and the dry humor of daily practice. The archive that has survived selection is one of the most unusual collections in the Good Works Library: not texts, not theology, but a people's record of a living practice.
The Group and Its History
alt.religion.shamanism emerged in the early 1990s as part of the proliferating alt.* hierarchy on Usenet — a space for discussion too specialized or too heterodox for the mainstream soc.religion.* newsgroups. Its golden period, from roughly 1999 to 2008, coincided with the broad popularization of neo-shamanism in the West through the teaching of Michael Harner and Sandra Ingerman, the expansion of core shamanism training, and the internet's first generation of serious online spiritual communities.
The newsgroup was organized around practice, not doctrine. Its participants came from divergent traditions — core shamanism, Andean paqo lineage, Swedish folk tradition, British land-based work, Yoruba-influenced urban practice — and no authority existed to arbitrate between them. What the group policed, collectively and with considerable vigor, was intellectual honesty. Credential-chasing was mocked; experience was the currency.
The Internet Archive's preserved collection spans 2003 to 2008 — the period when Giganews, the Usenet provider, began systematic archiving. Earlier posts survive only in fragments. The 2003–2008 window captures the group near its maturity: the community elders were established, the vocabulary was set, and a generation of newer practitioners was arriving with questions.
The Community
Joseph Bearwalker Wilson, founder of Toteg Tribe and operator of shamanist.us, was the group's most authoritative elder. His FAQ (version 1.3, 2003) remains one of the most carefully constructed publicly available introductions to neo-shamanism in the Harner tradition; his extended thirteen-part guide So You Wannabe A Shaman (2004), co-authored with Aisling WindSinger, is a sustained argument for practice over posture, tradition over branding. Wilson was the group's institutional memory.
tamara, a Texas-based practitioner who had been part of the community since at least 1999, contributed both teaching posts and retrospective accounts of early group culture. Her 2006 essay on balance between higher and lower self stands as one of the group's clearest articulations of shamanic ethics.
bosco (Ben), a Minnesota practitioner, became one of the most distinctive voices of the group's later years. His posts — on spirit helpers who develop cookie preferences, on the "job interview" he imagines preceded his calling, on the theology of endurance during long spiritual sieges — are marked by plainness, precision, and the dry wit of a working practitioner unimpressed by mystification.
Sandy Dollar (later identified as Sally Short), a practitioner of part Cherokee descent based in Medford, Oregon, contributed a multi-year series of journey accounts following the Harner core shamanism method. Her records of lower-world encounters — with a last flower facing extinction, with a water guardian who nearly would not let her leave — are among the most carefully observed practitioner narratives in the archive.
Bob Thomson (Steel Dragon), a French practitioner who trained formally in shamanic technique, contributed from approximately 2002 to 2010. His posts are notable for their systematic quality: both his apprentice journal entries and his later philosophical exchanges (on navigating spiritual space, on the grammar of spirit passports) bring analytical precision to visionary experience.
Al D (Al Deveron), a British practitioner, contributed a sustained series on place-based shamanism in the 2006 period — encounters with a Dorset woodland spirit, prehistoric stones, a Norse rune scratched in a hollow tree. His writing is grounded in the British landscape and shows the influence of continental neo-pagan scholarship.
K-ET, a Swedish practitioner, contributed both an extended essay on the continuous thread of shamanism through Swedish prehistory and a lyric poem about a spirit-beloved who speaks through trees and birds — two pieces that together show the range of what the group could produce.
Armin, an Icelandic practitioner, wrote from the lava fields and glacial lakes of Iceland. His account of the ruins at Lake Þingvallavatn — what lies under the water, what the stones carry — brings a distinctly Norse-influenced land-consciousness to the archive.
Other significant contributors include Nita Byrd, a fourth-level Andean paqo initiated in the lineage of Juan Nunez del Prado, who provided one of the archive's most authoritative accounts of the Qero tradition; Nick Argall, an Australian contributor who brought cross-traditional analysis and TCM framing to questions of shamanic calling; and FLORA (Auntie FLORA), a community elder known for direct, experience-grounded teaching.
What the Group Produced
The archive preserved from alt.religion.shamanism spans several distinct registers:
Journey accounts. The core of the archive is first-hand records of shamanic journeys — to the lower world, the upper world, the middle world — conducted by practitioners who had been doing this for years and were writing not to impress but to document. Sandy Dollar's series, bosco's accounts, and Bob Thomson's visions constitute a genuine phenomenology of contemporary shamanic practice: granular, honest, and sometimes disquieting.
Teaching texts. The FAQ, the Wannabe Shaman guide, and the introductory how-to pieces (on altered states, on working with animal spirits, on the Andean tradition) represent the group's systematic efforts to transmit knowledge to newcomers. These are not advertisements for courses but working instructions from people who took transmission seriously.
Philosophy of practice. The group's best contributors thought carefully about what shamanism is and is not — its relationship to therapy, to neo-paganism, to indigenous traditions, to commercial spirituality. bosco's essay on commercial shamanism (2007), Wilson's argument against appropriation, and tamara's account of balance together form an implicit ethics of practice.
Place writing. Al D's Dorset series and Armin's Iceland posts represent a genre that the group developed almost incidentally: landscape-shamanism, the reading of specific places through the shamanic senses, written for an international audience of practitioners who would never visit but could follow the perception.
Lyric. K-ET's poem Spiritual Embrace arrived in the community almost parenthetically, as a note in a thread about illness and loss. It is the archive's only poem. It belongs.
The Archive in Context
alt.religion.shamanism occupies an unusual position in the history of Western esoteric practice. It sits after the popularization of Harner's core shamanism (1980s), after the first wave of neo-pagan internet communities (1990s), and before the complete social-media displacement of newsgroups (2010s). Its practitioners were experienced enough to distinguish practice from performance, young enough to still be finding their language, and isolated enough — scattered across Iceland, France, Minnesota, Oregon, Australia — that the newsgroup was genuinely their community.
The commercial shamanism that bosco critiqued in 2007 has since grown beyond all proportion. What the newsgroup produced was its alternative: a record of practice undertaken without audience, money, or credential, by people who believed it mattered.
Colophon
Introduction written for the Good Works Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, March 2026. Source: Internet Archive, alt.religion.shamanism.20140813.mbox.gz.
🌲