This shelf is not shamanism itself, not Indigenous religion, not Siberian religion, not Saami religion, not Andean religion, not Native American religion, and not a license to practice what it describes. The public holding is a curated 37-file room selected from a 21,389-message Usenet archive, mostly preserving English-language Western and neo-shamanic practitioner writing from the early 2000s. Its value is not that it settles what shamanism is. Its value is that it lets readers study how a public internet room tried to define practice, calling, trance, spirit relation, cultural borrowing, place encounter, commercialization, and danger while the word "shamanism" itself was under pressure.
What This Shelf Contains
The raw alt.religion.shamanism mbox consulted for this shelf contains 21,389 messages dated from 2003 to 2014. The heaviest years are 2004 and 2006, with later decline and continued scattered posting. The group was also heavily cross-posted: many messages touched alt.religion.wicca, alt.religion.druid, alt.magick, alt.traditional.witchcraft, alt.pagan, talk.religion.buddhism, alt.philosophy, alt.paranormal, and other rooms. This matters. The raw archive is not a calm lodge of shamanic practitioners speaking in one voice. It is a large public Usenet field: argument, cross-post drift, spam, side quarrels, metaphysical debate, personal testimony, copied material, and practical instruction are mixed together.
The Good Works public shelf is smaller and more legible. It contains 37 selected Markdown files, about 62,000 words in total. Its central axis is a group of practitioner texts around Joseph Bearwalker Wilson and Aisling WindSinger's long guide, Wilson's FAQ, Sandy Dollar/Sally Short's journey accounts, Bob Thomson/Steel Dragon's apprentice and spirit-guide writings, bosco's plain-spoken accounts of calling and spirit work, tamara's ethical reflections, Al D's Dorset place-writing, Armin's Icelandic landscape posts, Nita Byrd's Andean paqo notes, K-ET's Swedish essay and poem, and several shorter practice witnesses.
The selection is therefore not representative forum traffic. It is a reader-facing archive room built from posts that could stand as source texts. The page must be honest about both sides: the raw group was larger, noisier, and more cross-posted than the shelf; the shelf is richer, cleaner, and more coherent than the raw group.
Selection has its own ethics. Long posts are easier to preserve than short replies, so a curated shelf can make a group look more essayistic than it felt to participants. Visionary accounts are more compelling than ordinary correction, so a shelf can overrepresent journeys and underrepresent maintenance labor. Posts by articulate repeat contributors can survive as "voices" while quiet readers, lurkers, skeptical participants, and people harmed by the discourse disappear. That is not a reason to reject the shelf. It is a reason to read it as a constructed public room, not as the transparent memory of a community.
The shelf also preserves a distinct moment in internet religious history. Usenet still allowed strangers to gather around named topics, build running vocabularies, answer newcomers, and leave durable text traces. But by the mid-2000s, many such rooms were already losing coherence to cross-posting, flame traffic, automated spam, and platform drift. The public shelf captures a room after maturity but before disappearance: enough practice memory remains to teach, enough noise remains to warn, and enough personal voice remains to make the archive human.
The Raw Group Beneath The Shelf
The raw archive confirms why selection was necessary. The largest poster counts do not map neatly onto the public shelf. Some high-volume participants are represented strongly in the files: Nick Argall, tamara, bosco, Bob Thomson, Nita Byrd, Joseph Bearwalker Wilson, and K-ET all appear in the selected room. Other high-volume posters are barely visible or absent from the public shelf because their traffic belonged more to debate, cross-posted metaphysical argument, social conflict, or ordinary newsgroup churn than to stand-alone reader text.
The subject lines tell the same story. The raw archive includes long-running arguments on belief and facts, being "under attack," A Course in Miracles, shamanism versus witchcraft, deities, magick, gender dispute, addictions, ancestors, Odin, shamanic calling in Chinese medicine terms, whales and dolphins, academic sources, positive and negative energy, drugs, and politics. A reader who only sees the curated shelf might imagine a quiet circle of practitioners trading polished wisdom. The raw group was messier: a public crossroads where shamanism touched Paganism, witchcraft, Druidry, occultism, Buddhism, philosophy, paranormal discourse, depression support, and internet quarrel culture.
That messiness is not a flaw to hide. It is part of the source. The polished files were written in a room where people were correcting, provoking, teasing, defending, advertising, grieving, wandering off topic, and sometimes trying to protect a word from misuse. A practice room on Usenet was never only practice. It was also moderation without moderators, pedagogy without classrooms, initiation talk without a shared institution, and community memory without privacy.
This is why Good Works should avoid two opposite mistakes. The first mistake is to dismiss the shelf because the raw group was noisy. The second is to honor the selected files so much that the raw noise disappears. The truth is harder and better: the selected files are valuable because they rose from a noisy public field, and they should be read with the field still audible behind them.
The Word Before The Room
The word "shamanism" is already a problem before the reader reaches Usenet. Encyclopaedia Britannica derives "shaman" from a Manchu-Tungus word and notes that the term is strictest in relation to northern Asian religious systems, while also being used more broadly for religious specialists who heal, divine, communicate with spirits, or guide souls through trance or ecstatic experience. Britannica also cautions that scattered traits do not by themselves prove that a culture is shamanistic. A drum, trance, healing role, spirit helper, or visionary journey can appear in many religious worlds without making them all one tradition.
The Human Relations Area Files essay on shamanism states the modern problem plainly: the term has often been treated as overused, romanticizing, and tied to an imagined archaic human past. The author still argues that the term can sometimes work as an ideal type for certain religious specialists and social relations. That is the tension the Good Works reader must keep open. "Shamanism" can help compare practices, but it can also flatten living cultures into a fantasy of universal ancient technique.
The alt.religion.shamanism shelf is inside that tension. Its writers often use "shamanism" broadly: core shamanism, neo-shamanism, Andean paqo work, Swedish prehistory, British land spirits, Icelandic place memory, Yoruba-derived orisha language, Chinese medicine categories, kundalini, animal guides, power places, and personal spirit helpers all appear in the room. Some writers are careful about source boundaries. Some make leaps. Some argue directly against commercialized and self-appointed shaman identities. The shelf is valuable because it records that argument from inside a practitioner public, not because it solves the category.
Core Shamanism And The Internet Threshold
The 2000s internet shamanism world needs Michael Harner and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies in the background. The Foundation describes core shamanism as a set of universal or near-universal features of shamanism, especially journeys to other worlds, not bound to a single cultural group. Its public account emphasizes non-drug techniques such as repetitive drumming and frames core shamanism as especially intended for Westerners whose own shamanic knowledge was lost under religious oppression.
That claim stands behind many texts in this shelf, even when Harner is not the writer. The lower world, upper world, middle world, power animal, spirit helper, drumming tape, and journey method are part of the shared vocabulary. Sandy Dollar's journeys, bosco's spirit-helper stories, Bob Thomson's apprentice journal, and the FAQ all assume some version of this practical map. The room is therefore not a Siberian, Saami, Native American, Amazonian, or Andean archive. It is largely a Western practitioner archive shaped by late twentieth-century core-shamanic vocabulary and by debates about what that vocabulary permits.
This point should neither dismiss nor sanctify the shelf. Core shamanism gave scattered practitioners a common language, and that common language made public conversation possible. It also created the risk that culturally specific practices would be extracted, generalized, and sold back as universal technique. The best writers in the room know this. Joseph Bearwalker Wilson repeatedly distinguishes a shaman as a community-recognized specialist from a person who has purchased a workshop, borrowed a title, or adopted an impressive self-description. Nita Byrd distinguishes Inka paqo practice from popular New Age adaptation. bosco criticizes commercial shamanism. The shelf's most important ethical work often happens at the boundary between practice and performance.
This background also explains why the group could be practical without being local. In many inherited shamanic settings, a practitioner is embedded in a people, language, land, ritual economy, illness theory, kinship structure, and recognized social office. The Usenet room usually does not have that. It has individuals, many of them geographically isolated, trying to build shared method in public text. The room's social form is therefore modern and networked even when its vocabulary points toward archaic or Indigenous worlds. It is a diaspora of method rather than a village of practice.
That makes the archive historically important in a narrow sense. It records how Western and English-language seekers tried to make shamanic vocabulary durable without the village structures that gave older shaman roles public accountability. The results are mixed. Some posts become careful boundary work. Some become visionary testimony. Some become personal mythology. Some become debate over whether a person may even use the word "shaman." The archive is strongest when it preserves the struggle rather than hiding it.
Wilson, WindSinger, And The Boundary Texts
Two files form the shelf's public threshold: Introduction to Shamanism -- alt.religion.shamanism FAQ and So You Wannabe A Shaman.
The FAQ, maintained by Joseph Bearwalker Wilson with community contributions, is a compressed vocabulary manual. It explains why the group is in the alt.religion hierarchy even though shamanism is not treated as a religion in itself; it defines journeying, soul travel, lower world, upper world, middle world, spirit helper, guardian spirit, tutelary spirit, nature spirit, initiation, ecstasy, and other working terms; it also marks what is and is not on topic. The FAQ is not an ethnography of the world's shamanic traditions. It is a newsgroup threshold document: a way to reduce confusion, correct newcomers, and keep discussion centered on practice.
So You Wannabe A Shaman, by Wilson and Aisling WindSinger, is much larger and more polemical. It argues against the easy adoption of "shaman" as a fashionable Western label. Its opening sections treat the title as a vocation rather than an identity costume. The text emphasizes calling, ordeal, community recognition, training, spirit relation, service, and danger. It is sharp, sometimes severe, and written from within a Western earth-based religious milieu that had already seen terms such as "witch," "Pagan," "Wiccan," and "shaman" shift through public fashion.
Read these two files together. The FAQ gives the room its grammar. The long guide gives the room its warning. Together they explain why the shelf is not simply a set of visionary stories. It is a room arguing over whether visionary stories are enough.
The FAQ also shows how internet communities stabilize themselves. A newcomer asks "What is shamanism?" and receives not only an answer but a permitted vocabulary. A question about power animals leads to distinctions between power animals, spirit helpers, guardian spirits, spirit guides, nature spirits, and tutelary spirits. A question about safety becomes a practical warning about common sense, spiritual strangers, and unwanted self-knowledge. A question about whether owning a rattle makes one a shaman becomes a boundary between ordinary spirit relation and specialized responsibility. The FAQ is therefore partly doctrinal, partly pastoral, and partly administrative.
The long guide has a different energy. Wilson and WindSinger write as people angered by the marketplace of titles. Their essay often sounds like a refusal: do not call every earth-based practitioner a shaman, do not mistake a purchased method for a vocation, do not romanticize the calling, do not imagine the work is harmless, do not confuse inner drama with social function. The severity is part of the source. It records a practitioner public trying to defend a term at the very moment the term was becoming attractive to consumers.
Practice Witnesses
Much of the shelf's force comes from first-person accounts. These are not polished memoirs. They are public posts: sometimes small, sometimes strange, sometimes unfinished, often written as answers to other practitioners.
Sandy Dollar, also identified in one file as Sally Short, contributes a series of journey accounts and practical reflections. Her writings include instructions for entering altered states, lower-world journeys, plant and rock spirit encounters, a water journey in which she nearly dissolves, a kundalini warning, and a final journey to meet Mother Earth as a wounded figure. These texts show the Harner-influenced journey method in lived form: drumming or sound, descent or flight, animal and plant relations, return difficulty, and the constant question of how much trust to place in inner perception.
Bob Thomson, writing as Steel Dragon, brings another register: apprentice journals, tiger spirit work, dragons, gates, keys, and navigation through a spiritual multiverse. His files are analytical even when visionary. He tries to think about how movement works in nonordinary space, how guides function, how danger is recognized, and how a practitioner knows whether a path is open.
bosco's writings are smaller but unusually grounded. He writes about a childhood "job interview" with spirits, a midnight encounter with the Lioness, toothed fish from old notes, being thrown out of a journey, spirit helpers with ordinary preferences, endurance under spiritual attack, commercial shamanism, and the gift of not having too much focus. The tone is often plain, dry, and resistant to glamour. For a reader, bosco is a necessary counterweight to the more spectacular visionary files. He makes the shamanic register sound like a job, an affliction, a responsibility, and sometimes an inconvenience.
tamara and FLORA add ethical depth. tamara's Living in Harmony and Respect versus Embrace treat balance, selfhood, and spirit relation as disciplines rather than moods. FLORA's The Dark Night of the Soul reframes crisis without turning crisis into romantic proof of calling. Together they show that the group did not only trade techniques; it also argued about discernment.
The practice witnesses also expose a permanent difficulty in this kind of archive: experience is vivid, but its interpretation is unstable. A water journey may be a real spirit encounter, an altered-state hazard, a psychological image, a symbolic teaching, or some mixture the archive cannot adjudicate. A dragon guide may be a being, a form, a teacher, a mask, a metaphor, or an event in a private cosmology. The public page should not decide for the reader by flattening these accounts into either "proof" or "fantasy." Its task is to keep witness, method, and interpretation separate enough that the source remains readable.
The shelf is also full of small anti-glamour details. Spirits have preferences. Journeys fail. A practitioner can get thrown out of a place. A helper can require apology. A person can return from an encounter with no clear answer. A calling can feel less like spiritual prestige than long-term inconvenience. These details make the archive more credible as lived religious discourse, because they interrupt the smooth commercial image of instant wisdom.
Place Writing And Local Worlds
A second cluster is place-writing. Al D's Dorset essays describe an enchanted wood, ancient stones, snapped trees, a rune, and a spirit of place that follows him home and changes his emotional life. Armin's Iceland posts speak from volcanic and historical landscape: Mt. Hecla, a river spirit, and the ruins and submerged memories around Lake Thingvallavatn. K-ET's Swedish essay ranges widely through Stone Age hunters, petroglyphs, Saami material, Norse seithr, witchcraft, alchemy, rural healers, and spiritualism.
These files should not be read as archaeological proof. K-ET in particular builds long continuities that require caution. The value of the Swedish essay is not that every proposed line from prehistoric hunting culture to modern spiritualism is established. The value is that a Swedish practitioner is trying to narrate shamanism through local memory rather than through generic imported imagery. Likewise, Al D's Dorset woods are not public evidence that a place has the properties he describes. They are evidence of how one practitioner reads place through the shamanic senses.
This is the shelf's best corrective to abstraction. The universalizing language of core shamanism can become thin unless it meets actual ground. The Dorset wood, the Icelandic river, the Swedish rock carving, the Oregon mountainside, the lower-world creek, and the household cookie offered to Otter all resist abstraction. They make the shelf particular again.
Specific Traditions And The Risk Of Borrowing
The shelf repeatedly touches named traditions that are not owned by the Usenet room. This is where the reader must slow down.
Nita Byrd's Notes on Andean Shamanism -- The Qero Paqo Tradition is the shelf's most detailed tradition-specific file. Byrd writes as a student initiated through Juan Nunez del Prado's Andean paqo teaching line. She describes kawsay, ayni, Apus, Pachamama, Inti, mesa, pampa mesayok, alto mesayok, Chumpi stones, energy belts, despacho, karpay, Hatun Karpay, and the Qero people. She also pushes back against New Age blending, especially the insertion of a medicine wheel into Inka practice.
The file is valuable, but it must still be read as a public Usenet practitioner account, not as the Qero people speaking. Its claims pass through Byrd's training, English-language explanation, Western audience, and the local newsgroup context. A reader should preserve her distinctions without converting her post into final authority over living Andean communities.
Something similar applies to the Saami, Yoruba-derived orisha language, Chinese medicine categories, kundalini vocabulary, Native American terms such as totem, and the broad "Indigenous" aura that sometimes surrounds shamanism writing. The shelf's best use is comparative and source-critical: who is speaking, from what training route, with what cultural permission, in what language, and for what audience?
K-ET's Swedish essay makes this issue especially visible. The essay tries to join prehistoric hunters, rock carvings, Saami shamanic material, Norse seithr, medieval witchcraft, alchemy, rural healing, and spiritualism into a long continuity. That continuity is powerful as practitioner myth-history; it is much weaker as a settled scholarly chain. The Saami drum material, for example, belongs to a colonized Indigenous people whose drums were confiscated, interpreted by outsiders, held in museums, and only recently discussed in relation to return and cultural ownership. A Good Works reader should treat K-ET's essay as Swedish practitioner reception, not as a substitute for Saami voices or Saami-controlled knowledge.
Al D's use of orisha language in relation to power spots raises a parallel caution. Orishas belong to Yoruba and Yoruba-derived religious worlds, including Candomble and related Atlantic traditions, not to generic landscape energy. Al D's file is useful because it shows how a British practitioner used comparative vocabulary to think about place. It should not be treated as instruction in orisha religion.
Nick Argall's Traditional Chinese Medicine explanation of shamanic calling works similarly. It is a speculative bridge. It may help readers see how one practitioner mapped calling-symptoms onto Hun, Liver, and spirit-body categories, but it is not Chinese medicine itself and not proof that shamanic vocation reduces to a medical theory. The shelf is full of bridges. Good reading asks what each bridge connects, what it leaves behind, and who has the right to build it.
Commercialization, Plasticity, And Public Harm
The public internet made small practitioner communities possible. It also made spiritual branding easier. This shelf knows that. Wilson and WindSinger warn against self-appointment and title-shopping. bosco criticizes credential commerce. Nita Byrd distinguishes transmitted Andean practice from sellable synthesis. The FAQ refuses to let every spirit-sensitive person call themselves a shaman.
Outside the shelf, Lisa Aldred's article "Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances" is a useful companion warning: New Age commercialization of Native American spirituality can detach practices from Indigenous histories, identities, communities, and obligations. The point is not that every file in this shelf commits that harm. The point is that the shelf lives in the same public economy where that harm became easy.
Good Works therefore preserves the shelf with restraint. It does not certify contributors, endorse practices, recommend journeys, or invite readers to adopt titles. It treats the files as primary witnesses to English-language internet shamanic discourse in the early 2000s: a discourse full of sincerity, skill, longing, humor, danger, borrowing, boundary work, and unresolved claims.
Practice-Adjacent Risk
Many files in this shelf describe techniques: altered states, drumming, journeying, power animals, spirit helpers, plant and rock work, kundalini symptoms, energy belts, initiatory experiences, and contact with dead or nonhuman beings. A reader should not treat the shelf as a safe manual. Public archiving is not training, supervision, initiation, medical care, psychological care, or ritual permission.
Several files make the danger visible from inside the room. Sandy Dollar's water journey includes difficulty returning from an altered state. The kundalini warning describes bodily and emotional disruption rather than spiritual achievement. bosco's Long Time Abiding treats hostile spiritual pressure as something endured over time. Thrown Out of a Journey describes being violently expelled from a visionary route. Wilson and WindSinger insist that calling may arrive through ordeal and that self-appointment is not enough. These are not decorative warnings. They are part of the source record.
Good Works' responsibility is to preserve this material without turning it into an invitation. The library should keep practice claims legible, but it should also keep them bounded: these are public posts by particular people in a particular internet room, not vetted instructions for the reader's body, mind, spirits, or community.
What Is Missing
The current shelf has real breadth, but its absences are decisive.
It does not contain sustained Siberian, Evenki, Buryat, Yakut, Chukchi, or other northern Asian language-source material. It does not contain Saami-controlled teaching, Qero-controlled publication, Yoruba or Candomble internal authority, Native American ceremonial protocols, Amazonian ayahuasca community instruction, Korean mudang material, Hmong healing traditions, or Indigenous Australian ritual authority. It does not contain a careful history of anthropology's use of "shamanism." It does not contain substantial critique from Native or Indigenous activists harmed by commercial spiritual borrowing. It does not contain clinical guidance on altered states, dissociation, psychosis, trauma, or spiritual emergency.
These absences do not make the shelf worthless. They define what it is. The shelf is an English-language public internet archive of Western and neo-shamanic practice discourse, with some tradition-specific claims and comparative excursions. It should be introduced as that, and no more.
How To Read The Shelf
Begin with the FAQ. It gives the vocabulary and tells the reader what the newsgroup thought it was doing.
Then read So You Wannabe A Shaman, not as neutral textbook, but as a boundary sermon against self-invention. Notice its anger at vague spiritual branding. Notice also its own Western position and its reliance on comparative shamanism.
After that, choose one practice cluster. For journey method and altered state, read Sandy Dollar's altered-state guide, water journey, plant-spirit files, and Mother Earth journey. For spirit-helper and calling language, read bosco's My Introduction to Shamanism, The Job Interview, The Cookie, Long Time Abiding, and Trekking the Net. For visionary apprenticeship and navigation, read Steel Dragon's tiger, dragon, and spirit-key files. For ethical discernment, read tamara and FLORA. For place, read Al D, Armin, and K-ET. For tradition-specific caution, read Nita Byrd's Andean file carefully and slowly.
Keep five controls active.
First, do not cite the shelf as shamanism itself.
Second, do not treat public testimony as proof that a practice is safe or transferable.
Third, distinguish core-shamanic vocabulary from culture-specific tradition.
Fourth, do not let anti-commercial rhetoric become a substitute for cultural permission.
Fifth, remember that the selected shelf is not the whole group. It is a public library room made from chosen posts within a much larger and much noisier archive.
Read this shelf for what it uniquely preserves: not ancient religion, not a clean tradition, not instruction from a lineage, but a public internet room where practitioners tried to speak honestly about trance, spirits, calling, place, danger, borrowing, and responsibility before those conversations scattered into later platforms.
Sources Consulted
This introduction was written from the local 37-file public shelf, the raw alt.religion.shamanism.20140813.mbox.gz archive, and the following public reference points:
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Shamanism."
- Human Relations Area Files at Yale, "Cross-Culturally Exploring the Concept of Shamanism."
- The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, "Core Shamanism."
- The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, "Michael Harner, PhD."
- University of Texas LAITS, "Saami Drums -- Then and Now."
- Lisa Aldred, "Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality," American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2000).
Colophon
alt.religion.shamanism was an unmoderated public Usenet group. The raw archive consulted for this shelf contains 21,389 messages dated from 2003 to 2014. The public shelf currently contains 37 selected files, not the whole newsgroup and not shamanism as a whole.
Introduction written for the Good Works Library, 2026.