someone asked me for my definition of shaman.

to me, a shaman is a meaning-worker. someone who is a deep appreciator, understander and respecter of meaning, who can help other people work through their own meanings. anybody can do shamanic work, just like anybody can tell a joke.

to be a meaning-worker you have to understand both the awesome power and the absolute limits of meaning and meaninglessness. there’s a reason shamanic characters often tend to be kind of cheeky, silly, insane. Because they’re playing with boundaries.

like the tailor or the blacksmith, the shaman is a specialist who learns his craft well so that he might serve others. he is the storyteller, the contextualizer, he helps people make sense of their lives and their struggles.

here’s an example of shamanic work: “One of my favourite stories I saw on reddit was a parent who taught her child that the secret of Santa is that YOU get to be Santa, and you get to join the secret group of people who make the world a better place for other people. I find that very compelling and heartwarming”

It’s about finding a way to reframe a story in a way that is rich, meaningful, compelling. it requires a sensitivity to people, and also a playful disregard for existing frames. it’s trickier than it might look! it can go very wrong.

Faulkner had shaman energy: “all of us labor in webs spun long before we were born… the ripples of consequences echoing down the generations… the demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always”

shamanic types are endlessly fascinated by the power of talismans, aka meaningful objects and ideas. they hit “inspect element” on meaning and mess around with the source code of human culture, to really understand thought and emotion

a fun nerd project might be to plot out a taxonomy of different classes of shamans. I’m a word-shaman, obviously. (2018: “My goal in life is to be a word artist-magician. Words are proxies for thoughts, and a master manipulator of words is a skilled navigator in the tumultuous ocean of meaning. Moana, but the ocean is the mind of humanity”) it’s conceivable that another shaman might eschew words entirely and do their work in absolute silence.

the shaman is the synthesizer of both the deathly serious and absolutely irreverent. what separates him from an unhinged quack is, there’s a method to his madness. it’s the sensitivity and perceptiveness to the needs of the… client (why am I like this) that makes the difference.

there’s a lot of fun stuff to get into about symbols and symbolism, but I think people tend to overindex on that. every shaman is invariably a symbolism otaku, but not all symbol geeks are shamanic. it’s the work – serving others – that really matters

but also, sometimes the best way to serve others is to be gloriously indifferent to them and to focus entirely on being a goddamn nerd yourself. and sometimes the worst way to serve others is to try to fix them.

you see the humor that runs through the whole thing?? ayy, lmao

a shaman who takes himself too seriously will be destroyed, a shaman who doesn’t take himself seriously enough will be devoured, and so every shaman is indulging in a kind of psycho-cultural extreme sport but I repeat myself (see first pic at the top)