Spiritual guides
Who ya gonna call
This topic of spiritual guides came up recently when I was watching a Korean drama. As I do not speak Korean, I had to look at the subtitles. The word shaman kept cropping up. I knew what shamans were. I had played fantasy games. They were usually the bad guys of some primitive chaotic religion.
Unfortunately, the Korean shamans did not match the fantasy stereotype of shaman. For one, the Korean shamans did not care much about good or evil. Unless the show was about the supernatural. They did their rituals like fortunetellers and then got on with seeing the next supplicant. A quick google showed that shamans are commonly defined as a spiritual guide. More accurately, the shaman got information from the spiritual ream and then pass on the message to the earth-based listeners. Naturally, for a higher price, the shaman could persuade the spiritual ream to turn a blind eye or create a protective charm.
We also had the infamous painted man at the January 6 uprising. The QAnon Shaman turned out to need more guidance from the real world. To be fair, he never blamed spirits for misleading him. Unless you believe that Q exists.
Need for a guide
In ancient times, people needed guidance for the unexplained. Today, we have Google and Wikipedia. In prehistoric times, you could ask the elders. Unfortunately, if you were the elder, the buck stops with you. Or did it?
That is where the shaman came in. He or she could communicate with the spiritual ream. One could in theory consult with dead ancestors or people who used to be in charged. This gave some legitimacy to the shaman as he or she supposedly had higher powers. Or unseen powers.
Some religious people would condemn the pagan practice except that in the early times, there was no religion. More accurately, there was no organized religion since the philosophy of deities and religion need a fair amount of groundwork to be done. If you asked ten shamans, you could expect to get ten different opinions. To get a religion, you need at least ten powerful people prepared to accept a system. Or agree in public that they fully accept the system. When the ten powerful people died, you still needed their successors to carry on with the faith or the charade.
Even when there is religion, people sometimes went back to the old ways. There is a story in the bible where the king of Israel went behind enemies to seek the counsel of a dead prophet. That story did open a can of worms as it appeared to be evidence that one could speak with the dead.
Need for a second opinion
To seek help from the spiritual ream required a few things. If you had daddy issues or mommy issues, calling on a deceased parent might not be an option. I doubt that elders who murdered their way to the top would get assistance from their victims. Moreover, if you murdered your way to the top, you probably do not think highly of the victims.
This is when druids came in. I am not saying that druids are a newer profession than shamans. In some societies, shamans and druids are sometimes the same person. Druids are usually seen as people who had a deep understanding of nature. In theory they could harness the power of nature or at least predict when nature had the right of way.
When I talk about druids, I am referring to the people that arranged for Stonehenge to be built. I know that druids came from the Celtic people who existed around 300 B.C, several thousand years after Stonehenge was completed. However, unless I find a better term for a proto-druid or the civilization that preceded the Celts, I am sticking with the term druid.
At that point, you needed people who could explain why the heavy stones needed to arrange in a circle and to be carved to a precise fashion. The stones are aligned with the sunset of the winter solstice and the opposing sunrise of the summer solstice.
For readers that have kept up with the latest information about the earliest manmade mega structures, I would include the Göbekli Tepe.
The size of the stones in Göbekli Tepe do not do it justice. One must also include the artwork that went into its production. On a different note, the purpose of the megaliths in Göbekli Tepe is not just a mystery. Its burial at a later date was another mystery. Some other civilization or people felt so strongly about the view that they carried piles of dirt up a hill to bury it.
Druids need to be in agreement on certain aspects on nature. This allowed them to be able to persuade people to unite to construct megaliths. It is doubtful that a shaman could convince the masses to do the same based on some grandfather story.
The role of a druid was also slightly different. A shaman advice was applicable for a person or a small tribe. A druid would be able to advise a larger community. Planting season was applicable for a region. Long term food safety and water safety was applicable often all year round. Moreover, the historical record for shamans making big predictions makes painful reading.
Answer for the modern world
Certain religions viewed the old ways as either superstitions or demonic. Like the biblical story mentioned above, the woman who summoned the spirit knew that the king wanted her to be killed. The question is why people keep going back to the old ways after centuries of indoctrination (if the educators were colonizers) or education (if you have no beef with the teachers).
There comes a point in one’s life that the script is totally flipped. In ancient times, it could be a drought that goes on for too long. Do you migrate or stick with the old ways? If you are the elder in the tribe, many people depend on your decision. No matter what choice you make, it is likely that you will upset people.
As a result, you offload the decision to another person who might consults experts. If the shaman is dumb, he or she might give a straightforward answer. Wiser shamans might give a cryptic answer and palm the decision back to the person in charge.
There is a base desire for answers. We want to believe that we are making the correct decision. We do not like uncertainty. We like to believe we can change the odds in our favour. When science fails, we would grab a supernatural hand that we thinks helps.
Cut to the chase
Theoretically, if we are pretty Zen like, we do not need to have shamans. we could in theory live with the mysteries of the world. The issue is that the natives often get restless. Can we accept that sometimes our decisions are wrong? Or that we might need to have experiments in order to get a correct result?
If you want the facade that you always have the answer, you know who to call. That is why a Fox news host got a Tarot card reader on his show to predict the fate of two presidential candidates. Nobody wants to wait for the life to play out.