Shamanism is a plethora of powerful magic methods and traditions spanning the globe. It’s human’s most ancient form of spiritual practice, and in some sense the basis for all others. Before gods, before religions, there were just the spirits, the one universal category of being, whose manifestations shape material reality and are in turn shaped by it.
As a shaman myself it’s always been puzzling to me how little of it is represented in the contemporary Left Hand Path, and how little of the Left Hand Path has survived in contemporary westernised shamanism. After all, spiritual experiences in the past were indeed vastly more free and radical, before dogmas, before forms outlived functions. The Devilist tradition of the spiritual freedom, complexity, and multiplicity taken away by the archons is a solid mirror of how increasingly hierarchical traditions imposed structures and limitations onto magic and spiritual practice, depriving most humans of the direct contact they could have with themselves and the world they live in.
All of this, of course, comes from exploiting fear and promising safety in structure, freedom from responsibility instead of the responsibility of freedom. Right hand path traditions offer answers and rules, boons and severe restrictions, keeping their followers in an eternal state of spiritual childhood. This is, of course, an outrage. Shamanism, as the contemporary Left Hand Path, demands you grow up and step beyond spiritual safety into spiritual responsibility.
As freedom-based spiritual practices, the Left Hand Path traditions tend to converge with shamanism the higher you go. You live your spirituality 24/7; you keep your magic awareness on more and more until it integrates permanently into how you see reality; you find rituals to be more and more instruments of focus than instruments of magic, since you are your only true magical instrument; you find it easier to access other dimensions with less and less preparation; you find it easier to make contact with entities, to understand them on their terms, and to engage with them as an equal in respect; you find it easier and easier to produce small effects at will. And this, every single bit, is precisely what a shaman does.
What shamanism does not offer, though, is artificial safety, or an easy answer to complex problems. It recognises and embraces the complexity of the cosmos and tries to leverage just the right thing to ensure a favourable outcome for the shaman and their people. It has no silver bullet, no shortcut to your self-development: you must delve into yourself and all your connections in/with existence and solve your problems from the ground up. You must face your fears, confront your traumas, acknowledge your flaws, recognise your abilities… and then you can start to make real progress. A shaman can take you on a spiritual journey and give you advice, but you must be the one who does the thing that will help you, be it whatever, from literally fighting a monster to having that talk with the spirit of your grandmother (sometimes the monster is easier). It has no easy way in and no way out. Once you see beyond, you cannot unsee it, though some may pretend otherwise.
So my question is and has always been… Why? Why is it not more represented in Left Hand Path traditions? What do you think? It seems to be a debate worth having.