Did a Western Shaman See the Fall of Satan?
Michael Harner , Ph.D., author of The Way of the Shaman, learned the craft of the shaman from some of the remotest tribes on the globe. No adventurer ever trekked further or sought more diligently the hidden secrets of the spirit world. For Harner , the purpose of shamanism is to help people who are bound and diseased by the intrusion of negative energy and spirits. A person needs power to combat these dark forces of nature. That power often comes from the spirit of a power animal, which has left the patient and has returned to its abode in Lower World. The shaman's job is to attain a shaman state of consciousness ( SSC ), with or without drugs, to leave the physical body, to combat or avoid the malicious spirits in the portal-tunnel (they may appear as fanged spiders or vipers, etc.), to recognize the appropriate spirit animal, to grab it securely so it can't bolt away, and bring it to the ailing participant. To be able to do so, of course, the shaman must have already gone to...