You’ve had a serious strain of bad luck. Little things, big things... Bounced checks, car trouble, problems at work... If it can go wrong, it has. Even your dog ran away. What next? You might turn to a counselor or a life coach, but who can do anything about what appears to be fate?

Maybe you’re sick, with a malady so lingering that it’s starting to affect your outlook on life. The feeling grows that something more may be behind the picture, and you start looking for some new ideas. Maybe you need more than a medical doctor. Maybe you need one of the Medicine People.

Today most of us think of sickness and healing in purely material terms. Our doctors seem to us mechanics, plumbers and chemists of the human body. It was not always so. In fact an aura of the spirit has always clung to the figure of the healer.

Traditional Asian medicine is based around concepts of ch’i, the worldlifeforce that runs through all earthly objects and beings. The healer is a virtual wizard, a scryer of this occult current. Classical, medieval, and Renaissance medicine was formed around philosophies that would seem“magical” to us now: the humours, the elements, the stars... These doctors were virtual mystics.

In recent centuries Western medicine has dismissed the role of personal intuition in healing and relies almost entirely on the scientific method, subduing the metaphysics. Some of the medical doctors I know are among the most deeply spiritual people I’ve ever met. Their work has handed them a file of tragedies from which they disengage, but they’ve encountered many a case that filled them with awe, wonder, and reverence for some power that must be beyond us all.

Pre-industrial societies had doctors, too, and it was never doubted that they were more than physical healers; they were doctors of the spirit. It makes sense that it would be this way. Preindustrial cultures thought that everything in the world - rocks, trees, grass, weather - was animated by spirit, if not “the spirits.” The suffering of a body seemed an imbalance in the spirit, if not an outright magical attack. The work of these doctors, therefore - like all humanity’s arts and all other practices considered to be expressive or spiritual - probably evolved from the idols, drawings, rites, dances and customs of humanity’s original priest: the shaman.

As we come to understand ancient philosophies better they seem not quite so simplistic.

The human being is body, mind, and spirit. If these aspects of existence are united at least temporarily in one place - the living individual - it seems logical to consider that an effect visible in one plane could have its origin in another. Thus we might reach through one of these realms to hurt or heal something on one of the others. The shaman was the culture-preserver for his or her community, combining the functions of the priest, the poet, the historian, the musician, the wizard, the teacher, and a dozen others. You can see images of this figure, often half-animal, on the walls of the Magdalenian caves, with the forms of the Ice Age critters, many now extinct, he/she hunted, spoke to, or mystically became.

Popular interest in shamanism and Neo-shamanism soared in the late 20th century. A lot has been written, some of it personal, imaginative, and elaborate. Never forget that little is actually known about the most ancient shamanism, and only a few fundamentals can be taken to be true.

The Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen encountered nomadic societies whose lifestyles and outlooks must have changed little in ten thousand years. The spiritual leader of one of these groups summarized his duties for Rasmussen: to lead the tribe to the finest hunting grounds, and talk to the spirits of the animals they have killed. He could do this because, in trance, he could leave his body and enter the spirit-world. Not only did
the spirits tell him things, but he could “explain” to the animal victims of hunting why humanity had killed them, and thus protect his tribe from the potentially vengeful spirit-legion.

Among the upstate Iroquois these shamanic spirit-journeys, it would seem, had expanded into a number of functions, among them that of the healer. It’s no stretch of the imagination to expect the shaman to talk also to the spirits of disease. Iroquois Medicine People at the contact period probably had more in common with these original shamans than with most of today’s religious figures nearer to them in time.

As doctors of the spirit, these medicine folk were masters of the supernatural. They were interpreters of landscape and all its strange ancient sacred spaces. They were the first line of defense against any attack – supernatural or physical, as they are still.