The Shamans of Today

I usually write these posts in the early morning. I wake up before 5AM, typically, take care of all the critters then have some time over coffee. This morning, I even have a roaring fire to keep me warm. As an aside, we currently have a fireplace, which is typically less than 0.0 % efficient. I'll be replacing that with a wood stove and moving to heating 100% with wood in the next few months. The down side of writing in the morning is eventually I get interrupted and the crystal clear thoughts of the pre-dawn hours get muddled with the nonsense of the day-to-day.

I wanted to give a couple of concrete examples of the Shamans of today who have YouTube channels. One unlikely one is Emmy Made In Japan. She does homesteading and cooking videos, but she is not in the corporate/consumer mind set. As an example, she did a video on preserving eggs with a lime solution. She made an off hand comment about eggs being alchemical treasures, which really struck me.

Another Shaman of Today is Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen. He does Bushcraft/Viking Reenactment videos and culture critique videos.

The Internet can serve the purpose of fostering decentralization and cultural experimentation and make a more resilient, maybe more natural civilization. (However, the centralizing insane and inbred oligarchy seems to be pushing YouTube away from that model.)

These two channels are good examples of a point I was trying to get to in my previous post. The idea of Darwinian survival of the fittest evolution is imbued with the concept of linear history and progress. The reality of nature, however, is co-evolution. All the plants and animals and bacteria and fungi and maybe even the rocks and water and air evolve at the same time. There's no evolution in isolation. The idea of a directed, centrally planned civilization is fatally flawed.

The sort of experimentation you see by people like Emmy or Bjorn's playing around with historical garb (there are probably thousands of other examples) doesn't just mimic co-evolution, it is co-evolution. The cultural creation of knowledge versus a corporate science knowledge creation process takes place at an ostensibly "slower" pace, but it's more comprehensive and time tested.

The cultural knowledge seems dumb and mute because it's ingrained in people rather than learned as an intellectual exercise. One role of the Shaman is to know the actual bases of the cultural knowledge, as well as keep the experimentation going.