The Hummingbird’s Daughter

"This is a recent book by a Chicano-American writer and it’s the story of a recent ancestor of his who was regarded as a local saint during the Mexican revolution in the late 19th/early 20th century. It’s about her life and a lot of it takes place around the medicine men and women who work on the ranches. She herself is the illegitimate daughter of one of the ranch bosses and not only is this a masterpiece of writing, it’s the best presentation of the shamanic world and the shamanic way of thinking that I’ve ever read, by someone who isn’t a shaman themselves and isn’t involved in that world. Well, shamans everywhere do the same thing no matter which continent they come from. Shamanism goes back to the original human way of addressing medicine and the spiritual needs of human beings. Most hunting and gathering cultures make no separation between those two things. There was once a shamanic tradition everywhere including in Western Europe but the church went to war on it pretty effectively which is why it’s unknown to us. People who knew how to do this sort of thing were demonised, to such an extent that anyone who knew about herbal medicine was likely to find themselves tied to a stake and burnt. It goes back to Africa and the oldest people on the planet, bushmen, with whom we all share DNA. They are about 200,000 years old and we all go back to that diaspora around 40,000 years ago. So it’s a pretty well-established thing. Shamanism is distinct from herbal medicine though shamans often know both. They are not going to use shamanism to cure a cold when they could use a herb to cure a cold, because the Shamanic thing is harder work. So, a shaman can be a man or woman and they are trained to go into an altered state of consciousness. While they are in that altered state of consciousness their experience is that they enter the spirit world and they interact with ancestor spirits, local nature spirits and the overarching divine. While they are in that state they can take something out that needs to come out, put something in that needs to go in, do hands-on healing. They will then often have a set of instructions. This is the same the world over, though the outward form might be different – the way of going into the altered state might be through the use of hallucinogens or through dance and so on. They almost all exhibit some kind of neuro-psychiatric condition, adult autism, schizophrenia, epilepsy, bi-polar disorder. In many cases, if you met them in our culture they’d be institutionalised, but in those cultures it’s regarded as a qualification for a job rather than a disqualification from society. It’s a fundamentally different outlook – is this a sick person, or is this a different kind of person who will play a different kind of role? If you think about how practical these people are – they live in areas where you have to be competent to survive, they are not whimsical people and they will use western medicine if it’s available. But some things, particularly neuro-psychiatric stuff, is better addressed through shamanism. We can contain it with drugs but we certainly don’t have a way of making it a positive thing; we only have a way of seeing the negative sides. So, that’s what shamans do and that process is described in this book."