Icaros - Shamanic Healing

Subject: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: ChrisJBrady
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 07:17 AM

I wonder if there are any equivalent songs or chants in our Western culture for shamanic healing that are commensurate with the power and emotion of the 'icaros' sung by Amazonian shamans during shamanic healing ceremonies. The words and tunes are reported as being taught by the rainforest plants themselves or rather the spirits of those plants; hence the concept of 'teacher plants.' On YouTube there are quite a few icaros of the most beautiful and haunting kind which brings emotions to the fore when listening to them. Has anyone here experienced the healing power of these songs firsthand.

A typical YouTube clip is at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pfUkPblIcc

"... Marcial is singing about strengthening the Arkana, your defense system around your body. With Icaros, (songs) shipibo´s create an arkana or forcefield of protection. This can be for an individual or whole group. The theme of many shipibo songs is loosely based on this principle. Also, the way shipibo´s sing, they use sound and tone many times more than the words themselves to create an experience, elicit an emotion, or initiate a cleansing or healing.

"The use of specific tones, inflection, and cadence are, in this situation, much more important that the words used.

"Also, He is not smoking a 'spliff' or a 'roach' that is a mapacho, or a cigarette of jungle tobacco. Mapacho smoke is used in many types of ceremonies in the Amazon. It is regarded and a cleansing tool, to clear bad energy, and flush away any bad spirits."

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 07:53 AM

"Also, He is not smoking a 'spliff' or a 'roach' that is a mapacho, or a cigarette of jungle tobacco. Mapacho smoke is used in many types of ceremonies in the Amazon. It is regarded and a cleansing tool, to clear bad energy, and flush away any bad spirits."

Even so it's use would still be frowned upon by most pub-based folk clubs in the UK, and most of them probably wouldn't get the idiom either. Otherwise my argument has always been that ALL music operates on the level of Shamanic healing - that's in the nature of music & accounts for its universality. In the English Tradition of Shamanic Healing Folk Song I would recommend Butter and Cheese and All as being particularly potent - especially when sung by the right sort of Shaman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOx6fEYq8jI

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 10:31 AM

I once acted for a client abused (not sexually) by a shamanic healing twat. It totally destroyed any respect I might have felt for hippy-drippy rebirth drum banging and inner healing.

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: katlaughing
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 10:48 AM

CJB, I don't know the answer to your question, but I thank you for posting the link and info. It reminds me of some of the Native American healers whom I have met and/or been treated by. They used sage as a type of incense, as I do myself, at times. I will be listening to more of those types of videos.

Richard, too bad you can't seem to see the difference between a charlatan and the real deal.

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 10:55 AM

Goodness me; that's me.

How Shaman!

~Shamanic music ~ "A first definition of this complex phenomenon, and perhaps the least hazardous, will be: shamanism = technique of ecstasy." Wikipedia.

Ecstasy, huh? Well, I can live with that ~~ not that I had taken any E's, you understand: but if that is what me 'umble best in singing induces in Sweeney···!

~Michael~

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: Jack Campin
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 11:23 AM

There is no trace (historical or archaeological) of any form of shamanism ever having been practiced in the UK. All the way back to Stonehenge. It never happened.

And I am not about to believe that Native American shamans have the concept of "forcefields". That sort of thinking comes out of the Theosophist misappropriation of science as part of their ideology.

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 12:09 PM

There is no trace (historical or archaeological)

What sort of traces would we be looking for? After all, there are those who suggest an essentially Shamanic foundation for the stone circles, ritual landscaping and rock art going back 7,000 years - and yet further given the hunter-garther migrations & recent findings at Göbekli Tepe which push back the envelope rather and are analogous to what we find in the UK at a later date. That we find Shamanic practise enduring as far afield as Lapland and the Amazon basin then it might be reasonable to suppose that pre-Xtian / prehistoric UK were similiarly disorientated. I'm sure even Aubrey Burl suggested as much - after all antler head-dresses have been found (even in Lancashire) conforming to the classic image. Where there is readily available hallucinogens / inebrients and tribal culture, there will be some form of Shamanism involved. And weren't the Druids themselves essentially Shamans? There are those that suggest that Christ himself was an initiate, and that Celtic Mythology is full of Shamanic / Bardic / Druidic references - Taliesin, The Tain, The Voyage of Bran and The Song of Amergin all!

I wonder - does Kaledon Naddair still hang around Auld Reekie? He was the self-styled Keltic / Pictish Shaman. And some of those Göbekli Tepe pictograms have a Pictish feel about them...

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: Jack Campin
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 12:46 PM

Shamanism is much more specific than that. As CJB said, it involves using animals as intermediaries to an upper world whose structure and mode of operation is spelt out in some detail. Every shamanic cult we know of puts its belief system down in pictures. There are no images like that from Western Europe.

This book gives a nice description of shamanic belief and practice:

Last of the Shor Shamans

One intriguing point the authors make in passing is that shamanism is known not to have been the original belief system of those people. But they don't give you any clues as to what they believed before (about 2000 years ago, I think), or why they switched.

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 01:10 PM

There are no images like that from Western Europe

I've mentioned several from cup & ring art to Pictish glyphs. As for being Specific, I guess the term Shamanism is about as specific as Folk when it comes down to it. How else can we use a Siberian term for a South American Indian religious practise?

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: Jack Campin
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 01:17 PM

Because the Siberian and Native American belief systems have a lot of similarities (maybe because the Native Americns got them from Siberia, like a lot of their languages?). No such similarities are perceptible in Celtic or Megalithic culture.

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 04:21 PM

No such similarities are perceptible in Celtic or Megalithic culture.

The similarities are certainly perceptible in terms of general & academic conjecture that has the Shamanic impulse (to some as innate as language & sexuality) as the universal root impulse of human religiosity. There are plenty who insist that it's behind the abstract / non-figurative nature of Beaker rock art, itself based on a vocabulary which at least implies a widespread belief system, albeit with regional dialects, throughout Northern Europe & the UK. Some would see it in the Gundestrup Cauldron, the patterns of the Lindisfarne Gospels and even the miraculous life of that celebrated Shaman Saint Cuthbert himself - who interceded with the elements & animals as a matter of daily daliance. The art of the Herefordshire Romanesque betrays a lot of such influences, which carries on from Norse Pagan influences into Norman Xtian culture, which itself draws on ideas from further afield (though a lot more immediate than the Siberian migrations into the Americas) see Kilpeck etc.

Time to dig out my copy of Eliade...

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: Jack Campin
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 04:33 PM

Paganism and shamanism are two very different things.

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 06:07 PM

Many would argue otherwise, but that's besides the point anyway. I'm talking about the universality of Shamanic impulse which is something Eliade (and others) have explored in some detail and remains very evdent in the various artistic traditions & mythologies I've mentioned above. Some would even argue Isobel Gowdie was a Shaman with her various shapeshifting & animating incantations.

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: Jack Campin
Date: 13 Dec 11 - 07:56 PM

But that is NOT what CJB was asking about.

No European culture has a tradition of plants as teachers of songs. When songs are learned from non-human entities, they are either the spirits of the dead or beings with no biological nature, like the trowies of Shetland.

Healing songs (or vaguely related things like lullabies and songs to the dying) have existed in historic times, but they don't invoke intermediaries from the non-human animate world.

Seems likely that one bit of shamanic culture did make its way into Europe, with the mushroom hallucinogen rituals of the Arctic being adapted by the Norse "berserkers". But berserkers weren't doing anything for the community by acting as ambassadors to Heaven as shamans do - they were simply darn good at going berserk with big sharp weapons. It was as far removed from the older traditions of shamanism as Westerners getting smashed in a dark room and listening to Pink Floyd was.

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 14 Dec 11 - 05:25 AM

There is more to Shamanism than what CJB was talking about. What I was responding to was your statement that no trace (historical or archaeological) of any form of shamanism ever having been practiced in the UK. All the way back to Stonehenge. It never happened. There are many traces - in archaelogy, mythology, folklore and history - so in all probability it did, and for some considerable time as well. Perhaps it still does. Leafing through Mircea Eliade's Shamanism - Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964) the universality of Shamanism is inescapable, and one chapter at least (Shamanic Ideologies and Techniques among the Indo-Europeans) brings it very close to home.

Anyway - by way of the Merry Season, there is one fat, jolly old man dressed in fur-trimmed red whose Shamanistic provenance is oft discussed (& oft disputed) certainly with respect of that old tradition of inbibing the distilled urine of reindeer fed on similarly hued fly-agaric mushrooms...

Santa Claus Was a Shaman

Wassail!

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 14 Dec 11 - 05:48 AM

Odd sort of feeling ~~

I figure in the OP via a link to my Youtube Channel. Apparently this is supposed to make some sort of point relating to the topic of this thread ~~

~~ of which I understand not one single solitary syllable. Better for me were it posted in Martian or α-Centaurian.

'Odd, did I say? Positively Gilbertian, my dears.

♫Never mind the why and wherefore♫

~M~

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: ChrisJBrady
Date: 14 Dec 11 - 06:28 AM

My OP was about the icaros sung by Amazonian shamans - ayahuasqueros - during healing ceremonies. The songs are unique to each individual, are reportedly inspired or taught by the plants themselves, and it is believed that singing them during a ceremony results in healing itself. That is - the mere singing of the icaros can result in healing on a spiritual, mental and indeed physical levels. And certainly this practice is widespread in the Amazon communities.

I find a parallel here with Western classical music, even folk music (and dance) that raises the emotions, and lifts the 'feel good' factor.

So my OP was wondering as to whether there are any songs (or chantings) in our own culture that have evolved to deliberately cause this raising of emotions and are used for healing the spirit, or even the physical body.

There are lots of icaros on YouTube - they do have the Internet in the Amazon!! - and Amazon.com also sells CDs of them.

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 14 Dec 11 - 07:04 AM

I figure in the OP via a link to my Youtube Channel. Apparently this is supposed to make some sort of point relating to the topic of this thread ~~

Not quite the OP anyway, Michael - and as CJB said above I find a parallel here with Western [...] folk music [...] that raises the emotions, and lifts the 'feel good' factor. So there you have it! My point was that I reckon it's easier for Western Ears to get this from a YouTue vid of MtheGM inbibing his magic-potion and singing Butter & Cheese & All than that of an Amazonian Shaman puffing on his magic jungle-weed singing something similar. Otherwise - yes, indeed, I'd all music operates on this level; and Shamans are the players who make it so especially potent...

I would also point out that in my other life as a Storyteller I'm acutely aware of the Shamanic value, origin and potency of the Indo-European Folk Tale, and of Traditional Balladry too, all of which act as essential distillations of healing ritual to work on an individual, familial or societal level. I knew a young Shaman once who, after many miscarriages, sang Child #6 every day throughout her pregnancy and was delivered of a healthy bouncing baby boy.

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 14 Dec 11 - 07:14 AM

Damn - I agree with MtheGM.

I'm getting worried about me!

But at least I know about datura and brugmansia...

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 14 Dec 11 - 12:16 PM

Lighten up, Richard - it's Christmas - a time to celebrate the inner Shamanic light common to each & every one of us (even you) yet manifest as a Star of Wonder that guided Three Wise Astrologer Shamans bearing gifts of... well, at school I once thought it was Coal, Frankenstein and a Mirror.

Subject: RE: Icaros - Shamanic Healing
From: ChrisJBrady
Date: 18 Dec 11 - 10:16 AM

Found this great article:

http://www.shamanism.co.uk/shamanism-article-library/ayahuasca-sacred-chants.html