New Thinking Allowed conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with parapsychologist Jeffery Mishlove.

Dr Jeffery Mishlove JM: Hello and welcome I’m Jeffery Mishlove. Today we’ll be exploring contemporary Witchcraft and Shamanism. My guest is Angela Puca who is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Religious Studies at Leeds Trinity University in the United Kingdom. She is also the host of her own YouTube channel called Angela’s Symposium in which she focuses on academic research on esoteric subjects. This is an internet interview and now I’ll switch over to the internet video.

Welcome Angela, it’s a pleasure to be with you.

Angela Puca AP: Hey Jeff, thank you so much for having me on your fantastic YouTube channel.

JM: You have been specializing in the academic study of esoteric subjects which, I guess, is opened up recently because I recall when I was a graduate student it was almost impossible to study contemporary, occult, esoteric movements even though, at a popular level, where I was in school at Berkeley, they were all over the place.

AP: Yeah it is still quite a niche subject although there have been quite a few studies at this point, especially when it comes to Western Esotericism. So, for example, you have the works by Antoine Faivre in France and there is a very famous school of Studies on Western Esotericism at the University of Amsterdam with Hanegraaff and Marco Pasi and von Stuckrad. So yeah, actually there are a few, very key scholars but overall, I’d say, the study of Magic-related topics, Western Esotericism, esoteric subjects still needs to be developed more, I’d say, and that’s why I have my YouTube channel to raise awareness that the academic study of these topics is indeed important.

JM: Now obviously you’re Italian but you’ve chosen to do your graduate work in the United Kingdom, at the University of Leeds, do you think the atmosphere in English is more favourable to this sort of research?

AP: Yes, indeed it is. Yeah, in Italy, at this point it is quite impossible to pursue this kind of research. So yeah, that’s why I chose to do it in the United Kingdom. Yeah, actually it was all because of my supervisor who is Dr Susanne Owen. Yeah, I came in contact with her and I just really adored her work, which is on Shamanism, Druidry and cultural appropriation. And so I really wanted to pursue my PhD with her as my advisor and that’s what I did basically.

JM: You just used an interesting term – cultural appropriation. Could you explain how that term is used in the Study of Religions?

AP: Oh well, that’s a very highly debated term and topic. So you will find very different ideas on the matter and yeah, on that topic I highly recommend my supervisor’s book which is “The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality.” Yeah, it is by Susanne Owen. So yeah, the term is normally used in reference to the appropriation of other people’s culture and it is something that is also relevant in my research. It is not as relevant but it is marginally relevant because, in my doctoral research, I have studied both transcultural and indigenous forms of Shamanism in Italy. So, of course, it’s quite interesting because first of all, I’m using the term indigenous in an Italian context which is something that I explain at length in my dissertation. How come I decided to employ the specific term and also the transcultural forms of Shamanism are those that, basically, import other forms of Shamanism from other cultures, those which are normally perceived to be indigenous cultures and they translate these practices according to the cultural context they belong to. So it is a way of importing, reinterpreting and somehow translating foreign practices and embedding them in a new cultural context. And they are usually defined as transcultural, especially in core Shamanism, for example, because they are believed to go to the essence of Shamanism. So the core principles, which are trans-cultural or cross-cultural and they do not need to be related to one specific cultural context but can be applied to multiple ones.

JM: Well, I’m under the impression, since you have referred to North American Natives and their shamanistic practices, that cultural appropriation is resented by indigenous people that they see outsiders coming in and learning some of their practices and then going out and selling workshops and so on and making money off of their cultural practices while they themselves are still struggling. Do you find that in other cultures? Say, for example, in Italy or elsewhere.

AP: Well in Italy you may find some kind of reinterpretations or, for example, Native North American practices and other indigenous practices but they are not normally done to gain a profit from it. So yeah, I think that there have been some scholars who have argued that the key aspect of cultural appropriation is disrespect of that culture and taking advantage of it from an economic point of view. So in the Italian case usually transcultural forms of Shamanism tend not to have that kind of approach, that kind of interest in profiting from it. Whereas transcultural forms, may take inspiration from indigenous practices, they only address the core aspects, the core elements, which they don’t believe belong to that specific indigenous culture but to all cultures. In that case, I’d say, there isn’t really a form of cultural appropriation just because culture is not really there, it is kind of yeah, eliminated. And it is one of the criticisms that they have encountered because there have been other scholars who have criticized forms of transcultural Shamanism saying that they are non-cultural rather than cross-cultural and so it is still an open debate. But because those who are in favour of them say no, it’s because we go to the essence and the essential practices are, actually, they go beyond the cultural belonging, they are they belong to humankind. And then you have the other party who says no because you cannot really have a practice you cannot understand the practice or even pursue a specific practice unless you embed it into a specific cultural context and into a tradition. So you have both takes on the topic which is interesting, I’d say.

JM: I recall when I was a younger person in Berkeley, there was a large Pagan community and many different overlapping Pagan communities but I’m pretty sure everybody involved and there were hundreds and hundreds of people, probably had a conventional middle-class Western American, in this case, upbringing and with some sort of mainstream religion and then they chose to leave the religion in which they were raised and assume a kind of pagan lifestyle. But it was never even close to being indigenous and I imagine that’s the case over most of the world today, at least the Western world.

AP: Yeah, I think that Paganism and Shamanism are two different phenomena, even though they may be related because, according to some, Shamanism can fall under the umbrella of Paganism but Paganism is quite different. Paganism is more a religion of course that may be debated as well because you will find Pagans would say it’s not a religion and other Pagans who say it is a religion. So normally that depends on how much the person associates the term religion with monotheistic religions because sometimes they feel like religion is, how can I put it, like a constraining kind of label, which is a constraint and that is when you ask them, how come you think that they tend to describe to you a monotheistic religion but yeah, there have been quite a few scholars in the past decade who have argued for the term religion to be not linked as much any more to those specific religions but just to different religious phenomena which are not necessarily of the monotheistic kind.

JM: Many years ago I interviewed Michael Harner. I’ve even been in touch with him relatively recently and I gather from your writing that he’s actually launched, practically, a worldwide movement of contemporary individuals who are practising Shamanism in this transcultural mode that you’ve described.

AP: Yes, Michael Harner was pretty key in the spreading of Shamanism in the Western world. I’d say that he and Carlos Castaneda are the two key figures here in the popularization of Shamanism in the Western world. Because while Carlos Castaneda has sort of given a model for the westerner to associate himself or herself too, which is the model of a westerner, rational person who encounters very different and yeah, perhaps not as rationalistic, as a westerner may think, practices and there is this encounter between these two worlds and somehow Castaneda has given us the opportunity to see how these two worlds can relate and the person can still maintain their foothold in our Western ways of perceiving the world. So I’d say that Carlos Castaneda has given us the framework, the cultural framework and the theoretical framework for a westerner with a specific, positivistic, rationalistic mindset to enter contact with indigenous practices, which are very outside of the box for the way we think, with the way we have been thinking after the enlightenment. And Michael Harner has given Europe and the Western world in general, especially the United States, actually at first and then it moved on to the other Western countries. Michael Harner and Core Shamanism have provided westerners with techniques, practical techniques, for them to implement and say okay, even though I was not born in an indigenous context I can still practice Shamanism. Because those techniques are cross-cultural and I can enter into a shamanic journey just from my living room, basically, by applying those techniques. And also he has given westerners the opportunity to pursue the shamanic journey and shamanic practices even without the use of entheogens because he explains that you can enter an altered state of consciousness even without the use of psychotropic drugs – just by using the monotonous sound of drums and rattles.

And so yeah, I say that whereas in Castaneda you do have the use of psychotropic drugs and yeah, I’d say that Michael Harner was really practical in how he affected, through his tradition of Core Shamanism and how he opened the doors for westerners to experience these kinds of practices which would have been otherwise perceived as very far from our way of doing and thinking.

JM: In both of these cases with Michael Harner and Carlos Castaneda you have examples of individuals who came out of the scholarly world and essentially launched contemporary religious movements. You also point out that, in the case of Wicca, Gerald Gardner, who was a scholar, founded what has become a contemporary religious movement.

AP: Yeah, this is a concept that is addressed in a very interesting book, apart from my paper, which is on Scientism and post-truth in contemporary Shamanism in Italy. There is a very interesting book on this which is called The Scientification of Religion by von Stuckrad, I hope I’m pronouncing it correctly, and it talks about how academia has affected significantly new religious movements such as Paganism and Shamanism, both because you have cases of scholars who have become Practitioners and in other cases, you have Practitioners who have drawn upon academic scholarship in order to validate their beliefs and their practices. So I’d say that, for example, Gardner was not a scholar in terms of an academic scholar but he was using Margaret Murray to justify and validate his beliefs, to say that there was this tradition of Witchcraft which has had been going on since the ancient times and still existed at that point. And there was a Horned God which was demonised by Christianity and all these kinds of things. These were published by what, at the time, was an academic publication which was “The God of the Witches” by Margaret Murray which was then later disproved, quite massively, by other scholars like, for example, Ronald Hutton. So now nobody in the academic world thinks that that kind of scholarship, which is quite outdated as well, so, of course, even the methodology and the access they had to information was limited but it is what is relevant here is not how accurate Margaret Murray’s works were but how impactful. The fact that an academic had published those specific things and that specific information was to the birth of Wicca as a religion, basically.

So yeah, that is interesting also Carlos Castaneda was a PhD student at UCLA in the United States and he actually only completed his PhD, he didn’t pursue an academic career afterwards. Whereas Michael Harner we may say was more of a proper academic in that after his PhD he has published quite a lot and also he had been teaching in universities for decades, I think, yeah.

JM: It seems to me that the situation is that there are many people of Western middle-class backgrounds who are seeking a different kind of spiritual path and if they don’t have direct access to a lineage that is authentic and has indigenous roots then they seek justification or appropriation from academic sources even if those sources turn out to be faulty.

AP: I think that that is kind of the way we work as westerners, ingrained in our culture because I think that when we have been trained and I mean we live in a world where certain things do not belong to our ontological world. So certain things don’t exist in our society, Magic doesn’t exist, spirits don’t exist and if they do they are embedded in specific religious belief systems but our lay society really does not encompass these kinds of beliefs. So when you are a person who is somewhat an outsider to this kind of theoretical framework that we live in, as belonging to this society. this post-enlightenment, positivistic society, then you have to rationalise, somehow, in order for those practices which are believed by your culture to be not acceptable. You have to make them acceptable, somehow, and of course, academia is the epitome of rationality for the average person, I mean to the average person academia is the epitome of science and rationalism. And so what better way to justify and incorporate in your theoretical understanding of reality certain practices which wouldn’t otherwise be considered acceptable if not by employing this kind of way. I guess that is one of the reasons why people tend to have in high regard what academics say, especially with Shamanism and Paganism and esoteric practices. I’d say that the community of Practitioners tends to care very much about the academic study of these subjects. I guess because they want to kind of prove to the world and to themselves that they are not crazy, just because they are doing something different from what other people do and what other people believe.

JM: So in your own research you have done several field trips in Italy looking at indigenous Witchcraft practices that are presumably ancient and long-standing and have sort of been an underground culture in Italy for many, many generations.

AP: Yes, I have.

JM: And also I understand you found amongst these Practitioners that they also looked up to you to give some sort of confirmation of what they were doing because of your academic background?

AP: Yeah, that actually happened both with the transcultural Practitioners and the indigenous, autochthonous, Italian Practitioners. Yeah, for example during fieldwork with Core Shamanic Practitioners we had a very intense experience on one specific night and the day after I’d say that most of the Practitioners, most of the attendees to that workshop came to me over breakfast or over lunch asking, so Angela what do you think as an academic about what happened yesterday? But the way they were asking it was a mixture of seeking my validation and kind of hinting at, you cannot really say that it was all made up, yeah, it was like a way of saying you were there, you saw, you experienced, so as an academic can you deny what you saw and what you perceived? So it was like they were already convinced that what they had experienced was true. Of course, true is a very difficult term to use and to position. But yeah, it was true to them and it was something that actually happened in their reality, in our reality – at the time it was a shared reality. But yeah they were already convinced of that but they still wanted my validation.

When it comes to the indigenous Practitioners, actually, the way I encountered them was kind of serendipitous. It was pretty much by chance I’d say because at first my doctoral research was supposed to only look at transcultural practices, sometimes referred to as Neoshamanism. But at some point there was an informant of mine who came to me and said, oh Angela have you heard of this person who says she’s an Italian Shaman – not an Italian practitioner of Shamanism but an Italian Shaman. So I came in contact with her, I reached out to her and I spent a few days at hers, with her husband and children and in-laws, so it was a full immersion. And she says, basically, that she’s the last Italian Shaman of a hereditary tradition. And during the days I spent with her she explained to me all the traits of a tradition because, of course, I was there to do interviews and I also did participant observations. So I attended rituals, even impromptu rituals that she wanted me to participate in and see and while she was explaining to me the traits of her tradition it kind of rang a bell and I thought, wait but I have already heard of these practices.

And so I asked her but what is the difference between your tradition and this form of folk healing Magic in Italy and she said, oh that’s a very good question and then she replied that her tradition had not been syncretised with Catholicism, whereas folk healing, folk vernacular Witchcraft in Italy is pretty syncretised with Catholicism, so that was her answer. But at the same time, it prompted me to look further into it and then it opened the world because then I realised that there are that it is quite widespread throughout the country and basically these kinds of vernacular Witches are everywhere. And so I put their practices, their belief system and everything in comparison to what Shamanism can be said to be, which is another very difficult identifier because it is still quite debated, but yeah I put it in comparison with what Shamanism is said to be and with a new way of addressing what the definition of Shamanism may be.

And so basically, I do argue in my doctoral research that this tradition of vernacular Witchcraft and vernacular healing practices in Italy are, or is a form of indigenous Italian Shamanism.

JM: One of the words, that you used in your paper, that I found interesting with regard to the transcultural or more modern approaches, is that they take the more ancient traditions and the word you use is they’re ‘sanitised.’ Tell me what the word sanitise means in this context.

AP: When transcultural practices, which are the ones which are imported and reinterpreted by westerners, are put in comparison with indigenous practices, which tend to be related to indigenous people, to the Shamanism of indigenous people, there are certain, quite evident differences that you find and one of these is what has been referred to in the literature as sanitization or sanitizing. And sanitizing means that all the dangerous and hazardous aspects of the practice have been totally removed from transcultural Shamanism. So you wouldn’t have the use of psychotropic drugs, and you wouldn’t have anything dangerous like being left in a cave for weeks without food and water. And this is actually this actually relates to the Italian Shaman I was just talking about. Because she really doesn’t like transcultural Shamanism and one of the things she said was, she explained to me, her initiation which happened when she was 16, she was left in the woods tied to a tree and she was left there, yeah, just to be there and without food or water and she had to even pee on herself and everything. And she explained that as a necessary process of dehumanization so that she would be reborn again as a Shaman. And she said how can that same process of dehumanization and of transcending your previous self occur if you imagine yourself going into a cave instead of being left in a cave for weeks. So she felt really strongly about it.

So sanitizing is kind of removing everything dangerous from the practice which may occur in different non-western contexts and quite rarely occurs when it comes to transcultural Shamanism. It’s been used as a way of undermining, sometimes, the validity of transcultural practices. Which is not something that I endorse. I think that they are just different and they run into trouble when they and sometimes they do, they want to claim that they do exactly the same thing as indigenous Shamans do. But I wouldn’t say that they are not valid practices, I just say that they are clearly, clearly different. And one of the differences is the one you mentioned.

JM: The idea of sanitization because I did do an interview, not too long ago, with a fellow named Andy Hilton who’s written a book on initiation, an academic book and he went through one of these weekend workshops on Shamanism and described having had what seemed to him to be an authentic out-of-body experience during the course of a weekend workshop. He was quite amazed by it and he felt it was something like an authentic initiation experience that really changed his life. But I gather that in indigenous cultures a process like that could could take years, you don’t necessarily do it over a single weekend.

JM: The idea of sanitization because I did do an interview, not too long ago, with a fellow named Andy Hilton who’s written a book on initiation, an academic book and he went through one of these weekend workshops on Shamanism and described having had what seemed to him to be an authentic out-of-body experience during the course of a weekend workshop. He was quite amazed by it and he felt it was something like an authentic initiation experience that really changed his life. But I gather that in indigenous cultures a process like that could could take years, you don’t necessarily do it over a single weekend.

AP: Yeah, sometimes it does stake years. Apart from the indigenous Shamanism I’ve also been in contact for quite some time, for several several years, with a form of indigenous Shamanism from South America which is the Mapuche Shamanism. And so I’m very familiar with other indigenous traditions, especially with Mapuche Shamanism. And these are traditions where initiations are pretty long and difficult and sometimes life-threatening, to be honest. Sometimes Shamans don’t want to be Shamans, they are forced into that because it’s either that or death, basically. So it’s not, as you know, romanticised as it has been in some cases in the western world because we have this idea of the Shaman as this mystical figure. And this is all due to Mircea Eliade who is an author who also popularized Shamanism before Castaneda but he was more niche, I’d say. Castaneda really popularized Shamanism because he was well-read even among the average people, not just academics or scholars who are particularly interested in Shamanism. But yeah, Mircea Eliade was the first one, I think, or one of the first ones who portrayed the Shaman as this mystical figure who belongs to this world that predates our current world and can give us access to what is really there beyond our structures, the structures we have created as westerners. So yeah that is a way of romanticising Shamanism, I’d say, which is pretty common.

JM: Earlier in our conversation you made a distinction between Paganism and Shamanism, although you indicated they overlapped, as I recall from your writing you imply that the term Witchcraft is sometimes used synonymously with Shamanism.

AP: In Italy there and there is a paper that I’ve written on the discourse analysis of the terms Witch and Shaman in Italy and how the two how people who used to refer to themselves as Witch are now referring to themselves as Shamans. And that is because basically, Witch has especially, of course, I’m referring to the Italian term which is Strega and it has a long history of antagonism with the Catholic Church and it’s very loaded as a term with negative connotations, even from popular culture. Whereas Shaman, as I was just mentioning, is seen mostly in a positive light. I mean there are of course Shamans who would do, you know, harmful forms of Magic but usually people in their imagination of the Shaman instead of a very positive person, a person who helps the community and heals people, whereas the Witch is more associated to, perhaps, evil Magic and binding spells and dangerous things which may be considered threatening to people. So Shaman is a term that people in Italy, Practitioners in Italy are using more and more. And they prefer it to Witch for this reason, basically because it is better received. I think it’s a similar process to what happened with Wicca. Even Wicca was a form of Magic which was perceived in a very harmless light, like Magic is now connecting to nature and even the magical spells tend to be very positive and you wouldn’t harm anyone otherwise it would come back to you three times fold. And all this kind of way of portraying Witchcraft and Magic really helped Wicca to become popular and also helped Practitioners of Magic to be accepted and understood by a society, that before Wicca only thought of Witchcraft as something evil and dangerous to society and to the community. So yeah, I’d say that both have sometimes romanticising a practice or a figure can have actually a very productive outcome for the community of Practitioners. Because sometimes you have to break through certain preconceptions that society has in order for you to enter what is considered to be acceptable and then you can show all the shades that the specific practice actually encompasses. So well done to Wicca and to the romanticisation of Shamanism.

JM: Even though you are Italian you found that in England the environment was more favourable for the sorts of research that you’re doing. I wonder if it’s not because the Anglican church, in England, has been more open to these things whereas the Roman Catholic church has a history of more hostility to various esoteric movements. So, for example, psychical research, which is a big interest of mine, has flourished in England in particular.

AP: Yeah, that is possible. To be honest I had a very positive experience here in England in terms of how open academia is. And it is particularly interesting because I’m teaching at a Catholic institution, which is fascinating because it’s like Catholicism somehow follows me. It’s something that I was born into and somehow yeah I’m still somewhat connected to it. So yeah, even though I am teaching in a Catholic university they are really open to what I do and in the past years, I have led a course, a course at the university which was specifically on Magic. It was on Magic in religious practices and how Magic is embedded and conceptualized and integrated across different religions. although in my module I decided to focus more on non-monotheistic religions, for obvious reasons. I guess because it’s not as controversial to analyse how Magic is embedded in Pantheism as it is in the Christian religion. so because of course, some may argue that there is Magic there, whereas most would argue that it’s not quite Magic. So yeah, but they didn’t really have anything to say about it, whereas in Italy I can’t even begin to imagine that possibility. Yeah, at the moment, I guess, that it is still a strongly Catholic country.

JM: I did another interesting interview with Zofia Weaver from the Society for Psychical Research about Polish Mediums and Polish Spiritualism and she pointed out it was very difficult in Poland for the Spiritualists because the Catholic Church regarded Spiritualism as some sort of an abominable practice. So, people, even the talented Psychics were discouraged, greatly discouraged by the church.

AP: That’s interesting.

JM: Now let me ask you another question while I have you here. You did a fascinating paper discussing Scientism and post-truth as different modalities for approaching reality and we’ve talked about Scientism and the sense that many of the people engaged in transcultural Shamanism look to academic experts for confirmation of their practices. How does post-truth fit in these days? We hear an awful lot about it, especially in the era of Donald Trump in the United States.

AP: Yes, yeah, post-truth fits in because well, post-truth – we can kind of define it as a view of reality where emotionally engaging something, a narrative is more important to the actual facts. So the way people understand reality in a post-truth theoretical framework is not based on factual evidence but rather on how emotionally gripping the narrative of things is. And I think it’s something which is becoming more and more common in today’s world.

JM: And in fact, I know you have a Facebook group focusing on contemporary Shamanism in Italy where various participants in that group really express post-truth narratives that they believed in strongly and found very compelling and the community of people found compelling even though they were not factually based.

AP: So yeah, I have opened a Facebook group which was created specifically for my doctoral research, to gather both informants and to create a community. Of course, they are aware that I’m a researcher and that everything they post can be used anonymously for my research. And there have been numerous interactions where this kind of narrative was very clear and was evidenced by the way they were interacting because sometimes there were altercations. Of course, there are quite often altercations on what is Shamanism, for example, what constitutes a real Shaman or real Shamanism and then you can, as you may read from my paper, basically those who tend to be more convincing and those who tend to be more driven by emotion and try to create a more interesting narrative tend to win the conversation. So the conversation is won by the most compelling narrative rather than what has been experienced in the actual lived reality by those who participate in the discussion, which is quite interesting.

JM: Now I gather the distinction also is that from the scientistic perspective, people with the most credentials who are considered experts are going to have an elite position, that their opinion counts more, whereas in the post-truth world it’s really just a question of numbers whatever the community is willing to go along with becomes accepted as reality.

AP: Yes and that’s why I thought it was so fascinating that there are these two theoretical strengths in contemporary Shamanism in Italy. Maybe they are present even outside of Italy but of course, since my fieldwork is in Italy I focus on that one. And yeah, it is very interesting because, on one hand, you have this scientistic mindset where only what science says is true and so they would really seek validation from academic experts. While on the other hand, they tend to be anti-specialism somehow and just believe in what is most fascinating and most compelling rather than what actually happens. So it is a very interesting mixture which might seem contradictory at first and maybe it even is it’s just that human beings are not straightforward we are really complex and sometimes we encompass things which might be considered not as compatible but they are compatible with certain people and certain communities.

JM: I thought that your analysis was fascinating and that it really applies especially here in the United States to culture as a whole. Not just to contemporary shamanistic Practitioners.

AP: Yeah even what we spoke about before, about the romanticising of Shamanism that is a form of post-truth, a way of seeing post-truth at play as well because you if you look at what Shamans do across the world, they are not really these very peaceful individuals, totally harmless and so on and so forth but they can do all sorts of things. Even Michael Harner reports that he paid for his training with a shotgun to the Shaman. So this way of deciding, at some point, either, I don’t know, maybe they are not aware of these kinds of aspects of Shamanism but at some point, they sort of decided that the Shaman and Shamanism is this very peaceful and romanticised practice which is harmless and will put you in contact with the spirit world and help the community with no harm whatsoever, neither to yourself nor to others. And yeah, so this is, I’d say, a post-truth element in that it is a narrative which is pleasing to the person who endorses it but it might not necessarily reflect what the actual facts on that specific subject would say.

JM: Well Angela Puca this has been a very enlightening informative discussion I’m really happy to have had this time with you and I’d like to encourage viewers of new thinking aloud to visit your YouTube channel, Angela’s symposium, where you cover the realm of esoteric culture from an academic perspective. I think there’s a lot to be gained there. Angela thank you so much for being with me.

AP: Thank you so much, Jeff. It was a pleasure to be here and to meet you and speak to you.

JM: And for those of you viewing, thank you for being with us.

Uploaded 25 Sep 2020