Kelly Champaign KC: Hello everyone and welcome to The Girlfriend God podcast, a podcast in search of and in

service to the divine feminine bringing you an equal mix of academic research and emotional spiritual experience. If you enjoy The Girlfriend God please share it, rate it or leave a review.

Just in case you didn’t know, so today I welcome Dr Angela Puca to the show. Dr Angela Puca is a PhD in Anthropology of Religion and has taught at leads Trinity University since 2016. She’s the author of several peer-reviewed publications and co-editor of the forthcoming “Pagan Religion in Five Minutes,” looking forward to that, for Equinox and you can find Dr Puca @AngelaPuca11 on Twitter or just search for Angela’s Symposium on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. I highly recommend the YouTube channel. I love it so much and I learned so much from you just from here what do you call them? Academic Nuggets? Those real short videos, those are my favourites.

Dr Angela Puca AP: I’ve stopped doing those. Now you’re making me want to do them again.

KC: Oh yeah, I like them. Well, today’s online presence has a very short attention span, so.

And so Dr Carla Ionesco creator of The Girlfriend God – you’re not the creator of The Girlfriend God, I’m the creator of The Girlfriend God, the creator of the Goddess Project podcast, there’s a lot of onomatopoeia in both of our podcast titles. So she’s going to be here today with me as a guest co-host and I’m sure that we will both have a lot of questions and today we’re going to be talking about Shamanism, particularly indigenous and transcultural Shamanism in Italy.

Dr Puca welcome to the show, welcome.

Dr Carla Ionesco CI: Welcome.

AP: Thank you very much for inviting me, Kelly and Carla, I’m pleased to be here with you.

KC: I do have a couple of questions that I think you’ll probably cover anyway but just as kind of a starting point, my two questions, because I made a couple of notes before the show, one was, is there a link between shamanistic journeying and the witch folklore fly agaric? And two, can anyone be a Shaman with the proper training or must it occur in your ancestral bloodline or are there other requirements to be able to call yourself a Shaman?

AP: Well, to answer those questions we need to set the background knowledge and information to answer those. Obviously what I’m going to talk about is what I think. If you want to know what I think, we can also cover that but I will cover primarily what my research is about and what emerged from my research. So one thing that we need to clarify is that it is quite challenging to define what a Shaman is and what Shamanism is. And it is still controversial in academic circles. So the way I define Shamanism is by using two methodologies. One is called the diectic approach which comes from Michael Lambeck’s work and diectic comes from the Latin word deixis which refers to terms that don’t have a meaning in and of themselves but only when put into relation with other things. So, for instance, words like ‘here’ and ‘there;’ these are meaningful words but in order to understand what they mean you need to put them in context.

And then the second aspect of our methodology is discourse analysis which comes from Foucault, basically. Many scholars in religious studies, at the moment, especially those who work with Paganism, Pagan religions, Shamanism or Witchcraft, they tend to use discourse analysis because these are traditions that don’t have a central dogma and they are not institutionalised. And so in order to understand them in their own right and without making them into something else, just to make them easier to pinpoint and describe, what we do is to use this methodological discourse analysis where you identify patterns of meaning that emerge from the community itself, from these discourses and the practices that the community creates. Obviously, it’s not based on what every single person says but when you collect enough data, you will find there are patterns of meaning, and that will give you an answer as to what a certain religious phenomenon is.

So when it comes to Shamanism we need to first clarify that Shamanism is a term that emerged from Russian ethnography in the 19th century. And there have been in the past decades ago, scholars who have said you can only use Shamanism when it comes to the Siberian forms of Shamanism because that’s where the term comes from. Well, the term doesn’t come from there, the term is a scholarly term that was superimposed over locally specific identifiers. So there is one region in Siberia, the Tungusic region where the term šaman was a native term to refer to their Shamans but if you move slightly you will find that in a different town, in a different area and they will have another term to refer to their Shaman. So one thing that tells you that a Shamanism is indigenous is that usually they have local specific terms to identify those people that have this ability to engage with reality in a non-ordinary way, so they can gather power and knowledge and healing for their community. So in every indigenous Shamanism that you find around the world, they will have their own words. So the term Shaman, the way we understand it today, is a scholarly construct, it wasn’t even the concept of Shamanism was not even native to the Tungusic area, it was just the term Shaman that was understood in a very context-specific way. So when I hear the argument of people saying, oh Shaman should only be applied to Siberia! It’s like, why? It was you know it was imposed by scholars to begin with, even on Siberian forms of Shamanism. So we need to understand first that Shamanism is a scholarly construct and it’s superimposed over local specific labels. It doesn’t mean that it has to erase them, in fact, it is important to keep the local specific terms but it is a fact that even among indigenous people, for instance, I have done fieldwork with Mapuche Shamans in Argentina, who are also in Peru by the way. And they will use the term Shaman because now it is widely understood. So, as always, there are several influences, it’s not just the case that scholars understand indigenous traditions and there is only a one-way kind of influence. Every party that is involved in the construction of meaning and in knowledge-making will influence each other.

So you will find that scholars will influence practitioners and practitioners will, obviously, affect the scholarly understanding of their practices. So it’s kind of a two-way thing, it’s not really just a one-way, like the scholar that observes very objectively. I really don’t like the word objective, I think that I haven’t met a religious study scholar who likes the term yet. But I also have to say that I’m surrounded by people that study things like Paganism so that’s also understandable, why this is the case. Probably theologians will have a different take but first of all, we clarify that Shamanism is a scholarly term, even when it is applied to the Siberian region and then after the first occurrence of the term and usage of the term you will find that scholars that study other forms of Shamanism, other forms of similar practices around the world, especially among indigenous people, will start to use the term Shamanism as well because they find that they are similar enough so that the term is meaningful. Because that’s what a term is for, a term exists, so that you can understand what you’re talking about and when you have enough similarities that the term is meaningful then you can apply it. It makes sense too because community language is about understanding each other.

KC: Sorry this is what I do, I interrupt. What, I have questions. So is the word ‘journeying’ a similar thing? Because you’ve got to keep in mind that I’m coming from the West where we tend to take these scholarly terms and apply them to things they don’t necessarily apply to because the people using the terms don’t understand the context. I mean I know that Shaman is a term in the United States, at least in this area of the United States, that is as generic as the term Witch, or the term Priestess, like anybody, can call themselves these things and not really have an understanding of what those terms actually mean, where they came from and there is so much misinformation online. I mean that’s part of this podcast and your podcast and Carla’s podcast is that there’s this huge disconnect between these spiritual practices and what the spiritual practices actually mean, where they came from and there’s so much misinformation online. You mentioned Siberia and that’s what I read this morning it is a tradition that started in Siberia and this is what it means and they don’t expand any further beyond that. I feel like people in the United States think that the word Shaman has existed since ancient times.

AP: No, it hasn’t.

KC: well I know that and you know that, Carla knows that but the average googler doesn’t, right?

AP: Yeah, to answer whether journeying is also a Western construct, the way we understand it, yes it is a Western construct. Another thing that I was going to mention, when it comes to Shamanism, is that there are two main forms of Shamanism that I identified in my research. One is indigenous Shamanism and the other one is transcultural Shamanism. So transcultural Shamanism is one that you will find the most in Western countries and it tends to be focused on the techniques. For instance Core Shamanism from Michael Harner. and Carlos Castaneda. Well, Carlo Castaneda still had some cultural elements in his practice and Michael Harner said that he had learned Shamanism from the Conibo and the Shipibo in the Amazon basin. The focus of transcultural Shamanism is the technique, meaning that you learn the technique, for instance, the shamanic journey or other such techniques in shamanistic techniques and you apply them and you’re supposed to get the same exact results. You don’t need an initiation, you don’t need to be a specific person – anybody can do it. And whether you are in Italy or in the UK or in the US you’re supposed to get the same exact results. It’s based on the techniques, you learn the technique and then you apply it and that’s it. Whereas indigenous Shamanisms are extremely connected to the culture, to the land, to the bloodline, to elements that are very specific to a place, very specific to certain types of people and very specific to a certain culture.

So you can see that indigenous Shamanism tends to be more locally and culturally based, more culturally sensitive, whereas transcultural Shamanism tends to be about techniques that are transcultural. So you don’t need an initiation whereas in indigenous Shamanism usually, you do need an initiation – only certain people can be Shamans. In transcultural Shamanism, anybody can be a shamanic practitioner. In Core Shamanism they say that only other people can say that you’re a Shaman. You can say for yourself that you are a shamanic practitioner but others will have to identify you as a Shaman but it is not something that you say yourself. And quite a few trans-cultural shamanic practitioners in Italy reported the same thing. One of my informants said, Shaman, is like “beautiful” you cannot say it of yourself because that’s what otherwise it’s not meaningful, whereas if somebody else tells you then you know it becomes a meaningful expression. So that was interesting that he said, but yeah, that’s the difference between transcultural and Indigenous Shamanism.

KC: I read somewhere in my because Elen of the Ways is kind of my Patron Goddess and she’s an antlered Goddess. I read somewhere in my research on nomadic deer tribes and reindeer herding tribes that travelled with the herd and they would… I don’t know if it was fly agaric but they ingested something that would allow them to do that kind of journeying where they could take on the form of a bird and fly above and see the whole herd and where they were going and where they were coming from. But I would suspect that those tribes didn’t call it shamanic journeying. I mean based on what you’ve said so far they probably likely called it something else and I’m sure there were only certain people in the tribe that could do it right?

AP: Yeah, I don’t know about this specific tribe. But definitely, when you look at indigenous Shamanisms you will find a lot of things that you could associate with astral projection or shamanic journeying or the flight of the Witches but these are our interpretations and they flatten the complexity of what the actual phenomenon is about. So I am against collapsing things that are different just to make them simpler for us to understand because otherwise you also lose the meaning and the specific elements of that practice.

KC: Okay, thank you. Carla? Questions so far?

Dr Carla Ionescu CI: No I don’t know if I have any questions so far. I think that that’s really fascinating. I understand about the term Shamanism, what makes me wonder, what makes it fascinating is that when you said that now the indigenous cultures apply to themselves in order to really identify themselves for others. I think that’s really fascinating the way that academia influences everyday language, then influences culture which influences academia. It’s fascinating because often academia doesn’t really influence everyday people too much. I don’t know if that’s fair, but you get a little blurb or like a little short piece from academia and people kind of take it and run with it. But this label is really fascinating because the same, I know South American Shamans that refer to themselves as Shamans to sort of let others know that this, you know. So for example from Brazil I have a couple of friends that are Shamans in Brazil and they identify especially when they do retreats and stuff as Shamans. So that’s really fascinating.

AP: I think that academia always influences to different degrees. Sometimes to a very small degree and very often decades after the research has come up. But I think there’s always some kind of influence of academic research especially when it comes to Social Science and Anthropology.

KC: So we’re influenced by academia, we just don’t always know that we’re influenced by academia.

AP: Well, if we want to get philosophical about it I’d say that we are influenced by everything that we come in contact with, not just academia. It’s not like it is, that this big brother thing that tells you what to do when it observes you. It’s more the case that we are generally influenced by all the things that we are surrounded by, the information that we get and how impactful that information is on people around us. So if you have a study, an academic study, that is impactful on certain people, people around you or people in your community, it is much more likely that it will influence you as well.

IO: Yeah, I guess the dilemma comes when the context around academic studying isn’t explained properly or isn’t transmitted as well. People don’t read peer-reviewed journals for fun very much. So it’s kind of what makes it news, right or like a teacher will take a peer review study and then sort of summarize that for her students but yeah the details of the study themselves sometimes fall through the cracks a little bit, sometimes.

AP: Yeah, also there’s the matter of the world’s understanding how peer-reviewed research works – that is not just about one study, especially when we talk about the Natural Sciences, Medicine, Biology and these sorts of fields. It’s not about one study and that’s a very common misunderstanding that I find in the general public, there’s one study on I don’t know 20 or even 200 people and you have a magazine article that says, study finds ‘headline.’ And it is just one study but it’s not how research works. Research works by a network of studies. So if you only have one study that suggests something and it is absolutely important for that study to publish its findings but if they are in contradiction with all the other studies all around the world, especially that is done at a larger scale. Larger scale studies or more recent studies than that one study on 20 people is not as relevant in understanding the specific phenomenon that you’re trying to understand. I saw a lot of that during the pandemic, a lot of misunderstanding as to how research works and just citing studies that hadn’t passed peer review or were very small-scale studies or studies that were not able to be replicated with the same results, with similar methodologies. So that’s also something that is important to highlight, especially for those who are interested in academic knowledge and want to gather how can I get a proper understanding or gather knowledge on a specific subject academically.

KC: Dr Puca, I just want to say I will go back in my research because I’d like to share with you what I read about this these deer cults and then what they call journeying or at least with the what the writers called journeying to see above the whole reindeer flock it was just really interesting. So I’d like to share that with both of you. So can we talk a little bit about the disconnect between academic research in this area and Shamanism in particular? And what I see as a problem in the US, with non-academic people and spiritual practices in general?

Okay, so how do we overcome that? How do we overcome the modern-day spiritual seeker dilemma of misinformation?

AP: So do you mean, I don’t know, I don’t think that I understand the question to be fair? So is it about modern practitioners needing to be more informed about their practice?

KC: Yes.

AP: So well, as you know I’m a scholar, so I don’t think that if you are following a specific religion or a specific spiritual practice you should necessarily be informed academically. It is more a case of when there is a claim on the part of practitioners that is false. So, for instance, if I’m following my own spiritual journey or my own religious journey and I feel that connecting to a certain representation of Diana improves my spirituality and makes me feel better and makes me feel more connected with everything around, around us and around me, then go for it. But if you then claim that that representation of Diana is historical and it comes from I a specific place in Italy and that is not true, that’s where I have a problem, as a scholar, and as somebody who likes accurate information and factual representation of things. So I think that as long as a practitioner has a clear distinction in mind as to what is their own spiritual practice and what is factual historical information, then I, personally, don’t have a problem with that. An example for me is Stregheria, the American tradition that claimed to be Italian. So I have a problem with that as a scholar and as an Italian because there’s nothing Italian about it. But if there’s a person who follows Stregheria and they find meaning in it and it enriches their life, I’m happy for you. It is for me the problem is when people claim that Stregheria is the authentic Italian Witchcraft, created by an American who wasn’t even able to speak Italian. So obviously, for me as an Italian who has also studied Italian Witchcraft in my research, that is an ontological problem. Because that’s not a fact, that’s not true in terms of history and factual information that you’re giving. But I don’t have anything against people that practice it because, if it helps their spiritual journey, then I’m happy for them as long as they realise that it’s not that what they’re doing is a practice, that is a spiritual practice and has nothing to do with Italian Witchcraft.

KC: Were you talking about Raven Grimassi?

AP: Yes.

KC: He could not even speak Italian.

AP: No, he wasn’t able to. I know because I participated in conversations where he was trying to explain to actual Italians the meaning of things that he had no idea what they meant.

KC: So yeah, but Raven Grimassi is a really good example of what I’m talking about, right? Very popular in the West, and people took his word as gospel in the West.

AP: In the US you mean?

KC: Well yeah, in the US.

AP: Even in Canada?

IO: I’m sure I haven’t heard it in Canada, to be honest. I haven’t heard of this group in Canada as a practice, like as a practising group. Most Italians I know are Catholic, in fact, all Italians I know are Catholic and we haven’t even had anyone bring it up. So I’m not sure if it’s practised in Canada unless it’s in a very small Italian circle.

AP: I think it’s very popular in the US because I got since I’ve done research on Italian Witchcraft and actually I systematised in my research Italian Witchcraft, as a whole, for the first time. When he claimed that there was something like Italian Witchcraft and there wasn’t – up until 20 years ago. So it was very regionally based but I think that it’s quite popular in the US because I get a lot of messages from Italian Americans. That, for instance, I really sympathise with them, I sympathise with those Italian Americans who want to reconnect with their heritage and I think that that’s very common in the US regardless of your heritage that people want to reconnect with their heritage and I think that that’s admirable. The problem is that when there is a very Americanised understanding of things that are far away in time and geographically.

KC: So for me, I want people’s spiritual practice to be more research-proven, I guess, but perhaps that it’s just the dilemma of the academic, spiritual person, of the academic spiritual seeker because when I’m interested in something, I do that, I will research as much as I can, outside of a paywall or outside of being in an academic setting, because I want to know that what I’m doing is authentic, I guess. Like I did a lot of research on my own ancestry and then started to research mythology from that particular area of the world on my mother’s side. There are a lot of Polish, Czechoslovakian, Yugoslavian, and Eastern European descent, so I started reading about traditional Witchcraft or traditional spiritual beliefs in those areas of the world. But I realised that I am not your average spiritual seeker.

AP: So I think that there is generally an interest in academic scholarship among practitioners, especially those who practice Paganism, and Witchcraft. There is also an interesting book by a German Professor called Kocku von Stuckrad called “The scientification of Religion” and there are a couple of chapters on Paganism and Shamanism and how they were and are heavily influenced by academic scholarship. There might be different reasons as to why that is. I think that probably one of the reasons is that when you practice Witchcraft and you are Pagan, you’re already kind of at the fringe of what is acceptable by the dominant cultural framework. And since academia and science are accepted, you’re kind of trying to get more of a sense of validation by doing that and also because for some people, as you said Kelly, the historical validity of a specific practice is important, that’s why you have, for instance, reconstructivists. They try, for instance, in Italy, you have Roman reconstructivists and Hellenic reconstructivists depending on the part of Italy. In the South, you will find more Hellenic reconstructivists because obviously there was more influence from Greece and from Egypt. In the Midlands more Roman influence and in the north you also had a Celtic influence. So you will find that reflects in the kind of reconstructivist movements that you find and those who are in reconstructivist movements tend to value a lot the historicity and the historical accuracy.

I think the movements like Wicca, eclectic Wicca and eclectic Witchcraft tend to be more focused on the results, the results that you get from your Magick, the results that you get from your practice, your spiritual practice or your Magick practice. And so in that sense, the information and the accuracy of the background information are less important. It’s the same with Chaos Magick. Chaos Magick basically says all these centuries of Ceremonial Magic practices, let’s just put them aside and make up our own correspondences and our own sigils and what matters is that they work. So I think there are different approaches to spiritual practices. Some tend to value more the accuracy of information and knowledge that you base your practice on and others that tend to value more, perhaps, the results and the kind of benefits in your life, whether they be spiritual or material or whatever you get in your life. So I think that there are different approaches.

KC: Yeah, I see that a lot in Witchcraft culture, in the US it is very results-focused and as a spiritual seeker I get frustrated with that because, in my spiritual path, part of my spiritual path is a reverence for what or who I’m working with. But I see a lot of Witches who just want to use the Goddess that they’re working with as their errand girl and personally I don’t think it’s supposed to work that way. Maybe I’m wrong and if it’s working for them then good for them. But I don’t know, I think when I start taking things personally in the US it’s because there’s such a disregard for tradition or for elder leadership, there’s a big lack of that and I mean maybe it just comes from being a young country. But you mentioned, Dr Puca, you mentioned correspondences and that is probably one of the biggest complaints I have about information that is on the internet because if you type in the name of any Goddess, you know, Diana or Artemis or Athena or Aphrodite or Ellen of the Ways if you type in that Goddess’s name and correspondences you will find conflicting information. I cannot tell you how many times I have tried to find out the correspondences to a particular Goddess and this person says that this Goddess is … I mean there are a million associations. What flowers is she associated with? What animals is she associated with? What crystals and gemstones is she associated with? What parts of the world is she associated with? And you can look at 10 different websites and get 10 different answers and like I want to know. I want to know if the Goddess I’m working from comes from cultural mythology, that the crystal that’s associated with her comes from the part of the world that her folklore mythology comes from. Does that make sense?

AP: Yeah, when it comes to correspondences related to pre-Christian deities even in history you will find contradictory information because I think that also the way contemporary practitioners understand ancient deities now, sometimes doesn’t take into account that certain deities, for instance, Diana or any Roman or Greek deity, they were not unitarian as we would think, you will find that they were worshipped in different ways, depending on the time, depending on the place. So you will find at a specific time and a specific place, for instance, before the Hellenisation of Rome, the Roman gods were forces of nature, it was very animistic. And then after the Hellenisation, they become personified. So which is the right one? Is it the force of nature or is it the personified version? Both are, it just depends, so I think that the problem that the modern practitioner faces even when they want to be accurate in the way they do things is that the way we want to understand deities now is very different from how it was in the past.

So that’s a difficulty that I definitely want to interview more reconstructivists to ask those kinds of questions to them. Because I find, especially for the reconstructivists, because they really want to stick to what history says and I have interviewed some from Rome and they tend to stick to a specific period. So they tend to be accurate in that respect. So they say that they are connecting to the deities from this specific time. So they chose a specific time and they also had a reason for that because it’s the time when you had a bit of a more unified understanding of those deities and you have more sources from that specific time, with Ovid, for instance. So they choose a specific time and a specific way of interacting with those Gods instead of looking at the entirety of the history around those Gods because otherwise, you will find… You know I’m not talking about websites, even in history we will find contradictory information because that’s how things are. Even in Christianity, that’s very dogmatic and institutionalised you will find that across different centuries the perception of the truth or some foundational concepts in Catholicism, for instance, have changed.

KC: I do ask all my guests the same three questions at the end of the show but before I do that what’s the one takeaway that you want the listeners to have from this? And hopefully, you will come back and we can do this again. I know that sometimes people come on the show and my style is very much to interrupt you with questions. So if you come with material prepared chances are you won’t get to it and I’m working on that, I’m working on… I interrupted you far less than I have interrupted others, right? Carla’s shaking her head. Anyway, one takeaway?

AP: One takeaway. I’d say one takeaway from this interview, I hope that people have challenged their preconceptions about Shamanism and about academic scholarship. It can be fun and I try to make it on my Angela’s Symposium YouTube channel.

KC: You do, that YouTube channel it’s very accessible to the non-academic I’ve directed a lot of other people to it. So I’m really glad that you’re doing that, thank you. So the three questions I ask all the guests at the end of the show are fun and non-academic. The first question is, tell us a fun fact about yourself the people that know you well would be surprised to learn.

AP: Yeah, the thing that people that know me would be surprised, you because the fun things about me people that know me will be aware of them, so, I don’t know the fact that I eat a lot of chocolate.

KC: Okay that counts. Tell us about your current favourite TV series or movie.

AP: Oh, my current favourite TV show is A Strange Angel because there’s a representation of Thelema, Crowley’s tradition. So yeah, I found that one interesting.

KC: Yes, me too and the whole first season and kind of the unveiling of Aleister Crowley and all that stuff. Yeah, that’s a good show.

What song, this is the last question, what song would be the theme song of the soundtrack of your life?

AP: That’s a difficult one.

KC: And it can be something we’ve never heard of.

AP: I don’t know because the first song that comes to mind is kind of a bit dark and I’m not sure I would want it to be the soundtrack of my

life. I would need more songs to make the soundtrack. I like the opening song of Outlander.

KC: Okay, yes me too.

AP: I also like the lyrics.

KC: Yes, it’s a great song that’s an amazing theme song like I said we get all kinds of answers. Kendall’s theme song is the Imperial Death March. So well, thank you Dr Puca thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you for putting up with my War and Peace length emails about what we could or couldn’t or should or shouldn’t talk about and I do hope that you come back and see us.

AP: Yes, thank you very much, thank you, Carla and Kelly, for inviting me.

KC: We’ll see you soon. Carla, can you stay on for a minute?

IO: I’ll stay on.

KC: Thank you so much. Thanks for watching or listening if you want more of The Girlfriend God you can find the g Girlfriend God and the

Girlfriend God Podcast on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.

Thank you.

Streamed 12 Feb 2023