A History of Healing Magick
Healers have been in demand from the beginning of
humankind, for accidents and illnesses of the body,
mind, and spirit have always been with us. These early
spiritual healers were shamans; shamanism is the
world's oldest spiritual healing profession. The traceable
roots of shamanism date from the Stone Age, at least
forty thousand years. However, common sense tells us
that the profession of shamanism must go back even
further, before humans felt any need to record their
activities in cave paintings.
Although the descriptive word used to designate a
shaman was different from culture to culture, the
training and practices of a shaman were remarkably
similar everywhere in the world, even today. In this
book, the word shaman is used to simplify the
description, although the word shaman comes only from
the Tunguso-Manchurian dialect and means "to know."
People generally connect shamanism with the Eskimo,
African, and Native American cultures. However, a
branch called Celtic shamanism existed for centuries,
finally dying out in Scotland and Ireland as the cultures
succumbed to the power of implanted religions.
Out of necessity, the early shamans (both men and
women) were a combination of healer, magician, and
priest. Early peoples knew that healing, magick, and the
spiritual were inexplicably intertwined and should not
be separated. The primary purposes of shamans were,
and still are, to travel to the Otherworld in their
spiritual bodies, to work positive magick, and to mediate
and communicate with spirits and deities in the
Otherworld. In this way, they are able to retrieve
information that is unknown on the ordinary levels of