Michael Harner Quotes

He (the Shaman) is a self-reliant explorer of the endless mansions of a magnificent hidden universe.

You are human, whether your ancestors come from Europe, Asia, Africa, or wherever, shamanism once existed there. We are just attempting to go home to our spiritual roots before the state religions, the agrarian centralized religions rose up with autocratic government and said, 'This is what you're going to believe, these are the official revelations, take it from us, you can trust us, we got it.'

What's really important about shamanism is that there is another reality that you can personally discover...we are not alone.

Shamanism is a path of knowledge, not of faith, and that knowledge cannot come from me or anyone else in this reality. To acquire that knowledge, including the knowledge of the reality of the spirits, it is necessary to step through the shaman's doorway and acquire empirical evidence.

If a state political organization is founded in part upon a state religion with a dogma based on one or a few 'official' prophets, then shamanism, where every shaman is her or his own prophet, is dangerous to the state. [...] Shamanism, as I said, is not a religion. The spiritual experience usually becomes a religion after politics has entered into it.

Shamanism is being reinvented in the West precisely because it is needed

Shamanism is a great metal and emotional adventure, one in which the patient as well as the shaman-healer are involved

Most of the sacrifices involved tearing out the heart, offering it to the sun and, with some blood, also to the idols