Is therioshamanism based on core shamanism?
No, primarily because I find core shamanism, which originated with Michael Harner (particularly his book The Way of the Shaman) to be an incomplete view of shamanism, practically speaking. Some of my reasons, which I detail in this essay, deal with cultural issues–specifically Harner’s attempt to make core shamanism culturally neutral, and I also talk some about the narrow technical focus of core shamanism on healing. Core shamanism places the techniques first in most cases that I’ve seen, and the spirit relationships are auxiliary to this, a means to an end. Harner sends you out, after reading The Way of the Shaman, with a single power animal. A good deal of the rest of the book is dedicated to an assortment of healing techniques which the shaman mainly facilitates hirself. I tend to focus more on the relationships with the spirits. Techniques are important, but there’s only so much you can really do with bare-bones techniques. They need to lead somewhere, after all. Therefore, I see
