Shaman or Sham man?

A few days after I was extoling the healing power of shamanism a self proclaimed warrior shaman   presiding over a plasticized sweat lodge sent several new agers to the hospital and two to meet their ancestors  thereby further discrediting shanmanistic healing in the eyes of the masses, 99% of whom already  believe it to be bullshit anyway.


Nanny staters and grandstanding politicians will call to regulate or, much better,  outlaw  sweats or shamanry.  The fact that each day a hundred times as many folks die from medical errors in our hospitals will go unremarked. Plaintiff's attorneys will go after the resort and maybe even Oprah.  Hopefully Ray gets a bit of jail time, in Arizona with it's high percentage of native inmates.

But was James Ray even a warrior, or much less, a shaman? Not by my reckoning. He may have been sincere in his beliefs, but he was  expropriating Native traditions, messing around with spiritual energies he had no comprehension of.  He was definitely tapping into something powerful, though. Those  gullible (paid 9k) rubes were  not the types normally willing to endure much in the way of discomfort, yet were willing to sit in his sweat box unto their deaths.

At least he made good on his promise of a life-changing experience.