Shamanic Practices with Nicki Scully

Thinking Allowed Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery, with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we'll be exploring shamanic initiation. With me is Nikki Scully, who is a shaman and author. She is the co-author with Norman D. Ellis of The Union of Isis and Thoth. Her other books include Alchemical Healing, Planetary Healing, and The Anubis Oracle. Welcome Nikki. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you. I've known of your work for a very long time, and I know it's been nearly 30 years since we were together when you officiated at the marriage of my dear friend Fred Allen Wolfe. That was a long time ago, and it was a very fun wedding. Indeed, indeed it was. And I know you have been engaged in shamanic practices going back a very long time, perhaps even before you realized it. Well before I realized it. In fact, I was considering becoming a Reiki master back in the days when it cost $10,000 and it had to be your full life's work. And the world Reiki master told me, before you commit to this, you really need to look into shamanism. I didn't even know what it was. She said, because your life experience has been one of shamanic initiations. And as much as I would love to have you part of our lineage, I really think you need to explore shamanism. And so that was the direction that I got that sort of led me into noticing that part of it. Well, one often thinks of shamanism as being associated with indigenous peoples and close to nature and animals, and yet you are so closely identified with the ancient Egyptian mystery traditions which involve temples that people don't normally associate with shamanism. Well, there's two directions I'd like to go here. Okay. First, the source of shamanism, which actually was from, I believe it's the Tungus tribe in Siberia. And when you were called to shamanism in that tribe, you went crazy. That was your calling. And if you didn't respond, you would go crazy. It's like a shamanic illness. Exactly. And if you answered the call and gave your commitment, then you would be able to learn what that meant in that culture. Now, the word is so overused, it's bandied about for all sorts of things. But what people don't realize about Egypt, they think of it as this high civilization, which it absolutely was, but they don't think of it in terms of shamanism. Yet in a recent book by Jeremy Nadler called Shamanism or Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Text, he talks about how those instructions that archaeologists assumed were for the dead person that was to live in that tomb, to give them instructions for the afterworld, were actually instructions for the living pharaoh who underwent initiations in order to keep their direct connection to divine source so that they could rule from that place of divinity. They were considered divine. And the difference between now and then is that the time for charismatic leaders is over. It's just not trustworthy anymore. They don't exist. And each of us has to step up to the plate of our own authority by however we are given through either rites of passage, initiations, in response to a calling, training, learn that divinity exists within us and that when we make relationship with that, when we prepare ourselves as a temple for divinity to live in, then we have direct access to source at all times. And the job of a shaman is to be able to traverse back and forth between the worlds in order to bring back healing, power, information for their communities. It's not a self-aggrandizing sorcery that we're talking about here. We're talking about a service and it's a calling. And frankly, we've disposed of the indigenous culture for the most part, thank goodness it's still thriving and coming back in a strong way. But there are so many people on this planet that don't have access to that, that shamanic experience is bubbling up into the culture. You talked about the shamanic illness as the beginning, the wounded shaman, the shaman has to learn how to heal themselves. That's definitely part of it. There's various ways in, there's so many indigenous cultures, all of which are based on some level of shamanism. And many of them include the wounded healer. A sense of death and rebirth. Well, part of the shamanic journey is not just once, but many times the shamanic death, the illumination that comes with that, then the regeneration and rebirth. For after all, when it gets down to it, it's what is important enough to incarnate, to consolidate yourself into a form that's small enough to fit into a body when one can imagine that in death, everything is wide open to you. So what is it that is so compelling? Is it perhaps the taste of chocolate? Is it perhaps that, how much brighter the colors are when you're first born? And how do you renew that, that sense of wonder and awe? How can you live in that state, which is of course the desired state as far as I'm concerned. And one accomplishes that through vision questing or other rites of passage. Even the sweat lodge, for example, that cleanse you sufficiently so that when you come out of the experience, it's like being reborn and everything is fresh and new. I suspect that in our culture, many people are experiencing the beginnings of this process, and feeling that they're going crazy. And it may be unfortunate for some if they get into the hands of the mental health system where they get diagnosed and stigmatized and drugged. It happened to me. And fortunately, I had community around me at the time that was smart enough to get me out of there and to help me to understand that mine was an initiatory path, that I wasn't really crazy, that these were the signs and expressions of someone who is called to the shamanic pathway. I don't call myself a shaman. One is conferred by one's community, the community that you serve. One who calls himself a shaman, it's a bit egotistical, in my opinion, unless you're someone like the original black elk who went through the visionary experience and the training to, and again, it was conferred by his tribe. And so there's a lot of confusion, especially when people who aren't indigenous wind up being called or falling into that path. And I was very lucky in my case, I was handed over to teachers who recognized me and helped me to understand who I was and what my service was. And it's been, as I understand it, a very long process of continual initiations. A very long and continually ongoing process. And even in ancient Egypt, the pharaohs had to renew their rights every, it's supposed to be 30 years, but I think they usually did it every about seven years, sometimes every three years, where they would have to prove themselves as having that direct connection to divinity so that their words can be accepted as the words of a god. And those rights were very shamanic and they were very rigid and they were tough. You had to fast, you had to go through many rights that are similar to some of the Native American rights of shamanism. And until you go to Egypt and you look on the walls and you see that the gods are shown in human bodies with animal heads, that you realize this is a nature religion. Their gods were the Netaru, they were the principles of nature that were observed for thousands of years and named and according to your station, which was related to your education, which was usually related to the priesthood, and whether you could read the hieroglyphs, you had a very different understanding of what was said on the walls of the temples. For me, having Norman D. Ellis as a partner and traveling to Egypt with somebody who can actually read those hieroglyphs, it's very illuminating and you can begin to see the different levels of understanding that are required to move upward in that ladder of consciousness to become the fully realized human that we are striving for, that we're all striving for. Well, it strikes me as you describe the process that it's happening at two ends. It's as if the Netaru, these powers, these animal nature powers, highly animated, are reaching out to you. Absolutely. Same time, you're reaching out to them and you connect and work together. It's amazing because when I first met Thoth, my teacher, was through a transmission from my physical teacher, who in no way wanted to share the stage with anyone else. As soon as she realized when she had me journey to the Aeneid, that it was Thoth that was my mentor and teacher, she was downplaying it. It took me a year and a student that came to me that was much smarter than me, that was actually a teacher, that was called in the shower, an elemental I had sent out looking for students, came to him and said, go to Will Nofky's New Horizons and take this class. Yes, Will is an old friend of mine, a radio interviewer from back in the 1970s. And when this student appeared, it was obvious that he knew way more than I did, and I didn't know what he was doing there. So when he had a non-experience of the most important journey, I needed to know why. And we couldn't get together again right away, so we got together on the telephone. And as I began to initiate him, he began to see what was happening around me because that's what I do, I'm a catalyst. So he gave me a vision that has held true for all these years, and I'm finally catching up with that. We're talking about decades. We're talking about decades where he was able to tell me what was going to happen for me in my life and give me the symbols and images to look out for and what they would mean. And I was able to follow my own progress through this rite of passage that I thought I was giving to one of my students, that in actuality he was giving to me. Well, you're getting at a very core principle here. It seems as if what you're really describing is oneness. You and your student and nature and the world around us and the stones and the wood, we're one with all of it. It seems as if we're actors in a drama, but we're also the whole drama. And our purpose right now is to develop our sensitivities to be able to be aware of what's happening around us, enough to read the signs and to know for ourselves what is true and authentic for us, to see from our hearts rather than from our heads. I'd like to touch, at least briefly in our remaining time, on your book, Planetary Healing, because it strikes me that as people become aware of their gifts as shamans or as healers or as mystics or even as meditators, we develop natural healing ability. It's just part of the path, I think, for everybody. And what you point out in that book is that we all have a certain responsibility incumbent upon us to use that healing to help heal the whole planet. That's correct. Now, my books have an evolution to them. And Planetary Healing is part of a trilogy that includes alchemical healing, which gives everybody the initiations, the rites, the maps, so that they can learn everything they need to know to become a healer, full range from laying out of hands to psychic surgery, working with animal totems. Planetary Healing is the next level, where you go from one-on-one to situations, to the environment, to environmental diseases and what are the allies that can help us heal that and how we can join together with the exponential power of our numbers to achieve a greater capacity in healing. It seems to me that we live in a very special time. Well, actually, ever since the human species, since Homo sapiens evolved as a species, we have been responsible for the greatest extinction of other life forms that this planet has ever seen. And as we become conscious, and not just living in our animal bodies, it does become incumbent upon us, I think, to try and rectify what our species has been doing for the last 30,000 years. It's our responsibility, our ability to respond to what's going on around us, that is going to allow us to find the solutions to the mess that we have created. And I mean, it's a matter of manners. You never leave a place in worse condition than you arrived there. You always try and improve it. Well, when we arrived on this planet, it was, by most accounts, a Garden of Eden. And now it's much more of a wasteland. And we don't have a lot of time. We're up for a major die-off, and maybe that has to happen. At the same time, those of us who are waking up, those of us who are being gifted with the co-creative power of solution, it's our responsibility to share that. It's as though life has been a treasure hunt, and each treasure is like a terma in the terma tradition in Tibet, where your whole life is about being at the right place at the right time so that you're given this gift of knowledge. And you have to decipher it, translate it, and then make it available to the world. And in a sense, all of us who are awakening are in that position. And when we see our lives that way, then we can live a life of awe, because we realize that the miracles are happening around us constantly. It's just a matter of paying attention, being aware, and realizing that we can participate in miracles, that we can help to co-create the miracles that can and will bring back that garden. Now, you yourself have talked about your communication, your intimate, personal relationship with Thoth, who is also sometimes associated with the Greek god Hermes, the Roman god Mercury, the messenger who goes back and forth between the realm of the humans and the realm of the gods. And if I recall correctly, he's also something of a trickster. Oh, yes. And he teaches with such humor. He's just as likely to show up with his feet up on his desk and using a cigar cutter to trim his ibis talons and smoking a cigar and being Groucho Marx. And when you make these relationships, you learn the sigil or the signature of each being. And once you know that vibratory frequency, you can't be fooled. So once you've made a relationship with Thoth and developed that relationship, there's no one that can trick you. And you always recognize no matter who he's coming through or what situation he appears in, that's Thoth. And it's the same with the bear, which is one of the most ubiquitous healing allies. Once you know bear and have that relationship, then you can not only call on bear to help you at any time, but you recognize when bear is showing up and needs to be brought in to help a situation because bear has that unique gift for that moment. And every aspect of nature has that. Plant, mineral. You also draw upon some of the Asian traditions as well, if I recall, Kuan Yin. Kuan Yin. And in fact, yesterday I had a reading in which Medicine Buddha showed up. And it was a really interesting mixture of working with the cauldron as I use it in alchemical healing and the Medicine Buddha and his vessel and his herbs and combining those and amplifying the healing in that way. And then, of course, Kuan Yin is accessible throughout the world as she who harkens to the call of the suffering. Now, let me ask you this, because from my esoteric way of thinking, it strikes me that Isis and Kuan Yin are kind of similar, along with Mary, you know, the great mother goddess. You use that term sigil, the unique signature of each being. That's an old hermetic word that it's like a symbol. There's one of, I can't remember which of my books has the initiation, I think it's alchemical healing, where each person receives their own sigil and it's implanted in their heart. And then they can be recognized by others of that level of training as who they are, because that unique vibration is like a thumbprint or the DNA that is uniquely yours. And so whether you're a god or a human, you carry that within you. And are the gods the same from culture to culture? I think they're more like cousins. I think Hathor is very much related to white buffalo calf woman. And yet they are not the same. They're very different. For she is a water buffalo. Hathor, in Egypt, is the water buffalo. And the white buffalo calf is the Native American bison. And so the DNA is different. The DNA is different, and yet much of their message is really similar and will play out similarly whether you are in Egypt or following the Red Road here in the United States. Following the Red Road. The Red Road. Well, you seem to walk on many roads. I kind of see it as a wheel, the wheel of life, and there is a central hub, and there are all these spokes that connect and make that wheel whole. And I think that too many of them makes us more of a dilettante. But if you just have two or three that you really deeply understand, then you know that the source is the same. And they're all connected, they're all equal, and it's like they all deserve their own integrity. So you can wear your hair down and you can have a plate for Native American. You can have a plate for Egyptian. You can have a plate for Buddhist. And then if you keep those with their integrity and you braid them, you will have something that is stronger, it's pliable, it's beautiful, and it holds all three with integrity. Nikki Scully, that was profound and elegant and beautiful. Thank you. So much for sharing that with us. My pleasure. It's been a joy to talk with you. And thank you for being with us.