Columbus Monthly (OH) magazine (July 2016 issue) had a story about a reiki center. Among other “professional therapies” offered at that location were “shamanic services.” Shamanism is defined by Webster’s as: “religion . . . characterized by belief in an unseen world of gods, demons, and ancestral spirits responsive only to the shaman.”
It’s interesting that reiki practitioners (including ones billed as “Christian reiki”) tend to speak in terms of “energies” and deny the fact that reiki has anything to do with actual spirits. Yet now, facilities offering “therapies” like reiki might also offer shamanic healing, which is openly acknowledged as a calling on/connecting with spirits.
Until now (at least, in my experience) references to shamans were pretty subtle. Tiny blurbs in the occasional magazine. But after seeing that article, I thumbed through the newest issue of a little New Age magazine and . . . whoa! Several stories/ads about shamans and shamanic healing. In one ad, the shaman even promises to “make death an ally.” (No thanks.)
I decided to search “Christian shaman” online—hoping to come up empty. But I spotted several references. Mind-boggling. Shaman, sorcerer, witch doctor, medium . . . Whatever you want to call it, it makes me so sad to think of people engaging a mediator to connect to lesser “spirits,” when everyone is invited to go directly to THE Spirit, the Lord Almighty himself.
Re: Sept 1, 2018. I am from the Columbus, Ohio area (born in that city) and while continuing to read your articles found the one re: Columbus Monthly mag. Just last week I was snooping around on the web and reading a lot of the blog of the business called Yoga on High which is, of course, a place that teaches Yoga and other occult things. Many of their teachers a featured on the blog and it seems just about all of them do Reiki. And some crowed about doing classes for local school kids and school teachers. In Upper Arlington, an affluent suburb of Columbus they are doing yoga in their elementary school called a Progressive school. Funny, they don’t have a Conservative/Traditional school in that system. It’s tax-payer funded so how are they doing yoga there, I wonder? Another yoga teacher is doing yoga in a local school in a poorer neighborhood. What’s to be done? I don’t know.