SHAMANIC FREQUENCIES

Perhaps they’re disenchanted with HMOs. Perhaps those homeopathic herbs had them breaking out in hives. Whatever the reason, a small but noticeable number of cure-seekers are looking for healing in the world of spirits and ancient rituals.

As far as they’re concerned, a medicine man is just what the doctor ordered. And they no longer need to head off to the African bush, or the Amazon basin, or the Siberian steppes to find relief: Urban shamans have hung out their shingles in Orange County.

After being virtually wiped out among indigenous peoples around the globe, shamanism is making a comeback--in the concrete-and-glass bastions of Western civilization. Among the cities where it has a toehold are New York and Vienna, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Locally, advocates of the ancient system of mind-body healing are emerging from varied walks of life. Among those who believe that the basis of disease and its cures lie in another realm--a realm that can be accessed through specific rituals--are a Laguna Beach psychotherapist, a San Clemente author, an anthropologist in Orange and even a long-running mayoral candidate.

While physicians look at cultures under a microscope and to the future for answers, these people look at the cultures of native peoples or into the distant past.

Michael Harner, author of “The Way of the Shaman” (Harper & Row)--a bible, as it were, of the movement--describes the shamanic renaissance that occurred between the first printing of his book in 1980 and the second 10 years later as “startling.”

“These new practitioners are not ‘playing Indian,’ ” Harner writes in the current edition’s preface. “If they get shamanic results . . . they are indeed the real thing. The shamanic work is the same . . . only the cultures are different.”

So what’s a shaman?

It depends on whom you ask. The New Age-friendly shaman has all but replaced such terms as “wizard,” “witch doctor” and “sorcerer.” The beneficent image is that of the baboon Rafiki, Pride Rock’s resident mentor and spiritual guide in “The Lion King.”

The contemporary shaman--like his or her tribal models--typically uses monotonous drumming to enter an altered state of consciousness to acquire knowledge, or power, or to accomplish specific healing.

Similar practices can be observed among tribal peoples from the Inuits and Lapps of the North to the !Kung Bushmen of Africa, from the Aborigines of Australia to the Lakota Sioux of the American plains and, closer to home, California Indians. Anthropologists say the healers in those cultures typically appear to be in a state of trance or ecstasy and often purport to draw upon the power of animal spirits.

And the healers in modern settings? Those who believe say they are drawing on the same power as the ancients did; those who don’t see it as just the latest manifestation of Western civilization’s yearning for the exotic.

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Joseph Pascal is a licensed psychotherapist and family counselor who practices shamanic counseling in Laguna Beach. Pascal’s offices are adjacent to his art gallery and workshop center, A Shaman’s Journey.

“All illness is emotionally based, seen energetically as a blocking in an archetypical form,” he says. “An urban shaman takes the archetypical to a contemporary utilization.”

Farther south, Joy Parker of San Clemente, co-author of “Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path” (Morrow, 1994), believes that a marriage of shamanism and psychotherapy is a snug fit. “Shamans were the first psychologists,” she said. “There’s a great deal of similarity. But we live in a mechanized world now, where instead of talking about emotional pain, a psychiatrist will give a person drugs. Not all psychologists have a deep connection to spirit.”

At least one political candidate in the county feels shamanism and city government could be just as snug.

Juan Pablo Serrano Nieblas, who is listed on his voter registration as a shaman, is undertaking his 21st campaign--”at least,” Nieblas said--for mayor of Orange.

“A shaman is someone who makes others aware,” Nieblas said. “That includes politically. In the old days, he was advisor to the chief. He had a few things to say about the way things were run.”

Also in Orange, Larry Peters, a psychotherapist, anthropologist and research fellow of Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies in Norwalk, Conn., lectures at the California Graduate Institute of Professional Psychology and Psychoanalysis. He was a shamanic initiate in Nepal.

Peters figures that at his practice in West Los Angeles, he devotes 40 hours a month to shamanic work but said he did not feel comfortable going into further detail. He maintains there are “hundreds” of bona-fide shamans living and working in Southern California.

Nieblas wasn’t surprised that Peters was hesitant to talk.

“It’s more open now,” he said. “But even a few years ago, I think they would be frightened to even bring this up. Especially the herbalists, who would be fearful of being hunted down by the law for practicing medicine without a license. I tell them to stand your ground . . . this is cultural.”

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Though shaman author Harner prescribes drug-free methods, many tribes around the world use psychotropic herbs in their shamanic pursuits. According to Nieblas, the son of a Mexican immigrant and a member of the Juan~eno band of mission Indians, the Juan~enos used marijuana in pre-mission days, and many still do.

“Of course you won’t find many that will admit it,” he said. “People talk about Indians using tobacco in their rituals. Why would any Indian use something deadly to their health for sacred ceremonies?”

Nieblas said that he inherited his healing powers from his grandfather, who he said was a noted healer during the Depression. Inheriting power from a grandparent conforms to classic guidelines of many shamanic traditions.

“People came from Los Angeles to see him in Santa Ana,” Nieblas recalled. “I remember lines of people. My grandfather instructed me to sit in a certain place in my living room, and I watched while he gave people the healing touch.”

Until recently, Nieblas worked as a custodian at a local hospital. He didn’t practice shamanism but figured it couldn’t hurt the patients there to be in close proximity to him.

Nieblas was contacted for this interview by letter: “I haven’t had a telephone for 35 years, and it’s heaven,” he said. He makes house calls and says money is not a priority. “One should never charge for one’s spiritual gift.”

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Frank Stainetti, who offers shamanic healings at his private practice in Newport Beach, charges plenty.

For a group session of 30 to 40 people, he bills $35 per person; for individuals, it’s $120 an hour--though, he says, “I never turn anyone away . . . $1, $5, it’s important to pay something.”

A chiropractor and nutritionist, Stainetti says he has studied myriad alternative healing techniques, including shamanic training with Harner, with a Hopi medicine man in the United States, and with an Ojibwa medicine man in Canada. He uses five Native American power spirits, or guides, that he says can either “shape-shift into animals” or remain “pure light.”

He recalled a recent session with a woman who reported abdominal pain:

“I put on a recording of drumming at 7.5 to 8 hertz frequency--there’s not always somebody available to do the drumming. The client went into trance . . . I [went] inter-dimensionally into the client’s spiritual body.”

What he found, he says, was inter-dimensional evidence of sexual abuse, on the strength of which he decided that the core issue of the woman’s pain was shame and self-hatred.

“She had just shut off feeling in that area,” Stainetti said. “Once energy has been blocked long enough, in this case for 30 years, a pathology will occur.”

According to Stainetti, that woman went for a medical examination, and the pathology that had occurred was multiple uterine fibroid tumors.

While the American Medical Assn. takes no position on alternative types of healing, one can safely assume that the mainstream medical community would be appalled at the thought of a person with abdominal pain turning to a shaman for treatment.

Stainetti believes he had a positive affect on the condition.

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What initially intrigued Pascal was the similarity between the shamanic trance state and that of schizophrenics. “The schizophrenic cannot come back,” he said. “The shaman can go into the other worlds and return at will. I wanted to experience that.”

In 1991, Pascal went with a group of anthropologists to study shamans in Nepal. He says he has been HIV positive for 14 years, and also hoped to undergo shamanic treatment.

While trekking, he contracted severe giardiasis, an intestinal infection often caused by drinking unpurified water; his companions, who were considering airlifting him out, carried him instead to the house of a shaman with whom they were studying.

The shaman spent two days preparing for an elaborate ritual, making a variety of objects including little clay birds. The ritual itself lasted for 20 hours; it began with drumming used to induce trance in both the shaman and his patient. Toward the end, Pascal recalled, “he rubbed a rooster all over my body. At the climax of the ritual, he chopped off the head. Always it’s a death and rebirth.” The shaman also cut down a nearby tree.

Pascal said that the giardiasis disappeared and that the next morning he climbed to 11,000 feet and continued trekking for a week. Upon his return to the United States, he said, tests indicated that his HIV condition had improved: “My T-cells went into normal range,” he said.

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Parker, the San Clemente author, was raised a conservative Christian and attended a Christian college, where she says her religion “was completely distorted.”

Her experiences at school led to deep disillusionment and agnosticism. While living in New York City, she says, she studied with a woman who had studied with a shaman in Peru.

But Parker stops short of calling herself a shaman, keeping in mind conversations she had with Malidoma Some, a West African “healer from a family of healers.”

“When Some started writing books and doing workshops, everyone wanted to use the word ‘shaman’ because that word is big bucks on book covers,” Parker said. “But to Some a shaman was something truly extraordinary. You call in the shaman in a crisis, in dire circumstances. He would never call himself a shaman.”

Parker was editor for a book with Some called “Of Water and Spirit: Ritual, Initiation and Magic in the Life of an African Shaman.” Now she serves as an editor for another writer, Martin Prechtel of Santa Fe. While the line is not always clear between healer and shaman, Parker says she considers Prechtel a true shaman.

“Prechtel spent many years living with the Mayas and was initiated by them as a shaman,” Parker said. “I am helping him to translate his experiences into a book. His teacher told him that he needed to bring these beliefs to North America, which they call ‘The Land of the Dead.’ ”

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Paul Apodaca, a curator at Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, is among those who believe that the word “shaman” is overused.

He explained that “shamanus” is a specifically Tungusian word, “shaman” is the Russian word; the Tungus are an East Siberian people who report that certain individuals have near-death experiences and emerge from those experiences with great insight and power.

“The tendency of hippies and anthropologists from the 1960s forward was to use the word to refer to anyone not involved with Western traditions of healing,” Apodaca said. “It would be impossible to link African, Celtic and Arctic traditions with those of the Tungus. ‘Shaman’ is used now for everything from Navajo singers to Polynesian ceremonial leaders.”

Apodaca also decries the notion that “at some time in our prehistoric past there was a universal system of accessing power and using it for good or for bad, and that all peoples in the world had insights into that system. If that is true, that is the only universal system on the planet. All other [systems] have been arrived at by independent sources at independent times.”

In any case, the heightened interest in the West in shamanism is fairly predictable, Apodaca says.

“This is just a new twist on an old colonial urge--the new twist using mysticism to try to place oneself in the position of being universally all-knowing.”