Into the Mystic

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 Southern California.

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, Vienna, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

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 West Los Angeles anthropologist and psychotherapist, a Newport Beach chiropractor, a San Clemente author 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 is 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 Aborigines of Australia. 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 archetypal form,” he says. “An urban shaman takes the archetypal to a contemporary utilization.”

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

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

“A shaman is someone who makes others aware,” Nieblas says. “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.”

Larry Peters, an anthropologist and psychotherapist who practices in West Los Angeles, is a research fellow of Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies in Norwalk, Conn. Peters was a shamanic initiate in Nepal.

Peters figures that he devotes 40 hours a month to shamanic work but says he doesn’t feel comfortable going into further detail. He maintains there are “hundreds” of bona-fide shamans living and working in Southern California.

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

“It’s more open now,” he says. “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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Shaman-author Harner prescribes drug-free methods, but 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 says. “People talk about Indians using tobacco in their rituals. Why would any Indian use something deadly to their health for sacred ceremonies?”

Nieblas says he inherited his healing powers from his grandfather, who he says 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 recalls. “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 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 says. He makes house calls and says money is not a priority. “One should never charge for one’s spiritual gift.”

That’s not the case with Frank Stainetti, who offers shamanic healing at his private practice in Newport Beach.

For a group session of 30 to 40 people, he bills $35 per person; for individuals, it’s $120 an hour--although, 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 recalls 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 a 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 the core issue of the woman’s pain was shame and self-hatred.

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

Stainetti says the 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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The word “shaman” is overused, says Paul Apodaca, a curator at Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana who teaches at UCLA in the World Arts and Cultures Department.

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 says. “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.”