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In this week’s episode, I’m very pleased to welcome author, teacher and practitioner of quite a few different (or not so different) occult traditions, Chris Allaun. Chris has published no fewer than five books in four years, the most recent fifth one, A Guide of Spirits, will be out on October 1, 2021 and we’ll be talking about it of course during our conversation.
Chris grew up in a fairly spiritual family of Presbyterian Christians with a psychic mother who used to talk to him about ghosts and dreams, visions, spirits and angels. As long as they came from god, they were kind of acceptable. However, Chris soon found out that his connection to nature played a huge role in what he perceived to be the divine so at age 17 he started to read books on paganism and witchcraft and kept this interest to himself until his later college years.
Due to his partly Cherokee Native American heritage Chris soon decided to dive deeper into indigenous spirituality, especially Lakota and Apache traditions. In 2000 the first formal teacher Chris studied with entered his life and trained him in paganism, magic, witchcraft and shamanism, which is indeed a very wide variety of different traditions. As this teacher was an ordained pagan priest he initiated Chris into this current in 2002 at age 27, and he has been practising and teaching paganism and shamanism for many years now.
The Cover of just one of the five books that Chris published recently. Find most of them with his publisher Mandrake from Oxford, or on his author’s page on Amazon.
In our conversation two kindred souls will be talking about how shamanism and civilisation interact and sharing experiences on attending sweat lodge (Lakota: inipi) ceremonies and entering deep trance states.
As I often do, I also asked Chris what his personal definition of magic is. Furthermore, we’ll be exploring how the concepts of the Right Hand and Left Hand Path tie in with shamanism and other forms of occult practices and what the ultimate goal of both might be. A definition of Traditional Witchcraft and its connections to shamanism will be another fascinating topic of this conversation.
All in all, prepare yourself for an extraordinary episode where syncretism at its best is to be enjoyed, in a very holistic, deeply connected way but at the same time going into detail instead of the superficiality of many negative examples to be found in occulture nowadays.
Music played in this episode
In the episode, Chris and I were also talking about the diversity between and at the same time the common ground of different forms of Shamanism across the globe.
So, in this episode, I picked three pieces of music with Shamanic background from three different parts of the world.
I say “Shamanic background”, so do not expect original Shamanic music, but contemporary interpretations and influences.
1) LAKOTA PEYOTE HEALING – North American
by Robbie Robertson, Verdell Primeaux and Johnny Mike
(Track starts at 6:27)
2) THE CALL OF THE SHAMAN – Siberian
by Olena Uutai
(Track starts at 49:29)
SPOILER ALERT! – I’m asking where this music comes from in the podcast, only revealing it after it being played. So if you want to guess, do not read further beforehand!
3) OZOLINI – Latviam
by the bagpipe and drum group “Auli”
