Hello and blessings to all! I hope this message finds you in good health and spirits! :-)
I'm Nicole, and I live in Israel. I first came here to research some plastic shamans from Core Shamanism, who claim to be students of the late Twila Nitsch operating and seeking recruits in Israel. We have been fighting their attempts at fooling people and stealing their money for years.
They've toned it down a bit in public, and gone kind of underground, but every once in awhile, they still pop up here and there.
A bit about my background...I am a mixed African American with, according to our family tree, some Catawba/Iswa (unknown percentage), and Anglo-germanic (also unknown percentage). Though I'm not hung up about it, I take the Ancestors very seriously, and believe that if someone is going to borrow, they should do so respectfully and transparently...and that if someone does not wish to share an aspect of their tradition or spirituality, then folks should just suck it up and find or hey, invent their own.
I am a practitioner of what one would call an alternative belief system that is derived from west African Vodun and various Congo beliefs, and over the years I have had to do my own exploration, fact and respectability checking with African priests, and when needed, innovation. I own my innovations, and am happy to. For the life of me I do not understand why someone would need to steal from someone else's culture.
I teach my students that if they don't have an explicit ancestral pantheon or practices already, to start with their own known benevolent Ancestors.
So I do not claim priesthood in any organized, tribal, or national system. I am the female king by consensus, of an ile of witches, and we own the fact that we are renegades and rightly so. We're not "new age" though. We have no fear of history or academic scrutiny, and if someone has an issue with the spirituality thing, we have a lecture about the usefulness of extreme appreciation of Nature and how it is beneficial to one's psychological health. So there.
I went ahead and subscribed so that I could stay abreast of news on the issue of fake shamanism, since here in Israel, it's apparently making a comeback. A friend messaged me recently that she was being invited to a sweatlodge, and wanted to know if the person holding it was legit since he was charging about $15 a head.
Blessings and Ase!
