The Morning Muse │Creativity │Life │Inspiration

The Writer as An Artist and A Shaman

The writer stands between two worlds, everyday life and the world of story.

“Writer As a Shaman” designed by Author (Carmellita) in Canva

Indulgence can be sweet when done in moderation. This morning after a walk on the treadmill and a long warm, then cold shower, I’m ready to indulge in my innocent pleasure.

Yes, sliced apples with cinnamon, a pinch of salt, and a tablespoon of date syrup drizzled on top, yum.

See, I told you — an innocent pleasure.

I crunch on the delectable treat as I contemplate the writer as an artist and the writer as a shaman.

How have we as artists and writers learned to stand between two worlds, the visible and the invisible? I question.

…the role of the artist has been compared to the role of the shaman. This is because the artist’s role has always been one of mediator, transformer and most prominently visionary.

The role of both the artist and shaman has always been to stand between two worlds: that of the visible and the invisible.

The viewers, or the community in the case of the shaman, entrust the artist to go forth into the realm of the invisible and return with a gift: the invisible transformed into the visible. — Dr. Clare Milledge

As a writer extracting the beauty from the above passage, I can see the viewer as the reader and the writer as the artist. This journey into the invisible imagination (I-Magi-Nation) and the conscious crafting and weaving of story and myth is the walk between two worlds.

Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, whose literary research posited the existence of a Monomyth (a word he borrowed from James Joyce), demonstrated that all myths tell a similar, universal story.

In his work, Campbell emphasized that every culture and tradition expressed the multidimensionality of the human experience and how it is a journey and adventure from the mundane to the magnificent, the physical to the metaphysical, and the human to the hero.

Perhaps not deliberately, but many writers as artists become shamans. As both artist and shaman, the writer imagines and creates worlds of…