Greetings.
I am the individual who once wrote books under the pen name Frank MacEowen; a name I selected very consciously to honor a specific ancestral line that traces back to County Tyrone, Ireland, and then to the Strathlachlan area of Scotland (Kilfinnan). Though some have suggested that this spelling is "inaccurate", the Clan MacEwen and MacDougall. recognizes nearly a hundred alternate spellings of the names associated with the name, and MacEowen is recognized by both Clan MacEwen and Clan MacDougall.
That is neither here nor there. That is not why I am here. That is not why I am writing on this forum.
In large part, I am writing to clarify some misinformation here.
Let us start with this notion of "Celtic Shaman". I have never--once--claimed to be a shaman. In fact, in dozens of talks I have given throughout the U.S. and Ireland, I have explicitly stated that I do not consider myself a shaman and that I abhor such representations of me. I have studied with and spent time with legitimate medicine people in certain cultures (such as the Lakota; people who would not use the term "shaman" themselves anyway), and I have always told people that unless you are living within a community and serving in such a role, with the sanction of elders, 24/7, then the use of the term is quite laughable. I understand why Mircea Eliade, the scholar who wrote Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, coined the term "shamanism"; he was trying to point toward a common theme he observed in a number of cultures, from Hawaii to Korea, but when we are talking about the actual practice of such a thing, I've always said I believe the cultural terms themselves are more appropriate e.g. curandero in Mesoamerican cultures, etc.
Back to the "Celtic Shaman" thing.
I have never purported to be such a thing. However, I *have* been misrepresented as such a thing by people attempting to write bios for programs, articles, and such. It is one of the key reasons I stopped teaching. I saw very quickly that there was no way for me to accomplish what I was really trying to accomplish (awaken and heal people's connection to the natural world, and kindle some living awareness of their ancestors) without *everything* I was doing being contorted, misshapen, and commercialized into a marketable commodity. It sickened me, I tried to counteract this tendency, but eventually gave up and realized I needed to go my own way.
About Jackson Hole, Wyoming: I was never "from" Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was invited to come present a talk at the Teton Wellness Festival. It was one of the last such gatherings I ever did.
About Arvol Looking Horse: The statements made below about my post to Arvol Looking Horse are somewhat mischaracterized. I was not "schooling" Arvol in my conversations with him online. I've done interviews with Arvol and wrote an article (with his participation and permission) for Shambhala Sun in the early days (old news print version, pre-syndicated magazine) about the history of Lakota spirituality, along with his commentary and concerns about the misappropriation of Lakota spirituality by people who are charging money for ceremonies. I have a great deal of respect for Arvol and his family, and his role in traditional Lakota society. I myself was welcomed in to traditional Lakota ceremonies by a Lakota family, and was a Sun Dancer in a Sun Dance with the Oglala medicine man Vernal Cross, who also had a strong connection with Arvol. The only characterization that is legitimate and true about the comments below are that the conversations between Arvol and I did, in fact, involve the sweat lodge.
The fact of the matter is, there is not only early evidence of earthen-mound sweat houses used throughout Ireland and parts of Scotland (as late as 1916 by curing doctors using them as herb-dousing houses to cure rheumatism and pneumonia), there is still contemporary use of sweat houses in Ireland today. Even a summary search on Google will pull up some articles on this from the University of Edinburgh. Of course the sweat house in Celtic lands is not and never has had anything to do with Lakota spirituality, Native American spirituality (Irish cosmology is very different), but I was simply sharing that information with Arvol and others, as it was becoming a very hot topic (pardon the pun) in Celtic circles at that time.
About Jenny Blain and her article about me: I have since had a conversation with Jenny. I have already told her this, but for the purposes of this forum I will repeat it here. I have no qualms about anything she had to say about me. I think she sizes up the New Age and neo-shamanic community pretty well. There is a deep desire of this group of people (I'm not talking about conscious abusers of native spirituality) to plug-in to a spirituality that they feel can be their own. Some gravitate to Wicca. Others gravitate to "neo-shamanism". Some feel a legitimate stirring of something within themselves and, because they do--in fact--hail from Irish, Welsh, and Scottish ancestry, there is a very powerful call to reconnect with something...let's call it a spiritual sense of ancestry.
Jenny's essay (which is excellent by the way) portrays me as a man grasping at straws to find some living, vital link to my blood ancestors, and to a perceived way of life, or perhaps a time in history, when people lived a life that was more honoring of the natural world. I still feel that, and still seek that, but I no longer attempt to do that through a self-constructed "Celtic" lens, largely cobbled together by archetypal impressions.
In my first book, I express the same thing. A man. Searching. Hurting. Seeing the world ailing. Seeing others. Grasping.At.Straws. Living in the United States of America, a largely plastic disposable culture that has no consciousness that it is dooming future generations to an existence of suffering (environmentally speaking). I had spent enough time, legitimately, with indigenous people that I know/knew another way is different. And, I had elders (West African, Native American, etc.) strongly suggest that I try to find in my own cultural background some "link up" to the natural way. THAT was what a lot of my work, writing, and journey was about. It was never about making a buck. It was never about making a name for myself. So, I am no shaman. If anything, I am a frustrated closet-anthropologist. A frustrated ecologist. A frustrated psychologist who understands the implications of a dying world, dying communities, dying cultures, and a life of modernity without a nature-honoring spirituality of some kind.
My ancestors were, in fact, of Gaelic origins. They were forced to leave Ireland during the Famine. Before that, they were run out of Scotland. Anything I ever attempted to do, however misinformed, however off-target from a scholarly point of view, had a central aim: Trying to help Americans who are a by-product of the Irish and Scottish diaspora to reconnect with the inspiration and spirit of the lands their predecessors were forced to leave, often under painful duress.
In any case, "Frank MacEowen" is dead now. So, you can take one "New Age Fraud" off of your list.
Deep Peace.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCjjsmcOnxs&feature=share&list=PL1708137942FFA3CC&index=1Remember Frank MacEowen, the 'Celtic Shaman' from Jackson Hole, Wyoming? I don't know whether you have to be aware that what you purvey is false to qualify as a fraud: maybe this guy should be classed as sadly deluded.
He responded to the 2003 protection of ceremonies declaration by writing to Arvol Looking Horse bizarrely claiming that his 'Celtic ancestors' had ceremonies very similar his modern-day ripoffs of Native religions, so he felt the declaration didn't apply to him. Trisha had some communication with him, I think.
Here's an article about MacEowen by a Scottish neo-pagan, Jenny Blain:
http://www.sacredsites.org.uk/papers/Blain_J-perm.pdf
She's rather PO'd by his utter lack of concern for historical accuracy and for the people who he claims are his ancestors. So am I: his surname and mine are the same, though I got it through my stepfamily, and it's spelt differently. Blain exposes MacEowen's 'research' as typical of the frankly p*ss-poor standard prevailing in the 'shamanic' community:
"Oh, no, not again! Why does everything have to be labelled ‘Celtic’ or (as here) ‘Pictish’. Can’t they get anything right? I then became aware that I was not merely exasperated, but acutely, blazingly, angry. I grew up with both ‘Pictish’ symbol stones, and the much older cup and ring marks, as part of my cultural awareness, part of my heritage, my knowledge of the surrounding countryside, the construction of my consciousness. Now it seemed to me that this was being prostituted, muddled and muddied, by this strange person about whom I was now finding it hard to think politely, who thought he could claim ‘Celtic ancestry’ and thereby tramp over people’s fields at night to sleep in a bronze-age grave [...], casually lumping together millennia and cultures."
Blain goes on to make some serious points about the nature of 'shamanism':
"‘Shamanism’ in the modern West has a history of abstraction and appropriation, constructed as being something to marvel at, something exotic that ‘other’ people do; described by recourse to individual abilities (as in Eliade’s 1964 definition). As such it is a westernism, a concept drawn from 18th century travellers’ tales."
