“In all the old shamanistic cultures, animals dominated the concepts and imaginations. To this day, hunting tribes are likely to give animal names to their children. Furs, pelts, claws, fangs, and feathers—preferably of ferocious predators such as wolves, wildcats, bears, eagles or ravens— are the favorite body decorations of the hunter, warrior, or medicine person. Talking animals appear to them in dreams and visions, teach them the secrets of nature, guide them as familiars or guardians, and give them the priceless gifts of courage, endurance, or keenness of senses. (The familiars of medieval witches, the owls, cats, and toads, are remnants of this ancient form of conceptualization.) The clans and lineages of these societies trace their ancestry to a totem animal that mothered/fathered them in a far off dreamtime. To this day they remain brothers and sisters to such an animal species. These totemic animals are celebrated at certain times of the year in what anthropologists call rites of increase.
Such rituals, once universal, involve ecstatic dances during which the hunters, dressed in horn and hide, turn into animal spirits themselves. They dance their lives in minute detail: the rutting, the coupling, the calving, the searching for fresh pastures, and finally, their deaths at the hands of the hunter. Such dances are carried out in a state of pure empathy and complete identification. In the process, the prey is already killed in spirit before the hunter brings the actual body of the animal down with his spears and arrows. After the ritual, the animal has but to be gathered up, for its guardian, the “lord of the animals” or the “animal mother,” has already released it unto death. The guardians of the animal souls live deep in the belly of the mountains, accessible only by a few hidden caves; or they live on the bottom of holy lakes. Only with the permission of the lord of the animals may the hunter hunt. In order to avoid disaster and misfortune, the path to this god has to be found so that the taboos and proscriptions might not be violated.
It is by means of rhythmic, repetitive dancing and drumming, fasting, or self-inflicted pain (asceticism), along with the use of mind-altering plant drugs such as mushrooms, nightshades, or hemp, that the ancient hunters achieved contact with the animal spirits and their guardians. By flooding the nervous system with more stimuli than the mundane mind can cope with or, on the contrary, by starving the senses, by concentrating on one single point or one monotonous sound, the archaic hunters were able to lift off and fly away into the other world. An individual who mastered these techniques better than anyone else, naturally became extremely valuable to the group. He or she became the shaman, the ritual leader and speaker for the tribe vis-à-vis the spirits and gods.”
~ Wolf-Dieter Storl, Shiva: The Wild God of Power and Ecstasy