Jan Van Ysslestyne is the foremost expert on  classical shamanism of the Ulichi.

photo by: Skeptiko

Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Jan van Ysslestyne to Skeptiko. Jan has written a very impressive new book titled Spirits from the Edge of the World and she’s here to join me in a conversation about shamanism and all sorts of related good stuff. Jan, we’re doing a take two of this interview, we did a little audio change here, but thanks again, so much, for joining me on Skeptiko.

Jan van Ysslestyne: Thank you so very much, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Alex Tsakiris: This is a really interesting topic and you were so generous to contact me you said, “Alex, I think we should talk about this amazing work I’ve done with this group of people, these native people in this remote area of Siberia and they’re the Ulchi people.” And as we were just chatting a minute ago, they are really the original shamanistic culture, that is where the name, the origin of the word shamanism comes from, these and the surrounding culture, right?

Jan van Ysslestyne: Correct, yes.

Alex Tsakiris: So, you’ve done this incredible deep dive into the work and I have to tell people that the book is really great, very well written, nicely compiled, and then I go to your website, it’s absolutely beautiful. You have these beautiful infographics with all of these teachers from the tribe and you have them laid out in their lineage and you have some great audio and video that you’ve collected. So, I guess the place to start again is to give folks a sense of how you came to study these people and what the process was like. You just told me it’s taken you a number of years, you’ve had these folks come and visit you for over ten years and you’ve learned their language. Tell us the whole story, if you would.

(continued below)

Click here for forum discussion

Click here for Jan’s website

Read Excerpts

Start 00:11:52 Alex Tsakiris: The main thing that I wanted to talk about, because I don’t care about the Ulchi, I’ve never going to meet the Ulchi, I care, only in the sense of what they can inform, in terms of all of my other kinds of things, and all of these competing ideas we have about this extended consciousness reality, right? So, the Ulchi say one thing, the NDEs say another thing, the ET says another thing, the astral traveler say another thing. I mean, are we looking at just a different cultural overlay, it’s the map versus the territory thing? How do we figure that out?

Jan van Ysslestyne: Well, I don’t think so. My concern was a lot of people go specifically into this field, is that they go and gather up all of this data and they come back, and they translate what they think that they’ve observed from a very mechanistic, linear, reductionistic, Western approach, and I think that’s kind of putting the cart before the horse. Personally, to really understand another culture, you have to liberate yourself from your own culture as best as possible and you have to go into another culture and know that you know nothing, you know nothing John Snow, you’re completely ignorant. You need to learn to think in a different way.

Alex Tsakiris: Why? Let me challenge that in a Skeptiko way. This is, kind of, the shut up and calculate model alternative. So,