Shamans as The First Shapers of Myth

The Shaman, the one who goes between, the one who passes outside of the tribe and then returns with memes, insights, cures, designs, glossolalia, technologies, and refertilizes the human family by this means. Human progress has always depended on the whispering of alien minds, confrontations with the Other, probes into dimensions where imagination and chaos dance. The shaman, as paradigmatic figure, is applicable both in the aboriginal social context and in the present social context.

"So who would have been in these early elementary Cultures, as you call them, the equivalent of the poets today? The shamans, The shamans, The shaman is the person who has in his late childhood, early youth, could be male or female, had an overwhelming psychological experience that turns them totally inward. The whole unconscious, The whole unconscious, The whole unconscious has opened up and they’ve fallen into it, they’ve fallen into it And it’s been described many, many times, and it occurs all the way from Siberia right through the Americas down to Tierra del Fuego. It’s a kind of schizophrenic crack-up, the shaman experience."

From Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, Ep. 3: ‘The First Storytellers’