The Tradition
Written by Michela Chiarelli
Seventh-generation medicine woman, Calabria
IT IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK
There is a misconception I need to clear up immediately, before I tell you anything about who I am.
People hear the word "shamanism" and they imagine a drum, a ceremony, a weekend in a circle with candles. They imagine something you do. An activity. A hobby of the soul, to be practised when you have time, between Tuesday yoga and Saturday shopping.
It is not like that. It never was. And if Italian shamanism were truly only that, it would not be worth writing a book about.
The Tradition is not a ritual you add to your life. It is the grammar with which your life is already written, whether you know it or not.
WASHING, EATING, GETTING DRESSED
Let me try to explain it this way: nobody thinks "today I will practise the ritual of washing myself." You wash. That is all. It is embedded, automatic, it requires no particular intention or special awareness. And yet it is a gesture full of meaning - you remove something, you prepare yourself to meet the day, you honour your body. Nobody notices because nobody calls it a ritual. It is just life.
This is exactly the point that nobody grasps when they look from the outside.
In the tradition I was born into, gathering herbs is not a rite celebrated on a special date in the lunar calendar - although the moon matters, it matters greatly. It is what you do when the nettle is ready and your grandmother has taught you to recognise it by its smell before you can even identify it by the shape of its leaf. It is bringing home a basket and knowing, without having to think about it, that this plant will become an ointment for an inflamed knee, that one a decoction for sleep, another an ornament to hang above a door because it protects the house.
There is no separation between the sacred and the domestic. Cooking minestrone and preparing a cream for chapped skin are the same gesture, with the same attention, the same care, the same presence. Tending the house, sweeping a threshold, hanging the laundry in the right sun - all of this is already practice. It does not prepare you for the sacred. It already is the sacred, and always has been, long before anyone invented the word "spirituality" to separate it from everything else.
The Tradition has no separate altar. The altar is the kitchen. It is the drawer where the sewing scissors are kept. It is the windowsill where you leave the lavender to dry.
THE SHAMANISM OF THE MOTHERS
I am the seventh generation of a line passed down through the female. I did not choose this path by studying it in a manual, I did not find it in a weekend course, I did not "discover" it at thirty after an existential crisis, as happens to many people who approach these practices today - often with the best intentions in the world.
I received it from my grandmother, who in turn had received it from those who came before her, in a chain of hands and gestures that stretches back seven generations, into my bones before it ever reached my mind.
This is what I mean when I speak of the "shamanism of the mothers": it is not a codified doctrine, not a system of symbols to be memorised. It is a knowing that passes through the body of one woman into the body of another, along with the milk, along with the words of daily use, along with the way you knead bread or bind a wound. It is not taught to you. It is transmitted to you. And the difference between teaching and transmitting is all the difference in the world.
When I was a child I did not know I was learning anything. I watched my grandmother do things. That was all. The knowledge entered through osmosis, through repetition, through imitation - the way you learn your mother tongue without anyone explaining the grammar to you. Only later, much later, did I understand that those gestures had a name, a history, an ancient root that reached deep into a peasant and shamanic Italy that the official history books have never told properly.
This is what makes a lineage different from any other form of learning: not the authority of the one who transmits it, but the fact that you already carry it inside you before you ever choose to want it.
THE VALUE OF LINEAGE IN A WORLD OF BOOKS & COURSES
I want to be clear here, because I do not want to be misunderstood: there is nothing wrong with books, courses, or structured learning. I myself have studied formally, and extensively, in other areas of my life - cosmetology in Barcelona, music for the harp, and over the years chemistry, physics, botany, astrophysics, genetics, even economics, because I wanted to understand with my mind what my hands already knew how to do. Knowledge that comes from a book or a course is real knowledge, and it would be foolish to deny it or look down on it.
I will say more: studying the chemistry of a plant never diminished the gesture of gathering it - it made it more precise. Understanding the physics of a lunar cycle did not dismantle my respect for the moon, it gave it firmer ground. Botany gives me the Latin name; the tradition gives me the name the women of my family used, and I hold both, without one needing to defeat the other. Astrophysics explains why certain cycles repeat with such precision; genetics reminds me that what I carry in my body is not metaphor but real biological data; and even economics, which seems the most distant from all of this, taught me to read systems, flows, scarcities and abundances - things I then find again, identical, when I speak of harvests and seasons.
But it is a knowledge of a different order.
A book gives you information. A course gives you a method. A lineage gives you a belonging.
When you learn something from a book, you remain yourself and the knowledge remains an external object that you acquire - something you can also unlearn, replace, update with the next edition. When something is transmitted to you through lineage, you become part of that thing, and that thing becomes part of you, in a way that is no longer negotiable. I do not "know how to make" a herbal remedy. I am, in some part of myself, the remedy that seven generations of women before me prepared in the same way, with the same hands that resemble each other from mother to daughter.
Today we live in a time when spiritual, shamanic, energetic knowledge - call it what you will - comes mostly from an intensive weekend, a certificate, an algorithm recommending your next online course. I do not say this to judge those who take that path (many do, and sincerely). I say it because I believe it is important, today more than ever, that there still exists someone who can say: I did not study this. This was given to me. And before me it was given to my grandmother, and before that to those who came before her, back to a point that no document can date with precision any longer.
In a world that needs to certify everything in order to believe in it, an oral, female, peasant lineage - certified by no one but the continuity of life itself passing from one generation to the next - is almost an act of resistance. Not against those who study. Against the idea that everything that matters must pass through a classroom or a screen in order to be legitimate.
THE TRADITION, NOT “A TRADITION”
This is why I write "The Tradition" with a capital letter, and not "one tradition among many," as though it were an option on a shelf beside other contemporary spiritual practices.
The Tradition, as I live it, is not an identity choice. I did not choose it the way one chooses a philosophy of life that resonates with one's sensibilities. It was already there, before me, and it will continue to exist after me, whether I want it to or not, because it is woven into the very way my family has always lived: planting, gathering, cooking, sewing, healing, naming plants with words that appear in no botanical dictionary but that have worked, across generations, all the same.
To call it shamanism is already, in a sense, a linguistic compromise - a word borrowed from other cultures in order to be understood by a world that has lost the name of its own roots. But before it is shamanism, this is simply the life of my house, of my mother's house, of her mother's house. It is the Italy that does not appear in the history books - the Italy of grandmothers who knew how to stop bleeding with a cobweb and the sign of the cross, the Italy of women who read the weather from the moon not out of superstition but because they had observed, for centuries, with patience, what worked and what did not.
This book, in the end, also wants to be this: not a manual of rituals to be learned, but an invitation to look at your own daily life as the place where tradition - any tradition - truly lives. Not in the exceptional. In the gesture repeated every day with attention.
The Tradition is not something you practise. It is something you inhabit.