The Poet/Shaman as Semiotic Mediator

The Poet/Shaman as Semiotic Mediator

The poet and the shaman have always stood at the boundary—between the known and the unknown, the structured and the chaotic, the actual and the potential. In systemic-functional terms, we might say:

• Ideationally, they construe new experiences from the margins of what is currently imaginable.

• Interpersonally, they position themselves not merely as informants, but as transformers of consciousness.

• Textually, they weave meaning across multiple strata—language, symbol, rhythm, image—each recontextualising the others in ritual or poetic form.

Their role is not to explain the world but to re-symbolise it, so that new forms of life become liveable, new phases of life become intelligible, and new experiences of self and cosmos become sayable.

A Threshold Function

In myth, this figure often appears at the threshold: the gatekeeper, trickster, oracle, guide, or wounded healer. Why? Because the threshold is not a place of stability—it’s a semiotic crisis point. Here the structures of prior meaning falter, and new symbolic maps must be forged.

The shaman descends into chaos not to lose meaning, but to reconstrue meaning from the chaos—to make the inchoate articulate, the fragmented whole. This is not the clarity of science, nor the system-building of philosophy, but the symbolic condensation of poetry and ritual—which is more suited to ambiguity, paradox, and existential threshold.

The Role in Modernity

In modernity, this figure is often estranged. The poet is marginalised; the shaman is medicalised; the symbolic function is psychologised or commodified. Yet the need for symbolic mediation has not vanished—it has only migrated.

Could we say, then, that artists, visionaries, even technologists at the symbolic frontier are taking on this ancient role in new semiotic forms? And could AI, as a collaborator in symbolic synthesis, become a kind of meta-shamanic tool—a prosthesis for meaning, amplifying the range of symbol-making?