Limbo is in himself for a while (gender assumption acknowledged) but I'm going to reply anyway while the discussion is fresh in my mind.
Yes, quite sure. You go hunting, you endure trials, and you return with the kill. A shaman will use that common experience as a metaphor to hint at the uncommon experience of leaving the body, going to the 'underworld', and returning with, say, a 'soul fragment' of a tribe member.
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Not so easy, but a hunt need not include the archetype of mana, or of the Goddess or temptress, or of the wise old man or woman, or of the trickster, or of the shadow, or of rebirth, ect. But the shamanic life-experience will include most or all of those.
Well, okay. We can disagree on this. I'd invite you, though, to consider more carefully the kinds of trials that can occur with "mundane" life experiences before concluding that tricksters, mentors, Goddesses, shadows, etc. would not be encountered therein. Mundane doesn't imply routine, simple, or safe, especially in prehistoric settings.
I can see how it might look that way to the uninitiated.
Good. I'm glad you can see that.
I, in turn, can see how it might look otherwise to an initiate.
But where does that leave us? We are both capable of understanding that different experiences can lead to different perceptions, and that initiations are experiences
deliberately designed to alter ones subsequent perceptions. Is that sufficient to distinguish whose perceptions are true (or truer?) I don't think it is. I'm sure you're as familiar as I am with cases where people (sometimes in vast numbers) have been initiated into wickedness and falsehood. Altering perceptions through initiation is no more a guarantee that the altered perceptions are truer than is altering perceptions by writing something in a book.
A hunt can take place in known, mundane geography. A soul-retrieval can't. A pilgrimage can can be part of a soap opera or teen romance. A UFO abduction can't.
My understanding is that the concept of "mundane geography" would be unfamiliar to most people who follow shamans. Geography is threaded with a fractal hierarchy of sacred places, times, and entities in the same way that living flesh is threaded with blood vessels. Shamanism arises and fits in that context. When you try to isolate the sacred away in some remote place or alternate dimension, and divide the world between wizarding and muggle, the whole system breaks down.
Thus, a symbolic soul-retrieval narrative absolutely can take place in a mundane setting. The soul will usually be symbolized by some object, just as it is in shamanic stories about soul retrieval (where the soul fragment always appears as something like a stone, a feather, a pearl, etc). So consider, for example,
Pee Wee's Big Adventure as monomyth. You couldn't book a more mythic journey of soul retrieval if Hermes Trismegistus was your travel agent. A large part of the point is to show that even its quintessentially mundane settings, a pastiche of kitschy Americana, still have plenty of sacred magic in them. That point would be lost if you moved the story to outer space or Never-Never Land. (Compare and contrast: the more literal treatment of similar themes, by means of more overtly fantastic narrative, in Neil Gaiman's
American Gods.)
So when a modern shaman just happens to be an author, you will get stories with archetypes and unknowns outside of the mundane, because those are the experiences of shamans, whether they are urban shamans initiated by UFOs or traditional shamans initiated by tribal gods. The UFO phenomenon is a transformation of archetypes, not a modern technological development that started in Roswell. They are a big part of sci-fi and of our space-age culture as a whole. And they are that which ancient shamans would call a tribal god. It's not a new phenomenon unique to the space-age, and it's not just smoke and mirrors.
So when a sci-fi fan reads a story about aliens, he is reading about an archetype in symbolic form - an archetype that the shaman deals with on behalf of the tribe in a ritualistic, sacred manner. We can see a UFO and imagine that it is mundane (but advanced) technology carrying mundane biological life-forms that evolved on a mundane planet. But that is just the secular, materialistic mythologem of the space-age which our culture takes to heart, and in so doing takes a myth literally just as religious fundamentalists do with Jesus. That's when it crosses over into 'religion'.
That last point is confusing.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind hits most of the mythic archetypes on your list (except for the return stage) and then some; its protagonist receives visions, goes searching for explanations of them, rejects (and is rejected by) mundane society in the process, is assisted by sympathetic helpers and hindered by the lies and machinations of tricksters, and eventually reaches a liminal sacred place where he has a final transformative experience that removes him from the earthly life and limitations he's no longer concerned with.
The literal narrative, though, concerns biological aliens that have evolved on some distant physical planet, and come to earth in advanced technological machines, abducting humans for study with the intent of eventually establishing contact, and finally accepting the protagonist as human ambassador/guest/specimen to board their big machine and fly away with them.
You seem to be saying that those who prefer that latter (and perfectly valid) interpretation of the story, the ones who focus on the literal plot, are the ones making it into religion. Honestly, what sense does that claim make?
Most rationalists (who are well represented among SF readers and fans), while enjoying well-crafted fiction like
Close Encounters, do not believe that UFOs are actual flesh and blood aliens in material high-tech space ships, nor that they are paranormal spirits from alternate realities manifesting as lights in the sky. They believe, based on the available evidence, that they're effects of various natural causes and human activities, that get misinterpreted. So, who are the ones making UFOs into religion? Certainly not, as a group, the SF fans.
Are Bible literalists more religious than Bible interpretationists? The latter, I might point out, includes the Catholic Church. Maybe you're using some non-standard definition of "religion" here; can you clarify?
Can see physical objects or places beyond the scope of vision: yes.
There's the crux of where we disagree.
But rather than argue back and forth on the point, I'm going to ask a rather complex question that I invite you to consider carefully. That question is: "What difference does that point of disagreement make?"
Please don't read that as a mere rhetorical question, implying that I think it makes no difference at all. That's not my intent.
Nonetheless, let me describe some differences it doesn't make. Imagine two worlds, one in which I'm correct and no seeing of remote places takes place, and one in which you're correct and it does.
In both worlds, the hunters go to the places where the shaman envisions game. In both worlds, the game is sometimes there and sometimes not. In both worlds, when it is not there, the hunters or shaman will say that the game must have moved while the hunters were en route, or that the shaman's vision was the right location but a different time, or that a trickster spirit was feeling extra tricky that day and misled the shaman with a false vision. In both worlds, the hunters will still listen to the shaman next time because he's often right, it's better than bickering among themselves about where to hunt, and they all understand that the shaman is as subject as they are to the will of the spirits who ultimately decide whether or not they get meat.
What differences does it make to them whether their shaman is paranormally remote viewing or not? What differences does it make to us whether their shaman is paranormally remote viewing or not?
