Book Description:

A compilation of anthropological research gathered during the past three centuries, this scholarly work tackles the attitudes toward and accomplishments of Native American shamans. The book is written from the point of view of the natives themselves, that is, in the belief that shamans can do what they say they can do. The articles are arranged alphabetically, and most of the entry titles are in the Native languages. The extensive index includes both subject and tribal name entries, which should aid students requiring information about specific tribes.

Book Description:

Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and scholar, brilliantly illuminates the ancient healing traditions of India embodied in the rituals of shamans, the teachings of gurus, and the precepts of the school of medicine known as Ayurveda. With extraordinary sympathy, open-mindedness, and insight Kakar has drawn from both his Eastern and Western backgrounds to show how the gulf that divides native healer from Western psychiatrist can be spanned.

Book Description:

Shamans Through Time is a five-hundred-year survey of writings on the healers, sorcerers, and conjurers who have fascinated us for centuries, tracing Western civilization's attempts to understand the ancient knowledge of shamans round the world, from Asia and Australia to Africa and the Americas. Narby and Huxley have collected observations about and interviews with shamans from more than sixty missionaries, botanists, anthropologists, ethnographers, and psychologists.

Book Description:

The Eightfold Path is a wheel of eight roads to opening the mind and soul, eight paths of altered states. From rhythm to utiseta to fasting to ordeal, this book covers the ways that the ancient shamans of the Northlands used these paths to open themselves to the Wights. The fourth book in the Northern-Tradition Shamanism series, this book includes spirit-taught lessons from many different spirit-workers and the Gods that they serve and revere.

Book Description:

This book gives accounts of initiations into altered states of consciousness, which made an individual a healer. Healers develop their unique talents through a variety of inner journeys, some of which include fasting, meditations, and/or lightning. Through the knowledge transferred during inner journeys, shamans are able to heal. Kalweit demonstrates the need for the physiological and biochemical study of visionary experience and the possibility of using archaic practices as healing therapy for modern humanity.

Book Description:

The journey on the shaman path is an enjoyable adventure with the more than fifty ecoshamanic practices and counterpractices that Endredy presents. From such counterpractices as seeing in systems, fasting, creating cognitive maps, and relating to the elements of earth, water, air, fire, and spirit/space, to the practices associated with ecoshamanic ceremony, ritual, chanting, and rites of passage and initiation such as dancing, working with deer, communicating with trees, and taking care of the scared flame, this book reads like a field guide for the natural soul.

Book Description:

Tedlock argues that deliberate misreadings of data have been common, as when a shamanic couple is described as a "shaman and assistant" even when both acknowledged their shared role. She argues that women have been active practitioners and, in fact, the primary occupants of the shamanic role. When talking about fasting, Tedlock said, "We enter an alternative state of consciousness by fasting, undertaking a vision quest"

Book Description:

The authors of this provocative exploration into the spiritual realms of healing are trained in the orthodoxies of Western medicine and psychology. Their inquiries into "mind over matter" phenomena have led them to conclude that science alone is inadequate in treating human illness. By observing diverse parapsychological and metaphysical methods of mediums, spiritists and others following "indigenous" healing from ancient to contemporary societies, Villoldo and Krippner enhance our concept of health.