Author: William F. Romain Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 9780759119055 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
Shamans of the Lost World bridges the gap between recent work in the cognitive sciences and some of humankind's oldest religious expressions. In this detailed look at the prehistoric shamanism of the Ohio Hopewell, Romain uses cognitive science, archaeology, and ethnology to propose that the shamanic world view results from psychological mechanisms that have a basis in our cognitive evolutionary development. The discussions in this volume of the most current theories concerning how early peoples came to believe in spirits and gods, as well as how those theories help account for what we find in the archaeological record of the Hopewell, are of interest to archaeologists and cognitive scientists alike.
Author: Douglas Gillette Publisher: Bantam ISBN: Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 314
Book Description
Insights into Maya religious symbolism ; based on recent archaeological findings and the most up-to-date decodings of Maya hieroglyphics.
Author: Jeff D. Nixa Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1591432863 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Discover your soul’s purpose by following the shamanic path of the heart • Explains how to engage your heart’s navigational guidance system to access your spiritual core directly and find your life purpose and spiritual identity • Includes shamanic practices to meet your power animals, consult with spirit guides, embark on journeys in the spirit world, slay your inner dragons of self-sabotage and fear, clear emotional wounding patterns, and find your personal spirit song • Offers case studies and troubleshooting help for common pitfalls and obstacles on the heart-centered shamanic path • Includes access to 4 guided audio journeys narrated by the author Each of us has a vision for our lives, our soul’s purpose awaiting release in our hearts. The most important task we have is to learn what that purpose is and then bring it into the world. In our world of endless busyness and “hurry sickness,” many people are experiencing soul loss as they live out dreams of endless motion, empty tasks, anxiety, and negative thoughts. But you can change your world and discover the shamanic heart path that activates your wildness, your power, and your soul’s purpose. Blending earth-honoring shamanic practices and modern depth psychology, Jeff Nixa explains how to practice the lost art of heart navigation to help you find your life purpose and spiritual identity, conquer the fear, doubt and criticism that stand in the way of that vision, and become a shamanic shapeshifter of your life. Providing heart-opening exercises to slow your mental racing and detect your heart’s navigational guidance system, he shows how to awaken your wild and free heart, access your spiritual core directly, deactivate trauma-based emotional patterns, retrieve vital energy, work with your dreams, and become an artist of the soul. You will learn how to meet your power animals and consult with spirit guides, embark on shamanic journeys in the spirit world for help and information, slay your inner dragons of self-sabotage, find your personal spirit song, and create the joyful life that your heart is attuned to seek out. Offering case studies and troubleshooting help for common pitfalls and obstacles on the heart-centered path, this shamanic manual provides hands-on practices and ceremonies--including access to 4 guided audio journeys narrated by the author--as well as wisdom from the author’s own journey and the powerful teachers he has worked with, including Sandra Ingerman, Mikkal, spiritual elders of the Oglala Lakota people, and plant-spirit medicine shamans of the Amazon jungle. Allowing you to understand the precise contours of your authentic self and your visionary heart, this book offers a map to a vibrant new life aligned with your soul and deepest calling.
Author: Michael J. Winkelman Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 0313381828 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
This book examines shamanism from evolutionary and biological perspectives to identify the origins of shamanic healing in rituals that enhance individual and group function. What does the brain do during "soul journeys"? How do shamans alter consciousness and why is this important for healing? Are shamans different from other kinds of healers? Is there a connection between the rituals performed by chimpanzees and traditional shamanistic practices? All of these questions—and many more—are answered in Shamanism, Second Edition: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing. This text contains crosscultural examinations of the nature of shamanism, biological perspectives on alterations of consciousness, mechanisms of shamanistic healing, as well as the evolutionary origins of shamanism. It presents the shamanic paradigm within a biopsychosocial framework for explaining successful human evolution through group rituals. In the final chapter,"the author compares shamanistic rituals with chimpanzee displays to identify homologies that point to the ritual dynamics of our ancient hominid ancestors.
Author: John C. Stephens Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1666758736 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 173
Book Description
This book explores the motif of the spiritual journey and its evolution in Western literature. A spiritual journey can be broadly defined as a search for the divine. Such a search can occur either internally as a psychological process or in some cases may involve an actual geographic journey. Spiritual journeys can be conducted by individuals or groups. In exploring this topic, various kinds of texts will be reviewed, including autobiographies, novels, and short stories, as well as myths, folktales, and mystical writings. The book classifies spiritual journey narratives into four categories: theological journeys, mystical journeys, mythopoetic journeys and allegorical journeys. Representative texts have been selected in the history of Western religious literature that illustrate the basic features of each of these four categories.
Author: David W. Anthony Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691143880 Category : Antiquities, Prehistoric Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
In the prehistoric Copper Age, long before cities, writing, or the invention of the wheel, Old Europe was among the most culturally rich regions in the world. Its inhabitants lived in prosperous agricultural towns. The ubiquitous goddess figurines found in their houses and shrines have triggered intense debates about women's roles. The Lost World of Old Europe is the accompanying catalog for an exhibition at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. This superb volume features essays by leading archaeologists as well as breathtaking color photographs cataloguing the objects, some illustrated here for the first time. The heart of Old Europe was in the lower Danube valley, in contemporary Bulgaria and Romania. Old European coppersmiths were the most advanced metal artisans in the world. Their intense interest in acquiring copper, Aegean shells, and other rare valuables gave rise to far-reaching trading networks. In their graves, the bodies of Old European chieftains were adorned with pounds of gold and copper ornaments. Their funerals were without parallel in the Near East or Egypt. The exhibition represents the first time these rare objects have appeared in the United States. An unparalleled introduction to Old Europe's cultural, technological, and artistic legacy, The Lost World of Old Europe includes essays by Douglass Bailey, John Chapman, Cornelia-Magda Lazarovici, Ioan Opris and Catalin Bem, Ernst Pernicka, Dragomir Nicolae Popovici, Michel Séfériadès, and Vladimir Slavchev.
Author: H. Sidky Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 1498551904 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 254
Book Description
In The Origins of Shamanism, Spirit Beliefs, and Religiosity, H. Sidky uses first-hand ethnographic fieldwork and scientific theoretical work in archaeology, psychology, and neurotheology to explore the origins of shamanism, spirit beliefs, the evolution of human consciousness, and the origins of ritual behavior and religiosity.
Author: Ronald Hutton Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 082644637X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 231
Book Description
With their ability to enter trances, to change into the bodies of other creatures, and to fly through the northern skies, shamans are the subject of both popular and scholarly fascination. In Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination Ronald Hutton looks at what is really known about both the shamans of Siberia and about others spread throughout the world. He traces the growth of knowledge of shamans in Imperial and Stalinist Russia, descibes local variations and different types of shamanism, and explores more recent western influences on its history and modern practice. This is a challenging book by one of the world's leading authorities on Paganism.
Author: Robin M. Wright Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1496211227 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 408
Book Description
Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon tells the life story of Mandu da Silva, the last living jaguar shaman among the Baniwa people in the northwest Amazon. In this original and engaging work, Robin M. Wright, who has known and worked with da Silva for more than thirty years, weaves the story of da Silva’s life together with the Baniwas’ society, history, mythology, cosmology, and jaguar shaman traditions. The jaguar shamans are key players in what Wright calls “a nexus of religious power and knowledge” in which healers, sorcerers, priestly chanters, and dance-leaders exercise complementary functions that link living specialists with the deities and great spirits of the cosmos. By exploring in depth the apprenticeship of the shaman, Wright shows how jaguar shamans acquire the knowledge and power of the deities in several stages of instruction and practice. This volume is the first mapping of the sacred geography (“mythscape”) of the Northern Arawak–speaking people of the northwest Amazon, demonstrating direct connections between petroglyphs and other inscriptions and Baniwa sacred narratives as a whole. In eloquent and inviting analytic prose, Wright links biographic and ethnographic elements in elevating anthropological writing to a new standard of theoretically aware storytelling and analytic power.
Author: Stephen B. Carmody Publisher: University Alabama Press ISBN: 0817320423 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Archaeological case studies consider material evidence of religion and ritual in the pre-Columbian Eastern Woodlands Archaeologists today are interpretin g Native American religion and ritual in the distant past in more sophisticated ways, considering new understandings of the ways that Native Americans themselves experienced them. Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief: Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America broadly considers Native American religion and ritual in eastern North America and focuses on practices that altered and used a vast array of material items as well as how physical spaces were shaped by religious practices. Unbound to a single theoretical perspective of religion, contributors approach ritual and religion in diverse ways. Importantly, they focus on how people in the past practiced religion by altering and using a vast array of material items, from smoking pipes, ceremonial vessels, carved figurines, and iconographic images, to sacred bundles, hallucinogenic plants, revered animals, and ritual architecture. Contributors also show how physical spaces were shaped by religious practice, and how rock art, monuments, soils and special substances, and even land- and cityscapes were part of the active material worlds of religious agents. Case studies, arranged chronologically, cover time periods ranging from the Paleoindian period (13,000–7900 BC) to the late Mississippian and into the protohistoric/contact periods. The geographical scope is much of the greater southeastern and southern Midwestern culture areas of the Eastern Woodlands, from the Central and Lower Mississippi River Valleys to the Ohio Hopewell region, and from the greater Ohio River Valley down through the Deep South and across to the Carolinas. Contributors Sarah E. Baires / Melissa R. Baltus / Casey R. Barrier / James F. Bates / Sierra M. Bow / James A. Brown / Stephen B. Carmody / Meagan E. Dennison / Aaron Deter-Wolf / David H. Dye / Bretton T. Giles / Cameron Gokee / Kandace D. Hollenbach / Thomas A. Jennings / Megan C. Kassabaum / John E. Kelly / Ashley A. Peles / Tanya M. Peres / Charlotte D. Pevny / Connie M. Randall / Jan F. Simek / Ashley M. Smallwood / Renee B. Walker / Alice P. Wright
Author: William F. Romain
Author: Douglas Gillette
Author: Jeff D. Nixa
Author: Michael J. Winkelman
Author: John C. Stephens
Author: David W. Anthony
Author: H. Sidky
Author: Ronald Hutton
Author: Robin M. Wright
Author: Stephen B. Carmody