The Shaman Tree

Dallas ex-cop Charlie Gants thinks there is nothing in this world for him to look forward to—except, maybe, more nightmares. He is about to leave the mental hospital where he has spent the past three months recovering—he hopes—from an explosion of murder that involved the deaths of two of his fellow policemen in a devastatingly dirty way. But shortly before his release, he is talked into accepting a fortuitous job offer—traveling to the cattle ranch of a family named McKendrick to try and find why—if there is a why—the family has been cursed with a series of serious and sometimes fatal accidents. The atmosphere is a strange one. It is possible that there is actually an Indian curse on the land—the Shaman Tree? It stands on the shore of the lake where a McKendrick daughter recently drowned. Is the old Indian Gants encounters there alive, or is he a figure in a dream, or possibly a figment in a flashback from the drugs forced on Gants at a time of the double killing that scrambled his psyche? One death follows another as Gants tries to find and foil a killer, deals with the otherworldly aura that hangs over the McKendrick land and its ominous great tree, and grimly fights to avoid being plunged back into the horror he has fought for so long.

The past sins of the Terry family occasion retribution on their decendants, and the terror seems to center around the shaman tree that is in the center of the McKendrick/Terry land

Miracles are hidden in plain sight, and The Shaman's Tree teaches you how to reveal them. Gathered from more than twenty years experience spent researching the Shamanic and Mind-Body arts, you will learn what the author experienced at the feet of some of the greatest practitioners of our times. The teachings in this book are both profound and immediately useful. The author, a scientist by training and artist at heart, uses heart and mind to reveal the hidden principles of knowledge which drive the fundamental forces of existence. The Shamans Tree engages the reader fully -- intellect, intuition, and emotion. It can bring blessings into your life.

Drawing on anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo's fifteen years of field research, Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche is the first study to follow shamans' gender identities and performance in a variety of ritual, social, sexual, and political contexts. To Mapuche shamans, or machi, the foye tree is of special importance, not only for its medicinal qualities but also because of its hermaphroditic flowers, which reflect the gender-shifting components of machi healing practices. Framed by the cultural constructions of gender and identity, Bacigalupo's fascinating findings span the ways in which the Chilean state stigmatizes the machi as witches and sexual deviants; how shamans use paradoxical discourses about gender to legitimatize themselves as healers and, at the same time, as modern men and women; the tree's political use as a symbol of resistance to national ideologies; and other components of these rich traditions. The first comprehensive study on Mapuche shamans' gendered practices, Shamans of the Foye Tree offers new perspectives on this crucial intersection of spiritual, social, and political power.

"Real questions from real students about life, living and power; answers to the questions of living in this modern age from a traditional indigenous Shaman."

The foundational work on shamanism now available as a Princeton Classics paperback Shamanism is an essential work on the study of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon. The founder of the modern study of the history of religion, Mircea Eliade surveys the tradition through two and a half millennia of human history, moving from the shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia—where shamanism was first observed—to North and South America, Indonesia, Tibet, China, and beyond. In this authoritative survey, Eliade illuminates the magico-religious life of societies that give primacy of place to the figure of the shaman—at once magician and medicine man, healer and miracle-doer, priest, mystic, and poet. Synthesizing the approaches of psychology, sociology, and ethnology, Shamanism remains the reference book of choice for those interested in this practice.

Shaman, artist and author Elen Sentier writes, "I was first taught the trees of the goddess as a child. The old ones from the village would tell us about the tree, how it lives, what creatures it lives with, its whole environment. They would tell us stories then we would go to the tree and sit with it, listen to what it had to show and tell us. Later, we would ask it for a piece of its wood to make its spirit- home. These were rituals but all so natural and normal they were just a part of life and living for me as I grew up. TREES OF THE GODDESS will help you find your way of doing this."

Tribal peoples believe that the shaman experiences, absorbs, and communicates a special mode of power, sustaining and healing. This book discusses American Indian shamanic traditions, particularly those of the Woodland Ojibway, in terms drawn from the classical shamanism of Siberian peoples. Using a cultural-historical method, John A. Grim describes the spiritual formation of shamans, male and female, and elucidates the special religious experience that they transmit to their tribes. Writing as a historian of religion well acquainted with ethnological materials, Grim identifies four patterns in the shamanic experience: cosmology, tribal sanction, ritual reenactment, and trance experience. Relating those concepts to the Siberian and Ojibway experiences, he draws on mythology, sociology, anthropology, and psychology to paint a picture of shamanism that is both particularized and interpretative. As religious personalities, shamans are important today because of their singular ability to express symbolically the forces that animate the tribal cosmology. Often identifying themselves with primordial earth processes, shamans develop symbol systems drawn from the archetypal earth images that are vital to their psychic healing technique. This particular ability to resonate with the natural world is felt as an important need in our time. Those readers who identify with American Indians as they confront modern technological society will value this introduction to our native shamanic traditions and to the religious experience itself. The author's discussion of Ojibway practices is the most comprehensive short treatment available, written with a fine poetic feeling that reflects the literary expressiveness inherent in American Indian religion and thought.