Tree Spirits

Trees offer gems of wisdom. You will be delightfully surprised in their conversations about life. You will be inspired by each tree’s response, photo personally taken, and auric field description. If you are a tree lover, you will enjoy the ways to communicate with trees which are listed within this book.

In this world tour of folklore and ancient art, Varner examines the images we give to the spirit of nature and explores this important aspect of human perception.

According to the author of this text, we often experience spirit contact in our lives but fail to recognize it for what it is. As a solution, this book shows how to access and attune to beings such as guardian angels, nature spirits and elementals, spirit totems, archangels, gods and goddesses, as well as family and friends after their physical death.

Bringing together a medley of stories, myths, and folklore Gary Varner shares a fascination and respect for humankind's early and contemporary cultures and wonders at similarities across the board. Here, he focuses on "Little People" and giants, animals and were-creatures, and the odd, helpful or threatening ways imputed to our earthly companions including dogs and cats, bats and spiders, and the stories people have told each other about them since time immemorial. Gary Varner has performed a valuable service in these books. [Presenting] lore from about the world, a collector's hoard of traditions rich and strange, ... Varner shows there really are obvious and puzzling similarities between widely separated cultures. Gary Varner has pointed the way to some important cross-cultural readings in the ageless themes of stone and water. - Jeremy Harte, Curator of the Bourne Hall Museum, Surrey, England, in Northern Earth magazine, #103, 2005 Menhirs, Dolmen and Circles of Stone is an excellent guide to large-scale magical stones and stone magic. This book is a must for anyone interested in megalithic sites. Most highly recommended. -PanGaia Magazine, United States As with other books by the same author, this is a book based upon broad research into the subject, stretching across the world. What results is a fascinating weave of stories and images, descriptions of sites and associated tales, that leaves a sense of a thousand deities whispering in the air. Because it is so broad a sweep, the positive outcome is an overreaching perspective of the patterns and commonalities held between human communities - our ancestors - all around the world. The book is a sound overview and provocation toresearch more deeply ourselves, to find alternative visions, tales and interpretations, to find out more about the sacred currents, their depths and importance - both to our ancestors and to ourselves. The author's notations are comprehensive, allowing us easily to follow the clues. A valuable piece of work. -The Druid Network, England * Gary R. Varner is a lecturer and writer on folklore and early religions. He is author of several popular books comparing legends and beliefs around the world, including The Mythic Forest, the Green Man & the Spirit of Nature (Algora 2006); Menhirs, Dolmen and Circles of Stone: The Folklore and Magic of Sacred Stone (Algora 2005); and Sacred Wells: A Study in the History, Meaning, and Mythology of Holy Wells. His approach incorporates details from ancient cultures and from Native American, UK and European, Asian, South Pacific and African folklore. Varner is a member of the American Folklore Society.

Despite what some scholarship has suggested, Shintô does exhibit a unifying cognitive integrity. Spirit Tree offers a unique social psychological interpretation of Shintô ritual at the Hakozaki Hachiman Shrine in Fukuoka, Japan and situates the cosmological organization of this practice within the larger context of ritual in East Asia. Employing a comparative approach, this study blends two theoretical orientations: cultural anthropology and Jungian psychology. Hakozaki's rituals are a combination of a Yayoi period female medium tradition with a complex set of Chinese Yin-Yang Five Phase principles. Both systems are based on the feminine archetype, a fundamental conceptual foundation of Shintô ritual practice, which cognitively links woman and the earth. While the female shaman tradition is female-affirming in outlook, the later Chinese system is much less so. This monograph is a new acknowledgement of the conceptual continuity of Shintô ritual as an outgrowth of social cognition.

‘People often ask us about the best way to come close to nature and the beings enchanted within it. One way to do so is through wonder and astonishment, to open our senses fully to nature’s beauty and wisdom. And here we can encounter entities that most closely resemble human beings — the trees.’ Verena has learned to communicate with elemental and nature beings, and to translate their language into terms we can understand. In her remarkable book Nature Spirits and What They Say, she conversed with a range of beings, including spirits of fire, air, water and stone. In this new volume, we hear from trees, the nature spirits that in many ways are most similar to human beings. Through Verena’s remarkable clairvoyant abilities, conversations with different tree species – such as sweet cherry, rowan, elm and common oak – are relayed. These communications reveal compelling insights into the role of trees within the natural world and their relationships with the vegetable, animal, human and spirit kingdoms. Particular emphasis is placed on the characteristics of trees that correspond with qualities of the human soul, such as the oak’s connection to individualism. The tree spirits want to speak, and are responsive all kinds of questions, such as their roles in the landscape, their specific shapes, on problems that affect them in particular, and on urgent issues that are relevant to all beings on earth, such as climate change. The interviews disclose beautiful, fascinating and often challenging insights, offering inspiration to help us build more constructive relationships to these wonderful entities.

The author shares her experiences meeting and learning about fairies, and includes conversations she claims to have had with them