This evocative guide to Shamanism takes you on a journey from its origins in Europe, North America, Siberia and the Arctic Circle through to contemporary rituals to try today. Illustrated with cultural images, totems and people, shaman John Matthews reveals the rich animistic traditions of this ancient spirituality and reveals how it can empower your life. Discover: The significance of power animals Shapeshifting - moving into different states of being Healing with spirit guides Vision questing - finding guidance in meditation and dream experiences Working with totems Shamanic drumming and trance

Jesus the Shaman is comprehensive, non-conformist & paradigm shattering. This unique, gripping, revolutionary thoroughly researched book astounds the reader as it gives numerous examples of prophets transformative spiritual psychic experiences, each of which gave birth to and contributed to the birth and development of world religions. These shamans, mediums, (channels), sages, oracles, mystics and prophets are not only shown to span all ages and the globe but are shown to have founded world religions. Entirely turning the tables on religious orthodoxy and traditional Newtonian physics (but not quantum physics)this innovative, highly controvercial, meticulous research methodically draws on primary sources revealing the esteemed spiritual teachers and prophets such as Moses, Jesus, Mohammad had mediumistic gifts.The author has inimitably established beyond question that supernatural communications laid the foundation stones of the world's religions.This book unifies the origins of religions under a single paranormal concept and thereby does much to dispel the causes of histories and todays religious strife.Emanuel Swedenborg, the medium to Europe's royalty & governments taught that thought patterns during physical life determine the appropriate after death landscapes of animals and people irrespective of their religious affiliations.

The Bible as we know it today offers a message far different than in its earliest beginnings. What was once an oral tradition of earth-based spirituality has become codified, the original intent obscured by translation after translation. Take a shamanic quest to discover long-forgotten interpretations of some the world's most influential tales and journeys. From the life-affirming tale of Noah to the mystery that is the Garden of Eden, you'll discover secrets that have been veiled for millennia. This is the Bible as it was meant to be - not the heavily edited, adapted text it has become. This is original knowledge unhindered by the intentions and motivations of translators and religious authorities.

"Originally published by Suspect Thoughts Press, 2004; Updated by the author and re-released by Lethe Press, 2013."

Historical Jesus research remains trapped in the positivistic historiographical framework from which it emerged more than a hundred and fifty years ago. This is confirmed by the nested assumptions shared by the majority of researchers. These include the idea that a historical figure could not have been like the Gospel portrayals and consequently the Gospels have developed in a linear and layered fashion from the authentic kernels to the elaborated literary constructions as they are known today. The aim of historical Jesus research, therefore, is to identify the authentic material from which the historical figure as a social type underneath the overlay is constructed. Anthropological historiography offers an alternative framework for dealing with Jesus of Nazareth as a social personage fully embedded in a first-century Mediterranean worldview and the Gospels as cultural artifacts related to this figure. The shamanic complex can account for the cultural processes and dynamics related to his social personage. This cross-cultural model represents a religious pattern that refers to a family of features for describing those religious entrepreneurs who, based on regular Altered State of Consciousness experiences, perform a specific set of social functions in their communities. This model accounts for the wide spectrum of the data ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth while it offers a coherent framework for constructing the historical Jesus as a social personage embedded in his worldview. As a Galilean shamanic figure Jesus typically performed healings and exorcisms, he controlled the spirits while he also acted as prophet, teacher and mediator of divine knowledge.

By the celebrated author of A Dream in Polar Fog, a collection of the myths and stories of Yuri Rytkheu’s own family that is at once a moving history of the Chukchi people who inhabit the northern shores of the Bering Sea and a beautiful cautionary tale rife with conflict, human drama, and humor. We meet fantastic characters: Nau, the mother of the human race; Rau, her half-whale husband; and Rytkheu’s own grandfather, fated to be an intrepid traveler, far-ranging whaler, living ethnographic exhibit, and the last shaman of Uelen. The Chukchi Bible moves through vast Arctic tundra, sea, and sky – and to places deep within ourselves—introducing readers, in vivid prose, to an extraordinary mythology and a resilient people.

As a “wild,” drumming thunder shaman, a warrior mounted on her spirit horse, Francisca Kolipi’s spirit traveled to other historical times and places, gaining the power and knowledge to conduct spiritual warfare against her community’s enemies, including forestry companies and settlers. As a “civilized” shaman, Francisca narrated the Mapuche people’s attachment to their local sacred landscapes, which are themselves imbued with shamanic power, and constructed nonlinear histories of intra- and interethnic relations that created a moral order in which Mapuche become history’s spiritual victors. Thunder Shaman represents an extraordinary collaboration between Francisca Kolipi and anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, who became Kolipi’s “granddaughter,” trusted helper, and agent in a mission of historical (re)construction and myth-making. The book describes Francisca’s life, death, and expected rebirth, and shows how she remade history through multitemporal dreams, visions, and spirit possession, drawing on ancestral beings and forest spirits as historical agents to obliterate state ideologies and the colonialist usurpation of indigenous lands. Both an academic text and a powerful ritual object intended to be an agent in shamanic history, Thunder Shaman functions simultaneously as a shamanic “bible,” embodying Francisca’s power, will, and spirit long after her death in 1996, and an insightful study of shamanic historical consciousness, in which biography, spirituality, politics, ecology, and the past, present, and future are inextricably linked. It demonstrates how shamans are constituted by historical-political and ecological events, while they also actively create history itself through shamanic imaginaries and narrative forms.