“An ancient grave unearthed in modern-day Israel containing 50 tortoise shells, a human foot and body parts from numerous animals is likely one of the earliest known shaman burial sites, researchers said on Monday. The 12,000-year-old grave dates back to the Natufian people who were the first society to adopt a sedentary lifestyle, Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher Leore Grosman and colleagues said.
“The interment rituals and the method used to construct and seal the grave suggest this is the burial of an ancient shaman, one of the earliest known from the archaeological record,” they wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Shamans play an important role in many cultures, mediating between the human and spiritual worlds and acting as messengers, healers, magicians to serve the community, the researchers said.
The Israeli team found the bones in a small cave in the lower Galilee region of present-day Israel that was a Natufian burial ground for a least 28 people. At the time of burial, more than 10 large stones were placed directly on the head, pelvis, and arms of the elderly woman whose body was laid on its side. The legs were spread apart and folded inward at the knee. The special treatment of the body and use of stones to keep it in a certain position suggests the woman held a unique position in the community, likely some sort of a shaman, the researchers said.”
(via News Daily. Thanks DJ!)
Among the current onslaught of info on the web about scientific studies on meditation, I found this interesting post by Greg Downey about the late anthropologist Felicitas Goodman and her studies on altered states:
“Some readers may have thought I was doing my little anthropologist’s quibble with the research on gene expression in meditation in Relax your genes, when I wrote, ?I’d be surprised if variations in these techniques (such as those that use chanting or movement, for example) had no effect at all on the resulting neural, cellular, and perhaps even genetic processes.’ Some of you might have thought to yourselves, ?Sure, Greg, you always say stuff like that – you’re paid to say stuff like that as an anthropologist.’ But one of the things I was thinking about was the work of the late anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman, which I hadn’t really discussed at all on Neuroanthorpology.
I stumbled across the webpages for the Felicitas Goodman Institut (the page is in German), and the English discussion of her work, Ritual Body Postures and Ecstatic Trance, by Nana Nauwald, and the webpage for The Cuyamungue Institute, which Goodman founded, this morning. A bit of searching turned up an interview with Prof. Goodman at Conversations for Exploration.
Goodman’s own biography is pretty fascinating; she didn’t do her PhD in anthropology until she was in her 50s, already a veteran German professor at Ohio State where she emigrated after leaving Germany with an American husband (Glenn). She went on to teach anthropology at Denison University (Ohio), and is best known for her contributions to the study of ecstatic states, including trance and glossalalia (speaking in tongues). She wrote a number of works, including Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences and Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia (now out in a new edition, according to Amazon). After falling in love with the area around Santa Fe, Goodman helped to found The Cuyamungue Institute in New Mexico, which, according to the institute’s website, ?continues her research into altered states of consciousness and holds workshops about the postures which she admits are but one door to alternate reality.’”
(via Neuroanthropology)
A small Northern European town will host three days of lectures, discussions, and film showings as the International Midnight Sun Witchcraft Conference descends on Vardo, Norway. The conference is being hosted by universities from the United States and Scandinavia, and will also feature discussions on shamanism and on the issue of cultural persecutions of witchcraft, both in a historical context and in examples from around the world in the modern day.
The original article (complete with stereotype-propagating image and obligatory Harry Potter mention) from BBC News.
I was asked to pass this along:
dear friends
i?m looking for contributions for my first occultural book which will be a compilation of several texts from several contributor swith these topics / guidelines :
chaos magick, sigils, cut ups, cybermagick, alchemy, modern pagan philosophies, pagan activism, techno-shamanism, esoterrorism, situationism, anarchy, immediatism, sufi, thelema, wicca, culture jamming, direct action, utopia/dystopia, disinformation, conspiracies,etc.
the book will be printed in english.
the book wil lbe printed in a small quantity and in a non profit basis.
let me know then in case of interest
best regards
fernando
www.thisco.net
E-mail submissions to thisney at gmail.com within 2 months.
Came across this via Kris Olsvik and Nerdshit, by Chris Arkenberg:?
The human brain is not a static computing device merely receiving and processing information acquired by its sensoria but, rather, it is a dynamic and plastic network of neural centers, each specialized to handle specific tasks, coordinated with each other through a continuously changing array of associative connections between hundreds of billions of neural cells. (Readers are encouraged to look through “The Self & It’s Brain” by Karl Popper & John Eccles for exhaustive studies of neuronal plasticity in associative networks and their implications for consciousness.) While the various regions of the brain are shared by all humans, and the functions of those regions are essentially the same in each of us, the connections between them and the intangible interface which integrates experience between our senses and our mind is absolutely unique to each individual. Genetic predisposition, early imprints, and life experiences each contribute to the ever-evolving construct of the individual. And behind it all in the secret center of our mind, resides the self, absolutely intangible but undeniably real, stringing together the momentary snapshots of the sensoria, creating our sense of time and guiding the processes of mind in accord with its will. But while many may never question the way their mind and brain color their world, others seek to elevate the self to the level of meta-programmer and actively break the bonds of belief to rewire the associative network of the brain and its mind. Many tools exist for such a task, including the archaic techniques of shamanism, the use of psychedelic compounds, and the canon of western esoterica commonly known as magick. By employing these and other methods it is possible to directly modify the physiology of the brain and reprogram the mind in accord with the ideals of the self. (Please note that this paper is not intended to present a reductionist or mechanistic view of consciousness. The visionary experiences of shamanism and the phenomenology of magick are far more profound and ineffable than if they were simply side effects of metabolism.)
continued here?
EDIT ? I just found this via the writings of LVX23, which leads me to perhaps conclude that THEY MAY BE THE SAME PEOPLE! Or not. I do not know, cuz the other articles on there have no orthodox name. And the reason I was jumping around his site is cuz I need to e-mail him, but I am without a contact method. Please shoot me a msg on how to contact you.
Shamanism
Working with Animal Spirits
from the site:
Shamanism, the world’s oldest healing tradition, is found in all cultures on Earth.
Shamans work with their allies–the animal spirits.
Learn the wisdom of over three hundred of these spiritual teachers.
This is the largest (if somewhat haphazardly organized) site on animal energy in shamanic work that I’ve personally encountered..
(note that it is a geocities site, so it might get smushed by a lot of traffic. )
The TIP Records album Mystery of the Yeti 2 has a song by Hallucinogen called “the Herb Garden” in which there is a sample attributed to entheogen researcher Christian Raetsch and transcribed by fUSION Anomaly:
“you have heard of the yeti? the ubanamanamanala snowman? that is of course not an animal or a prehuman being, that is originally one of the shamans gods, the real name is Banjhakri, that means the shaman of the forest… so therefore nobody will ever find the yeti in nature, because you have to go in trance and then you’ll find the Yeti easily…”
“uhm, the Banjhakri uhm, the (…) man or the, the (…) shaman, the forest shaman, he wears a skin of, uhm… d-d-d-deer (jibberish) the symbol of this mushroom!”
“the yeti loves to drink shnaps too, so he’s like a real shaman… he, uhm, uh, if you want to contact him, you have to put some alcoholic offerings in front of the forest.”
“he has one dreadlock, that’s in honour of Shiva… i ask ‘then why don’t you have dreadlocks all over?’ he said ‘because, you know i’m, uh… pupupupu ap tepepep un nenenenn umndibdibdib dsedsedse de ann ktsingngngng to have dreadlocks all over’”
So this got me curious. I did a Google search, but didn’t come up with much promising material. According to this source: “Ban Jhakri is also the Nepali word for the smallest type
of yeti, so it appears that yetis do exist, at least in the spirit world” and I found a site selling back issues of a transpersonal psychology journal with an article about “The ‘calling’ the yeti, and the banjhakri ‘forest shaman’ in Nepalese shamanism.” The other pages I could find were in other languages and couldn’t be translated. I also found that the term “Ban Jhakri” is often used to simply mean shaman. Someone on Barbelith says that the Yeti guarded Shangri La- but he’s a tabloid writer so I’m skeptical. I’m just wondering if anyone out there has any information that might clear this up, or suggest some further reading on the yeti/shamanism connection.
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