Summary
Michael Harner (1929–2018) was an American anthropologist who turned his fieldwork into a method. He went to the Upper Amazon in 1960–61 to study the Conibo, drank ayahuasca at the urging of his hosts, and emerged convinced that the shaman’s claim to enter another reality could be tested directly rather than analysed at a distance. Over the next two decades he trained with Conibo, Jívaro, Wintun, Pomo, Coast Salish, and Lakota Sioux teachers, then distilled what they had in common into a transmissible practice he called core shamanism. The Way of the Shaman, first published in 1980 and reissued through three editions, presented this distillation as a workshop curriculum: monotonous drumming as the entry technique, the journey to the Lowerworld as the basic exercise, and the recovery of a guardian spirit as the foundational healing act. Harner argued that the convergence of shamanic methods across cultures separated by oceans and millennia was best explained pragmatically — they had survived because they worked.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Life and Career
Harner trained as an anthropologist and conducted his earliest substantial fieldwork among the Conibo of the Peruvian Amazon in 1960–61.(Harner, Michael, 1990) On that trip the Conibo pressed him to drink ayahuasca, telling him he could not understand their cosmology by talking about it. The first dose produced visions of giant reptilian beings at the base of his skull who claimed to be the true masters of life on Earth.(Harner, Michael, 1990) When he reported the experience to a blind Conibo shaman, the man laughed and dismissed the entities as Masters of Outer Darkness — known to him from his own journeys, now familiar to Harner from his.(Harner, Michael, 1990) That moment of recognition, in which a barefoot shaman casually identified what Harner had taken for revelation, became the founding scene of his career. He decided to learn shamanism from inside.
Akachu warned Harner to hold his balsa at all times or die, and Harner panicked after hearing about deaths and delirium from taking maikua.(Harner, Michael, 1990) The Jívaro tsentsak system describes spirit helpers, often called magical darts, that are the main powers causing and curing illness; they are invisible to nonshamans and visible to shamans only in altered consciousness.(Harner, Michael, 1990) A healing shaman drinks ayahuasca and other consciousness-changing substances to see into the patient’s body, identifies the intruding entity, and determines if he can extract it by sucking.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Tobacco water, kept constantly available, sustains the tsentsak and keeps them alert; a Jívaro healing shaman never travels without green tobacco leaves.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Harner learned from the Conibo and Jívaro that shamanism can be practiced successfully without the use of ayahuasca or other drugs.(Harner, Michael, 1990) This knowledge proved especially useful in introducing Westerners to the practice of shamanism.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Unlike Australian and many other tribal peoples who practice shamanism without psychedelics, the Jívaro and Conibo employ psychedelics.(Harner, Michael, 1990) [GAP: No cited information about Harner founding the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, publishing Way of the Shaman, or teaching thousands.]
Core Shamanism: The Method
Harner’s central theoretical contribution was the claim that shamanism is methodology rather than religion — a set of repeatable techniques for entering altered states and accomplishing specific tasks within them.(Harner, Michael, 1990) He thought this distinction would matter to a particular kind of educated reader: people who had left ecclesiastical religion behind, who no longer trusted competing scriptural authorities, and who required higher standards of evidence than secondhand or thirdhand anecdote.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Shamanism, on his account, supplied that standard: it offered direct experiential verification, available in a few hours of trained practice, of phenomena that meditation or prayer might require years to produce.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The method as Harner taught it had four pillars.
The first was the distinction between two states of consciousness. Following Carlos Castaneda’s terminology of “ordinary” and “nonordinary” reality, Harner formalised the contrast as Ordinary State of Consciousness (OSC) and Shamanic State of Consciousness (SSC). The shaman’s defining capacity is the ability to move between them at will.(Harner, Michael, 1990) The SSC is not merely an altered trance state but a learned cognitive framework: knowledge of shamanic cosmography, of the mission appropriate to the journey, of how to navigate the Lowerworld. Without the framework, the altered state alone is insufficient for shamanic work.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The second was monotonous percussion as the entry technique. Harner argued that this classic drug-free method was remarkably safe — practitioners who lost focus simply returned to ordinary consciousness — and produced results quickly compared with meditation, prayer, or chanting.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Laboratory research by Andrew Neher had shown that drumming produces measurable changes in the central nervous system, with rhythmic stimulation affecting electrical activity across sensory and motor areas not ordinarily affected. Jilek and Ormestad, studying the Salish deer-skin drum, found beat frequencies concentrated in the theta wave range (4–7 cycles per second), the band most effective for inducing trance states.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Drumming had to be sustained throughout: unlike Western spirit possession, the SSC is a light trance that allows full recall afterward, with part of the shaman’s consciousness still connected to ordinary reality, and the drumbeat must be maintained by an assistant or the shaman returns to OSC.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The third was the journey to the Lowerworld. Harner gave it a universal structure: the shaman enters a hole in the earth — cave, spring, hollow tree, waterhole — traverses a tunnel or tube, and emerges into a bright underworld landscape to accomplish a healing or knowledge task before returning back up through the tunnel to the surface.(Harner, Michael, 1990) The Conibo had taught him to follow the roots of the giant catahua tree down into the ground; in the SSC the roots transformed into black serpents down whose backs he slid to reach lands of forests, lakes, rivers, and strange cities lit by a hidden underground sun.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Iglulik Eskimo accounts described the same descent in different ethnographic dress: a tube fitted to the shaman’s body, kept open by ancestral soul-helpers, with the return heralded by an audible rushing sound before the shaman shoots back up.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Harner read the concentric circle motif in shamanic art across continents — Eskimo masks, Tibetan mandalas, Hopi sipapu paintings — as a representation of the visual experience of the tunnel entrance itself.(Harner, Michael, 1990) His practical instructions for a first journey were simple: drum at 205–220 beats per minute, lie in darkness, visualise a remembered earth entrance, and enter.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Workshop participants reported multisensory experiences that exceeded vision alone — feeling cold water, smelling a daisy, hearing babbling streams — which Harner took as evidence that the SSC engaged a wider range of perceptual channels than ordinary imagination.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The fourth pillar was the guardian spirit, also called the power animal. Following Ruth Benedict’s classic work on the guardian spirit complex of native North America, Harner held that this relationship is virtually universal in shamanism — a prerequisite for shamanic functioning, called by different names (tutelary spirit in Siberia, nagual in Mesoamerica) but structurally the same. Without a guardian spirit, shamanic work is virtually impossible.(Harner, Michael, 1990) The two fundamental healing approaches available to the shaman are derived directly from this concept: restoring beneficial powers to someone who has lost them (guardian spirit or soul retrieval), and extracting harmful intrusive powers from the patient’s body.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Following Eliade, Harner defined the shaman technically as a person who enters an altered state of consciousness at will to contact hidden reality, possessing specific techniques of ecstasy — particularly the soul journey to sky or underworld — and at least one, usually more, “spirits” in personal service. This is what distinguishes shamans from other magicians and medicine men.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Iglulik Eskimo qaumaneq — the shaman’s “lighting” or “enlightenment,” the ability to see in darkness with eyes closed, perceiving things and events hidden from others — illustrated the experiential character of the gift: not metaphorical sight but a literal perceptual capacity within the SSC.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Shamanic initiation is experiential and gradual: learning to achieve the SSC reliably, gaining personal certainty of one’s guardian spirit, and successfully helping others shamanically.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The Argument from Convergence
A claim that runs through every chapter of the book is that the cross-cultural uniformity of shamanic methods is itself an argument for their effectiveness. Harner held that shamanic methods are at least 20,000–30,000 years old on archaeological and ethnological evidence, possibly considerably older given the antiquity of the human lineage.(Harner, Michael, 1990) They are documented across aboriginal Australia, native North and South America, Siberia, central Asia, and Europe; the consistency cannot be attributed to lack of imagination among premodern peoples, whose social systems, art, and economics are widely variable. The pragmatic explanation — that the methods worked, were preserved because they worked, and converged through trial and error onto effective techniques — was for Harner the most economical.(Harner, Michael, 1990) He extended the argument: premodern peoples lacked advanced medical technology, so they had every reason to develop the nontechnological capacities of the human mind for health and healing, and the basic uniformity of their results suggests they arrived at the same conclusions.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The book is dense with cross-cultural parallels offered as evidence for this thesis. The spirit canoe as a vehicle for the shamanic journey appears in Siberia, Malaysia, Indonesia, aboriginal Australia (as a serpent-canoe), the Desana of the South American tropical forest, and the Tapirapé of central Brazil.(Harner, Michael, 1990) The belief that the guardian spirit resides primarily in the chest, with the fontanelle as a key entrance and exit point for power, is held by the Jívaro, in aboriginal Australia, and in western North America.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Quartz crystals are valued as the strongest power objects of all by peoples as widely separated as the Jívaro, Australian aborigines, Huichol, Tsimshian, Coast Miwok, and western Yuman — found in California archaeological sites and prehistoric burials dating back 8,000 years.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Shamanic metamorphosis into power animals — Lapp shamans into wolves, bears, reindeer, and fish; Eskimo and Siberian shamans into wolves; Yuki “bear doctors” into bears — survived in Western Europe until the Renaissance.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Care not to wake sleeping people suddenly, on the grounds that the soul or guardian may be wandering, is found among the Murngin of Australia, the Warao of South America, and the Jívaro alike.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Harner’s parallel between the master shaman and the master scientist — both pursuing firsthand empirical inquiry into hidden causal processes of the universe, both refusing ecclesiastical and political authority — was offered in the same spirit.(Harner, Michael, 1990) The shaman’s epistemology, on his account, is closer to natural science than to religion. The SSC is a research instrument; the journey is fieldwork; the guardian spirit is a working hypothesis confirmed or rejected by repeated practice.
He coined the term cognicentrism — the analogue in consciousness of ethnocentrism — for the prejudice against nonordinary states that is held by people who have never experienced them, and proposed that the only real solution is for more people to experience the SSC themselves and on their own terms.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The Power Animal
Harner’s chapter on power animals presented the concept in a form designed for transmission. In shamanic cosmology, the guardian connects the shaman with the power of the entire genus or species, not merely an individual animal: possessing Bear as guardian means access to the power of all Bears.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Power animals commonly display a dual nature — appearing in animal form in vision and in human form in dream — reflecting the widespread shamanic belief that humans and animals share a common ancestor and ancient unity.(Harner, Michael, 1990) They indicate their power by appearing in elements not their ordinary environment: a land mammal or serpent flying through the air, with or without wings, showing that the animal is nonordinary, a bearer of power.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Harner distinguished the Jívaro nagual — the shamanic guardian animal connected to the SSC and nonordinary reality — from the tonalli or tonal animal, which is linked to birth-date and ordinary destiny in pan-Mesoamerican usage. He argued that anthropological literature on Mexico and Guatemala often confused the two, and that following Castaneda the nagual is properly understood as lying beyond ordinary reality.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
For Westerners without an indigenous teacher, Harner taught a “Calling the Beasts” exercise: a non-drug method using rattle, half-closed eyes, and free movement through phases of increasing tempo, allowing one to dance an animal until its presence becomes felt.(Harner, Michael, 1990) The exercise required maintenance. The shaman must regularly dance or physically exercise the power animal to keep it willing to remain; among the Jívaro, guardian spirits typically stay only a few years before departing, necessitating the acquisition of a succession of guardians over a shaman’s lifetime.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Power animals were always beneficial — sources of power, never agents of possession. “It is a spirit to be exercised, not exorcised,” Harner wrote, contrasting the shamanic relationship sharply with the Caribbean Vodun model.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Weekly dancing of the power animal was the maintenance practice he taught his students. Practitioners who maintained the routine reported optimism, physical health, and resilience; those who neglected it experienced guardian departure and dis-spiritedness.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Healing: The Two Approaches
Restoring Power
From the shamanic perspective, illness is fundamentally a loss of guardian spirit power. Dis-spiritedness creates a vulnerability that allows harmful power intrusions to enter, and serious illness is only possible when a person has lost this energizing force. Depression, weakness, and proneness to illness are symptoms of guardian spirit loss; the dis-spirited person can no longer resist or ward off the unwanted intrusions that would in better circumstances bounce off them.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The healing journey to restore power was Harner’s central clinical method. He taught it as a step-by-step procedure: pre-journey abstinence and fasting, a darkened room, dancing one’s animal, rattling in six directions, singing a power song to induce the light SSC, lying prone beside the patient, journeying down the Tunnel to the Lowerworld, finding the animal that appears at least four times in different aspects, clasping it to the chest with one hand, then immediately blowing it through cupped hands into the patient’s breastbone and the fontanelle at the top rear of the head.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The Coast Salish spirit canoe is the elaborate cooperative form of the same work. A patient showing symptoms of dis-spiritedness — which among the Salish could include the gradual loss of property and wealth — hired half a dozen to a dozen shamans, who formed two imaginary canoes by standing in two parallel rows inside a large house. Each shaman held a six-to-eight-foot pole as a paddle, with magical cedar boards stuck into the dirt floor beside them. Together they journeyed to the Lowerworld over one to six nights, retrieved the patient’s guardian spirit, and returned it; the patient then rose and danced.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Harner adapted this for Western workshop settings as a group spirit canoe method: participants form a human canoe around a prone patient, the shaman lies beside the patient and journeys to retrieve the power animal, while crew members journey simultaneously to see and repel dangers in the Lowerworld using their own guardian animals.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
A power song was a prerequisite for shamanic healing work. Harner taught that one acquires it through a day of solitary fasting in a wild place, through dreaming, or through active journeying. Once received, the song functions as a trigger for shifting into the SSC and as a call to one’s guardian and other spirit helpers; with use it becomes more effective as a state-shifter.(Harner, Michael, 1990) The Pomo Indian shaman Essie Parrish described receiving her first power song at age eleven through a dream in which a song entered her chest from the sky — a representative case of the widespread pattern of involuntary song acquisition as shamanic calling.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
A Tavgi Samoyed shaman’s first Lowerworld journey illustrates how this work extends to mental illness. Guided by a companion spirit, the initiate saw nine tents and entered the first to find seven naked men and women singing while tearing their bodies with their teeth; the companion told him that the spirits of seven earths cause people to lose their minds, and that the shaman must be shown all the ways of diseases before he can make magic for the insane.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Harner reported that Westerners frequently experienced vivid and detailed journey narratives in power animal retrieval exercises, often including corroborated synchronicities — patients revealing prior unusual connections with the animal recovered for them, or independently experiencing some of the same details of the journey as the shaman without verbal communication. He took these as evidence that power was working beyond ordinary probability.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Extracting Intrusions
The other half of shamanic healing is the extraction of harmful intrusive powers — the shamanic analogue of infection. Harner explained intrusions as caused by eruptions of hostile emotional energy from other people who are unaware of their capacity to harm. Urban density was understood to increase intrusion frequency, because concentrated humanity generates more involuntary hostile projections; the colloquial expression “radiating hostility” is, on his reading, a latent expression of the shamanic view.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The sucking technique Harner taught was structurally similar to the Jívaro practice he had learned in 1964. The shaman enters a light SSC, locates the intrusion by passing a hand over the patient’s body to sense heat or vibration, wills two spirit helpers into the mouth to capture the intrusive power, then sucks at the skin and performs repeated dry-vomiting into a container — the sucked-out power must be expelled, never swallowed.(Harner, Michael, 1990) He insisted on a strict prerequisite. Extraction work should only be undertaken by a shaman who possesses two spirit helpers identical in type to the intrusion encountered in the Tunnel; a shaman who lacks the matching helpers must bypass the intrusion and proceed instead to guardian spirit restoration as supportive treatment.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Two further extraction methods were drawn from North American practice. The Lakota Sioux tobacco trap technique uses miniature cloth pouches of tobacco placed in a circle around the patient or passed around a group circle, exploiting the belief that intrusive spirits are attracted to tobacco — consistent with the Jívaro view that tsentsak are fed on tobacco water. The shaman draws the spirits into the ties, rolls them into a ball, takes them to a remote location, and drapes them over the branches of a tree to allow the spirits to disperse far from humans.(Harner, Michael, 1990) The Coast Salish “becoming the patient” technique requires the shaman to interview and emotionally identify with the patient, exchange clothing, and dance mimicking the patient’s movements until he has taken on the affliction; he then runs to wilderness, throws the harmful power away into the sky, and returns for a re-exchange of clothes and joint smoke purification with sage or cedar.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Harner read this practice alongside the !Kung Bushmen healing in which shamans wrap their bodies around patients to absorb sickness and expel it with shuddering and screaming, suggesting that both anticipated modern psychoanalytic principles such as countertransference.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Plants in this system serve as spirit helpers rather than guardian spirits, available only to shamans, with wild undomesticated species holding far more spiritual power than domestic plants or animals; their cumulative power can rival that of a single guardian.(Harner, Michael, 1990) The acquisition method is specific: approach a wild plant, apologise and take a specimen for botanical identification, confirm it is non-poisonous, eat four small pieces of a living member, then that evening journey to the Lowerworld to find two plants of the same species and watch them transform into nonordinary spirit form, which the shaman then ingests in the SSC.(Harner, Michael, 1990) The Tavgi Samoyed parallel — flowers that turn into red stones at a voice’s command — offered Harner a cross-cultural anchor for the spontaneous self-revelation of plant spirit helpers.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The Pomo shaman Essie Parrish supplied detailed first-person testimony for the diagnostic side of extraction. In trance she could hear the disease “making noise” inside the patient, “like insects”; the pain itself pulled her hand toward it as if by a magnet, so she did not place her hand consciously but allowed the disease to draw it. Over four years she developed a physical growth in her throat that became her sucking power organ.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Power Practice and Daily Life
The middle chapters of The Way of the Shaman cover what Harner called power practice — the application of shamanic technique to the texture of ordinary life rather than to formal healing. Shamanic divination — consulting the power animal through the journey to obtain advice on personal problems or the nonordinary cause of a patient’s illness — was one of the primary practical applications. The procedure followed the usual journey: silently greet the guardian, hold it visually, pose the question, and wait for the animal to provide its answer, most commonly by moving its body in an unusual way.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Harner’s text presents a Cashinahua anthropological account by Kensinger documenting the predictive accuracy of shamanic journeys assisted by ayahuasca.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Informants with no prior knowledge of Pucallpa had described the town in sufficient detail for the ethnographer to recognise specific shops; six of nine men reported the death of the ethnographer’s grandfather two days before he received radio confirmation.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
He distinguished “big dreams” — vivid, repeated, unusually powerful dreams understood as literal communications from the guardian spirit — from ordinary dreams, which shamans regarded as irrelevant. Big dreams were to be enacted symbolically in minor ways to prevent or invite their physical occurrence: a vivid dream of a car accident, for example, was a warning to be honoured by symbolic enactment that might prevent its serious occurrence. He attributed the technique to tribes of northeastern and western North America.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The Jívaro view that power lingers “like perfume” for weeks after a guardian departs informed Harner’s “locking in” technique: if a replacement animal is restored promptly, its power seals in residual energy from the prior guardian, allowing long-term accumulation of protective power across years and across multiple guardians.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
For absent or hospitalised patients Harner taught a distance healing technique. The shaman faces the direction of the patient, covers his eyes, visualises the patient in detail on the bed, journeys to the Lowerworld to recover a power animal for that person, sends it mentally and emotionally to the patient as visualised, then calls upon his own power animal and sends some of its force into the patient’s guardian to activate it into dancing.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The bone game — the hand game or stick game of western North American Indians — Harner presented as a training vehicle for shamanic seeing and power. Coast Salish shamans (locally called “Indian doctors”) were recognised as the best see-ers because of their power, and it was considered presumptuous for others to play against them. Among the Paviotso or Northern Paiute of Nevada, a man might seek a vision in a cave at night to obtain power in seeing in the game.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Quartz crystals occupied a special place in his power-object teaching. They are valued by the Jívaro, Australian aborigines, Huichol, Tsimshian, Coast Miwok, and western Yuman peoples in part because they appear identical in ordinary and nonordinary reality — material and spiritual natures the same — and are associated with seeing, light, and long-distance healing.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Harner offered the parallel between the physical properties of quartz (piezoelectric, foundational to radio and computing) and its shamanic role as a power object as one of the “synchronicities that make the accumulated knowledge of shamanism exciting and often even awesome.” He cited the physicist David Finkelstein’s remark, on hearing of the belief, that striking a large quartz crystal a smashing blow could theoretically release hundreds of thousands of volts — sufficient to electrocute the medicine man.(Harner, Michael, 1990) He taught practical instructions for consecrating a crystal: wash it in spring or ocean water, leave it point-upward in a split stick on a high place for eight days over a solstice, and recharge it periodically by striking the non-pointed end on a rock in a natural spring.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Relationship to Predecessors
Mircea Eliade
Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy was Harner’s primary comparative authority. Harner adopted Eliade’s technical definition of the shaman — a person possessing specific techniques of ecstasy, particularly the soul journey — as the framework that distinguishes shamans from other magicians and medicine men.(Harner, Michael, 1990) Where Eliade had assembled a global comparative survey, Harner was attempting a transmissible practice; he treated Shamanism as the documentary basis from which his own distillation could be drawn.
Carlos Castaneda
Castaneda’s distinction between “ordinary reality” and “nonordinary reality” supplied Harner with the vocabulary he formalised as OSC and SSC. He invoked Castaneda’s terminology as a way to make the shamanic two-state model legible to readers who had encountered the Don Juan books, and explicitly cited Castaneda on the nagual in distinguishing the shamanic guardian animal from the tonalli of ordinary destiny.(Harner, Michael, 1990)(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Ruth Benedict
Benedict’s classic work on the guardian spirit complex of native North America provided Harner’s anchor for the universality of the guardian spirit. Her observation that shamanism is “practically everywhere in some fashion or in some aspect built around the vision-guardian spirit complex” was the premise from which Harner developed his teaching that without a guardian spirit it is virtually impossible to be a shaman.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
The Return of Shamanism
Harner closed The Way of the Shaman by aligning shamanic healing with emerging Western evidence for mind-body medicine. The burgeoning field of holistic medicine, he argued, was independently reinventing techniques long practised in shamanism: visualisation, altered states of consciousness, aspects of psychoanalysis, hypnotherapy, meditation, positive attitude, stress-reduction, and the mental and emotional expression of personal will for health. The Simontons’ cancer treatment — in which patients journeyed to meet inner guides, summoned power-animal-like imagery, and visualised white blood cells attacking tumours — was, for Harner, an explicit shamanism-to-biomedicine bridge. The Simontons’ patients spontaneously drew snakes and other creatures surprisingly similar to those seen by shamans as harmful intrusive powers in the bodies of their patients.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
Harner advocated a complementary model rather than a competitive one. He cited Jívaro shamans’ willingness to send their patients to missionary doctors and to encourage all available technological treatment, alongside Schweitzer’s maxim that each patient carries their own doctor inside them. He envisioned a future in which a modern version of the shaman would work side-by-side with orthodox Western physicians, and held that in shamanism there is ultimately no distinction between helping others and helping yourself: by helping others shamanically, one becomes more powerful, self-fulfilled, and joyous.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
His learned framework of shamanic perception included a deep ecological reverence — approaching animals, plants, and even inorganic matter as relations with inherent power. The shaman knows that humans are related to all forms of life, “all our relations” as the Lakota Sioux say, and approaches other forms of life with familial respect and understanding in both the SSC and the OSC.(Harner, Michael, 1990) A Lakota Sioux rock-seeing technique illustrated how the same perception was available even in ordinary daylight: walk through a wild area until a two-fisted-size stone attracts your attention, carry it to a quiet place, pose your question, and study the stone’s surface until living creatures formed by its lines, crevices, and irregularities reveal themselves.(Harner, Michael, 1990)
See Also
- mircea-eliade
- carlos-castaneda
- ruth-benedict
- core-shamanism
- shamanic-state-of-consciousness
- power-animal
- soul-retrieval
- ayahuasca
- tsentsak
- foundation-for-shamanic-studies
Editorial Notes
Gaps the encyclopaedia compiler flagged for future evidence work, collected from inline markers in the body and frontmatter.
Life and Career
- [GAP: specialist source needed — no Harner biography published; Way of the Shaman evidence cards focus on shamanic content, not institutional biography; death date (2018) can be confirmed from Anthropology News obituary if acquired]
Ruth Benedict
The Return of Shamanism
- [GAP: specialist source needed — indigenous reception and neo-shamanism critique literature (Kehoe, Lindquist) not in Library; Foundation for Shamanic Studies records are institutional, not published]