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Paperback The Shaman Book

ISBN: 0806121068

ISBN13: 9780806121062

The Shaman

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Book Overview

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.

Customer Reviews

3 ratings

A great research aid to Ojibway shamanism

The Shaman was a very helpful and personal description on what it means to be a shaman, historically and in later Ojibway culture. The first hand accounts are concise and direct. I found the pictures of the midewiwin and petroglyphs particularly helpful when I was wrting my own novel, Neitherworld Book One Akiiwan. If the casual reader has trouble understanding the ancient Ojibway (or Ojibwe) culture after reading the shaman it is not the author's fault - it is instead because paleo-American culture is really so foreign to later Euro-American culture. Remember while reading the Shaman, that the Shaman's power derived in large part from the belief of his audience in him/her. Without that, the stories are detached and even unsatisfying. It is thus in every culture, of course, including ours.

Native Americans Live in a Universe

Thourough account of shamanism in the Ojibwe society, but applicable to the phenomenon as a whole. A great researcher, Mr. Grim provides perspectives from other areas of the world such as Siberia to exhibit similarities of human experience both in the shamanic realm and in the human psyche.

Excellent synopsis of the shamanic practices of the Ojibwe.

The author wisely places the practices of shamanism within the cultural context. At no point does the author make the mistake of reducing the shamanic practices to deities and such but correctly emphasizes the "forces" and movements of nature of which the shaman is an "expression." Excellent read for anyone generally interested in shamanism or specifically in the Ojibwe practices of the Mide society.
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