6 Ways Drumming Heals Body, Mind and Soul
From slowing the decline in fatal brain disease, to generating a sense of oneness with one another and the universe, drumming's physical and spiritual health benefits may be as old as time itself. Read the article here
Read more…
Comments
The grave of an elderly woman buried about 12,000 years ago included a plethora of animal remains, adding one piece of evidence she was indeed a shaman who possibly used animal spirits to communicate with the spirit world (depicted in this artistic reconstruction of the grave).
This care along with the animal parts point to the grave belonging to both an important member of the society and possibly a healer called a shaman, the researchers conclude in their research published this week by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Such healers mediate between the human and spirit worlds, often summoning the help of animal spirits along their quests, according to the researchers...
BTW. there are two absolutely fabulous books I recommend on the history and culture of women shamans, one of which I recall includes some discussion of one of these burials (can't remember which, though). You probably know these books well, Mary, but for anyone else, they are "The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Relgion and Medicine by Barbara Tedlock, and "Shakti Woman: Feeling our Fire, Healing our World-The New Female Shamanism" by Vicki Noble.
Hey Ed - here is one quote from the rather obscure source:
“The female whose strongly flexed gracile skeleton we found in 1949 under two mammoth scapulae, below the level of the culturalstratum near the edge of the first settlement unit, also showed a defect [that
two art portraits replicate] of the left half of the face. Her head and chest had been sprinkled
with red ochre; in her fist she held canines of a polar fox and a skeletal
portion of the same animal; and near her head was a flint point – a typical
example of funerary rites of religious character in the upper
Paleolithic…. In any event, the
woman interred in the grave at Dolni Vestonice was of small stature, and her
delicate appearance…her grave marked her for ritual practices as if she had
been “born” for them.” (Bohuslav
Klima, “The First Ground-Plan of an Upper Paleolithic Loess Settlement in
Middle Europe and its Meaning,” in Robert Braidwood and Gordon Willey (eds.), Courses Toward Urban Life, 203.)
If you cannot find the book via Amazon or such, I could copy and snail mail you the essay. Per shamanism and cross-culture, I think shamanism delves to a stratum that transcends culture and you just KNOW when you are in the midst of a healer that you are kindred with, transcending language, but certainly not self-imposed grandiose attempts or the heavens will send trickster in some form or another to re-humble-ize the healer so they remember they aren't really the healer, more like the divine secretary or such. A somewhat simple answer but even within my own "culture" there can just be a knowing who and who isn't the shamanic-one who can assist. If someone arrived speaking a different language and that mutual knowing was in-of our souls, I would not mind one bit that the person was of another language and culture. I think white-ies have a bad rap because we've forgotten our own shamanic heritage which goes back millennia and then try to find our origins through someone else's. But at the deepest strata the origins remain alive and well and eager to be re-membered. Mary
Mary,
I am interested in this area so please list the obscure references. I became interested after reading several of the Geer books (People of the Wolf) and the like. I have not kept up with this group as I would wish so this next question may have been covered: What is the place of a person not of a particular culture in providing shamanic healing cross-culturally? I have a concern about, for example, any attempt of a self-proclaimed, Western shaman attempting to help a native from Peru. The desire may be genuine but if the culture is so different......?