discussion and links for shamanism, medicine, & ritual
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  • Thanks Britta,

    Your image of the shaman with 4 thumbs sadly made me think of how we in the western world would have treated that child at its birth. Maybe we need to also be sensitive to the fact that we often label something a wound that is really an opening to a deeper, richer vision. Even pathology might be redefined not as the study of pathos but the study of another path.

  • Interesting thread. Thank you.

    I am reminded of an experience I had while trekking in Nepal many years ago. I became sick deep into the journey days away from "medical" help in a very small village. The medicine man was sent for and I was treated by a Shaman through ritual practices while the village folks watched. He was gifted with 4 thumbs, two on each hand that worked. I can still distinctly see him moving grains of rice around on his tray with his thumbs. Perhaps I just ate something bad or perhaps his medicine worked as the next morning I left that village and resumed my trek.

    He was "marked" for the highly skilled work of healer. He was not ostracized as different but revered for it and the gifts that came with that marking as special.

    For me it is not just the wound, but what has been done with the "wound" or marking that is the true mark of a healer. Like Ed said, it is in the awareness and its healing, not simply the wound itself. 

    And thank you for the Navajo weaver reminder. May write my paper for Native Traditions of the Americas on that! Thank you!!! 

  • Not much to add other than welcome and I appreciated reading your words Rebecca as well as Ed's!  Welcome!  Mary
  • I think the idea that the divine comes through the perfect & ideal is an inheritance from the Greeks with a Christian spin being put to it later. Not sure if any other cultures also have this perfection ideal. (Anyone? Anyone?) Whether wound to the body, ego, emotions, and/or spirit, I'm one who agrees that the gift is in the conscious awareness of the wound and its healing. (I'm also a bit jealous of your on-going experience.) Thanks for reminding me of the Navajo weavers. There is something I'm supposed to hear in this for today.

    Ed

  • I am excited to find this group and by all of your contemplations. I have been working with a woman trained in shamanistic practices...attending a weekly self-healing shamanic journey circle. My experience is a level of embodied connection with my place in the cycle of life, The Mystery, and the mystery of who I am.  In thinking about the wounded healer...and the flaw Navajo weavers wound intentionally include in their work...and the idea that the gift is in the wound...I wonder -- contrary to the popular notion that the divine is found in the perfect & ideal -- if the potency of the divine seeks, perhaps needs, and is hidden in and called forth through the flaw?   

  • Is anyone interested in a trip to Peru for about a week at the end of August or beginning of September (dry season) to experience the ayahuasca.
  • Looking at the quotes - I don't think I grabbed what I was looking for - alas, I will cliff note it as the 2 quotes do piecemeal what I was wanting to share:  This Shaman woman 26,000 BC has a skull that reveals that she had facial paralysis.  In her day, she was sculpted in a way that is unlike any prehistoric artwork.  For years scholars debated if it was a forgery since it has no artistic lineage and is very skillfully sophisticated and realistic.  I believe (off the top of my noggin) that it was carved from Mammoth ivory, her hair in a bun, very elegant and the bust-portrait reveals the left side facial paralysis (being the first known, oldest prehistoric portrait of a known person).  Generations later, she was depicted again, memory of a great healer, this time as a more stylized mask, one also revealing the facial paralysis on the left side.  Mary
  • I appreciate all the comments made by Cathryn and Lynn Marie this morning - nod of head.  Mostly, I appreciate Cathryn's pointing to the foot offering for this shaman woman had a limp or dragged her foot in her life and gifted with a new foot for her next life passage.  I am struck by what feels like consistency of heritage of shamans as Wounded Healers - this woman, 12,000 years ago, a healer with a limp, and the one whose captured my attention (26,000 BC) having facial paralysis on her left side (see more quotes on her below).  This leads to such matters as hysteria and "mental illness" once being initiatory ground (or still being such in other cultures) rather than pathology.  How might we revision suffering which may very well be the voices of the gods, new green grow?  Musing with coffee in hand.  Cheers, Mary

     

    “Her faithful depiction was achieved by one of her contemporaries of the settlement represented (found by Absolon in 1936 –perfect three-dimensional small female head)….  Some generations later…she was depicted a second time but
    now in an entirely different manner (as she was now known only in traditional
    memory) as a ritual mask for ceremonies. 
    She might also (in life) have functioned as a ceremonial practitioner or
    assistant, who gave explanations of everyday occurrences through mimicry,
    gestures, or vocal utterances.

    We may therefore assume that in the open sites of the upper paleolithic there took place the same complex religious ceremonials thatwere performed before the excellent paintings, engravings, and animal
    sculptures of the western European caves. 
    Selected individuals of the primal communities seem to have dedicated
    themselves to such ceremonials…. 
    It is, of course, possible that, as with the Chukchi – where women were
    better acquainted with all ceremonial concerns and cults than were men – women
    assumed as “guardians of the fire” thee care for sanctified objects.  Furthermore, the domestic magic of women
    was credited with greater power and force than were the hunting efforts of the
    men on the tundra.  At the lower
    phases of economic and social development, cultic concerns were also women’s
    tasks.”  (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, 202-204.)

     

    “The asymmetrical left facial halves, reminiscent of slack features, may be thought to be indications of total debility of the meneticmuscles and a clear evidence of a peripheral paralysis of the left facial
    nerve.”  (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.)  (Ref nervous systems, ritual and the
    grotesque – she is grotesque by definition of the grotesque – not classical,
    drooling, etc.)

  • Cathryn, your remarks are potent.  Where I live, several inches of snow and ice cover the places where I make my gardens.  Your comments reminded me that I need to be with that sacred place of growth no matter what the season or weather.  I want to hold a space for the dying back and the miracle of returning growth each spring. This connection to Earth is deeply needed and I appreciate the reminder. L.
  • Ed: Interesting comment you make about cross-cultural shamanic healing. My thoughts started to work on this whilst I was in my veg garden this morning, it looks rather rough cold and wet right now, but it transforms in a few short weeks into something quite spectacular, with not a lot of input from me.  This gave me the impression that no matter what our culture, if we are genuine and have that great connection which allows feeling and emotion to flow between, then we do what flows. Alternatively if we try to emulate another cultures ways, then the connection may not flow quite in the way it needs. Just my musings.
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