Healing EEs/EHEs/Healing Process Record Type: Review   ID: 531
Shamans, Healers, and Medicine Men Kalweit, Holger
This work by a German ethnologist "tells of how primal healers experience being, how they give themselves over to the energies of life and act in sympathy with them" (p. 2). It is about the resacralization of human consciousness through understanding health as a way of being, "a change in the level of consciousness, a change in the spiritual space-time structure. ... Shamanic therapy means the healing of an entire life" (p. 3). Part I, "The Birth of the Healer," has 5 chapters, including one on "White Shamans" (Western psychics and healers such as Olga Worrall and Peter Hurkos). Part 2, Vision of Knowledge, has four chapters on trance visions and ways of inducing them, such as the vision quest. Part 3, "Sacred Journeys Through Space and Time," consists of four chapters on shamanic journeys in space and time. Part 4, Ways of Power, "has two chapters on shamanic feats of black magic and contests between shamans. The last part, "The Shadows of Everything Existing," consists of four brief but important chapters, 16-19. In the 16th, he contrasts shamanism and psychosis. In the 17th he identifies shamanism with the "holy and healthy as an expression of a paradoxical world" and contrasts it "with the unholy and healthy as an expression of our linear, Euclidean world" (p. 222). In the 18th he presents some data indicating that "blue light emanations, shamanism, and altered states ... are somehow connected" (p. 239) and that blue light and the energy of healing perhaps are the same thing. In 19 he presents a "transtherapeutic philosophy," in which "the shadow behind everything existing refers to our real being. What is actually the shadow is the body, life, the visible. We have unwittingly reversed core and husk to enable us to approach life in a more unencumbered and unequivocal fashion" (p. 241). In an Epilogue, he describes a transpersonal anthropology.
Publisher Information:	Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1992. 299p. Bibl: 269-286; 11 illus; Index: 291-299

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