Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men

Shamans, Healers, and Medicine Men explores the primal healing methods of shamans all over the world. The author shows that for these extraordinary men and women, healing is not merely the alleviation of symptoms but entails a transformation of one's relationship to life.

The author of Dreamtime and Inner Space shows that Western medicine and psychology have much to learn from the primal healing methods of shamans. As Kalweit surveys the shamans' training methods and consciousness-developing techniques, he also draws comparisons between the accounts of shamans and those of Western researchers into near-death experiences, "spiritual emergencies, " and other altered states of consciousness.

Shamans, Healers, and Medicine Men explores the primal healing methods of shamans all over the world. The author shows that for these extraordinary men and women, healing is not merely the alleviation of symptoms but entails a transformation of one's relationship to life.

Library Journal

In relating the practices of primal healing within world cultures, Kalweit emphasizes the need for modern science to look to primordial stages to understand the ``paralogical, paradoxical processes of life.'' The book, originally published in German in 1987, does not show the reader how to become a shaman but gives accounts of initiations into altered states of consciousness, which made an individual a healer. Healers develop their unique talents through a variety of inner journeys, some of which include fasting, meditations, and/or lightning. Through the knowledge transferred during inner journeys, shamans are able to heal. Kalweit relates the need for the physiological and biochemical study of visionary experience and the possibility of using archaic practices as healing therapy for modern humanity. For scholarly collections.-- L. Kriz, Sioux City P.L., Ia.

Holger Kalweit is a German ethnologist and psychologist who has studied shamanism in Hawaii, the American Southwest, Mexico, and Tibet. He is the author of several books in German as well as the founder of two psychotherapy methods—Darkness Therapy and Nature Psychotherapy—that draw upon shamanic elements.