Here’s a necessary passage from George P. Hansen’s 1994 opus The Trickster and the Paranormal, which is a flatly necessary book (though one that’s oddly semi-obscure, for reasons that have long eluded me): [Anthropologist Larry] Peters recognized that the idea of creative illness, advanced by Henri Ellenberger in 1964, can be understood as a liminal…
Tag: shamanism
Jan Svankmajer: “A puppet is a magical object”
A puppet is a magical object. It is not a toy, is it? Here they see it as puppet theatre, as puppets for kids. But it’s just not like that. These native tribes — in Africa or Oceania, etc. — the shamans use puppets in communication not only with the upper world, with the gods,…
Interview with James Fadiman: The Daemon and the Doors of Perception
Dr. James Fadiman Just published and now available here at The Teeming Brain: my interview/conversation with Dr. James Fadiman, one of the pioneers of transpersonal psychology and modern research into the spiritual and therapeutic applications of psychedelics. This has been a long time in coming, for reasons that I explain in the interview’s introduction. The…
The perils of literary shamanism and the gothic horror of ‘Melmoth’
In a fascinating article from 2008 at The Daily Grail, Aeolas Kephas (a.k.a. Jason Horsely) reflects at some length on the roles of Whitley Strieber and Carlos Castaneda as literary shamans whose dedication to sharing their paranormal experiences, encounters, visions, and insights brought them much trouble: Both Castaneda and Strieber were apparently singled out by…
Anthony Hopkins on philosophy, shamanism, and ‘a landscape of darkness and horror’ in ‘Noah’
“The Flood” by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (1634/35) Via Art and the Bible, Fair Use I recently saw the Noah movie, and I’m pleased to report that I really liked it. The angle taken by writer-director Darren Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel struck me as deeply engrossing and just right for our collective cultural moment….
Teeming Links – April 11, 2014
Apparently, the whole of West Virginia has now become a sacrifice zone for the coal industry. Did you know there’s an average of one train derailment every single day in America? This is why the oil transport industry is basically a giant, horrible, environmentally apocalyptic accident just waiting to happen. You know all that propaganda…
Uncanny impact: The paranormal implications of the missing Malaysian airliner
I presume that at this point we’ve all heard about the (apparently serious?) speculations by a CNN personality that a black hole or an unspecified supernatural force might be responsible for the disappearance of Malaysian Flight MH370. Weird as this is, it’s only slightly weirder than the recent and sudden decision to radically relocate the…
Entering the fictive dream: The shamanistic, alchemical approach to writing
Andre Dubus III In On Becoming a Novelist — one of my favorite books about writing — John Gardner emphasizes the centrality of the “fictive dream,” the mental-imaginal movie that novelists are tasked with entering as deeply as possible so that they can channel it onto the page and thus recreate it in the imagination of the…
Teeming Links – August 30, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word is actually double: two opening words. The first is from John Michael Greer, writing with his typically casual and powerful lucidity. The second is from international studies expert Charles Hill, who writes with equal power. They’re lengthy, so please feel free to skip on down…
Homer, Tolkien, and the ontology of visionary states in a materialist age
In his new book The Shamanic Odyssey: Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary Experience, English professor, writer, and classical guitarist Robert Tindall, writing with psychology professor and transpersonal psychotherapist Susana Bustos, “Weav[es] together the narrative traditions of the ancient Greeks and Celts, the mythopoetic work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the voices of plant medicine…