Some cool book images:

Where is my Calvin and Hobbes?

Image by frankieleon

Hofer’s Gold Label Lager Beer

Image by Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, UofT
Creator: The Hofer Brewing Company Ltd.
Title: Hofer’s Gold Label Lager Beer
Date: [c.1928-1939]
Extent: 1 label: printed ; (8x10cm)
Notes: From a collection of beer labels, stationery and Canadian breweriana donated by Lawrence C. Sherk.
Format: Label
Rights Info: No known restrictions on access
Repository: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario Canada, M5S 1A5, library.utoronto.ca/fisher

The Woman In The Shaman’s Body

Image by Earthworm
The Woman in the Shaman’s Body
Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine

Published in 2005 this book takes the work of Maria Gambutas regarding female centered religious deities forward to focus on women in shamanism. Written by a professor of anthropology who is herself trained as a shaman in the mayan tradition, her book combines her personal experience and eye witness accounts of shamans as well as her research. The result is a history of women in Shamanism that was overlooked by earlier ethnographers who dismissed these women as either sorceresses or simple midwives. These early researchers being men were also forbidden to be present in certain birthing rituals and did not have enough curiosity to send a woman in, having already decided that there was nothing worth observing in such gatherings. We know all that from similar biases involving indigenous transgendered people.

Such amusing assumptions as identifying a cave painting as a bison instead of a pregnant woman. As technology improved the remains of women could be more readily identified and when found buried with the tools of a shaman then provided proof of these oversights. She also gives scientific backing to the visionary physiology of women. "sheer number and density of neurons in women’s brains are significantly greater than in men. Neurons course between the left and right sides of the brain within the corpus callosum, a connective passageway that is larger than in men." So is the "anterior commissure and a third band of fibers connecting the thalami of the two sides of the brain—the mass intermedia—is present more often in females than in males".

The book covers the many shamanic methods used including dreams, plant medicines, journeying, divination, channeling and erotic trance states. It is clear that there were as many female shamans as male. Male shamans were initiated as warriors participating in fierce battles while female shamans were initiated in a birthing process often becoming shamans after the birth of their first child, then becoming midwives. The author also covers menstrual blood rituals, women as weavers and celestial goddesses and the use of gender shifting in shamanic work. It is clear that the cultures that supported such shamanic work understood that gender was a tool rather than an identity. That men and women could use gender shifting rituals to access different perspectives.

She also covers stories of transgendered shamans who were mediators between the sexes. "Sexuality, trance and the healing use of vital energy all merge in a shaman’s activities." Some words are given to the ecstatic visionary experience of women through erotic experience. How the shaman enters an altered state of consciousness through orgasm. Word for orgasm is the same as trance in many languages. Reference is made to ecstatic experience among nuns who were Christian mystics. Energy is an expression of spirit transforming into matter, she says.

She also gives an account of how shamanism in Russia survived and was being reconstituted despite 70 years of Soviet rule during which shamans had their drums burned and their tongues cut out before being sent to the gulag. Similar oppression in China. In England shamanism but a dim memory, but Celtic descendants reviving it now. She mentions Michael Harner’s work and Sandra Ingerman here in the states.

This book is an eclectic survey of shamanism from a women’s perspective. There are many topics and stories offered here that deserve fleshing out, but just having it all in one book offered a lot to me as a woman and gender shifter that I can now understand how these qualities can be linked to shamanic practice.