ABSTRACT
As Michael Harner notes in his exemplary work, The Way of the Shaman’, we have been content in our contemporary scientific world to pass over the folk-wisdom of shamanic cultures, ostensibly because the societies from which these beliefs flow are unsophisticated and technologically simple. The revival of modern western magic and the renewed interest in ‘native’ cosmologies and shamanism as found among the Amer-indian cultures, for example, show that a ‘mythic backlash’ has taken place. By contrast both shamanism and magic offer techniques of approaching the visionary sources of our culture. Both systems of thought structure the universe in ways that are deeply and symbolically meaningful and which fully accommodate enlarged horizons of human consciousness. Clearly we humans require domains of mystery; we need to know where the sacred aspects of life may be found and how to understand the intuitive, infinite and profoundly meaningful visionary moments which arise in all of us at different times.
