ABSTRACT
Shamanism is the magic of ecstasy, of leaving the body and soaring to great heights of mystical illumination. Mircea Eliade, the famous scholar of comparative religion calls the shaman ‘the technician of the sacred’. In the strict anthropological sense, shamanism is best represented in Siberia and in South and Central America among the native Indian tribes. Perhaps the most impressive role of the shaman, however, is his ecstatic flight into the world of his native mythology. Castaneda spent ten years attempting to grasp the magical concepts of the Mexican shaman Don Juan Matus, whom he had originally met on an anthropological field trip to Arizona. Superficially the world of the native shaman may seem to be of little relevance to the occult and the modern magician, but this is not the case. The basic assertion of the shaman or trance magician is that by encountering the gods of our minds in this way, we in fact discover ourselves.
