The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine

by Barbara Tedlock

Book Overview

A distinguished anthropologist-who is also an initiated shaman-reveals the long-hidden female roots of the world's oldest form of religion and medicine. Here is a fascinating expedition into this ancient tradition, from its prehistoric beginnings to the work of women shamans across the globe today. Shamanism was not only humankind's first spiritual and healing practice, it was originally the domain of women. This is the claim of Barbara Tedlock's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553379712
• ISBN13: 9780553379716
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Bantam
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A must in healing pratice for woman

I work in healing and practicing it for my own benefeit because I had 2 chronic deseases for over 15 years... through my own experience of being treated by a majority of men, I end up realizing that there were things missing in their approach so I can feel completed... I wasn't sure what... but as it is well documented in this book, women approach healing from a different perspective, a different body... this book was very inspiring for me and still reminded me, in my own practice now, to look at things from my own perspective as a woman and as a person... and from it, I gain some knowledge that I never thought reacheable... thank you again for writhing it Mrs. Tedlock... excuse my english, I am french from Montreal (Quebec)

Brilliant, feminine balance to Jung, Campbell, Eliade

A brilliant, feminine balance to Jung, Campbell and Eliade "The Woman in the Shaman's Body" is empowering, vastly informative and also great fun to read. It reads swiftly and goes down as easily as cool water with delicious healing herbs thrown in - it flies along as easily as a shaman in a lucid dream. If I were still a college teacher I would use it for a text, for I know young people would find it accessible and intriguing. As a woman engaged in alternative healing practices, an author and a lifelong student of the world's shamanic traditions, I LOVE this book and will place it in my library's spot of highest honor. Yes, for me it is an elixir. Tedlock is a great synthesizer of the scholarly - with prodigious research and meticulous citation, and a fair sprinkling of up-to-date neuroscience and the biochemistry of healing and altered states - blended with vivid, earthy stories and personal anecdotes from her incredible adventurous life into a marvelous alchemy. As she says herself, to make her point she relies on the skills of both her callings: "argumentative intellectual reasoning" and "intuitive emotional reasoning", the yang and the yin. It should be difficult for any reader to not be persuaded by her writing. What is Tedlock's case? It is the argument for the "existence, importance and power" of women shamans in ancient cultures over the entire Earth, a legacy that belongs to all of us. (We can all follow the shamanic paths of our ancestresses. You don't have to be Native American or usurp or steal Native American or Mongolian traditions. You don't have to be male). As with other indigenous traditions, the knowledge of ancient women, the feminine connection to the spirit world and with healing, birth and death has not perished and is coming to light again with the help of writers like Tedlock. Her argument is not earth-shattering news for we who have been following recent work in history, prehistory and anthropology, or consulting female shamans and healers (even, as in Tedlock's case, their own grandmothers). It won't be shocking or controversial to those who know that much of human history, especially in the spiritual and healing realms, has been suppressed and censored for centuries - if not thousands of years - by masculine and European dominance, or that female knowledge, power or talent has been denied or killed off. Once that suppression was brutal; in more recent years, as Tedlock shows, it has been more from ignorance, insidious censorship or use of misleading words.The woman shaman was always seen by Eurocentric male explorers as just an "assistant", for example. Many of us know all about that. Yet there will be readers who are shocked. It will be considered revolutionary by those still of the older patriarchal mindset still prominent in academia and medicine, that the feminine healing/spiritual practices of indigenous cultures were somehow of a lower order than those of men, that women shamans were not SHAMANS but rathe

Reclaiming the Feminine

I applaud Barbara Tedlock for tackling the sometimes difficult issues, at least academically speaking, of the roles of hallucinogens, sex, and blood in shamanic practices. She also takes on some of the established "greats" in the academic world related to shamanism, like Mircae Eliade and Michael Harner, and holds them accountable for their misogynistic statements. She reclaims shamanism for women in a way that holds strong academically and experientially, as her credentials are excellent on both counts.

Taking the Field from Mircae Eliade

Tedlock knows her subject from the inside as someone who has experienced the "lightning in the blood", yet because of her knowledge as a scholar, she has truly written a tour de force. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the old ways, for the book un-seats Mircea Eliade's book, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy. I found it to be not only a fleshing out of the role of women as shamans, but also of couples as healing teams. F. Christopher Reynolds, M.Ed. Ashland University and Berea City Schools

Myth-Shattering Exploration of the Female Roots of Shamanism

In this book a woman anthropologist and initiated shaman challenges the historical hegemony of the masculine shamanic tradition, restores women to their essential place in the history of spirituality, and celebrates their ongoing role in the worldwide resurgence of shamanism today. She probes the practices that distinguish female shamanism from the much-better-known male traditions and reveals the key role of body wisdom and women's eroticism in shamanic trance and ecstasy. She explores feminine forms of "dream witnessing" and vision questing as well as the use of hallucinogenic plants. There is much that is absolutely new here, especially in terms of Mayan and Mongolian shamanism. The book also delves into shamanic midwifery, perhaps the first book to ever do so! Her knowledge is both experiential, i.e. she is a trained practicing shaman, and scholarly she has read virtually everything ever written on shamanism worldwide and has undertaken first-hand research in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In her worldwide coverage of the topic she is similar to Mircea Eliade but both her gender and her training in shamanism makes her very different from Eliade. The last chapter explores various forms of shamanic practice today: Wicca, Goddess Spirituality, Druidry, Heathenry, Seidr and many more. She points out that we are at the beginning of a worldwide spiritual movement in which women and men trained in feminine shamanic traditions insist on their right to openly practice ancient religious rituals as well as complementary and alternative medicine. A must read!