• Complain

Bruce Eve - Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus

Here you can read online Bruce Eve - Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: Peru;Rochester;Vt, year: 2013;2012, publisher: Park Street Press, genre: Religion. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover

Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Bruce Eve: author's other books


Who wrote Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

For the Sarah I knew then Echo en falta que la mayora de todos skank-ho Fuma - photo 1

For the Sarah I knew then: Echo en falta que la mayora de todos skank-ho. Fuma y agua; amor para siempre. Y el Sarah ahora? No le conozca.

For those who contributed. For Darryl, Bobby, Suzie, Emily, and Jeannie ~ who kept the faith and fire alight during darker nights. For Teertha, Tania, Sue, and Emily ~ for new adventures. For my children.

CACTUS OF
MYSTERY

An amiable intelligent and passionate introduction to the sacred medicine of - photo 2

An amiable, intelligent, and passionate introduction to the sacred medicine of the Andes. Ross Heavens Cactus of Mystery is valuable not only as an orientation toward the ancient Huachuma tradition but also as an exploration of the experiences of healing and creativity common to all sacred medicine traditions.

ROBERT TINDALL, AUTHOR OFTHE JAGUAR THAT ROAMS
THE M
IND AND THE SHAMANIC ODYSSEY

Contents

INTRODUCTION

The Mystery of San Pedro

Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus - image 3

Ross Heaven

If you are reading this book you are in a privileged minority, for almost nothing has been written about San Pedro or its use in shamanism and healing. Before my 2009 book The Hummingbirds Journey to God, there was little information available on it at all apart from scattered references in a few other works. Trouts Notes on San Pedro (Mydriatic Productions, 2005), for example, is a study of the botany, chemistry, and history of the plant, but does not address its shamanic uses. One of the more useful books in the latter regard is Douglas Sharons Wizard of the Four Winds: A Shamans Story (Free Press, 1978), but this has its limitations also because it is more or less the story of a single individual (the books subtitle suggests as much), Eduardo Calderon, an Andean healer whom Sharon worked with for a few seasons some decades ago. As such it focuses on one healer operating within the traditions of one part of Peru (the north) and is a study of curanderismo (Andean healing) in general rather than San Pedro, per se. A further limitation is that the book has been out of print for many years and is hard to come by, with copies on the web often selling for a hundred dollars or more.

A Google search will not help much either, yielding next to nothing useful for students of shamanism or San Pedro, apart from a few articles and interviews mostly stemming from me.

Frankly, I am amazed that so little research has been done on San Pedro, its effects, or its applications for healing, especially since the latter are, in my experience, real and profound.

I have worked with the plant since the late 1990s and increasingly so in the past decade, during which time I have also taken groups of people to Peru so they can drink it themselves. I have witnessed firsthand what some of the shamans in this book refer to as healing miracles during the course of these journeys, and seen people cured of cancer, depression, grief, childhood traumas, alcoholism, diabetes, and other debilitating and sometimes life-threatening diseases. And yet there is still almost nothing published about this plant.

WHY?

At least in part this lack of information is a reflection of the fact that the most ancient healing traditions of Peru, like those of other pre-Christian cultures, are transmitted orally. Not much is ever written down by shamans so where records do exist they have tended to be made by European explorers, invaders, or missionaries who have brought their religious beliefs with them and denigrated indigenous practices that did not sit well with their own notions of God.

As professor of cultural anthropology Irene Silverblatt put it, History making (which includes history denying) is a cultural invention.... History tends to be made by those who dominate... to celebrate their heroes and silence dissent.

Another, Father Olivia, part of a seventeenth-century-church-sponsored scheme to extirpate idolatries, wrote in 1631 that after they drink it they [participants in San Pedro ceremonies] remain without judgment and deprived of their senses and they see visions that the Devil represents to them and consistent with them they judge their suspicions and the intentions of others.

Fundamentalism like this never results in any pure or useful critique and, as Jim DeKorne remarks in Psychedelic Shamanism (Breakout Productions, 1994), rather than trying to understand native customs:

The Spanish Inquisition reacted with characteristic savagery to anyone who dared to break their laws by eating [sic] [San Pedro]... a great many Indians were flogged and sometimes killed when they persisted in [doing so].... [One mans] eyeballs were said to be gouged out after three days of torture; then the Spaniards cut a crucifix pattern in his belly and turned ravenous dogs loose on his innards.... This level of response to the ingestion of... San Pedro in Peru effectively drove the use of [the cactus] underground for hundreds of years.

Even the name of the plant owes more to Catholicism than the shamanic traditions of the Andes, for the cactus (originally known as huachuma) was, as DeKorne relates, renamed after Saint Peter, guardian of the threshold for the Catholic Paradise... an apparent strategy of the Indians to placate the Inquisition.

Juan Navarro, with whom I drank San Pedro in the 1990s, may be suggesting something along these lines as well when, in my book Plant Spirit Shamanism (Destiny Books, 2006), he remarks that San Pedro retains a certain mystery to it.

Navarros ceremonies are performed at night from a mesa (altar), which contains many Catholic symbols, crosses, staffs, rosaries, icons, and lithographs of the Christian saints. This may be a form of syncretism but most likely is also a sort of mask that draws attention away from the way that things were originally done within the San Pedro tradition. When Navarro performs a ceremony, for example, he prays to God, the saints, the Virgin, and to Jesus and he holds a cross aloft, but I have no doubt that these emblems have a different meaning to him than to us. Some anthropologists suggest that the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose image is ubiquitous in Andean healing rituals, is in fact a Christianized version of the Aztec lunar goddess Tonantzin, so whomever Navarro is praying to is most likely not the same Holy Virgin we know.

These historic considerations have been pushed aside in recent times, however, certainly by the shamans I know and work with in the Andes, who seem keen to lift the veils of secrecy surrounding San Pedro. The feeling among these shamans (some of whom have written for this book or been interviewed in its pages) is that the time for greater openness about this medicine is now, because we are entering a period of great change and its healing is needed more than ever before.

The feeling seems mutual among the scientific profession as well, and a number of academics are also beginning to look again (or for the first time) at San Pedro and the role it may play in healing, ESP, precognition, and other extrapersonal and transpersonal states. David Luke, Ph.D., is one such academicin this book he examines the potential of San Pedro in this regard and reports on an intriguing experiment of his own.

But lets start with the basics. What exactly is San Pedro and what do we know of its usage?

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus»

Look at similar books to Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus»

Discussion, reviews of the book Cactus of mystery the shamanic powers of the Peruvian San Pedro cactus and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.