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The Shamanic Odyssey
Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary Experience
Foreword by John Perkins / With Susana Bustos
Published by Park Street Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
Reveals the striking parallels between indigenous cultures of the Americas and the ancient Homeric world as well as Tolkien’s Middle Earth
• Explores the shamanic use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey and the fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien
• Examines Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism
• Reveals how the Odyssey emerged precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness
Indigenous, shamanic ways of healing and prophecy are not foreign to the West. The native way of viewing the world--that is, understanding our cosmos as living, sentient, and interconnected--can be found hidden throughout Western literature, beginning with the very origin of the European literary tradition: Homer’s Odyssey.
Weaving together the narrative traditions of the ancient Greeks and Celts, the mythopoetic work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the voices of plant medicine healers in North and South America, the authors explore the use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Tolkien’s final novella, Smith of Wootton Major. The authors examine Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism. They show the deep affinities between the healing powers of ancient bardic song and the icaros of the shamans of the Amazon rain forest, how Odysseus’s battle with Circe--wielder of narcotic plants and Mistress of Animals--follows the traditional method of negotiating with a plant ally, and how Odysseus’s journey to the land of the dead signifies the universal practice of the vision quest, a key part of shamanic initiation.
Emerging precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness, Homer’s work represents a window into the lost native mind of the Western world. In this way, the Odyssey as well as Tolkien’s work can be seen as an awakening and healing song to return us to our native minds and bring our disconnected souls back into harmony with the living cosmos.
• Explores the shamanic use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey and the fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien
• Examines Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism
• Reveals how the Odyssey emerged precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness
Indigenous, shamanic ways of healing and prophecy are not foreign to the West. The native way of viewing the world--that is, understanding our cosmos as living, sentient, and interconnected--can be found hidden throughout Western literature, beginning with the very origin of the European literary tradition: Homer’s Odyssey.
Weaving together the narrative traditions of the ancient Greeks and Celts, the mythopoetic work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the voices of plant medicine healers in North and South America, the authors explore the use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Tolkien’s final novella, Smith of Wootton Major. The authors examine Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism. They show the deep affinities between the healing powers of ancient bardic song and the icaros of the shamans of the Amazon rain forest, how Odysseus’s battle with Circe--wielder of narcotic plants and Mistress of Animals--follows the traditional method of negotiating with a plant ally, and how Odysseus’s journey to the land of the dead signifies the universal practice of the vision quest, a key part of shamanic initiation.
Emerging precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness, Homer’s work represents a window into the lost native mind of the Western world. In this way, the Odyssey as well as Tolkien’s work can be seen as an awakening and healing song to return us to our native minds and bring our disconnected souls back into harmony with the living cosmos.
Excerpt
CHAPTER SIX
ANIMAL BECOMING
THE INTENSIFIED TRAJECTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
If the archaeological record is to be believed, the oldest game in town, after procreation, is animal transformation. Following the delicious mammoth bone figurines of the Paleolithic Venuses, whose generous, open vulvas and swollen breasts bespeak fecundity and nourishment, the oldest surviving images of prehistoric Europe are representations of animal becoming. The earliest yet found, a portable statuette of a human body and feline head from a cave in Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany, dates to 32,000 BCE.
These mysterious traces of human/animal symbiosis resurface in the earliest literature of the West. As we have seen, story in the ancient world, while delighting in the fantastical, was never just that. In oral culture these accounts were faithfully transmitted from generation to generation. Such literature survives as a hoary remnant of our ancient symbiosis with animals, which, alien as it may seem today, was almost certainly among the earliest conscious experiences of our species. In this way works such as The Odyssey, the Norse Saga of the Volsungs, and the Celtic Mabinogion exhibit kinship to this mysterious cave art.
Repositories of far more ancient folklore and spiritual practice than the date of their actual composition, these written accounts contain numerous accounts of animal becoming.
It has long been argued that such transformations were facilitated by the ingestion of psychoactive plants. Far less frequently considered is the possibility that the nature of such shamanic states is not pathological. Indeed, as in the case of Odysseus’s men who emerge from animal becoming “younger than ever, taller by far, more handsome to the eye,” the wild infusion of animal vitality and wisdom can even be key to healing trauma and restoring a healthful, balanced homeostasis to the mind and body.
Cognitive archaeologist and anthropologist David Lewis-Williams claims that such a transmutative, potentiating capacity is hardwired in our nervous system. In his The Mind in the Cave, he offers a neurophysiological model for the process of entering that “mental vortex that leads to the experiences and hallucinations of deep trance,” an entry he claims was psychologically indistinguishable for Upper Paleolithic people from their actual entrance into “the subterranean passages and chambers . . . the ‘entrails’ of the netherworld” of the prehistoric painted caves. In other words, the ritual activity of entering the caves for early people mirrored the psychophysical experience of entering trance, a biological inheritance of the human species.
What, then, would be this hardwiring we all share? According to Lewis-Williams, the ordinary spectrum of consciousness of Homo sapiens ranges from waking, problem-solving orientation to dream and--beyond the edge of the psychic world--unconsciousness. This alteration of consciousness is also familiar in the history of science. The German organic chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, frustrated in his quest for the structure of the benzene molecule, fell asleep before a fire and dreamed of an atomic dance (entoptic and construal), out of which arose a molecular snake with its tail in its mouth (visionary). This sign he correctly interpreted as the closed carbon ring structure of the molecule. He was eventually to recommend to his fellow scientists, “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen.”
Such dreaming again reminds us of the meaning of “seeing” in the shamanic and ancient worlds, which “in Greek as well as Latin--when the verb occurs in an emotionally charged context--always means more than just ‘to observe’ or ‘to witness’ something; it means ‘to experience,’ ‘to be involved in a meaningful event.’”
Such was the experience of my friend Anders, a Swedish pilot and wing-walking stuntman. Anders first saw the land on which his family now runs an animal sanctuary during a casual flyover. At the time he was penniless and not hunting for land, but the certainty that he was seeing his future home was electric.
In a subsequent, unannounced flyover with his wife, Montrese, she also saw it:
As we flew directly over it, I felt a surge of energy in my solar plexus. I looked down and saw a plateau of golden pastoral beauty that fit our dreams perfectly. I put my hand on his shoulder and said into his ear over the loud noise of the airplane’s engine, “That’s it! That’s it!” He nodded and said, “I know.” When we landed we compared notes on how we had each been drawn to this one piece of land out in the middle of nowhere.
Eventually the land was offered to them for sale--again, out of the serendipitous blue.
Later, upon participating in a peyote ceremony on his land, Anders found himself transforming into an eagle and sailing over the landscape he loves so much. “But the exactness of the detail,” he told me, shaking his head in wonder, “the complete specificity. I really was flying and seeing all these places. I would travel into town and visit areas I was curious about, getting a clear sense of the features and topography of the land.”
“I also hate snakes,” he added. “So it came as a real surprise when I found myself hungry for one. I was returning from a long flight and found myself fantasizing about finding a nice snake for dinner!”
That evening, as Anders sailed far from his body’s physical locale in the tepee, a Diné elder was making his way around the circle. Anders was suddenly recalled to his body to find the man gazing into his face, as if searching a distant landscape. “I’ve only been looked at like that a few times in my life,” Anders said.
After the ceremony the elder came up to the couple and gave Anders a gift: an eagle feather.
“It will take care of you,” the Navajo assured him.
“It was like a crack of thunder,” Anders’ wife, Montrese, told me, “because I was the only one that knew all the Eagle medicine that Anders had been undergoing.”
ANIMAL BECOMING
THE INTENSIFIED TRAJECTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
If the archaeological record is to be believed, the oldest game in town, after procreation, is animal transformation. Following the delicious mammoth bone figurines of the Paleolithic Venuses, whose generous, open vulvas and swollen breasts bespeak fecundity and nourishment, the oldest surviving images of prehistoric Europe are representations of animal becoming. The earliest yet found, a portable statuette of a human body and feline head from a cave in Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany, dates to 32,000 BCE.
These mysterious traces of human/animal symbiosis resurface in the earliest literature of the West. As we have seen, story in the ancient world, while delighting in the fantastical, was never just that. In oral culture these accounts were faithfully transmitted from generation to generation. Such literature survives as a hoary remnant of our ancient symbiosis with animals, which, alien as it may seem today, was almost certainly among the earliest conscious experiences of our species. In this way works such as The Odyssey, the Norse Saga of the Volsungs, and the Celtic Mabinogion exhibit kinship to this mysterious cave art.
Repositories of far more ancient folklore and spiritual practice than the date of their actual composition, these written accounts contain numerous accounts of animal becoming.
It has long been argued that such transformations were facilitated by the ingestion of psychoactive plants. Far less frequently considered is the possibility that the nature of such shamanic states is not pathological. Indeed, as in the case of Odysseus’s men who emerge from animal becoming “younger than ever, taller by far, more handsome to the eye,” the wild infusion of animal vitality and wisdom can even be key to healing trauma and restoring a healthful, balanced homeostasis to the mind and body.
Cognitive archaeologist and anthropologist David Lewis-Williams claims that such a transmutative, potentiating capacity is hardwired in our nervous system. In his The Mind in the Cave, he offers a neurophysiological model for the process of entering that “mental vortex that leads to the experiences and hallucinations of deep trance,” an entry he claims was psychologically indistinguishable for Upper Paleolithic people from their actual entrance into “the subterranean passages and chambers . . . the ‘entrails’ of the netherworld” of the prehistoric painted caves. In other words, the ritual activity of entering the caves for early people mirrored the psychophysical experience of entering trance, a biological inheritance of the human species.
What, then, would be this hardwiring we all share? According to Lewis-Williams, the ordinary spectrum of consciousness of Homo sapiens ranges from waking, problem-solving orientation to dream and--beyond the edge of the psychic world--unconsciousness. This alteration of consciousness is also familiar in the history of science. The German organic chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, frustrated in his quest for the structure of the benzene molecule, fell asleep before a fire and dreamed of an atomic dance (entoptic and construal), out of which arose a molecular snake with its tail in its mouth (visionary). This sign he correctly interpreted as the closed carbon ring structure of the molecule. He was eventually to recommend to his fellow scientists, “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen.”
Such dreaming again reminds us of the meaning of “seeing” in the shamanic and ancient worlds, which “in Greek as well as Latin--when the verb occurs in an emotionally charged context--always means more than just ‘to observe’ or ‘to witness’ something; it means ‘to experience,’ ‘to be involved in a meaningful event.’”
Such was the experience of my friend Anders, a Swedish pilot and wing-walking stuntman. Anders first saw the land on which his family now runs an animal sanctuary during a casual flyover. At the time he was penniless and not hunting for land, but the certainty that he was seeing his future home was electric.
In a subsequent, unannounced flyover with his wife, Montrese, she also saw it:
As we flew directly over it, I felt a surge of energy in my solar plexus. I looked down and saw a plateau of golden pastoral beauty that fit our dreams perfectly. I put my hand on his shoulder and said into his ear over the loud noise of the airplane’s engine, “That’s it! That’s it!” He nodded and said, “I know.” When we landed we compared notes on how we had each been drawn to this one piece of land out in the middle of nowhere.
Eventually the land was offered to them for sale--again, out of the serendipitous blue.
Later, upon participating in a peyote ceremony on his land, Anders found himself transforming into an eagle and sailing over the landscape he loves so much. “But the exactness of the detail,” he told me, shaking his head in wonder, “the complete specificity. I really was flying and seeing all these places. I would travel into town and visit areas I was curious about, getting a clear sense of the features and topography of the land.”
“I also hate snakes,” he added. “So it came as a real surprise when I found myself hungry for one. I was returning from a long flight and found myself fantasizing about finding a nice snake for dinner!”
That evening, as Anders sailed far from his body’s physical locale in the tepee, a Diné elder was making his way around the circle. Anders was suddenly recalled to his body to find the man gazing into his face, as if searching a distant landscape. “I’ve only been looked at like that a few times in my life,” Anders said.
After the ceremony the elder came up to the couple and gave Anders a gift: an eagle feather.
“It will take care of you,” the Navajo assured him.
“It was like a crack of thunder,” Anders’ wife, Montrese, told me, “because I was the only one that knew all the Eagle medicine that Anders had been undergoing.”
Product Details
- Publisher: Park Street Press (November 20, 2012)
- Length: 224 pages
- ISBN13: 9781594773969
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Raves and Reviews
“The authors weave a fascinating tale connecting South American shamanic practices of magic plants and wondrous spirit beings to one of the West’s oldest mythic tales of exploration--Homer’s Odyssey. Such tales provide nourishment and medicine for the soul’s growth.”
– Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., psychologist, Professor Emeritas at the California Institute of Integral Studi
“The authors’ exploration of the shamanic, indigenous characteristics of Odysseus’ journey through the ancient otherworld of divine powers is a noteworthy new contribution to the field of Classics. In particular, his reading of the Odysseus and the Cyclops episode in light of the encounter between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the ‘civilized’ European conquistadores opens marvelous new possibilities for understanding the mind of Homeric man.”
– Carl A. P. Ruck, Ph.D., professor of Classical Studies at Boston University, and co-author of The Ro
“A unique and insightful comparative look at the Odyssey and the South American shamanic tradition—highly recommended!”
– Mark Plotkin, author of The Shaman’s Apprentice and Medicine Quest
“Tindall and Bustos do more than remind us of a world celebrated by visionaries from Homer to Shakespeare to Tolkien to indigenous shamans, a world where the old gods walked with us and the animals taught us how to live and the plants healed us. They take us there.”
– Steve Walker, Ph.D., Professor BYU College of Humanities, author of The Power of Tolkien’s Pro
“Placing the story firmly in a shamanic context, ranging on the way over sacred psychoactive plants and the creative mythology of Middle–earth, and presenting us with a Homer who is an indigenous singer of healing song, Tindall and Bustos have a truly comprehensive vision, a striking depth of knowledge, a scholar’s love of language, and a compelling storyteller’s way of tying together the many threads. A significant and hugely enjoyable book.”
– Stephan V. Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants
“The Shamanic Odyssey is a brilliant book, and beautifully thought out. The authors explore wildness, in the form of plant spirits, indigenous people, and ancient roots of deep knowledge. They illustrate what one meets on a shamanic quest, whether mythic, collective or individual. The treatment is erudite, illuminating, and deeply insightful.”
– Kathleen Harrison, M.A., Ethnobotanist
“Tindall and Bustos have blended personal experiences and scholarship into a compelling narrative that links the indigenous wisdom hidden in the Odyssey to contemporary shamanistic practices in North and South America. A marvelous blend of stories and practices illuminating today’s pressing problems. Overall, a splendid, engaging and ultimately hopeful presentation.”
– James Fadiman, Ph.D., author of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide
“The elegance and brilliance of this book will demolish philosophical presuppositions, break literary boundaries, create new dialogue between worlds, change your eyes, and open your heart.”
– Adine Gavazzi, author of Arquitectura Andina
“The nature of reality and of consciousness is slippery. At the cutting edge of quantum physics scientists now tell us that no absolute truth or reality exists. In The Shamanic Odyssey however, Tindall and Bustos demonstrate we have always intuitively known that to be the case, from the first origins of European literature to the oral wisdom of shamanic traditions worldwide. This evidence has important consequences for how we view meaning, life and truth.”
– Ross Heaven, founder of The Four Gates, therapist and author of Cactus of Mystery
“An ingenious, innovative approach to the Odyssey, the symbolic language of the myth and the world of Classics. Extremely interesting, well documented, intuitive and very well presented. A joy to read.”
– Evie Holmberg, professor of Classics and Greek Patristic Literature, Hellenic College, Holy Cross Sc
“This is a fascinating work which offers an insider’s view of the shamanic way of life, it is solidly founded on a traditional worldview and while offering much of the latest psychological research on the nature of shamanism avoids many of the pitfalls of a ‘western looking in’ at the shamanic experience.”
– Living Traditions, February 2013
“..if you enjoy literature and the role of shamanic thinking in the world-at-large, then this is great reading.”
– Psychedelic Press UK, March 2013
“The authors’ exploration of the shamanic, indigenous characteristics of Odysseus’s journey through the ancient otherworld of divine powers is a noteworthy new contribution in the field of Classics.”
– Carl A.P. Ruck, Boston University, Reality Sandwich, January 2014
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