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Product Details

  • Paperback: 312 pages
  • Publisher: North Atlantic Books (April 9, 2013)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1583945466
  • ISBN-13: 978-1583945469
  • Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #163,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Michael Harner and The Way of the Shaman
 
“What Yogananda did for Hinduism and D. T. Suzuki did for Zen, Michael Harner has done for shamanism—namely, bring the tradition and its richness to Western awareness.”
—from Higher Wisdom, by Roger Walsh and Charles S. Grob
 
“Wonderful, fascinating.… Harner really knows what he’s talking about.”
—Carlos Castaneda, best-selling author of The Teachings of Don Juan and The Active Side of Infinity
 
“An intimate and practical guide to the art of shamanic healing and the technology of the sacred. Michael Harner is not just an anthropologist who has studied shamanism; he is an authentic white shaman.”
—Stanislav Grof, author of The Adventure of Self-Discovery
 
“Harner has impeccable credentials, both as an academic and as a practicing shaman. Without doubt (since the recent death of Mircea Eliade) the world’s leading authority on shamanism.”
—Nevill Drury, author of The Elements of Shamanism
 
“Michael Harner is a great shaman. He also proves that a person can be both a scientist and a shaman.”
—Bo Bair Rinchinov, Siberian Buryat shaman

"Michael Harner is the world's best-known expert on shamanism."
Parabola magazine

"Without doubt essential reading and destined to be a classic on the subject—just as much as his ground breaking Way of the Shaman, written all those years ago."
Sacred Hoop magazine

"A contemporary classic of shamanic studies."
—Nefer Khepri, Magickal Musings

"Cave and Cosmos demonstrates with many examples of shamanic journeys from [Harner's] students that spirits really do exist and they want us to know that they exist."
—Riverdrum.com

"Cave and Cosmos is likely the most important modern work on the perservation of shamanism and our renunion with humanity's original spiritual heritage."
—Marc Star, New Dawn magazine

"Since the publication of The Way of the Shaman Michael has established The Foundation for Shamanic Studies and has been actively promoting his work through regular workshops and lectures. Cave and Cosmos is a relfection on a great deal of the intervening years research...It is a highly-readable and thoroughly engaging account..."
—Peter J. Morris, MysteriesofSirius.com

About the Author

The pioneering work of MICHAEL HARNER, PhD, brought shamanism to the West. In 1979, he and his wife, Sandra Harner, created the Center for Shamanic Studies, which later became the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, the world’s foremost shamanic training organization. In 1987, he left academia to devote himself full-time to shamanism. His classic books on the subject have been translated into many languages.

Customer Reviews

It is a book worth reading, worth recommending, and worth re-reading.
Mauricio Bruce
This book is full of detailed instructions and examples of shamanic practices, especially shamanic journeying, that encourages personal exploration.
Bear medicine
I am so very grateful to Michael Harner before he retired as president from the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.
Katherine J. Journeay

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 62 people found the following review helpful By dreaming90 on April 12, 2013
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
I devoured this entire book in a single sitting. Like Harner's previous masterpiece, The Way of the Shaman, Cave and Cosmos is an instant classic. Harner's writing is clear and easy to read, yet immensely intelligent. His knowledge of shamanism and how it is practiced in a variety of cultures around the world is immense.

But that's not the best part of the book.

The Way of the Shaman offers many accounts of journeys to the Lower World, yet Upper World experiences are nowhere to be found. Cave and Cosmos picks up where Way of the Shaman left off in this regard. And the accounts of Westerner's journeys to the Upper World are... extraordinary. Sure, there are heavenly realms complete with clouds, crystals, and deities, but there's more.

It has become fashionable to consider the formless and nondual experiences cultivated by disciplines in the East as more "evolved" or superior to shamanic experiences. Several accounts in Cave and Cosmos indicate that this is incorrect. I will let the accounts speak for themselves here:

"I travel away, fast, upwards I go. I am nothing but a speck of consciousness in a vast Universe. Like a particle of stellar dust, I travel through infinity... I sense that perhaps I can stay in the "nothingness" or return to near Earth and assist with the great white rings of light. But no, I must go through an opening in the vastness in which I encounter myself... I enter and, once again, I become Light. Incredible warmth and peacefulness fulfill my senses, my body, and my mind. Now I experience pure joy! I see a Buddha. Earth is the first chakra within Buddha. There are other Buddhas within the first Buddha, just like a babushka doll. The joy and laughter of the Buddha within a thousand Buddhas fills eternity...
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful By Dave Hanson on September 18, 2013
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Good book for beginning students of shamanism and a nice followup to Harner's "The Way of the Shaman," (1980) The two books together provide an easy beginning study and practice of what he terms "core" shamanism, a universal form of shamanism that floats free of culture. His books are essentially descriptions of techniques and reports of the visionary results..

As one who learned about shamanism from Harner 27 years ago, enjoyed his teaching immensely, completing all the courses from his FSS, became a certified shamanic counselor, taught in many small shamanic circles and worked as a shamanic healer, I, along with others have waited for this book for decades. Now I have read it with some pleasure, nostalgia and surprise that the author restricted himself to the same methods, student accounts of "journeys", a bit of personal experience and more stories of the upper world.

Harner is an important central figure in returning some popular attention to shamanism as a spiritual practice so it is surprising that "Cave and Cosmos" stays so narrow in its focus while there are so many questions to discuss if shamanism is to have any chance to gain more understanding, contemporary support, and any chance of making the world a better place. To be fair, Harner has no obligation to write more broadly about the nature and place of a shamanic spiritual path in contemporary society, or the possible ways in which such a practice could engage the practitioner in contemporary concerns, but one would hope that the ordinary middle world destruction would illicit something along those lines from him.
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Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
This is the book for you if you want to understand as much as possible about the shaman; who they are, how they do the work that they do and the worlds that they travel to. It is like Mircea Eliade's "Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy" in scope and depth but extremely user friendly as it is is written from the point of view of the practitioner AND scholar. I think of this book like a series of first hand reports from the first sailors who set off for the new worlds and reported that the world was not, in fact, flat. Harner wants to show you this new world/other reality- and to show you its maps. The many encounters noted reflect a universality of experience and give ample support for the existence of another reality. Of course, I needed no convincing of this as I am a practitioner myself. I am also a student of Harner's. The book contains a bit of memoir from Harner as well as hundreds of examples of shamanic experiences from his students. Do not read this book if you like to be surprised and you have not yet undertaken such journeys and plan to do so. As a person who has dedicated my life to this work, I read this book with great interest. Harner is a master story teller and this book may ignite your interest in exploring this other reality if you have not yet done so. Don't take Harner's word for it. In the appendix, instructions for making your own forays into this other reality are also there. I keep very few book and send most to the library or give to friends.. This is going in the permanent collection as this will be a resource I return to again and again.
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