Customer Reviews

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

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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 rather, mere "herbalists" old wives, or just evil witches. Such orthodox thinkers may be confounded to learn that many of the skeletons of ancient shamans taken for men by researchers were probably those of robust women (or at least half of them were!) For those people who have already moved beyond that mindset and are part of the growing worldwide renaissance movement of holistic earth-based spirituality and healing, Tedlock's book will be a good, seminal source of information, and all in one place instead of scattered through a thousand books. It is not often a book like that comes along.
Sex, herbs, spirit flight, spirit guides, childbirth, gender-bending, weaving (!) - Tedlock has it. I find of particular interest her focus on the neglected aspect of shamanic dreaming, which she gives its rightful place of immense power. She herself is an accomplished dreamworker.
As I blazed through this book, I found myself growing evermore excited, as if I was myself unearthing those womanly remains of the shaman who lived sixty thousand years ago in that Bohemian forest. Though I had been exposed to such ideas before, I felt an awe, the tingling kind I feel in caves and cathedrals and tall forests, moutain tops...and maybe even a kind of fear. Excited, because vindicated by such a worthy author in what I have long known to be true from my own life experience and research. Fearful, because of the responsibility it gives us women. Knowledge is power and power is scary to wield. Fearful because of the implications, in the way the initiate feels fear when passed the old secrets and now is going forth into the world.

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

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!

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.

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)

The author does name names of sources for the most part. I think that her discussion of traditional shamanisms and shamanistic practices in different cultures is pretty good, and that she does a service in lifting the veil of academic male-centered assessments of shamanism in her work. She has some very good things to say, but overall, I do find her approach rather feelgood. She somewhat downplays the dangers of the shamanic path, though she points out that the death/renewal theme of shamanic initiation seems to arise more from the masculine practice of shamanism, where her view of the feminine practices emphasise birth/midwifery as a metaphor of shamanic initiation in global practices.

Generally, the book seems reasonably sound. My greatest overall complaint is that there is no bibliography. All her cites are in her footnotes, and the reader is forced to comb through the footnotes to get where her research is coming from, rather than having her sources and readings cited in a more easily accessible bibliography. It's in looking to these sources that I have some concerns.

Her chapter on reconstructing shamanisms is where I have my greatest single issue. She seems to hold Michael Harner in high regard, and cites people like Nigel Pennick (whose books are always notably free of source cites), John Matthews, Tom Cowan, and DJ Conway about the shamanic nature of early Celtic religion and Wicca. This in itself is more than enough to make me twitch. I could probably have lived with it if she'd only cited Cowan and Matthews, but Conway's inclusion really tosses her final chapter off the deep end for me, and makes me wonder about the rest of the scholarship in the book. Her academic mentors, Peter Furst (well known for his work on entheogens and shamanism) and Mihály Hoppál are quite respectable in the field and are generally reliable from what I can discern.

Overall, I'd say this book is a mixed bag, but worth the read if you want to wait for the trade paperback. Her chapter on reconstruction, if read with Robert J. Wallis's Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, alternative archaeologies and contemporary Pagans, can be somewhat useful. Wallis's approach is to take "neoshamanism" as its own thing, unrelated to indigenous shamanism, but useful and workable in its own right. I feel that if we're going to deal with things like this, it's how we should approach the field rather than making attempts to claim that New Age and NeoPagan "shamanisms" are the same as indigenous practices. I feel Wallis's book is more useful to modern practitioners in general, though Tedlock's work on uncovering the feminine side of shamanism is certainly eye-opening for those exposed only to mainstream academic views of the shamanic complex.

This is a WOW book for the woman healer who wishes to reconnect to her roots, educate herself AND broaden her mind in regards to earthly ways. Written with personal tales and photographs, this is truly a gift to those who are prepared to reclaim thier purpose. I highly recommend it.

Wow! I learned so much about women's struggles and how they have been treated throughout the last couple thousand years. It's amazing that so many spiritual women have survived and openly become shamen. I was impressed with the amount of research and the variety of cultures discussed.

This is a great resource on shamanism for women! I found it easy to read and full of great information that most likely took years and years of research to compile. The author is coming from all angles: she had a native grandmother who was a healer, she is an anthropologist, she has traveled the world meeting shamans from many cultures, and she was actually initiated by shamans in the Mayan tradition along with her husband. She writes like a teacher, in a way that isn't discouraging or condescending. I have read some other books that had an attitude of superiority, but Barbara Tedlock is open and generous about sharing what she has found in her research and travels. I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in understanding more about shamanism, just note that it is not a "how-to" book at all.
It has been fascinating to read about how much the feminine side of shamanism has been hidden or de-emphasized over the years, and this book unearths the truth and I found it to be a very empowering read for a spiritual woman like myself. :-)

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

Truly an excellent source of history of women practicing/living Shamanism, in explicable terms. Barbara Tedlock unveils the original intension and vision of women in spiritual practices with infinite detail, contributing excellent resources and facts; further educating the reader to a higher level of intellectual value on the subject matter. As an environmentalist, spiritualist, and writer I highly recommend this piece with no reservations.