Contemporary spirituality discourses tend to assume that a canopy of light and love overarches all spiritual pathways. Unfortunately, the dark side of humanity cannot be spirited away so easily, and aberrations of personal spiritual development, interpersonal spiritual relationships and new spiritual movements can often be traced to the denial, repression and return of our dark side....
Abstract In the great ritual just described, shamans danced between the home trees, with their images of ancestral disasters, and the outer tree, bearing its spirits of double-edged fortune and maleficent void. Nothing in this shamanic universe was a single indivisible unit, and nothing was simple or devoid of threat. Such a universe arose, I suggest, from the shaman’s real-life practice, which...