Contemporary Voices from Anima Mundi

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin (PhD, Brandeis) is Emerita Professor in Anthropology at Smith College. She is Director of the Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration in Peru and has authored 6 books and over 55 articles and has edited 8 books. Stefano Varese (PhD, PUC-Lima) is Professor Emeritus of Native American Studies at the University of California-Davis. He is the founder of the Indigenous Research Center of the Americas and has authored 8 books and over 100 articles.

List of Figures – Acknowledgments – Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Stefano Varese: Introduction: Cosmic Dialogues – Frédérique Apffel-Marglin: Western Modernity and the Fate of Anima Mundi: Its Murder and Transformation into a Postmaterial Ecospirituality – D. Ahmed: Lost and Found: Gifts, Dreams, and Sanity – Inés Hernández-Ávila: Spirit Crossings: An Indigenous Cultural Perspective on Mortality, Death, and Dying – Jacques Mabit: The Sorcerer, the Madman and Grace: Are Archetypes Desacralized Spirits? Thoughts on Shamanism in the Amazon – Stefano Varese: Between Matter and Spirit: An Unfinished Journey – Rabbi Fern Feldman: To Dwell in the Thick Darkness: The Sacred Dark in Jewish Thought – Guillermo Delgado-P: Andean Entifications: Pachamama Ajayun, The Spirit of Mother Earth – Neela Bhattacharya Saxena: Mapping the Chiasmus: Liberating Patterns in a Planetary Mandala – Robert Tindall: Shamanic Archaeology at Chavín de Huántar – List of Contributors

“This is and will be a necessary book, due to the fundamental awakening of our troubled world’s beating heart. Perhaps the prefix ‘post-’ betrays our way of life, with the continuous talk surrounding post-positivism, post-modernism and everything else that emerged as a result of post-materialistic science. It is true that profitable mechanical matter has flooded Western society and signaled a dogmatic ‘language game’ in the mouth of the false myth, whose concept of the ‘objective observer’ has relegated the spirit to pathology in too many cases. However, that spirit is being recovered thanks to those who have kept listening to Nature’s subtlety, in the jungles, the rivers, mountains and monasteries, all without falling into infantile justifications. Science today also unites the awakening of the ‘spiritual intelligence’ that penetrates everything that exists and, what is more, it has set off on the path towards the ‘only search’ that, in the end, the divine breath can offer us. An ontology of BEING is co-created, as well as an epistemology of our ‘inner world’ that allows us to lose our fear and be able to map the numinous cosmos. You will find this and much more among these pages. May this book become an itinerant encyclopedia in space and time as successive contributions are made.”—Manuel Almendro, PhD, clinical psychologist, member of European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations, Specialist Certificate in Psychology and Psychotherapy-EuroPsy, Director of Oxigeme, Center for a Psychology of Consciousness, Barcelona, Spain

“Tribes and Ancient Societies have always negotiated with animal spirits their right to hunt for food, asked mother earth and Anima Mundi for rain if there was drought, and resolved their problems of social and ethnic justice through rituals of mediation with the Spirits of Nature and the Universe with the support of master plants and other techniques. What is the logic of ancient societies maintaining rituals and balance with supernatural forces and laws for millennia? That scientific-materialistic rationalism does not have the tools to explain this cannot delegitimize or reduce these spiritual practices, an authentic technology of the quantic or spiritual World, to a simple irrational folkloric belief. We have a big blind spot in our western society, and we don't want to see it.”—Lluís M. Tomas, MD, PhB, Associate Professor at Health Sciences Foundation University, Bogota, Colombia, co-author and coordinator of published peer-reviewed articles in medicine and alternative medicine, founder of Nuna Hampi Retreat Center, Bogota, Colombia

“This book is a remarkable collection of essays on a topic of immense importance for our times. Bringing years of experience and expertise, the authors illustrate brilliantly the healing dimensions of the living world. Apffel-Marglin and Varese are to be congratulated on this singular achievement.”—Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University Forum on Religion and Ecology