Book of Leaves

So I did my grocery shopping for the month yesterday, relying on my credit cards. At least I'm not going to starve or anything. This is a cosmic good. I've got black beans simmering and beets in the oven to make borscht, and I'll freeze some of both for later. Cabbage for galobkes. Chicken in the freezer. It's a start in the right direction, at least. I'm glad I've got energy to cook today, though mostly I'm just feeling kind of sluggish mentally and don't have the wherewithal to write.

I finished up Shamanism: A Reader edited by Graham Harvey this afternoon. It's an interesting, if somewhat uneven collection of articles, excerpts and opinions on shamanisms ancient and modern. Some of the essays are so buried in academic-speak as to be miserable reading. Other essays and excerpts are excellent, and well worth the price of the book.

My particular favorites included Mihály Hoppál's "Ethnographic Films on Shamanism", a survey of (particularly Soviet) films that preserve shamanic rituals and history. The films he discusses are not in English, and it was quite fascinating to see the variety of films that have been made, though most are unattainable for a general public. Just gaining an awareness of them is, to my mind, important.

Two essays by Marjorie Mandelstam Balzar, "Sacred Genders in Siberia: Shamans, Bear Festivals and Androgeny" and "The Poetry of Shamanism," were particularly good. The second is an examination of an artistic and poetic cultural revival of shamanism among the Sakha (Yakut) people of Siberia. I think it addresses a number of issues that those of us working on reconstructionist traditions might find useful as insights. Particularly, she discusses how the revival of traditional shamanism has changed and shifted its practice in some ways from how it was practiced in the pre-Soviet era, attempting to serve the urban needs of the people of the Sakha republic.

Bernard Saladin D'Anglure's "Rethinking Inuit Shamanism Through the Concept of 'Third Gender'" was another short but worthwhile addition to the anthology, discussing how 'third gender' shamans are on the cusp of Inuit cosmology, standing in a between place very like the mists within the insular Celtic traditions.

I'm only going to give this book three shaman's drums out of five, mostly because of the unevenness of the anthology's contents and how appallingly bad a few of the contributions are. The good contributions, had they been joined by others of like quality, would have brought this one up to five drums.