Robert Tindall – författare

Reveals the striking parallels between indigenous cultures of the Americas and the ancient Homeric world as well as Tolkien’s Middle Earth • Explores the shamanic use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey and the fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien • Examines Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism • Reveals how the Odyssey emerged precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness Indigenous, shamanic ways of healing and prophecy are not foreign to the West. The native way of viewing the world--that is, understanding our cosmos as living, sentient, and interconnected--can be found hidden throughout Western literature, beginning with the very origin of the European literary tradition: Homer’s Odyssey. Weaving together the narrative traditions of the ancient Greeks and Celts, the mythopoetic work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the voices of plant medicine healers in North and South America, the authors explore the use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Tolkien’s final novella, Smith of Wootton Major. The authors examine Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism. They show the deep affinities between the healing powers of ancient bardic song and the icaros of the shamans of the Amazon rain forest, how Odysseus’s battle with Circe--wielder of narcotic plants and Mistress of Animals--follows the traditional method of negotiating with a plant ally, and how Odysseus’s journey to the land of the dead signifies the universal practice of the vision quest, a key part of shamanic initiation. Emerging precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness, Homer’s work represents a window into the lost native mind of the Western world. In this way, the Odyssey as well as Tolkien’s work can be seen as an awakening and healing song to return us to our native minds and bring our disconnected souls back into harmony with the living cosmos.

A journey into the deeper workings of indigenous healing in the Amazon• Explores the three pillars of Amazonian shamanism: purging, psychoactive plants, and diet• Shares the experiences of apprenticing with an Ashaninca master shaman• Reveals the intimate relationship between shamans and plant spiritsThe Jaguar that Roams the Mind is a journey into the vanishing world of Amazonian shamanism--an adventure of initiation and return--that explores the unique reality at the heart of the Amazonian healing system. Robert Tindall shares his journeys through the inner and outer landscape of the churches of ayahuasca and with the Kaxinawa Indians in Brazil; his experiences at the pioneering center for the treatment of addiction, Takiwasi, in Peru; and his studies with an Ashaninca master shaman deep in the rainforest jungle.Moving beyond the scientific approach to medicinal plants, which seeks to reduce them to their chemical constituents, Tindall illustrates the shamans’ intimate relationships with plant spirits. He explores the three pillars of Amazonian shamanism: purging (drawing disease out of the body), psychoactive plants (including the ritual use of ayahuasca), and diet (communing with the innate intelligence of teacher plants). Through trials and revelations, the subtle inner logic of indigenous healing unfolds for him, including the “miraculous” healing of a woman suffering from a brain tumor. Culminating in a ceremony fraught with terror yet ultimately enlightening, Tindall’s journey reveals the crucial component missing from the metaphysics of the West: the understanding and appreciation of the sentience of nature itself.

A fascinating description of how utilizing the biochar embedded in terra preta, the recently rediscovered sacred soil of the pre-Columbian peoples of the Amazon rainforest, can cut our dependency on petrochemicals, restore the health of our soils, remove carbon from our overheating atmosphere, and restore the planet to pre-industrial levels of atmospheric carbon by 2050. The authors show that the rediscovery of terra preta is an opportunity to move beyond the West’s tradition of plunder and genocide of the native civilizations of the Americas by offering an invitation to embrace the deeper mystery of the indigenous methods of inquiry and to participate in an animate cosmos that gave rise to such a powerful soil technology. Sacred Soil, in recognizing the need for biocultural regeneration, takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the phenomenon of biochar soils, utilizing mythopoeic, historical, anthropological, and scientific perspectives to embrace the deep past, the vexed present, and the prospectus for our future. Coming at this crucial juncture in human history, the potential resting in biochar is also an open doorway into the indigenous ways of knowing that enabled the pre-Columbian Amazonian high civilizations to support a population of millions while leaving their lands more fertile than when they arose.