Word: shamanism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When drivers aren't praying, they're fasting. Who knew they were an offshoot of the Franciscan monks? As I'm talking to Kyle Petty, the ponytailed shaman among NASCAR drivers, he goes into the refrigerator of his trailer for an energy bar and makes sure it has the right ratio of protein to carbohydrates. "In the trailer park where all the drivers live in their coaches, if you're out of skim milk or tuna, you know what door to knock on, because you know who's on what diet...
...three men trying to cope with these mid-ether collisions of dollars and expectations are an unlikely team. Greenspan, the data-loving analyst with government roots sunk back into the financial and moral chaos of the Nixon Administration, and a shaman-like power over global markets. Rubin, the Goldman Sachs wonder boy who ran the firm's complex and dangerous arbitrage operations and then led it to rocket-ship international growth. And Summers, the Harvard-trained academic who is invariably called the Kissinger of economics: a total pragmatist whose ambition sometimes grates but whose intellect never fails to dazzle...
...shaman placed a bamboo shoot filled with hallucinogenic snuff against Mark Plotkin's left nostril and blew into the tube. Plotkin's head snapped back, he recalls, as if he "had been hit with a war club." Little men began dancing before his eyes. He asked the shaman who they were. "They are the hekuri," the wise man replied, "the spirits of the forest...
Celebrity best sellers like Andrew Weil's 8 Weeks to Optimum Health (Knopf; $23) and Jean Carper's Miracle Cures (HarperCollins; $25) may promise more than they can deliver, but they do contain healthful hints. If you want to add adventure, read Mark Plotkin's Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice (Penguin; $14), which shows how ethnobotanists comb jungles for natural cures...
...late 1930s was a boy in deep emotional trouble, drinking like a fish and undergoing Jungian analysis. Like other Abstract Expressionists-to-be (Mark Rothko, for instance), he was on the lookout for archetypes and dark, unconsulted levels of feeling, in the hope that art could release his inner shaman, antlers, rattle and all. Hence the portentous "mythic" subjects of his pictures (The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, Pasiphae and so on) and their general ooga-wooga atmosphere. As Varnedoe writes, "The godsend, liberating idea for him was the one he got simultaneously from looking at modern art and listening...