Describes the essential features and scope of native American religions, and examines the religion of the Wind River Shoshoni and the Zuni

Native Religions of North America: The Power of Visions and Fertility (Religious Traditions of the World)

History

Hultkrantz, Åke

World

Harper-San Francisco

This book presents a comprehensive survey of the complex indigenous religions of the Americas, both North and South, as they were in the past and as they still exist in some societies.

The religions of the American Indians (Hermeneutics, studies in the history of religions)

Religion & Spirituality

University of California Press

The Religions of the American Indians (Hermeneutics: Studies in the History of Religions) (Volume 5)

Monica Setterwall

Americas

15 essays ON RELIGIOUS ATTITUDES AND PRACTICES OF A VARIETY OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN

Belief and Worship in Native America

Vecsey, Christopher

Other Religions, Practices & Sacred Texts

Syracuse Univ Pr

Swedish Scholar Åke Hultkrantz is recognized as one of the foremost authorities on American Indian religions. This collection of fifteen of his essays on the religious attitudes and practices of a variety of North American Indian communities brings together some of his best work over the last twenty-five years. The essays are grouped into four areas: belief and myth, worship and ritual, ecology and religion, and persistence and change. Topics include the importance of myths and rituals; religious beliefs among the Plains Indians and Wind River Shoshoni; the cult of the dead; the Spirit Lodge, the Sun Dance Lodge, and the Ghost Dance; the spread of the peyote cult; feelings toward animals and natural phenomena; and the problem of Christian influence on Northern Algonkian eschatology. To students of American Indians Hultkrantz reveals the integrity of Indian religion as a subject in its own right, not divorced from culture, history, or ecology, but religion as an effective force in Indian life. To students of comparative religion he offers American Indian religious phenomena as a treasure trove of data to be mapped and related to the religions of the world. Christopher Vecsey's introduction summarizes Hultkrantz's major ideas and outlines the field work and research methods which distinguish his scholarship. Bibliography included.

Belief and Worship in Native North America

Syracuse University Press

In this pioneering work one of the world's leading experts on Native American traditions offers a detailed survey of Native American practices and beliefs regarding health, medicine, and religion. In contrast to the sharp Euro-American division between medicine and religion, Native American medical beliefs and practices can only be assessed, says the author, in their relation to their religious ideas. Spanning the full length and breadth of Native North American cultural areas, from the Northeast to the Southwest, the Southeast to the Northwest, the book offers "thick" descriptions of traditional Native American medical and religious beliefs and practices, demonstrating that for Native Americans medicine and religion are two sides of the same coin: a coherent and holistic system in which supernaturalism acts as a motor in healing.

Shamanic Healing and Ritual Drama: Health and Medicine in Native North American Religious Traditions (Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Crossroad

In this pioneering work, one of the world's leading experts on Native American traditions offers a detailed survey of Native American practices and beliefs regarding health, medicine, and religion. In contrast to the sharp Euro-American division between medicine and religion, Native American medical beliefs and practices can only be assessed in their relation to their religious ideas.

Shamanic Healing & Ritual Drama: Health & Medicine in the Native North American Religious Traditions

The diversity and continuities in American Indian spirituality! The religious life of Native Americans is a panorama featuring an immense diversity of beliefs, ceremonies, and ways of life. Native Religions of North America reflects this rich tradition as it admirably distills a complex subject in a practical and engaging manner. Through concise expression and careful choice of examples, Hultkrantz identifies the diversity and continuities in American Indian spirituality. He introduces the hunters and farmers, the past and present, and the physical contexts and the sublime speculations of tribal religions, even the subtle shades of meaning within an Indian community.

Native Religions of North America: The Power of Visions and Fertility

Waveland Pr Inc.

"Visionaries who have made their way to the realm of the dead and then returned have told of its secrets."\nIn this scholarly but highly readable book, the famed anthropologist and historian of religions Åke Hultkrantz takes us on an in-depth exploration of Native American afterlife journey myths and shamanism. Anticipating the western "discovery" of near-death experiences by nearly 20 years, Hultkrantz recognized them as phenomena distinct from other extraordinary experiences such as dreams and vision quests. Equally remarkable, Hultkrantz found that Native American afterlife myths were actually influenced by NDEs and shamanic otherworld journeys. Weaving this discovery together with various cultural and psychological factors, Hultkrantz also delves into other supernatural beliefs and practices such as soul-retrieval, ghosts, funerary rituals, reincarnation, and the Ghost Dance religions in which initiates deliberately induced NDE-like experiences. Rounding off his study with comparisons to afterlife journey myths in ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, across Asia, and the Pacific islands, Hultkrantz crafted an unsurpassed masterpiece of comparative religion and paranthropology, many years ahead of its time.\nOriginally published as a small edition in Europe, the book was never widely available to the general public and has been out-of-print for decades. Afterworlds Press is proud to now make this groundbreaking work accessible to a new generation of readers.

The North American Indian Orpheus Tradition: Native Afterlife Myths and Their Origins

Anthropology

Afterworlds Press

"Drugs in different forms have served as stimulants for ecstasy 
in shamanism since archaic times."\nThe Attraction of Peyote is an unrivalled exploration of the use of psychedelics in Native American spiritualities by one of the world's foremost anthropologists of religions, Åke Hultkrantz. The author highlights how this psychoactive cactus began as a basis of shamanic power and eventually became a cult object and medicine for the initiated. He examines the formations and spread of Peyote-based religions and the extraordinary experiences that inspired them, showing the relationship between the trance states achieved in traditional "shamanic seances" and the effects of this potent hallucinatory drug. The book is nothing less than a cultural history of Peyote, in religion, symbolism, and practice, incorporating a consideration of Christian and inter-tribal influences on Peyote traditions.\nOriginally published in a European small press edition, The Attraction of Peyote is available now to the general public for the first time. Unique to this edition is the author's memoir of his own Peyote experience with the Shoshone people.\n"In a career spanning half a century Åke Hultkrantz has proven his prowess repeatedly as a scholar of American Indian religions. His latest investigation upholds his high standards of thoroughness in explaining the spread of the peyote religion among Native Americans over the past two centuries.... He reviews virtually all published (and many unpublished) accounts of the peyote religion, including his own field notes among the Wind River Shoshonis of Wyoming." - Prof. Christopher Vecsey, Shaman: Journal of the International Society for Shamanistic Research.

The Attraction of Peyote: Native American Psychedelic Spiritualities

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