Animism, Perception, and Earthly Craft of the Magician

Although the term “animism” was originally coined in the nineteenth century to designate the mistaken projection of humanlike attributes — such as life, mind, intelligence — to nonhuman and ostensibly inanimate phenomena, it is clear that this first meaning was itself rooted in a misapprehension, by Western scholars, of the perceptual experience of indigenous, oral ...

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Making Magic

They told me I had powers. Powers? I had been a magician for seven years, performing steadily back in the States, entertaining in clubs and restaurants throughout the country, yet I had never heard anyone mention powers. To be sure, once or twice a season I was rebuked by some spectator fresh out of Bible ...

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Gary Snyder and the Renewal of Oral Culture

What a pleasure to have this chance to ponder this marvelous, and marvelously strange, poem cycle — “Mountains and Rivers Without End”— by our friend Gary Snyder. I must admit the poem has had me flummoxed and befuddled.  Yet I was immediately taken with the animistic terrain of these pages. This shifting, metamorphic realm where ...

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The Riddle of the Twins

Here is a riddle that was posed to me by my friend and colleague, the meso-american shaman and poet Martin Prechtel: “Into the fresh blond hair of the young rain deities, The twins drop to retrieve their parents’ face. One disappears in order to hold the other, Whose death as well, feeds the world in ...

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Earth in Eclipse

There is another world, but it is in this one. — Paul Eluard As a fresh millennium dawns around us, a new and vital skill is waiting to be born in the human organism, a new talent called for by the curious situation in which much of humankind now finds itself. We may call it ...

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Reciprocity and the Salmon

1. The Lessons of Salmon My first encounter with spawning salmon gleams with a cool, moonlit radiance in my memory. I’d grown up in the suburban east coast and knew nothing of this wild fish and its mysterious ways. It was in the mid-eighties, and I was kayaking in the Prince William Sound a year ...

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Depth Ecology

Deep ecology, as a movement and a way of thinking, has commonly been contrasted to conventional environmentalism, and especially to approaches that focus only on alleviating the most obvious symptoms of ecological disarray without reflecting upon, and seeking to transform, the more deep-seated cultural assumptions and practices that have given rise to those problems. Rather ...

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Waking Our Animal Senses

I’m beginning these thoughts during the winter solstice, the dark of the year, during a night so long that even the trees and the rocks are falling asleep. Moon has glanced at us through the thick blanket of clouds once or twice, but mostly left us to dream and drift through the shadowed night. Those ...

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Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth

Introduction Slowly, inexorably, members of our species are beginning to catch sight of a world that exists beyond the confines of our specific culture—beginning to recognize, that is, that our own personal, social, and political crises reflect a growing crisis in the biological matrix of life on the planet. The ecological crisis may be the ...

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Eairth’s Imagination

This essay will basically explore three statements: First, We live in the imagination. Second, this imagi-nation, a nation of images, arises from the autonomy of the image. And thirdly, the place where this image-magic is finding place, is, quite simply, the air. Taken together these three have the potential, I propose, to transform our relationships ...

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