This classic work describes shamanic figures surviving in Japan today, their initiatory dreams, ascetic practices, the supernatural beings with whom they communicate, and the geography…
Purity and purification – All cultures make some division between what they consider “normal” and what they consider “abnormal”; some also categorize certain things, events,…
Purgatives – Many shamanic rituals and performances include the ingestion of plants that result in vomiting. Some observers, including enthusiastic participants (e.g., Gordon Wasson) have…
Psychotechnologies – Term used by Mircea Eliade to refer to the strategies shamans use to alter states of consciousness and thereby achieve “ecstasy”—from drumming and…
Psychonauts – A term sometimes applied to neo-shamans, Chaos Magickians, techno-shamans, those ingesting entheogens, some Pagans, and other contemporary Westerners exploring the realms of altered…
Psilocybin – A hallucinogenic or entheogenic alkaloid (4-phosphoryloxyN, N-dimethyltryptamine) of the tryptamine family present in many species of fungi, the best-known being the genus Psilocybe,…
Protection – A significant role of shamans in many indigenous communities is to provide protection from enemies of various kinds, including sorcerers, witches, predators, enemy…
Price-Williams, Douglass – Professor emeritus in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has, as part of his research into psychological anthropology and…
Price, Neil – Archaeologist whose exhaustive analysis of Norse–Saami relations in The Viking Way (2002) indicates that there was much creative cultural exchange. In particular,…
Pretty Shield (1856–1944) – Medicine woman of the Apsáalooke (“Children of the Large-Beaked Bird,” often now called Crow) during the 19th-century transition to reservation life.…