Meadows, Kenneth – One of a number of neo-shamanic authors whose books in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Shamanic Experience: A Practical Guide to Contemporary Shamanism (1991), popularized shamanic practice, especially drawing on Native American spirituality. That such a title as the early Earth Medicine: A Shamanic Way to Self-Discovery (1989) remains in print is a testament to the popularity of this sort of approach and the medicine wheel teachings in particular. Meadows’s notion of “shamanics” styled shamanism as a technique for personal growth among Westerners, rather than something that was embedded in social relations or negotiations with other-than-human persons. Meadows has also written a book on runes entitled Rune Power (1996), largely born from his rather bizarre suggestion in Earth Medicine that there are similarities between runic divination and the Native American medicine wheel. Just as his many books have been vilified by Native Americans campaigning against the exploitation of their traditions, many Heathens are critical of his New Age and psychological-reductionist interpretations of runes and Heathen traditions.
SOURCE:
Historical Dictionary of Shamanism by Graham Harvey and Robert J. Wallis 2007
