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Shamans & Shamanism

Mighty_Emperor

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
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Not sure where to put this so........

Enter the Shaman

Strange journeys on the edge of the new frontier

By R. V. Scheide

When I was 17, I had a dream in which I forgot my own name. A question bobbed to the surface--who are you?--and just like that, all sense of what is commonly referred to as identity or the self vanished. I heard my name called, but did not recognize it. I saw my own face, but it was unfamiliar. The sounds and images faded into an infinite void from which no frame of reference could be drawn, self or otherwise. I had ceased to exist. Yet the sense of existence persisted. I instinctively understood that what was once me was now an indivisible part of this existence. This was how life would go on. The instant I pondered how I could possibly know this, since I had ceased to exist, I woke up.

I've never forgotten that dream, and the memory of it has served me well. When I read French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre's assertion that "nothingness lies coiled within being like a worm" in his classic philosophical text Being and Nothingness, I knew exactly what he meant. Jung's collective unconsciousness? Been there. Nietzsche's eternal return? Done that. All of these examples seem like valid interpretations of my experience.

But was my experience valid?

Until relatively recently in the Western world, the answer was no. Back in Galileo's day, 400 or so years ago, dreams, hallucinations, souls, spirits and other metaphysical phenomena were cast out as objects of legitimate scientific inquiry by the Church, which didn't want anyone else cutting in on the God business. What originally evolved out of religious intolerance--scientific method--ironically morphed into its own dogmatic secular religion, nowhere moreso than in the medical sciences. If it can't be measured with instruments-- and so far, no one has built a device capable of detecting, say, a soul--it doesn't exist, as far as Western medicine is concerned. We're living in a material world.



Enter the shaman. For thousands of years, individuals with specialized knowledge of both the natural and the supernatural--sometimes referred to derogatorily as witch doctors, wizards, warlocks and witches by us moderns--have practiced the healing arts. From indigenous tribes in North and South America to practitioners of 3,000-year-old traditional Chinese medicine, such healers approach health problems from physical as well as spiritual perspectives. Now the West, blinded by science for a half a millennia, is finally catching on. Shamanism now pervades everything from complementary medicine to quantum physics. It may even contain the meaning of life.

Since the 1960s, anthropologists like Michael Harner, founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies in Mill Valley and author of The Way of the Shaman, have helped reintroduce the Western world to the shamanic healing traditions of our distant past. These traditions, still practiced by intact indigenous tribes and other non-Western cultures around the world, take a decidedly different view on reality; namely, that there are at least two sets: "ordinary reality," which we experience in our normal waking state, and "nonordinary reality," which occurs in dreams or induced trances.

"One of the distinguishing characteristics of the shamanic practitioner is the ability to move back and forth at will between these realities with discipline and purpose in order to heal and help others," writes Harner in his article "Science, Spirits and Shamanism." It seems that my dream of 27 years ago qualifies as a quasi-shamanic experience: I crossed into nonordinary reality and returned with knowledge that has proven quite useful to me in ordinary reality.

Unlike Western scientific method, shamanism validates such experiences, believing them to be the stuff that ordinary reality is made of. The shamanic technique of flipping back and forth between realities has proven to be a powerful metaphorical tool for understanding diverse complexities ranging from interpersonal relationships to quantum mechanics. Its use has gone decidedly mainstream. The Four Agreements by San Rafael author Don Miguel Ruiz, who trained as a Nagual shaman in the Toltec tradition of his native southern Mexico, remained on the New York Times bestseller list for two years.

From Harner to Ruiz and beyond, there is no shortage of shamans in the North Bay. Despite a reputation as the woo-woo capital of the planet, more than a few genuine masters are in our midst. Some of these practitioners guide the curious through group ceremonies that emulate Native American shamanic tradition, combining dance, percussion and chanting to create a trancelike experience. Others take Harner's "discipline and purpose" to the limit.

Dr. Gary Daniel, a Santa Rosa-based motivation and behavioral specialist with 20 years of experience and Ph.Ds in hypnotherapy, hypnotic anesthesiology and transpersonal psychology, approaches shamanism from a more Western perspective, merging sound, light and computer technology with shamanic healing traditions to create a new modality of treatment: techno-shamanism.

"Shamanism Plugs into the Wall," is how Daniel describes it in an essay recently published in the collection The Heart of Healing, edited by Dawson Church and featuring contributions from such luminaries as Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil. Daniel is co-inventor of the NEURO (short for "neuro-imaging optimization") system, a computerized biofeedback system employing vibration, sound and optical lasers. "We're just using high technology to do what the Indians did with drums and fire," he says. "This takes all the guesswork out of it."

The real trick to shamanism is the moving back and forth between the two realities at will. An altered state is required. Shamans from many indigenous tribes throughout the Americas used hallucinogens to induce such states, but that's a little impractical in the legally prohibitive 21st century. Fire, drums, dancing and chanting sufficed for other tribes. The NEURO system claims to get the job done more quickly than either of those methods, and is totally legal to boot.

The system is the featured attraction at Allura du Jour, a high-tech mind and body spa founded by Daniel and partner Debra Corrigan. Stepping inside is kind of like diving down that rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. Plush, overstuffed sofas squat like giant mushrooms. Columns and pedestals are finished in a powdered cocoa color that looks edible.

And in its own separate dark chamber sits the NEURO, a sculpted human-form-fitting chair with a bank of computer monitors and equipment, twin lasers perched on a pedestal in front of the chair and duplex cables snaking across the floor connecting everything together.

The chair is lined with a latticework of miniature speakers that transmit auditory vibrations through human bone. It also contains sensors that monitor the body's vital statistics, translating the data via computer algorithm to approximate the subject's brain-wave pattern on a screen: alpha, beta, theta or delta. Daniel manipulates NEURO's vibration, sound and light elements to achieve the desired brain state.

From previous experience, I know that I'm one of the 20 percent of the population who is relatively easy to hypnotize, so eagerly accept an offer to "test drive" the system.

Encased in the NEURO chair, I close my eyes and laser spirograph patterns flicker across my eyelids. My breathing slows. The light seems to penetrate my visual cortex. The "sounds" of wind blowing and waves crashing throb through the chair and up and down the length of my skeleton, making it feel as if my body is levitating on an invisible cushion of sonic energy like a puck on an air hockey table. My breathing, the throbbing sounds and the pulsing lasers seem to synchronize and I slip into the deepest, purest trance I've ever experienced.

A prerecorded voice not unlike Stuart Smalley's, the character played by Al Franken on Saturday Night Live, begins reciting first-person positive affirmations: "I have the power to take control of my life. I am a creative person. I will reach my full potential."

It doesn't seem silly at all. In fact, I believe every word with every vibrating molecule of my being. As Daniel eases off of the machine, an effect he calls "fractalization" kicks in: I am floating in a sea of what looks and feels like television static. It's the closest I've ever come to experiencing that same infinite void from my dream. Perhaps it was psychosomatic, but my mood is elevated for weeks after that 12-minute session.

"I knew that light and sound have a tremendous effect on the body, and I knew there had to be a way to synthesize it," Daniel later explains. He's used the system to treat clients ranging from creatively blocked professionals to hardcore nicotine addicts. Believing in the process, however, is a major hurdle to overcome.

"The shaman somehow tapped into their subject's ability to believe in the shaman's power and create a true healing event," he writes in "Shamanism Plugs into the Wall."

"Today's healer must overcome the fear from acquired wisdom in the subject by overloading the subject's consciousness and thereby opening the mind at the subconscious level to new ideas and possibilities."

Like Gary Daniel, Allen Hardman began his shamanic explorations as a hypnotherapist. A chance encounter with Four Agreements author Miguel Ruiz led to nine years of study with the Toltec Nagual. With the master's blessing, Hardman last month branched out with his own shamanic workshop, the Lucid Living Intensive. Computer-savvy and modern, Hardman is often jokingly referred to as the "high-tech Toltec."

"I'll often take people into essentially a hypnotic trance, to give them the sense of the mindless divinity, to experience what they perceive mindlessly," he says. Sensing the mindless divinity--an apt description of my original dream experience. Such insights, from dreams or induced trances, can open up new, less distorted channels of perception.

"Light carries the message perfectly, but our normal channels of perception distort the message," he stresses. By focusing or "channeling" individual awareness in nonordinary reality--a process known as "lucid dreaming"--distortion is ideally cut to zero, permitting experienced Toltec shamans to take control of the dream or trance, a useful tool for exploring still more channels in nonordinary reality. But Hardman prefers focusing his advanced student's awareness toward ordinary reality, a process called "lucid living," and a fairly radical paradox occurs: as the distortion clears, students realize ordinary reality is but a daydream. That means, just as in lucid dreaming, ordinary reality can be controlled.

Since light seems to play such a significant role in a wide array of shamanic traditions, it is perhaps not surprising that quantum physicists--the scientists who study quarks, the tiny packets of wave/particle that seem to oscillate between matter and energy at the subatomic level--are interested. As psychiatrist and physicist Arnold Mindell demonstrates in his seminal book Quantum Mind: The Edge Between Physics and Psychology, there appears to be a profound relationship between the mathematics of quantum mechanics and the ordinary and nonordinary realities of the shaman.

The equations used to describe wave motion in quantum physics utilize complex numbers, a combination of real numbers and the so-called imaginary numbers based on the square root of -1. If you didn't make it this far in high school math, don't worry. Mindell proposes a fairly simple hypothesis: the real numbers are analogous to ordinary reality; the imaginary numbers are analogous to nonordinary reality.

"We have seen that the patterns found in the psychology of perception in shamanic experience are consistent with patterns found in math and now in physics," Mindell writes. "This consistency points to the unified field, the dreamlike substance of experience, which is basic to life, to psychology and physics, to electrons and their observers, to all of us as we live and grow."

Not coincidentally, Mindell compares the way physicists think about imaginary numbers with the shamanic concept of lucid dreaming. "When you multiply a complex number by its conjugate [mirror image or reciprocal], the result is an entirely real number," he writes. In other words, the equations describing energy waves appear to correlate with the shamanic notion of a mindless divinity from which both nonordinary and ordinary reality arise.

Could the shaman's mindless divinity and the so-far-undiscovered unified field be the same thing? Perhaps. Physicists from China, where traditional Chinese medicine or qigong (pronounced "chi-gong") has been practiced for the past 3,000 years, have speculated that chi, the energy or life force that flows through the body, emanates from the unified field or a similar structure in theoretical physics known as the quantum vacuum.

A rich tapestry of overlaying traditions compose qigong, including martial arts, acupuncture, natural medicine, diet and a system of movement similar to the yoga, in which special poses, mimicking spiritual animals such as the turtle, crane and bear, help channel the flow of chi through medians and other conduits of the body.

Chi itself is most often compared to electricity because it is thought to flow through these medians and conduits like electrons through a wire. Skilled practitioners such as Grand Master Jin-sheng Tu, a Taiwan native and one of the foremost qigong practitioners in the United States, claim they have the ability to "emit" chi as a healing power.

Master Tu speaks little English and doesn't call himself a shaman, but in his self-styled qigong garb, he certainly looks like one, a bandana covering his long, thick black locks, tight breeches tucked into thigh-high lace-up boots with pointed toes that curled over on the tips like an elf's shoes. When I first met him, he was balancing on eggs in his bare feet while painting a fairly accurate watercolor of Bodhidharma, who brought Zen Buddhism to China.

"Where does chi come from?" I asked through an interpreter.

Rather than speaking, Master Tu held up his left arm as if he were waving goodbye and made a little clutching motion at the air. He pointed his index finger straight up, like he was testing the wind. Then, through the interpreter, he asked me to hold out my right palm. He lowered his index finger to the precise center of my palm, and when we touched, a jolt of energy lasting five seconds or so passed into my hand, not unlike this shock you'd feel if you touched your tongue on both terminals of a 9-volt battery.

Master Tu had given me a fresh shot of chi.

He never really told me where chi comes from, but I think I've got it figured out by now. It comes right out of the air we breath, flowing back and forth between ordinary and nonordinary reality, occasionally making itself known to those who are willing to do the work in its purest form: the mindless divinity, that infinite void from which no frame of reference could be drawn that I dreamed of so long ago.

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/07.14.04/shaman-0429.html
 
I thought this might be of interest on here. I've been given this book over the weekend and have been browsing through it:

Keepers of the Ancient Knowledge:The Mystical World of the Q'Ero Indians of Peru
by Joan Parisi Wilcox

The Celestine Prophecy- James Redfield's international bestseller- was a fictional account of Peruvian mysticism and spiritual awakening. Now the real story is told. For the first time, the most respected shamans of the Peruvian Andes share their mystical cosmology with the world.


The reviews on Amazon are, how can I say, a mixed-bag. :?

This webpage quotes from the book, Shamans' Stories from the Andes
 
Don't know much about shamanism, however I did read a book called "Entering the Circle" by Olga Kharitidi, about Siberian shamanism.. Unfortunately I lent the book to someone and never got it back, so I can't really elaborate, but if any one else has read the book I'd be interested to know what they thought of it.

I just thought it was interesting because the word 'shamanism' is usually associated (by people like me with little or no knowledge of the subject) with Native American practice or something similar... Siberian shamanism seemed unexpected, which I think is why I inititially picked up the book.
 
I've read in several books, as well as concluded from several trips, that Shamanism was once solely of feminine origin, back when the MOTHER GODDESS religion was dominant. IF anyone is ever curious as to how warlocks, wizards and witches got their pointy caps, female shamans were pointy caps during ceremonies. The higher the cap, the more powerful the shaman.

WW
 
IF anyone is ever curious as to how warlocks, wizards and witches got their pointy caps, female shamans were pointy caps during ceremonies. The higher the cap, the more powerful the shaman.

We have done witches hats before, although not in much detail -
forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13723
Link is obsolete. The current link is:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...mstick-pointed-hat-stereotypes-origins.13723/


I don't think there is anything that brings out more opinion and half-remembered groundless 'common-knowledge' couched as historical fact than witches.
 
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Agree. Though we should also put druids into that bag as well. :D
 
I would reccomend Dreamtime and Inner Space by Holger Kalweit.
 
Saddened to see these Japanese female shamans are dying out. I can't honestly remember ever reading about female shamans before.

http://jezebel.com/5342714/japans-mediu ... -dying-off
To those with an interest in the occult, Japan's itako - female, blind spirit mediums practicing an ancient form of shamanism - are endlessly fascinating. But as the few remaining women die off, it's a tradition in danger of extinction.

I remember the first time I heard about itako from a Japanese friend whose grandmother had made periodic visits to the shamans to contact her dead husband. It's reminiscent of the oracles at Delphi: what the New York Times calls "elderly, often blind women who hold séance-like ceremonies that customers hope will allow them to commune with spirits of the dead" in a sulfur-permeated dormant volcano known as the "Mountain of Horror." It seemed impossible that anything so ancient should still exist. But as the Times explains, it won't for much longer.

Although the animistic practice is thought to pre-date both Buddhism and Shintoism - and over the years have been treated with hostility by both religious and civic authorites, who regard it as superstition - it has come to incorporate elements of both. The Mountain, for instance, is thought to be a place where souls assemble before reincarnation, and is the site of a Buddhist temple. However, the article points out that the temple has disassociated itself from the freelance shamans, who have long been regarded by some as frauds - and, as one professor points out, perhaps scorned partially as a result of their lower social status; as opposed to (male) priests, most itako came from the lower classes.

While there used to be hundreds of itako, whom people would consult at temples, asking them to channel the dead for a small fee, now only four remain, three of whom are elderly. Traditionally, blind girls trained from a young age - or were called to the practice, often by a health crisis in later life.

Ms. Himukai, the 40-year-old itako, says she enters a trance in which she feels the presence of the spirit and its mood, which she expresses in her own words. She said she decided to begin the three-year period of study to become a spiritual medium as a teenager, after an itako near her rural village cured her of an ailment that doctors could not fix.

It's easy to see why the rigors of the mysterious discipline might leave some young Japanese women cold, particularly in a world where the blind have other employment options. Here's how Wikipedia describes the initiation process:

In training for initiation, itako dress in a white kimono 100 days before the ceremony. Austere purification is obligatory to achieve an extreme state of mind. Rites where she must pour cold water over herself, usually in the cold of winter, occur and she is required to practice chanting. Three weeks prior to the ceremony, she is not permitted to consume grain, salt, meat and must avoid artificial heat...During the ceremony itself, the itako trainee is dressed as a bride to indicate that she will marry a god. The ceremony is accompanied by continual drum and bell sounds to help the itako achieve the concentration required to enter into a trance. Older itako sit around to assist the chanting; the ceremony may go on for days until the trainee has entered the said trance. Once she has entered a trance, the master itako will determine which god has possessed the trainee. Trainees are not permitted to sleep and food consumption is kept to a minimum. As a result of being blind, itako must learn the obligatory scriptures by heart and may even know the scriptures better than some less motivated priests

As an outsider, it's easy to mourn the death of ancient tradition - particularly one whose continued existence is itself remarkable. But at the same time, for a young woman with other options - and more to the point, other means of enfranchisement - it would be inexplicable, in a way, to opt for such a difficult life. For those few pilgrims who still seek their services, of course, the loss will indeed be felt: as is clear to any of us who've ever, even in spite of our intellectual reservations, given into the temptation to have our cards or palms read, a desire to know the unknowable dies very hard.
[/quote]
 
'Shaman' Peter Aziz jailed over psychedelic drug drink
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-14762782

Peter Aziz was arrested after being exposed in a BBC Inside Out West television programme

Related Stories

Four arrested for drugs offences
Police arrest two in drugs search

A self-styled shaman who brewed a drink containing a Class A drug for ritual healing ceremonies has been sentenced to 15 months in jail.

Peter Aziz, 51, from Buckfast in Devon, supplied a concoction made from the illegal jungle plant ayahuasca.

The plant contains the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT).

Aziz, who had claimed the drink could help fight serious health problems such as cancer, was found guilty at Bristol Crown Court.

In a trial believed to have been the first of its kind in the UK, he was convicted of two counts of producing the Class A drug DMT and two counts of supplying it.

Aziz claimed to have taken Home Office advice about the legality of using the drug.

He was arrested after being exposed in a BBC Inside Out West television programme in which an undercover GP posed as a patient seeking a treatment for cancer.

Continue reading the main story

Start Quote

We witnessed people vomiting into buckets having quite serious hallucinations”

Dr Charles Shepherd
GP
Aziz was filmed secretly at a disused hotel in Weston-super-Mare in 2007. He took £100 each from 20 people who then drank the herbal mixture.

Passing sentence, Judge Michael Roach said: "You knew it was wrong to supply DMT, you knew it was wrong to make DMT, but you did it anyway."

The GP who went undercover, Dr Charles Shepherd, welcomed the outcome of the trial.

"It's a serious matter... offering to treat people with cancer, producing a drug which had really quite potent properties to it.

"We witnessed people vomiting into buckets having quite serious hallucinations.



Click to play

Peter Aziz was filmed secretly in 2007 at a disused hotel in Weston-super-Mare
"If this drug had been given to someone who was weakened through cancer it could have made them seriously ill."

Speaking after the trial, Det Ch Insp Phillip Jones from Avon and Somerset Police said DMT was a "dangerous drug" and was "a Class A drug for a reason".

"It's in the same category as heroin and cocaine," he said.

"We've worked closely with the drug strategy unit at the Home Office and I'm hoping that they'll publicise nationally and raise awareness of the problems and health concerns with DMT."
 
The mystic shamans who bring the spiritual and physical world together: Peru's mysterious Curanderos who believe they can cure any disease with the power of Mother Earth
  • Shamans are believed to be a bridge between this world and the next, able to communicate with spirits
  • In the Peruvian Amazon Basin, shamans use medicine songs called icaros to contact the spirit world
  • Diana Abagnoli went to Peru to photograph the shamans - or Curanderos - and their intricate traditions
  • They attracted worldwide intrigue thanks to the Mayan 'end of days' prophecy for December 2012
By Hannah Al-Othman For MailOline

PUBLISHED: 16:39, 7 March 2017 | UPDATED: 17:05, 7 March 2017

These incredible pictures offer a fascinating insight into the rich and diverse traditions of Peruvian shamans, known as Curanderos.
Shamans are believed to be a bridge between this world and the next, able to communicate with spirits through magic, rituals and spiritual visions.
In the Peruvian Amazon Basin, shamans use medicine songs called icaros to evoke spirits, communicating with them using totemic items such as rocks that Curanderos believe have special powers.
Although shamans are not as common as decades past, they continue to shepherd their communities across remote Peruvian regions.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-bring-spiritual-physical-world-together.html
 
Good set of photos.
 
Stumbled on a Twitter discussion about the disappearance of Chinese shamanism:

Random question: where did all the shamans go? Are they in psych wards? Plodding along in desk jobs plagued by migraines? Homeless junkies? I presume the same percentage of people still go through the whole shamanic illness deal but it seldom gets resolved into a social role.

Eh. I'm not convinced these modern new age guys; they enjoy it too much. All the real ones I've seen regard it as an imposition and would quit if they could.

I guess, but the idea that you don't get into it voluntarily is an ancient one. Most of the legit ones I've seen in Singapore or seen interviews with on tv just seem to regard it as an exhausting chore that was forced upon them.

Ok, but that still doesn't solve the problem. There's every indication that shamanic sickness is a universal phenomenon, so what happens to people who get it in societies that have no designated role for them?


1620986055261.png

 
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Evidence For European Shamanism​

From The Upper Palaeolithic to the Mesolithic​

My first video content for my Substack, looking at some evidence for shamanism or related magical practices in the archaeological record of the European Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic.

https://stoneageherbalist.substack.com/p/evidence-for-european-shamanism?s=r

Thank you for presenting this to us. Both thoughtful and thought-provoking. I foresee many happy hours with the site.
 
Thank you for presenting this to us. Both thoughtful and thought-provoking. I foresee many happy hours with the site.
Just to avoid misunderstandings ... this is not me nor my content. But I like it too!
Sometimes I'm too quick copying and posting, and I can understand that it can feel like it's my content. But it's not :)
 
Just to avoid misunderstandings ... this is not me nor my content. But I like it too!
Sometimes I'm too quick copying and posting, and I can understand that it can feel like it's my content. But it's not :)
Of course, I think my Fortean friends are all brilliant and accomplished! I actually did think it was your work.
 
New findings tend to confirm that this woman was a Shaman.

The double burial of an adult woman and an infant, dating to about 7000–6800 BCE, discovered in 1934 during construction works at the spa gardens of Bad Dürrenberg, is regarded as one of the outstanding burial finds of the Mesolithic in Central Europe. Because of the unusual equipment with the woman, who was buried in a seated position, and her bodily anomalies, the burial is interpreted as that of a shaman.

Genetic research now reveals the relation of the woman and the child: the boy is not her son, but is a fourth- or fifth-degree relation. The phenotypic variants analyzed in the woman's genome inform us that she had a relatively dark skin complexion, dark, straight hair, and blue eyes.

The unusual equipment buried with the woman comprises flint artifacts and solid rock tools, but also bone and antler artifacts, a piece of red ochre, a number of animal bones including the shell of at least three terrapins and partly pierced animal teeth. Together with deer antlers and originally six partly pierced boar's tusks, these finds are probably head/body ornaments. Due to the grave goods and bodily anomalies of the woman, the burial is interpreted as that of a shaman.

Subsequent excavations at the site as part of the preparations for the State Garden Exhibition 2024 brought not only new revelations about the deposition and positioning of the body to light, but also revealed a multitude of new finds, which could be clearly attributed to the burial. Besides the pierced animal teeth, remains of fauna, lithic artifacts and a large amount of human skeletal remains could also be recovered.

A recent article, published as a chapter in the conference proceedings Propylaeum, by Jörg Orschiedt (State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt, LDA), Wolfgang Haak (Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology), Holger Dietl (LDA), Andreas Siegl (LDA), and Harald Meller (LDA) details the results of recent work on the find, which included a DNA-analysis. ...

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-genetic-year-old-shaman-burial-germany.html
 
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