mythology, in which the role of the shaman and the spirit world
play an important part. In the early eighties I wrote a master's thesis
in Danish literature where I analysed a modern Danish writer's
usage of the Greenlandic spiritual world to illustrate our de-spirited
modern society. My conclusion was that this writer, Vagn Lundbye,
saw himself as a sort of modern version of a shaman, as a mediator
between a non-inspired Danish society and a highly inspired
traditional Greenlandic one. I was unaware as I wrote that a
modern version of shamanism, known as core-shamanism, created
by Michael Harner, was starting to spread in the United States.

As I followed the development of the interest in shamanism in the
West during the eighties and nineties, as presented in journals, books
and courses, it became clear to me that there were significant
differences between the shamanism that had derived from the
traditional Arctic region and neo-shamanism, especially where the
relationship to the spirits was concerned. I therefore decided to
participate in a variety of courses to examine that difference. The
fieldwork material in this book is based on the courses of one particular
course organiser. He was fully informed of my intention to conduct
research and to compare the courses with the traditional shamanism
represented by the angakkoq. I undertook my research with a sense of
profound respect for the valuable experiences of the participants and
was very careful never to take any notes during the participants'
descriptions of their journeys where permission was not first given.
The examples of journeys are therefore based on my own experiences
and the accounts given to me during the interviews I conducted.

One of the aspects of New Age thinking that has caused me
concern over the years is a reluctance to face the negative aspects of
spirituality. There is an old Nordic legend which describes a saint
who was carefully building a church during the day but each night
a troll came and tore it down. After this had gone on for some time,
the saint decided to hide during the night and find out who the
culprit was. Hearing the troll's name, the saint managed to face the
troll, using the name as his weapon, to put an end to the nightly
destruction and get on with building his church. The un-named
dark side can play all kinds of havoc or, in other words, the sense of
power achieved in a course might 'overwhelm' the present-day
healer as it did some of the angakkut.

Merete Demant Jakobsen

Oxford

-ix-