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Woman Shaman: the Ancients DVD

Product description

This video by Max Dashú reveals the rich cultural record of medicine women, seers, oracles, healers, trance-dancers, shapeshifters, and dreamers—on a global scale. The visually stunning exploration of female shamans in archaeology overthrows the presumption that archaic shamanism was a masculine preserve. Max Dashu retrieves archaeological images from obscurity to reveal an unimaginably rich female past. Women do ceremony in rock art of the Sahara, southern Africa, Azerbaijan, Spain, and Baja California. They dance with tigers on Indus seals, with serpents on Iranian ones, and in ecstatic ceremonies on Aztec codices, Chinese bronzes, and Cretan seals. Female shape-shifters manifest walrus tusks in Nunavut, and horns in Libya; ceramic sculptures in Ecuador, Peru, Nicaragua, show women changing into snakes, owls, deer.

See ancient representations of divination, laying-on of hands, staff dancers, regalia, deified shamans, paleolithic shamans-- all augmented by an evocative musical underscore. To experience the beauty, power and wisdom of these spiritual legacies is medicine for the spirit, especially for the women who have been pushed down, marginalized, denied, and silenced in the name of religion. These most ancient spiritual ways have immense value—however far back, or deep, we have to go to recover this human birthright.

Movie with full music underscore. 2 disc dvd set, total run time 178 minutes.