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When Jung introduces us to “totality” in his 1935 Eranos lecture, we can have no conception of its width and breadth. When he speaks of the unus mundus, numinosity, or the anima mundi, we don't know the levels of consciousness that are being reached or how they advance healing. Jung's ideas are 100+ years old; the shamanism of the Andean people of Peru can be traced back 15,000 years and directly addresses the content and domain of these states.
By explaining the detailed cosmology of shamans of the Q'ero community, the descendants of the Incas, then linking it to Jung's structure of the psyche,
this work offers an invaluable resource with which to unfold Jung's structure of the psyche as applied to trauma. I appreciate the availability of this work as it has profoundly changed many of my long-held ideas as to the nature of numinous experiences, the ways to approach the realization of the Self, and the practical ways I struggle to work with a patient's deeply embedded complex trauma.
The author is a Jungian analyst with a practice in Denver, but also, uniquely, a paqo, a shaman, initiated and trained in Peru; immersed, as can be seen from her writings, in the sacred liminal space in which healing occurs. As she explains, in a way that suggests the depth of her knowledge: “I began receiving karpay rites in initiation ceremonies from the paqos, when the ‘linage’ from their misa [medicine bundle] was energetically transmitted into mine.”
This work is about the importance of atemporal states, where time is suspended, a place of numinosity. In Andean shamanism, it is these states outside time that offer access to the healing of unprocessed trauma. The book therefore focuses on Incan cosmology and the ancient knowledge of the paqos to explain the dimension of these spaces, their dynamics, the nature of the place where healing can occur.
Rather than immersing us too quickly into the complex Andean system of energy and connection, with its own vocabulary and practices, she l