The tribal initiation of the shaman, the archetype of the serpent, exemplifies the death of the self and a rebirth into transcendent life. This book traces the images of spiritual initiation in religious rituals and myths of resurrection, poems and epics, cycles of nature, and art and dreaming. It dramatizes the metamorphosis from a common experience of death's inevitability into a transcendent freedom beyond individual limitations.
 "This is a classic work in analytical psychology that offers crucial insights on the meaning of death symbolism (and its inevitably accompanying rebirth and resurrection symbolism) as part of the great theme of initiation, of which [Henderson] is the world's foremost psychological interpreter. This material is really the next step after the hero myth that Joseph Campbell has made so popular, and provides an understanding of how not to use the hero myth in an inflated way as a psychology of mastery, but as an attainment progressively to be died beyond. [Henderson] is helped by the presence of Maud Oakes, who is a trained anthropologist with exquisite taste in her choice of mythic materials and respect for their original contexts."--John Beebe

The Wisdom of the Serpent

Politics & Social Sciences

Henderson, Joseph Lewis

Oakes, Maud

Social Sciences

Princeton University Press

This work takes its title from the richly symbolic creation legend of the Navaho people, which they incorporated into their blessing ceremony for tribe members headed to battle. Having observed this rite during World War II, when native Americans were for the first time drafted into the U.S. military, ethnologist Maud Oakes recorded the legend and made reproductions of the beautiful ceremonial paintings, given to her by the medicine man Jeff King. Originally printed separately in a portfolio, the text and eighteen paintings are now available as a bound book.

Where the Two Came to Their Father

King, Jeff

The Description for this book, Two Crosses of Todos Santos, will be forthcoming.

Two Crosses of Todos Santos (Bollingen Series, 355)

Reference

This work takes its title from the richly symbolic creation legend of the Navaho people, which they incorporated into their blessing ceremony for tribe members headed to battle. Having observed this rite during World War II, when native Americans were for the first time drafted into the U.S. military, ethnologist Maud Oakes recorded the legend and made reproductions of the beautiful ceremonial paintings, given to her by the medicine man Jeff King. Originally printed separately in a portfolio, the text and eighteen paintings are now available as a bound book.

Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial (Bollingen Series, 125)

Religion & Spirituality

While convalescing in the south of France after a terrible motor accident in the Peruvian Andes, Maud Oakes had occasion to accompany her filmmaker cousin to the home of C. G. Jung in Switzerland. There she encountered a block of stone that Jung had designed and carved with signs, symbols, and inscriptions that drew on Greco-Roman religious ideas and the symbolism of astrology and alchemy.
The Stone Speaks is Miss Oakes’s meditation on the personal and transpersonal meaning of the Stone. Her extensive correspondence with Jung regarding her interpretations and her account of the healing and transformation that took place throughout her inner spiritual journey are a valuable document of individuation and health as the product of inner change, achieved by synthesis and integration.
Miss Oakes’s amplification of the symbolism of Jung’s Stone goes a long way toward showing why the influence of the deeply embedded ideas of one’s culture need not be antithetical to the spontaneous production of symbolism for one who can enter into the creative spirit of giving meaningful expression in some art form to the non-rational contents of the unconscious, as Jung did when he brought into visible form what he saw on the face of his block of stone.
Miss Oakes’s exposition of her own thoughts concerning the stone enables us to feel this unification of the different levels of experience. We cease to care, as we enter the circle of its inner meaning, whether the stone speaks of unconscious or of conscious matters. Then perhaps, even without being able to see the stone in Jung’s garden, the reader might hear it “whisper its misty lore of ancient roots and ancestral lives.”
More than the story of a richly and mysteriously carved stone . . . it is the parable of her own inner life, her own search and discovery.” William McGuire Editor, The Bollingen Series The Collected Works of C. G. Jung

The Stone Speaks: The Memoir of a Personal Transformation

Chiron Publications

The Stone Speaks

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Chiron Pubns

The Wisdom Of The Serpent: The Myths Of Death, Rebirth And Resurrection

Book by Henderson, Joseph Lewis, Oakes, Maud

The Wisdom of the Serpent: The Myths of Death, Rebirth and Resurrection

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Literary Licensing, LLC

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Beyond The Windy Place - Life In The Guatemalan Highlands

History

Americas

Mason Press

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Books by Oakes, Maud