THE GHOST DANCE  The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion by Weston La Barre (1915-1996) is a classic search for the origins of religion, employing psychology and anthropology to explain elements of Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, Christian, shamanic and Native American religion.   The Ghost Dance offers a fascinating exploration of the history and origins of religious belief from earliest times to the present day. The Ghost Dance takes its place beside other great studies of religion, such as those by Sigmund Freud, Geza Roheim or Mircea Eliade.   WESTON LA BARRE   Weston La Barre is best known for his work in anthropology and ethnography, in which he drew on the theories of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Born in Uniontown, PA, La Barre studied at Princeton and Yale, and later taught at Rutgers, Wisconsin and Duke universities. La Barre conducted field work across North and South America, and later through India, China, Africa and Europe. He studied the Plains Indians and their peyote cult with Richard Evans Schultes (which resulted in the 1938 book The Peyote Cult). La Barre's masterwork is The Ghost Dance: The Origin of Religion (1970), which draws together his explorations of shamanism, world religion, Native American culture, altered states of consciousness and the use of drugs in belief systems. His other books include The Human Animal (1954), They Shall Take Up Serpents (1962), Culture In Context (1990), and Muelos (1985).   BOOKS BY WESTON LA BARRE  The Peyote Cult ••• The Aymara Indians of the Lake Titicaca Plateau ••• The Human Animal ••• Materia Medica of the Aymara ••• They Shall Take up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snakehandling Cult ••• Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion ••• The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion ••• Culture in Context, Selected Writings of Weston La Barre ••• Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition About Sexuality

The ghost dance: origins of religion

Weston La Barre

Religion & Spirituality

Allen And Unwin

Accompanies the author's ground-breaking 1938 study of ritual use of the peyote cactus by Mexican and American Indians with surveys of research and studies in the field between 1938 and 1973

The Peyote Cult

Other Religions, Practices & Sacred Texts

Archon

They Shall Take Up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snake-Handling Cult

Schocken

For half a century, readers on peyotism have devoured La Barre’s fascinating original study, which began when the author, at age twenty-four, studied the rites of fifteen American Indian tribes using Lophophora williamsii, the small, spineless, carrot-shaped peyote cactus growing in the Rio Grande Valley and southward. Continuing his research from the 1930s through the 1980s, Weston La Barre reviews topics such as the Timothy Leary-Richard Alpert “experiments” with peyote and other psychotropic substances, the Carlos Castaneda phenomenon, the progress of the Native American Church toward acceptance as a religious denomination, the presumptions of the Neo-American Church, the legal ramifications of ritual drug use, and the spread of peyotism from the Southwest to other North American tribes. This new edition of La Barre’s classic study includes 334 new entries in the latest of his highly valued bibliographical essays on works relating to peyote, not just in anthropology but in a variety of fields including archeology, economics, botany, chemistry, and pharmacology. The bibliography lists important contributions in popular media such as newspapers, audiotapes, and films, as well as in scholarly journals.

Peyote Cult

History

Americas

University of Oklahoma Press

Culture in Context

This leading psychoanalytic anthropologist brings together here some of his most important writings of recent decades: work on the psychology & anthropology of psychotropic drugs, essays on the links of psychoanalysis & anthropology, & several "classic" papers on topics like social cynosure, psychoanthropology of sexuality, & psychoanalysis & the biology of religion. The lead paper on psychotropics does an original synthesis of six earlier papers of this author in a masterpiece combining meticulous detail & brilliant creative insights, marks of Le Barre's whole long & & enormously productive career. This master of THE HUMAN ANIMAL is clearly in evidence again in this feast. To order: Psyche Press, P.O. Box 780, New York, NY 10024. 212-721-4466.

Labarre

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Books by Weston La Barre