{"id":398,"date":"2005-04-01T22:01:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-01T22:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=398"},"modified":"2005-04-01T22:01:00","modified_gmt":"2005-04-01T22:01:00","slug":"felicitas-goodman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=398","title":{"rendered":"Felicitas Goodman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Word comes of the passing of Felicitas Goodman on 31 March. She was in her early nineties.<\/p>\n

Born to ethnic German parents in Hungary, she attended the University of Heidelburg. She came to the United States after World War II and worked as a scientific translator before entering graduate school as a “nontraditional” student and earning a PhD in anthropology. She taught linguistics and anthropology at Denison University until retiring in 1979.<\/p>\n

And then she began to devote herself full time to some very interesting research in the anthropological reconstruction of shamanism, culminating in the publication of her book Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences<\/em> (Indiana University Press, 1990). Get it if you can, perhaps through some service like Advanced Book Exchange<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I was fortunate enough to persuade her to write the lead chapter of my 1994 anthology Witchcraft and Shamanism<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

She purchased some land between Santa Fe and Espa\u00f1ola, New Mexico, and founded the “Cuyamonge Institute” for the study of shamanism. It never became as large as Michael Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies<\/a>, but I tend to think of Goodman and Harner as somewhat parallel: anthropologists who “went native.” Goodman, however, taught shamanic techniques perhaps more in Europe than in the United States, particularly in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.<\/p>\n

Nikki Bado-Fralick<\/a>, one of her former academic students, wrote of her today, “I learned from Felicitas that we need to be brave adventurers in what she called the ‘alternate realities.’ There seemed to be no aspect of the alternate reality that we should not investigate, no spiritual territory that we should not explore. Felicitas warmly and generously gave to others, supporting them in their adventures without pause.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Word comes of the passing of Felicitas Goodman on 31 March. She was in her early nineties. Born to ethnic German parents in Hungary, she attended the University of Heidelburg. She came to the United States after World War II and worked as a scientific translator before entering graduate school as a “nontraditional” student and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[32,11,12],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-new-mexico","tag-shamanism","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-6q","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12750,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12750","url_meta":{"origin":398,"position":0},"title":"The Making of an Ethnobotanist in a 1960s University Scene","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 23, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the books on my ethnobotany shelves is Witchcraft Medicine:Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants, a colloboration between Wolf Dieter Storl, Claudia M\u00fcller-Ebeling, and Christian R\u00e4tsch, all three anthropologists and ethnobotanists. M\u00fcller-Ebeling and R\u00e4tsch are married and live in Hamburg, but Storl was born in Germany in 1942\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/storl.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":801,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=801","url_meta":{"origin":398,"position":1},"title":"Dolores LaChapelle","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 29, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Dolores LaChapelle of Silverton, Colorado, died January 22 at an advanced age. (She was still skiing deep powder in her seventies.)She begins the preface to her 1992 deep ecology book Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life by stating that it does not\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"deep ecology\"","block_context":{"text":"deep ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=deep-ecology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4030,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4030","url_meta":{"origin":398,"position":2},"title":"University Courses that I Wish I Could Have Taken","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 4, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Anthropology 666, \"The Anthropology of Shamanism and Occult Experience,\" with Professor Neil Whitehead at Wisconsin. I wonder what the exam questions were like and what sort of papers he assigned.","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6430,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6430","url_meta":{"origin":398,"position":3},"title":"Anthropologist Describes Rebirth of Mongolian Shamanism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 30, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"A news release from the MIT News Office carries the subhead, \"MIT anthropologist finds that after Soviet domination, a rebirth of shamanism helped Mongolia rewrite its own history.\" The release continues, In 1990, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, Mongolia, long a satellite of the U.S.S.R., regained its independence. Socialism\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"anthropology\"","block_context":{"text":"anthropology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=anthropology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/newsoffice.mit.edu\/sites\/mit.edu.newsoffice\/files\/styles\/news_article_image_top_slideshow\/public\/images\/2013\/20131213180343-0_0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":133,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=133","url_meta":{"origin":398,"position":4},"title":"Estonian shamanism site With thanks\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 2, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Estonian shamanism site With thanks to the dashing Odious and Peculiar, a link to a site on Estonian shamanism created by Aado Lintrop. Most of the links are in English, some in Estonian. But Lintrop links to the dreaded Michael Harner's site. Quick, call the Culture Police! (No, not them;\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":837,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=837","url_meta":{"origin":398,"position":5},"title":"The most controversial anthropologist","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 14, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"One episode of a BBC series called Tales from the Jungle on famous anthropologists examines the \"shamanthropologist\" Carlos Castaneda (d. 1998), appropriately described as the most controversial anthropologist ever.For those of us who can't watch the Beeb, it is available in segments from YouTube.There are also episodes on Bronislaw Malinowski\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"anthropology\"","block_context":{"text":"anthropology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=anthropology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}