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"Robert Torrance posits a dynamic questing impulse as intrinsic to both human nature and the wild process of nature. Torrance sets out an impressive array of examples as to what 'spiritual quest' has meant in human experience, highlighting cases from societies that are not dominated by organized religious ideologies. The background of ethnographic cases serves to underpin the challenging assertion that we must forever base our seeking on a wholehearted engagement with uncertainty and impermanence. The spiritual quest is creative, and always made new in light of Torrance's book—a marvelous view."—Gary Snyder, author of Turtle Island
"This is a magnificent effort to approach the question of our most expansive psychic activity, the quest for transcending our limited universe. This is a brilliant work, which opens the gates to much new research."—Ake Hultkrantz, author of Shamanic Healing and Ritual Drama
"This is an important book for the history of religions, for it redeems the universalist hypothesis from the caves of the Jungians (supplying a critical corrective to Joseph Campbell and, more significantly, to Mircea Eliade), nimbly sidesteps the vortex of the structuralists, and beats back the dragons of deconstruction. His sophisticated use of contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and the anthropology of shamanic cultures makes this Platonic approach to the narrative of human experience, this old faith in human universals, newly compelling."—Wendy Doniger, author of Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts
List of contents
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PART ONE· ANIMAL QUAERENS: THE QUEST AS A DIMENSION OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
1. Religion and the Spiritual Quest: From Closure to Openness
2. Biological and Psychological Foundations of the Quest
3. Linguistic Foundations of the Quest
4. The Questing Animal
PART TWO · THE SPIRITUAL QUEST IN RITUAL AND MYTH
5. Ritual as Affirmation and Transformation
6. Myth and the Journey beyond the Self
7. Mobility and Its Limits in Communal Ritual and Myth
PART THREE· SPIRIT POSSESSION AS A FORM OF THE SPIRITUAL QUEST
8. The Varieties of Spirit Possession
9. Possession and Transformation
PART FOUR· FORMS OF THE SHAMANIC QUEST
10. Shamanism, Possession, and Ecstasy: Australia and the Tropics
11. Shamanic Heartland: Central and Northern Eurasia
PART FIVE · FORMS OF THE QUEST IN NATIVE AMERICA
12. The Arctic and Western North America
13. Mesoamerica and South America
14. Eastern North America and the Great Plains
PART SIX · THE THEORY OF THE QUEST:SOME CLOSING CONSIDERATIONS
15. A Ternary Process
16. The Reality of Transcendence
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
About the author
Robert M. Torrance is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis.
Summary
A study which argues that the spiritual quest is rooted in our biological, psychological, linguistic and social nature. Drawing on tribal religions and practices and from theorists and thinkers, the author seeks to expand our awareness of this complex human activity.
