On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow. Friedrich Nietzsche What mountains mean to me: in one word, awe-inspiring. Although we can measure them, our minds are incapable of actually grasping the very small or the very large things in nature: neither atomic particles nor astronomical distances. How big is a mountain, how much does it weigh? Our limited minds can only cope with subjective assessments such as how difficult is it to climb, how dangerous would an avalanche be? So the feelings it produces are awe, a little fear, and possibly exhilaration if and when we think that we have conquered the mountain - but in reality we never can. Professor David Hunt All the stories presented in this collection contain shamanic elements, so the obvious starting point is to explain what is meant by this. The term 'shaman' is a controversial one. Initially employed by early anthropologists to refer to a specific category of magical practitioners from Siberia, the term is now widely used to denote similar practitioners from a variety of cultures around the world. This application of an originally culture-specific term to a more general usage has caused problems with regard to definition, with disagreements among scholars over whether certain features, such as soul flight or possession, or certain types of altered states of consciousness, should or should not be listed among the core characteristics of shamanism (Wilby, 2011, p.252). Introduction What are Mountains for you? Soul Captivation on White Bone Mountain The Magic Brush and the Golden Mountain The Legend of Amirani The Story of Jumping Mouse The Children of Hamelin: A Shamanic Journey into Mount Poppenberg The Crystal Clear Waters of Mount Elbruz The Vision Quest, Mount Sinai, and a Dream Fulfilled Mount Ararat Mount Koya-san, the Hermit's Cave, and Fujiyama Sacred Towers The Fool on the Hill and the Book of Mysteries The Tobacco of Harisaboqued The Princess of the Tower Appendix: The Baal Shem Tov - Rabbi, Religious Formulator or Shaman?

The whole adventure started with a Firestone Tire replica ashtray, created for the New York Worlda s Fair in 1939. Pat Mitchell (who really exists) bought the ashtray at a yard sale. According to Mitchell, engraved into the ashtraya s lip was a code pertaining to a fortune in gold bullion. Intrigued, he began to collect these ashtrays and found more codes. He became obsessed. Was Pat crazy, seeing things? He enlists his reluctant grandson, an investigative reporter, to help. Ace Mitchell, Pata s grandson, begins a grand quest for the truth, which takes him from Philadelphia to Clarksburg, West Virginia to Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany. During his investigation, he encounters members of U.S. Intelligence, Der Spinne, a Nazi organization based in South America, and one of Germanya s richest men. What will he find: a fortune in gold bullion, hidden by the Jews of Bavaria before the war, or a verification of the delusional obsession of an old man? Ace Mitchell is a story that jumps between pre- and post-war Bavaria and current times. It is a story of greed, murder and hypocrisy. Pat Mitchella s notes are very thorough and reproduced in the book. Could it all be true?

Issue 6 of The Crooked Path Journal includes the following articles:
Beefcake, Whine and Cheese by Grace Victoria Swann
The Drift by Jongeorgi Enos
Shamanism by Michael Berman
Weikerie by Robin Artisson
To Twist and Twine by Veronica Cummer
Witch Tales in Serbian Crafting by Radomir Ristic
The Art of Invisibility by Peter Paddon
The Travelling Man by Robin Artisson
Walking Widdershins by Jongeorgi Enos

Life on the farm in Missouri is pretty sweet for twelve-year old Alan Albright. With wide-open fields to play in, horses to ride, forests to explore, and loving parents to take care of him, he's a genuinely happy kid. Sure, his little sister Katie can be annoying at times, but the truth is, Alan would be perfectly content to stay in his hometown forever and grow up to be a farmer, just like his dad. But all of that changes the summer before 7th grade, when Alan's parents suddenly and mysteriously disappear. Although the police are convinced the Albrights were killed in a car accident, Alan refuses to believe it. He soon begins his own investigation and uncovers a mystery that takes him not just far from Missouri... but far from planet Earth. Orion is a first-person account of Alan's journey as he travels across the galaxies to discover the truth about extraterrestrials, outer-space and what really happened to his missing parents.

Written and designed for TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) teachers, this is a visually appealing, thoroughly practical resource -- full of exercises, activities, stories, visualizations, puzzles and information for immediate use in the classroom. It provides exercises and advice for teaching and contains all a teacher will need to keep students challenged and learning in the style that suits them best, A Multiple Intelligences Road To An ELT Classroom covers all essential areas making teaching easily accessible, compelling and fun! An extremely versatile book, this can also be used as an activities resource for teachers of English as a first language.

The forests comprising the Gila National Forest and Wilderness in southwest New Mexico is the largest in the contiguous U.S., the least visited or photographed, the one most wild in nature. It is nestled at the nexus of four great ecosystems. It lies at the end of the Rocky Mountains after they slide down the North American continent like a glacier before breaking up into an archipelago of small ranges floating in a sea of grasslands. A couple hundred miles to the south, the Sierra Madre Mountains rise up, serrating Mexico for another two thousand miles. To the west lies the Sonoran Desert with its giant saguaros, and to the east spreads the Chihuahuan Desert, a minimalist dream of small ranges and desert grasslands. In its present state, the Gila is a functioning, high-quality ecosystem of remote forests and canyons. The Gila River courses through this land, the last undammed river in New Mexico. The heart of the Gila is its unspoiled wilderness. Noted environmentalist Aldo Leopold conceived the modern concept of "wilderness" here. It was designated the world's first wilderness area in 1924, and became the cornerstone of the National Wilderness Preservation System when the Wilderness Act was signed into law in 1961. For more than thirty years, celebrated photographer Michael P. Berman has explored the vast Gila, fascinated by the land and how people use and value it. He has wandered deep into the forest with his large-format camera, searching for the untrammeled, scraggly, and complex ecosystems, allowing the Gila to reveal itself. In this two-volume slip-cased edition, the untouched specialness of the Gila is captured in Berman's photographs and explored in fifteen essays by noted writers, natural historians, and environmentalists.

"In Marxist anthropological theory, shamanism represented one of the early forms of religion that later gave rise to more sophisticated beliefs in the course of human advancement ... The premise of Marxism was that eventually, at the highest levels of civilization, the sacred and religion would eventually die out" (Znamenski, 2007, p.322). Though history has of course since disproved this, the theory clearly had a great bearing on what was written in the former Soviet Union about shamanism, and also on people's attitudes in the former Soviet Republics towards such practices. On the other hand, it has been suggested that "all intellectuals driven by nationalist sentiments directly or indirectly are always preoccupied with searching for the most ancient roots of their budding nations in order to ground their compatriots in particular soil and to make them more indigenous" (Znamenski, 2007, p.28). Although this might apply to searching for the roots of Christianity in Armenia, when it comes to searching for the roots of pagan practices, interest on the part of the people of Armenia is generally speaking not so forthcoming. This impasse, coupled with the effects of the repressions against religions, including shamanism, unleashed by the Soviet government between the 1930s and 1950s, along with the recent surge of interest in the Armenian Orthodox church, a backlash to the seventy years of officially sanctioned atheism, makes research into the subject no easy business. However, hopefully this study will at least in some small way help to set the process in motion.