Why So Many Icelanders Still Believe in Invisible Elves - Ryan Jacobs. If a road is completely necessary, the elves will generally move out of the way, but if it is deemed superfluous, a possibility at Gálgahraun, “very bad things” might happen.
“This elf church is connected by light energy to other churches, other places,” Jónsdóttir said. “So, if one of them is destroyed, it’s, uh, well, it’s not a good thing.” Though Jónsdóttir’s belief in elves may sound extreme, it is fairly common for Icelanders to at least entertain the possibility of their existence. In one 1998 survey, 54.4 percent of Icelanders said they believed in the existence of elves. That poll is fairly consistent with other findings and with qualitative fieldwork, according to an academic paper published in 2000 titled “The Elves’ Point of View" by Valdimar Hafstein, who now is a folkloristics professor at the University of Iceland. The elves differ from the extremely tiny figures that are typically depicted as assistants to Santa Claus in popular American mythology.
Australasia. North America. South America. Reporter's Notebook: 'What Part Of Sacred Don't You Understand?' : Code Switch. Hide captionNavajo activist Klee Benally chains himself to an excavator on the San Francisco Peaks, which he and 13 tribes consider sacred.
Ethan Sing Navajo activist Klee Benally chains himself to an excavator on the San Francisco Peaks, which he and 13 tribes consider sacred. Laurel Morales covers Indian Country as a reporter for NPR member station KJZZ from a base in Flagstaff, which is on the edge of the country's largest reservation. The Paris auction of 27 sacred American-Indian items earlier this month marks just the latest in a series of conflicts between what tribes consider sacred and what western cultures think is fair game in the marketplace. Earlier this year, Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, said "To see the art market driving this kind of behavior, it's not just distressful to the Hopi people, it's a hurt that I don't believe people can really understand. " The auction wasn't the first such sale and probably won't be the last. Horse Medicine : What Horses Teach Us. Speed, strength, and grace are the finer qualities of this noble animal.
The horse lived on the North American continent for thousands of years, but mysteriously disappeared and was later reintroduced by Spanish Conquistadors in the 1500's. American Indians quickly mastered equestrian skills and found the spirit of the horse to be a valuable asset in learning ways of leadership, safety in movement and freedom. Even though the horse can be domesticated, it's spirit forever roams into the far reaches of freedom. The horse meant ease of movement for indigenous people who quickly learned they could hunt and move into new territories as never before.
The Woman Who Chose to Plant Corn. Not long ago, a Diné (Navajo) friend of mine, Lyla June Johnston, sent me a one-line email: “I am not going to Harvard… I am going to plant corn.”
Her statement signals a profound divergence from the path she’d set out on when she was an undergraduate at Stanford University. She is choosing instead to learn the lifeways of her culture, to become fluent in her language, to relearn traditional skills, to be intimate with the land. The dominant American culture does not encourage such a path. What a Shaman Sees in A Mental Hospital. Stephanie Marohn with Malidoma Patrice SoméWaking Times The Shamanic View of Mental Illness In the shamanic view, mental illness signals “the birth of a healer,” explains Malidoma Patrice Somé.
Thus, mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, spiritual crises, and need to be regarded as such to aid the healer in being born. What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm. One of the things Dr. “I was so shocked. Another way to say this, which may make more sense to the Western mind, is that we in the West are not trained in how to deal or even taught to acknowledge the existence of psychic phenomena, the spiritual world. “The Western culture has consistently ignored the birth of the healer,” states Dr. Schizophrenia and Foreign Energy Alex: Crazy in the USA, Healer in Africa Dr. Dr. 4 Ways To Honor Native Americans Without Appropriating Our Culture.