Product Description: Reveals the striking parallels between indigenous cultures of the Americas and the ancient Homeric world as well as Tolkien’s Middle Earth • Explores the shamanic use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey and the fantasy works of J...read more

Product Description: This work examines the psychomachia, or battle of the soul, as it occurs in the 14th century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Based on an analysis of the Gawain-poet¿s earlier work, as well as contemporary analogs in chivalric manuals, Arthurian romances and mystical literature such as The Cloud of Unknowing, it argues that Sir Gawain's quest into the Otherworld is a tragedy of limited, human perception pitted against a mysterious Infinite that "deigns to destroy" the mortal protagonist¿s delusion of knowing...read more