Bushman Shaman

Bradford Keeney details his initiation into the shamanic tradition of the Kalahari Bushmen, regarded by some scholars as the oldest living culture on earth. Keeney sought out the Bushmen whilst in South Africa as a visiting professor of psychotherapy. He had known of the Kalahari "trance dance", wherein the dancers' bodies shake uncontrollably as part of the healing ceremony. Keeney was drawn to this tradition in the hope it may explain and provide a forum for his own ecstatic "shaking" which he had first experienced at the age of 19 and had tried to suppress throughout his adult life.