"Eyes Of The Jaguar" is a record of one woman's first steps on this path, a life-journey into the sacred

Of the living mystical traditions in the world today, few have the mystery and romance associated with them as does the "Incan" Shamanism of the high mountain cities of Peru. "Eyes of the Jaguar" is a journal of one woman's initiatory "journey into the nagual" with these Shamans. This is not just a look into the fascinating world of Incan Shamanism, it is also a personal story of discovery.

The jungle stirs up passion and menace. She wasn't a spy! Eve Gardiner's grant to seek out medicinal plants in the Yucatan jungle came at a price. She was to keep an eye on Simon Mercier, her host at El Gato del Sol ranch. The handsome ex-agent turned international businessman made the feds uneasy. But he made Eve want to fall in love. Simon was dark, lean and as powerful as a jungle cat. Eve knew the chemistry between them was too potent, to explosive to escape. Eve's instinct was to trust Simon with her heart. But what about his alarming past? Was this gorgeous man too good to be true? Danger filled the air. Get caught up in this thrilling story. Don't miss it.

The Shamanic path is found in cultures all over the world. Virtually every "native" tradition has its healers, its wise men and women, its "medicine men" and "witch doctors." These wisdom lineages vary in their preservation, as some Shamanic heritages are nearly lost to us while others survive intact, or very nearly so. The Shamanism of the Andes, the "Incan" tradition, is one of the survivals. Of course, to obtain these teachings would be impossible if not for the willingness of lineageholding Shamans to make themselves available to students from the West. We are all fortunate that don Riccardo's visions (that we must become the new caretakers of the Earth) have led him to open up the Incan Shamanic teachings to us. For this to happen, we must come to re-learn the realm of the Sacred. We must learn to journey beyond the tonal, the daily world of personality and ordered linear reality. We must learn to move within the nagual, the place "where power hovers." We must re-discover the viracocha, the "Creator" of the Incas, which is the field or force that patterns all things and allows us to reach out for "extraordinary health" by bringing ourselves into line with it. We need to learn to walk the "medicine wheel," taking the Shaman's journey from the South to encounter the Serpent and to shed our pasts; to the West to meet the Jaguar and learn impeccability from her; to the North to hail the Masters in their crystal cave and come in touch with the mastery within us; and to the East to summon the Eagle to bring us vision that we may become co-creators in our own reality, true Incas, children of the sun. "Eyes Of The Jaguar" is a record of one woman's first steps on this path, a life-journey into the Sacred.

An important new way of viewing the prehistoric art of the Americas, The Jaguar Within demonstrates that understanding a work of art’s connection with shamanic trance can lead to an appreciation of it as an extremely creative solution to the inherent challenge of giving material form to nonmaterial realities and states of being. Shamanism—the practice of entering a trance state to experience visions of a reality beyond the ordinary and to gain esoteric knowledge—has been an important part of life for indigenous societies throughout the Americas from prehistoric times until the present. Much has been written about shamanism in both scholarly and popular literature, but few authors have linked it to another significant visual realm—art. In this pioneering study, Rebecca R. Stone considers how deep familiarity with, and profound respect for, the extra-ordinary visionary experiences of shamanism profoundly affected the artistic output of indigenous cultures in Central and South America before the European invasions of the sixteenth century. Using ethnographic accounts of shamanic trance experiences, Stone defines a core set of trance vision characteristics, including enhanced senses; ego dissolution; bodily distortions; flying, spinning, and undulating sensations; synaesthesia; and physical transformation from the human self into animal and other states of being. Stone then traces these visionary characteristics in ancient artworks from Costa Rica and Peru. She makes a convincing case that these works, especially those of the Moche, depict shamans in a trance state or else convey the perceptual experience of visions by creating deliberately chaotic and distorted conglomerations of partial, inverted, and incoherent images.

Nobleman by birth, naturalist by training, and adventurer at heart, Daniel Heywood ventures into the wilds of the Amazon, determined to leave his mark on science. Wounded by Indians early in his journey, he is rescued by a beautiful woman. As she nurses him back to health, Daniel realizes that he has stumbled upon an undiscovered civilization, a people that would prove his friend Darwin's theory correct. But science can't explain the way he feels about the woman who tended his wounds and melted his heart.