Neo-shamanism (for “new shamanism”) is a phenomenon that has been mainly developing in recent societies of Europe and of North America since the second half of the 20th century. The practice mostly draws its influences from Amazonian, Mesoamerican, and North American traditions. It is comprised of many modalities and is the marriage of spiritual and psychotherapeutic practices applied to a modern context above all else. Joan B. Townsend defines neo-shamanism as¹ :

[…] an eclectic collection of beliefs and activities drawn from literature, workshops, and the Internet. It is an invented tradition of practices and beliefs based on a constructed…

I have discussed at length about the importance of rituals in traditional societies, however our modern perspective highlights several sociological and anthropological complexities that ought to be discussed, and which I will be presenting here. The first are the semantics on which modern anthropologists and sociologists rely on to define and explain rituals: if initiatory rites define the relationship between God — or the many gods — and the individual, as well as the relationship between the individuals themselves, they fail to fully define such relationship in our secular societies, that spearheaded a world free from any theological instinct. Initiation…

This is the second part of a two-part series on the movie The Fountain. Click this link to read the first part.

By studying the religious motifs in The Fountain, we notice how the obsession of the protagonists touches on religious symbols, which appear to us as universals. The search for the eternal Life is the insatiable human effort that transcends the ages. In the movie, this becomes the real cure for cancer, both metaphorically and real. Among the religious motifs that we noticed, the Tree of Life is an obvious reference to the tree of life in Genesis. …

This article is the first of a two-part series. The second part, which focuses on the Mayan creation story and religious themes, will be released shortly.

The Fountain is a movie written by Darren Aronofsky and released in theaters in 2006. It is the story of a man through the ages to save the woman he loves. The film, which belongs to the fantastic, dramatic, and spiritual genres, poetically weaves and romanticizes a man’s quest for death, and establishes the love union as a salutary principle. In such a fight, two principles are opposing: the hold of death, slaying a…

In an attempt to decipher the meaning of contemporary movies and their relationship to archaic religious symbology, I will discuss here the movie The Matrix, made by the Wachowskis. There is no need to introduce the movie to the reader, given its success and the broad range of studies and articles that were published once the movie released.

The Matrix is ​​a science fiction movie released in 1999, written and directed by The Wachowskis. The film depicts a dystopian world in which reality is a computer simulation, the Matrix, created by machines to control the human population. The movie belongs…

One of the hallmark of modern societies is the disappearance of the sacred. As contemporary individuals no longer conceive their existence in a sacred world, they become conscious of their existence as areligious beings, that is, beings detached from any metaphysical order. As such, they seek to realize themselves in History and its subsequent progress.

The current article proposes a brief review of the development of societies in Europe as it relates to religious thinking, and attempts to understand from a contemporary perspective shifts in the structure of belief for modern individuals.

From the 17th century and onward, modern societies…