Ancient cairns, tales of buried treasure, church gargoyles and mysterious standing stones – the Yorkshire landscape is awash with folklore and history and one man has been chronicling it for the last 30 years.
Neil Hudson travelled to the rugged moorland beyond Hebden Bridge to meet him.

In 1979 a group of like-minded people who were interested in unexplained mysteries, old folk tales, myths and legends gathered at the Griffin Hotel in Leeds.

True healing puts into order the body, mind and spirit with the past, present and future. What kind of agent or method or formula or treatment can help to effect such sweeping, integrated healing? I offer for your consideration ayahuasca, a psychoactive potion indigenous to the Amazon rainforest. Made from the vine Banisteriopsis caapi (called caapi) and the leaf Psychotria viridis, (known as chakruna) ayahuasca is considered among natives in the Amazon to be a sacred plant medicine. Among those for whom the ceremonial healing use of ayahuasca is a way of life, the brew is referred to as “La Medicina,” meaning The Medicine.

AFTER STEVE WITTE was laid off from his job at Pfizer last year, he decided to pursue a radically different approach to medicine. Swapping his New York apartment for a thatch hut near Iquitos, Peru, Witte, 44, set aside his squash hobby to become an apprentice under the master shaman Alfredo Cairuna.

Ziporah Reich sat cross-legged on her living room floor. As Judith Wendell chanted and burned incense that seeped into every crevice of the apartment, Ms. Reich meditated over an altar that included bowls of water with candles and wildflowers and a stack of brightly colored papers on which she wrote her wishes: finding her soul mate, starting a family and having more success in her career.

It is often said that Jeju is culturally unique. While all cultures by definition have singular characteristics, Jeju is especially interesting in this regard.

At first glance, Jeju appears to be a mirror image of the mainland: the riotous chaos of shamanism as opposed to the hierarchical structure of Confucianism; a matrifocal culture in contradiction to Korean patriarchy; a laid-back island in contrast to the ‘ppalli ppalli’ (hurry, hurry) of dynamic Korea.