Michael James Harner (April 27, 1929 – February 3, 2018) was an anthropologist, educator and author. His 1980 book, The Way of the Shaman: a Guide to Power and Healing, has been foundational in the development and popularization of Core shamanism as a new age path of personal development for adherents of neoshamanism. He also founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. Career Harner was born in Washington, D.C. in 1929. He initially worked in the field of archaeology, including studying the Lower Colorado River area. As a graduate student in 1956-57 he undertook field research on the culture of the Jívaro (Shuar) people of the Ecuadorian Amazon and began to pursue a career as an ethnologist. His doctoral dissertation, "Machetes, Shotguns, and Society: An Inquiry into the Social Impact of Technological Change among the Jivaro Indians" (U California-Berkeley 1963), became the basis for his book, The Jívaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls. In 1960-61 he reported experimenting with the Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca with the Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon, which he wrote about in the articles "The Sound of Rushing Water" (1968) and "The Role of Hallucinogenic Plants in European Witchcraft" (1973). Harner returned to the Jívaro in 1964, 1969, and 1973 where he learned the use of the entheogen maikua (Datura brugmansia). In 1966, having taught at UC-Berkeley and served as associate director of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, Harner became a visiting professor at Yale and Columbia University and in 1970 joined the graduate faculty of The New School for Social Research in New York City. He co-chaired the Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences. In 1983, Harner founded the Center for Shamanic Studies, which is today known as the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. In 1987 Harner left academia to devote himself full-time to the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. Walsh and Grob note in their book, Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics, "Michael Harner is widely acknowledged as the world's foremost authority on shamanism and has had an enormous influence on both the academic and lay worlds.... What Yogananda did for Hinduism and D. T. Suzuki did for Zen, Michael Harner has done for shamanism, namely bring the tradition and its richness to Western awareness." He died on February 3, 2018, at the age of 88. Development of Core shamanism After traveling to the Amazon where he reported ingesting