Lynn V. Andrews

Lynn V. Andrews (c.1940–2022) was an American author who became a central figure of the popular feminine-shamanism movement. She emerged in 1981 with Medicine Woman, which narrated her transformation from a Beverly Hills art collector and socialite into a student of indigenous healing.

The book recounts her apprenticeship to two Cree medicine women in northern Canada, Agnes Whistling Elk and Ruby Plenty Chiefs, and her initiation into what she called the “Sisterhood of the Shields,” a circle of women healers she described as drawn from cultures across the world.

Medicine Woman launched a long, best-selling series, and Andrews continued teaching and writing until her death in 2022. (Her exact birth year is not consistently documented across sources; catalog listings give 1940, so it is marked approximate.) Andrews matters to the mind-power lineage as a populariser who framed shamanic transformation specifically through the sacred feminine.

Often read as a feminine counterpart to Carlos Castaneda, her narratives foreground initiation, dreaming, symbol, and synchronicity as the medium of inner change, and they present the apprentice’s journey as the awakening of a deeper Self through imaginative and visionary work.

While her accounts are best understood as teaching-stories rather than ethnography, their cultural impact was large: they helped move shamanic and goddess-centered spirituality into the mainstream women’s-empowerment current.

(Tradition tagged Transpersonal Psychology as the closest controlled fit; her stream is New Age feminine shamanism.)