A Teacher
Hank Wesselman
Spontaneous visionary travel between worlds
The transmission
Hank Wesselman (1941–2021) was an American anthropologist and paleoanthropologist who, alongside an academic career studying human origins in East Africa, became an unlikely contemporary shaman.
Beginning in the early 1980s while living on the flank of an active volcano in Hawaii, he reported a series of spontaneous, vivid visionary experiences he came to regard not as ordinary dreams but as genuine journeys into what shamans call the spirit worlds.
He recounted these in the Spiritwalker trilogy, beginning with Spiritwalker: Messages from the Future (1995), followed by Medicinemaker and Visionseeker. Wesselman matters to the mind-power lineage as a trained Western scientist who documented, in the first person, the participatory and visionary dimension of consciousness from inside.
In the Spiritwalker visions he described contact with “Nainoa,” a Hawaiian man living some five thousand years in the future, an experience that dissolves ordinary boundaries of time, self, and world. His work, paired with the kahuna wisdom of Hawaii and the core-shamanic methods of Michael Harner, presents the shaman’s reality as one that is actively entered and co-created rather than merely observed—reality as participatory, read through symbol and synchronicity, and opening onto a deeper, trans-temporal Self.
(Tradition tagged Transpersonal Psychology as the closest controlled fit; his actual stream is contemporary/visionary shamanism.)
What they gave
Spontaneous shamanic vision: Documented unbidden visionary travel as direct experience, modelling consciousness that crosses worlds without ritual induction.
- Scientist as experiencer: Brought an anthropologist’s credibility and self-observation to the inner geography of the shamanic journey.
- Participatory cosmos: Portrayed reality as something consciousness actively engages and helps shape, not a fixed external given.
- Bridging traditions: Wove Hawaiian kahuna teaching together with Harner-style core shamanism for a contemporary Western audience.
In their words
I am about to tell you a most unusual story, a chronicle of something that happened to me while I was living on the flank of an active volcano on the island of Hawai’i. I’m a scientist. I mention this because I do not feel that I was in any way predisposed for what was about to occur.
kahuna thought begins with the search for self-realization—with the quest to discover who we are as well as where we are in our journey as souls traveling across time.
In this sense, his shared wisdom reactivated universal attributes found in all people everywhere, through each person’s experience and expression of aloha—love.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Michael Harner’s core shamanism; the Hawaiian kahuna lineage; the visionary-anthropology current associated with Carlos Castaneda.
- Influenced: The contemporary core-shamanism and journeying community; fellow practitioner-authors such as Sandra Ingerman; a generation of Western shamanic practitioners.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Spiritwalker: Messages from the Future1995
- The Bowl of Light2011