Fire in the Head is Tom Cowan's engrossing, intelligent, and shamanically well-informed work that is an important gift to all those Westerners seeking a knowledge of Celtic shamanism.

In The Song of Wandering Aengus, William Butler Yeats refers to the '"fire in the head" that characterizes the visionary experience. Tom Cowan has pursued this theme in Fire in the Head, a lyrical cross-cultural exploration of shamanism and the Celtic imagination that examines the myths and tales of the ancient Celtic poets and storytellers, and outlines techniques used to access the shaman's world.