What Is Shamanism?

Shamanism is not a religion. It has no founder, no scripture, no priesthood and no creed. It is a way of working: a set of methods by which a person deliberately enters an altered state of consciousness, travels in spirit to realms that are not ordinarily visible, works there with helping spirits, and returns with healing or knowledge for the benefit of others. Wherever human beings have lived in close relationship with the land, something very like this has arisen.

The Word

The word shaman entered European languages in the seventeenth century from Russian, which took it from the Evenki (Tungus) people of eastern Siberia. In Evenki, šamán is the title of the community’s spirit-worker. Explorers and then anthropologists applied the word to similar figures in other cultures, and by the twentieth century it had become a general term for the ecstatic healer-seers found across Siberia, Central Asia, the Americas, Australia, parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, and the Arctic.

Most peoples have their own word. The Sámi have the noaidi, the Koreans the mudang, the Nepalese the jhãkri, the Zulu the sangoma, the Mongols the böö. Using “shaman” for all of them is a convenience and a simplification, and it is worth remembering that the Evenki did not ask for their word to travel so far.

The Shaman’s Role

The shaman is, before anything else, a servant of the community. They heal the sick, find lost objects and lost souls, guide the dead to where they are going, divine where the herds have moved, mediate with the spirits of the land and weather, and keep the stories. In most societies they are chosen by the spirits rather than by ambition, often through a crisis of illness or vision in youth, and they are trained for years by an elder before they are trusted to work alone.

The anthropologist Mircea Eliade, whose 1951 study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy made the subject a serious one, defined the shaman by the technique of ecstasy: the controlled departure of the soul from the body to travel to the sky or the underworld. That emphasis on deliberate spirit-flight, in service of others, is still the best short definition.

Four Marks of Shamanic Practice

The Three Worlds and the World Tree

Cultures separated by oceans describe the same map. The cosmos has layers: a Lower World reached by going down through a hole in the ground, a cave, a spring or the roots of a tree; an Upper World reached by climbing a mountain, a tree, a rainbow or a column of smoke; and the Middle World, our own, which has a spirit side as well as a physical one. Joining them stands the axis of the world, very often imagined as a great tree, a pillar or a mountain.

Lower is not hell and Upper is not heaven. The Lower World is typically a place of nature, animals and earthy power; the Upper World a place of teachers, light and wide perspective. Both are inhabited by compassionate spirits. The shaman learns to move between them as a traveller learns a country.

The Shamanic Journey

The journey is the central practice. The practitioner lies or sits in darkness, forms a clear intention (“I am going to the Lower World to meet my power animal and ask about this illness”), and begins the drum or has a partner drum for them. They picture a real place they know where the earth opens, enter it, and allow the journey to unfold with as little steering as possible. When the drum changes to the call-back rhythm they return the way they came and come fully back into the body. The whole thing commonly takes fifteen to thirty minutes.

What is met in the journey is treated as real on its own terms. Whether these worlds are “inside” or “outside” the mind is a question practitioners tend to find less interesting over time than whether the work helps.

Healing Methods

Power animal retrieval

Restoring a person’s connection to a guardian animal spirit, whose loss is felt as chronic misfortune, weakness or depression.

Soul retrieval

Finding and returning parts of a person’s vital essence that left during trauma or shock. Brought to wide attention by Sandra Ingerman’s 1991 book Soul Retrieval.

Extraction

Removing spiritual intrusions, perceived as misplaced energies or forms, from the body of a client.

Psychopomp work

Helping the souls of the dead to cross over, and helping the dying to prepare.

Divination

Journeying to ask the spirits a question on behalf of a person or a community.

Working with the land

Ceremony and journey on behalf of places, waters, crops and weather, which in many traditions is the shaman’s largest task.

The Modern Revival

In the second half of the twentieth century, as anthropologists lived with and learned from Indigenous peoples, some of them began to practise what they studied. The most influential was Michael Harner, whose 1980 book The Way of the Shaman distilled what he called core shamanism: the near-universal features of shamanic practice, above all the drum journey to the Three Worlds, taught without the specific cultural dress of any one people. Harner founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and his students, among them Sandra Ingerman, Tom Cowan and many others, carried the work around the world.

Core shamanism gave hundreds of thousands of modern people a reliable way in. It also raised a question that Harner himself encouraged: once you can journey, what tradition do you journey in? For many in Ireland, Britain, Brittany and the wider Celtic diaspora, the answer came from their own ground. That is the story of the Celtic tradition and of its integration with shamanic practice.