Shamanism: One Word Doing Too Much Work
Shamanism began as one Siberian job title and became a global category covering practices that have little in common. This guide traces the Evenki word saman, its promotion by European travelers and by Mircea Eliade, Michael Harner's core shamanism, and the argument that the single label hides real differences between Siberian, Amazonian, Korean and Sámi specialists.
What is shamanism, and why does the word resist a single definition?
Shamanism is a label Western scholars attached to a loose family of practices in which a designated specialist enters an altered state to deal with spirits on behalf of other people, and it resists a single definition because it was never the name of one thing. The word entered European languages from Evenki, a Tungusic language of Siberia, where it named a particular kind of ritual worker inside a particular society. Everything after that is extension by analogy. Once travelers, missionaries and then comparative religionists began finding shamans in the Amazon, in Korea, in Nepal, in the Arctic and in the archaeological record, the term had to stretch far enough to cover people whose training, cosmology, social standing and techniques barely overlap. A Sakha oyuun inherits spirits through a family line. A Korean mudang is usually a woman seized by an illness she did not want. A Shipibo onanya learns songs through years of restricted plant diets. Calling all three shamans asserts that the resemblance between them matters more than the differences, and that assertion is an argument rather than an observation. Every competing definition admits some practitioners and quietly excludes others.
Three definitions have done most of the work. Mircea Eliade's, from 1951, made ecstatic soul flight the test, so a specialist who is entered by a spirit rather than traveling to one fell outside. Åke Hultkrantz, in a 1973 paper in the journal Temenos, defined the shaman as a social functionary who, with the help of guardian spirits, attains ecstasy to create a rapport with the supernatural world on behalf of the group. That version shifts the weight from the technique to the office and the helping spirits, so it admits specialists whose ecstasy is not soul flight. It still requires ecstasy, which is why it does not simply open the door to every medium, and readers who cite it as a wide-open definition are overstating what it says. Michael Harner's working definition, built for teaching rather than for scholarship, centers on a voluntary journey undertaken in a deliberately induced state for the benefit of someone else. Each draws the boundary where the others do not, which is why a reader can find one book insisting that Korean mudang are shamans and another insisting that they are not. No committee ever settled it, since no discipline has the authority to. The word belongs to nobody, and it survives because it is convenient.
Is shamanism a single tradition with local variations?
No. Shamanism has no founder, no shared scripture, no lineage connecting Siberia to the Amazon, and no historical contact that would account for the resemblances. What the practices share is a role, a person who handles spirits professionally, and roles can arise independently in unrelated societies. Treating the resemblance as evidence of one ancient tradition is a claim that nobody has demonstrated.
Do practitioners in these traditions call themselves shamans?
Mostly they did not, and many still do not. Evenki speakers used saman, but a Sakha specialist is an oyuun, a Mongolian or Buryat one a böö, a Korean one a mudang, a Sámi one a noaidi. Some now use shaman when speaking to outsiders because it travels better than a word nobody recognizes, which is a translation decision rather than a self-description.
Why do reference books still use the word?
Convenience and inertia. Encyclopedias need a heading that gathers comparable material, and shamanism is the only term readers already recognize for spirit specialists working outside an institutional priesthood. Careful writers now keep the word and add a paragraph explaining that it is an outsider's category, while specialists in any one tradition tend to use the local term and drop shamanism entirely. Search habits keep the word alive too, since it is what readers type.
Where does the word shaman come from, and what did it mean in Evenki?
Shaman comes from saman, a noun in Evenki, a Tungusic language spoken across a wide band of eastern Siberia, and it named a ritual specialist who dealt with spirits for a clan. Russians moving east through Siberia in the seventeenth century picked the word up from Tungus speakers, and it passed from Russian into German, French and English over the following hundred years. The most widely repeated Evenki etymology derives saman from a verb root sa-, to know, so the title would mean something like one who knows. That derivation is plausible and it is printed everywhere as settled. It is a reconstruction, not a documented history. A competing proposal traces the word to Sanskrit sramana, a wandering ascetic, which reached Central Asia through Buddhist transmission and could have entered Tungusic through Mongolian or Chinese intermediaries. Berthold Laufer argued against the Indian derivation in a 1917 paper in American Anthropologist and favored a native Tungusic root. Sergei Shirokogoroff, who worked among Tungus communities in the early twentieth century, took Buddhist influence on Tungus religion seriously enough to leave the question open. Neither side produced evidence that closed the argument, and both derivations are still printed as settled fact by writers who have never looked into the dispute.
What the Evenki word covered is narrower than what English readers now assume. A saman held an office inside a clan, answered to that clan, and worked with named spirits belonging to a specific territory and lineage. The job included curing, finding lost reindeer, escorting the dead, and negotiating with the spirit owners of game animals before a hunt. It also included failure, and a saman who lost too many patients lost standing. Payment was normal and expected. The equipment mattered: a coat hung with iron pendants, a headdress, and a drum whose frame and beater were made to a pattern. None of that transfers to a reader in Los Angeles who has finished a book about journeying, and Evenki speakers today are clear about the difference. Shirokogoroff's study of Tungus religion, published in 1935 as The Psychomental Complex of the Tungus, is still the fullest single account of the office.
How is the word spelled and pronounced in the original?
Transliterations vary because Evenki had no writing system until the Soviet period. Scholars write saman, šaman or xaman depending on dialect and transliteration system, with the stress on the first syllable. English shaman is a double borrowing, filtered first through Russian and then through German, which is why English speakers say SHAH-man rather than anything an Evenki speaker would produce. The earliest English use recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1698, in Adam Brand's published account of a Russian embassy to China.
Who were the Tungus, and are they still there?
Tungus is the older external name for peoples now usually called Evenki and Even, along with related groups including the Nanai and the Udege. Fewer than forty thousand Evenki were counted in Russia's 2010 census, with a comparable population in northeastern China and a small one in Mongolia, and the Evenki language is classed as endangered. Reindeer herding continues in some communities. The people whose word became a global category are a small minority at home.
Did the Evenki have other ritual specialists?
Yes. Blacksmiths held a distinct status across several Siberian societies and were sometimes thought to outrank shamans, since both dealt with iron and fire, and a Sakha proverb puts smith and shaman in the same nest. Elders led clan sacrifices that needed no shaman at all. Bear ceremonies followed a fixed procedure that needed no improvised spirit contact. The saman was one specialist among several.
How did a Siberian job title become a worldwide scholarly category?
A Siberian job title became a worldwide category in three stages: Russian expansion collected the word, Enlightenment writers used it as a specimen of primitive religion, and twentieth-century comparative religion promoted it to a universal type. The first stage runs through the seventeenth century, when Russian officials, exiles and traders east of the Urals reported on Tungus ritual. The exiled archpriest Avvakum described a Tungus shaman's divination in the autobiography he drafted in confinement at Pustozersk between about 1669 and 1675. Nicolaes Witsen, a Dutch mayor of Amsterdam who collected material on Siberia, printed an engraving of a Tungus shaman in Noord en Oost Tartarye in 1692 under a caption naming him a priest of the devil, and that image circulated for two centuries. The second stage is eighteenth-century. Shaman entered French and German print as a general term for a deceiver or a nervous enthusiast, useful to writers who wanted a foil for reasoned religion and a way of attacking clergy at home by analogy. The third stage is academic. Once anthropology held Siberian, Arctic and Amazonian material in one library, comparison across it looked natural, and a word already existed for what was being compared.
The globalization of the term ran alongside a nineteenth-century habit of looking for one hidden teaching behind every tradition, the habit that produced Theosophy and its claim of an ancient wisdom underlying all religions. That story is told in Helena Blavatsky: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices, and it matters here as context: an audience already trained to expect universals was ready to accept that Siberia, Sonora and the Amazon were doing the same thing under different names. Russian and Soviet ethnography supplied most of the raw material. Waldemar Bogoras on the Chukchi and Waldemar Jochelson on the Koryak and the Yukaghir published detailed monographs for the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Bogoras's The Chukchee appearing between 1904 and 1909 and Jochelson's The Koryak in 1905 and 1908, with the Yukaghir volume running on to 1926, and those books, together with Scandinavian work on the Sámi, became the evidence base later comparatists read. Almost none of the comparatists who built the category out of those pages had met a shaman, and several of the fieldworkers who had were describing communities already reshaped by Russian taxation, missionary pressure and epidemic disease.
What did Enlightenment writers use the word shaman for?
Mostly as an insult. In eighteenth-century French and German writing the shaman is a stock figure, an impostor exploiting credulous people, and the figure was handy for criticizing priests closer to home without naming them. Almost nobody deploying the word had been to Siberia. The evaluation traveled with the term, and traces of it survive in ordinary English usage.
When did shamanism become a scholarly field?
In the twentieth century. The concept had circulated since the 1700s, but the systematic comparative literature dates from the interwar decades and consolidated after 1951, when Eliade's book handed the field a single organizing definition. Conferences and journals devoted to the subject came later, mostly from the late 1980s, by which point the term was carrying Amazonian, Himalayan and North American material too.
Did any indigenous scholars shape the category?
Some did, and their work is usually read later than it deserves. The Sakha ethnographer Gavriil Ksenofontov collected Siberian shamanic accounts in the 1920s, published a volume of them in 1930, was arrested in Moscow in the Yakut case in April 1938 and was executed that August. Mongush Kenin-Lopsan, a Tuvan scholar who lived from 1925 to 2022, recorded Tuvan shamanic texts through the Soviet decades and founded the Dungur shaman society in Kyzyl in 1993. Their material is primary in a way travelers' reports are not.
What did Mircea Eliade mean by technique of ecstasy, and what did that definition leave out?
Mircea Eliade meant by technique of ecstasy a learned method through which a specialist sends the soul out of the body to travel to an upper or a lower world and brings something back. Eliade, a Romanian historian of religions who taught at the University of Chicago, published Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l'extase in 1951, and the English translation appeared in 1964 as Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Ecstasy in his usage carries the Greek sense of standing outside oneself, not euphoria. Around that core he assembled a recurring pattern: an initiatory sickness the candidate does not choose, a vision of being dismembered and reassembled, an axis joining three worlds, and a ladder, tree, river or bridge along which the soul moves between them. What the definition left out was possession. If a spirit enters the specialist and speaks through the body, Eliade classified that as something other than shamanism proper, and often as a late corruption of it. That one move excludes or demotes a great deal of Korean, Nepali, Amazonian and African practice, including several of the best documented living traditions on the list.
Eliade did no fieldwork with shamans. He read published ethnography in several languages and arranged it, which is a legitimate method and a limited one, because the pattern he found was partly a pattern in his sources, and Siberian material dominated the literature available to him. He also carried a commitment to the idea that archaic religion preserved something modern religion had lost, and his book reads the Siberian practice of his own century as decadent beside a reconstructed original that nobody observed. Historians of religion argue about how much his politics color the work. He published articles supporting the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist and antisemitic movement, in the second half of the 1930s, and he was detained in 1938 on suspicion of Legionary sympathies. Readers disagree about whether the search for a primordial archaic religion carries anything of that. The reach of the book is not in dispute. For thirty years it was the book on the subject in English, and most popular writing about shamanism still runs on its outline without saying so.
What is the difference between ecstasy and possession?
In Eliade's scheme, ecstasy means the specialist's soul leaves and travels, while possession means an outside spirit arrives and takes over the body. He treated the first as authentic shamanism and the second as a different phenomenon. Practitioners often make no such split. Many Siberian, Korean and Amazonian specialists describe both movements inside one ritual, sometimes within minutes of each other.
Did Eliade think shamanism was declining?
Yes, and the judgment is built into his book. He described the Siberian material available to him as showing decomposition, a falling away from an older and purer ecstatic form. The argument requires a pristine original that no observer ever recorded, which is why the decline thesis now reads as Eliade's preference for archaic religion rather than as a finding about Siberia.
Which parts of Eliade's account have held up?
The descriptive parts. Initiatory sickness, dismemberment visions, three-world cosmologies and the drum as a vehicle do recur across widely separated Siberian and Inner Asian traditions, and his collation of that material stays useful. What has not held up is the claim that those features form one archaic system with a single history, and that possession is a degraded version of it.
What is core shamanism, and how did Michael Harner build it?
Core shamanism is a stripped-down practice assembled by the American anthropologist Michael Harner in the 1970s, built by removing everything culturally specific from the shamanic material he had read and experienced and keeping what he judged to be the universal mechanics. Harner did fieldwork with the Shuar of Ecuador and with Conibo communities on the Ucayali in Peru during the 1950s and 1960s, and he published academic work including a 1972 book on the Shuar and an edited volume on hallucinogens and shamanism. Then he changed audience. The Way of the Shaman, published in 1980, gave readers a method they could try at home: lie down, have a drum beaten at a steady fast tempo, enter what Harner called the shamanic state of consciousness, and travel to a lower world through a remembered opening in the earth to meet a helping animal. In 1979 he founded the Center for Shamanic Studies in Norwalk, Connecticut, later reorganized as the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and it has taught and certified practitioners internationally ever since. The extraction was deliberate and Harner said so. His argument was that the cultural material is packaging and the technique underneath belongs to everyone.
Timing explains the reception. By 1980 a large American audience had already passed through the psychedelic and guru counterculture described in Ram Dass: Be Here Now and the Path of the Heart, and many of them had tired of paying a lineage for access to a teacher. Core shamanism asked for none of that. Two days bought a portable technique and permission to practice without belonging to anybody. Harner's drumming claim deserves a plain statement. His foundation describes the journey drumming as a steady beat of about five beats per second, and researchers who have timed his published recordings put them near 220 beats per minute, a little under four beats per second. The figure that circulates in workshop literature, four to seven beats per second, is not a drum measurement at all. Four to seven cycles per second is the frequency band of theta brain waves, and it was borrowed from EEG and reattached to the drum, which is what makes the claim sound settled when it is not. Whether a drum at any tempo drives a distinct and specific brain state has not been tested to a clinical standard. A 2014 comparison published in PLOS ONE put thirty-nine people through fifteen minutes of either repetitive drumming or instrumental meditation music, under either shamanic-journey or relaxation instructions, and salivary cortisol fell in every condition with no difference between them, while the experiences people reported differed according to the instructions rather than the sound. The honest description is that many people find a steady drum helps them concentrate and imagine vividly, and that the instructions do much of the work. Harner presented core shamanism as a modern distillation rather than a tribal tradition, and his foundation still describes it that way, though how consistently his students have kept that distinction is disputed.
Is core shamanism the same as any indigenous tradition?
No, and its founder did not claim it was. Core shamanism is a modern synthesis with a known author, a publication date and a curriculum. It borrows the journey structure and the drum from Siberian and Amazonian sources, discards the cosmology, the language, the obligations and the social accountability, then packages the remainder for people outside any of those societies. Calling that borrowing is accurate. Calling it an unbroken tradition is not.
What do core shamanism workshops actually teach?
The published format is consistent: an explanation of the three-world map, a drumming journey to the lower world to find a helping animal, a journey upward to meet a teacher, and instruction in doing this on behalf of another person. Entry courses run to about two days, with longer trainings afterward. Plant medicines have no part in the method as Harner taught it.
How is core shamanism received by indigenous communities?
Reactions run from indifference to formal objection. Individual practitioners from Siberia and the Amazon have taught in Western workshops willingly and for money. Others, particularly in North America, treat the enterprise as appropriation, and the declaration of war against exploiters of Lakota spirituality, passed at a Lakota summit in June 1993, names paid ceremony and non-Native workshop leaders directly. The question is not settled inside any single community either.
What is the flattening critique, and who makes it?
The flattening critique argues that the single word shamanism erases the differences between the practices it covers, and that those differences are exactly what a reader needs to understand any of them. The anthropologist and archaeologist Alice Beck Kehoe made the sharpest version in Shamans and Religion, published in 2000, arguing that shaman is a Siberian term carrying Siberian assumptions, that applying it to Native North American practitioners imports those assumptions without evidence, and that the universal category flatters Western seekers by turning other people's religions into a resource. Ronald Hutton's Shamans, from 2001, traces how the Western picture of the Siberian shaman was assembled by people with purposes of their own, and shows the image shifting to suit each era: fraud in the eighteenth century, neurotic in the nineteenth, healer and psychonaut in the twentieth. Roberte Hamayon, who worked on Buryat material, argued in 1995 that trance and ecstasy are observers' words which explain nothing and hide the social logic of what is happening. The critique does not say these practices are unreal. It says the label does the reader's thinking, and does it badly.
The flattening carries a practical cost, and it shows up as invented provenance. Once shamanism is a universal, any object or technique can be attributed to it, and a claim about an unnamed ancient tradition becomes hard to check precisely because no specific tradition has been named. The habit of reading every tradition as one secret teaching wearing different costumes, set out on this site in Manly P. Hall: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices, is what makes an unattributed technique sound credible in the first place. The pattern recurs whenever a workshop advertises something as ancient without saying whose. The crystal skulls are the worked example, sold for a century as pre-Columbian and then found under magnification to carry the marks of a rotary cutting wheel unavailable to their supposed makers. A second cost falls on the traditions themselves. Communities that spent a century defending their practices against missionaries and state suppression now have to distinguish themselves from a global market trading on their vocabulary, and the resemblance the word asserts becomes a problem they did not create. Defenders of the term answer that comparison is legitimate work and that nobody has yet offered a better word.
Does anyone defend the general category?
Yes. Comparative religionists point out that every general term in their field, religion and ritual and myth included, has the same problem, and that abandoning comparison leaves a shelf of unconnected local descriptions. Their position is that shamanism works as a family resemblance rather than a definition, provided a writer names the tradition whenever a specific claim is being made.
What is a plastic shaman?
Plastic shaman is a term used in Native North American communities for someone who sells ceremonies while claiming an indigenous training they do not have. The complaint is about false lineage claims and about charging money for rites that were never meant to be sold. It is applied to non-Native teachers and also to Native individuals selling ceremony against their own community's rules.
Is using the word shamanism disrespectful?
Using it as a general term for spirit specialists is ordinary in scholarship and rarely draws objection. What draws objection is applying it to a specific tradition whose members reject it, or calling yourself a shaman while implying a training you never had. Naming the tradition avoids both problems and costs the writer nothing but a few extra syllables, while telling the reader something they did not already know.
What actually differs between Siberian, Amazonian, Korean and Sámi specialists?
They differ in how the role is acquired, what the specialist does with it, what technique induces the working state, and how the surrounding society treats them. Siberian traditions vary among themselves, but a Sakha oyuun or a Buryat böö typically inherits spirits along a family line, wears a heavy coat hung with iron, uses a frame drum, and answers to a clan. Amazonian practice has no single form: a Shipibo onanya trains through long dietary restriction with individual plants and works mainly by singing, while a Yanomami shabori takes yakoana, a powdered snuff blown hard into the nose through a long tube by a colleague. Korean musok is dominated by women. A spirit-chosen mudang is selected by an illness, sinbyeong, that lifts only when she accepts initiation, and the ritual she performs, a gut, involves possession, a costume change for each visiting spirit, food offerings, live music and a paying client family. The Sámi noaidi used a painted drum with a marker that moved across the figures to divine, and Sámi practice was suppressed hard enough that the continuous line broke. Four different jobs, four routes into them, and four different sets of people to answer to.
Payment, gender and risk sort them further. Korean mudang are professionals with fees and occupational associations, and a gut is a commissioned event that can run all night with a hired band. Shipibo healers are paid too, increasingly by foreign visitors, which has changed who trains and what they treat. Siberian shamans were paid in goods and could be blamed, and sometimes killed, for a failed cure. Gender divides the four as sharply as money does. Korean practitioners are overwhelmingly women, and a male one, a baksu, is unusual enough to be remarked on, while Amazonian plant specialists have historically been mostly men, though women practice too and more are training now, and Siberian societies had both, with Turkic-speaking Siberia keeping a separate word, udagan, for a woman who held the office. The Sámi case is the clearest break. Drums were confiscated and burned by Lutheran missionaries through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Thomas von Westen's Norwegian mission collected more than a hundred of them from 1716 onward. About seventy of those burned in the Copenhagen fire of 1728. Roughly seventy original drums survive worldwide, most of them in European museums, and several have been the subject of repatriation claims, one of which sent a drum back to a Sámi museum in Sweden in 2022. What Sámi people practice today is a reconstruction with a documented gap in the middle, which is a different situation from Korea, where practice was harassed under Japanese colonial rule and again by state modernization campaigns in the 1970s but was never interrupted, and from the Amazon, where the pressure came from rubber-boom violence and mission schooling rather than from a state church.
Which of these traditions are still practiced?
All of them in some form, with very different continuity. Korean musok has a continuous practice and a working economy, and several kinds of gut carry national intangible cultural heritage designations, among them the Jindo cleansing gut and the east coast village gut, while the Jeju Chilmeoridang Yeongdeunggut was added to a UNESCO list in 2009. Amazonian traditions continue and in places have grown through ayahuasca tourism. Siberian practice was suppressed under Soviet rule and revived after 1991 through registered organizations in Tuva and Buryatia.
Do these traditions describe the same spirit world?
No, and the cosmologies do not map onto one another. Siberian traditions commonly describe layered upper and lower worlds reached along an axis. Shipibo accounts describe plants as teachers with their own songs and personalities. Korean ritual deals with named gods, generals and ancestors who arrive in sequence. The three-world map that Western writing treats as standard is Inner Asian.
Is a curandero the same as a shaman?
Not reliably. Curandero is a Spanish word covering a wide range of healers across Latin America, many of them Catholic, who work with prayer, herbs, eggs, massage and saints, and who never enter an altered state at all. Some people called curanderos do work in the way outsiders mean by shamanic. The word describes healing, not spirit travel, and collapsing the two loses the part that matters to the patient.
How should you name a specific tradition instead of saying shamanism?
Name the people, the role and the practice in their own terms, and keep shamanism for the moments when you genuinely mean the comparative category. In practice that means writing Sakha oyuun instead of Siberian shaman, Korean mudang or the tradition name musok instead of Korean shamanism, Shipibo onanya instead of Amazonian shaman, and Sámi noaidi instead of Sámi shaman. When a specific practice is meant, name that too: a gut, an icaro, a drum divination. If you cannot tell which tradition a claim comes from, that is worth noticing, because a technique with no named origin usually has no verifiable origin. The same rule applies to describing yourself. Someone trained in Michael Harner's method can say exactly that in one sentence, and the sentence is both more informative and less contested than the bare title. Someone who apprenticed in a named tradition can name the tradition and name the teacher. The cases where the word causes trouble are the cases where nothing more specific can be said, which is a useful signal on its own. Precision here is cheap. It costs a clause and it buys the reader something checkable.
A second reason to prefer the local term is that it makes claims checkable. Write mudang and a reader can find Korean-language scholarship, recordings of gut and the practitioners' own association. Write shaman and the reader gets a global category with no address. The same holds for reading. When a book, a workshop or a retreat describes its lineage, the useful questions are plain: which people, which language, who taught the teacher, and can anyone in the community concerned confirm it. Practitioners with genuine training answer those questions easily. Where a health claim is attached, treat it separately. Nothing described here treats or cures any illness, and none of it substitutes for medical care. Anyone considering a plant-medicine ceremony abroad should speak to a doctor first, and there is a specific pharmacological reason. Ayahuasca brews pair a vine carrying harmine and related alkaloids, which inhibit the enzyme monoamine oxidase A, with a plant carrying DMT, and that inhibition is what makes the DMT active by mouth at all. The same inhibition is why the brew interacts badly with serotonergic antidepressants, SSRIs included, and cases of serotonin syndrome following ayahuasca appear in the clinical literature. Ceremonies also raise heart rate and blood pressure, and psychotic episodes have been reported in people with a personal or family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder. Agitation, sweating, tremor, a racing heart, muscle rigidity or confusion after a ceremony are reasons to seek emergency care rather than to wait them out. Retreat marketing rarely mentions any of this, and a screening questionnaire is not a medical assessment. Vagueness about origins and pressure to decide quickly are both reasons to stop and ask the questions again before paying anybody.
What if a tradition has no term I can find?
Describe the role instead of reaching for shaman. A ritual specialist who treats illness by contacting spirits is a full description, and it commits you to nothing you cannot support. Anthropologists writing about societies with no settled English term do this routinely, and the phrasing reads no worse than the label it replaces once a reader has adjusted to it.
How do I check a teacher's claimed lineage?
Ask for names and check them independently. A teacher trained in a living tradition can say which community, which teacher and over what period, and those details can usually be confirmed with organizations in that community. Claims involving a secret order, a lost tribe or a lineage that cannot be verified for reasons of confidentiality should be treated as unverified, because that is what they are.
Is it fine to practice a modern method under a different name?
Yes, and many teachers already do, calling their work journeying, drum journeying or shamanic practice rather than claiming the title itself. The method can be described accurately without implying a training or an ancestry that is absent. That settles most of the dispute, since the objection is almost always to the claim rather than to the practice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is shamanism a religion?
Shamanism is not a religion in the sense of an organized body with doctrine, scripture and membership. It is a role that exists inside other religions. An Evenki saman worked within Evenki cosmology, a Korean mudang works within Korean musok and its gods, and a Shipibo onanya works within a Shipibo understanding of plants. Modern core shamanism is closer to a technique than a faith, and Christians, Buddhists and atheists practice it. Some contemporary Siberian movements have organized shamanic practice into registered religious bodies with officers and premises.
Is it appropriate to call yourself a shaman?
It depends what you are claiming. In most traditions the title is conferred by a community after training and initiation rather than adopted, and calling yourself a shaman in North America is widely read as claiming an indigenous authority you probably do not hold. People trained in Michael Harner's method usually say shamanic practitioner instead, which is accurate and draws no objection. If you were initiated in a named tradition, name it. If you cannot name one, the title is doing work your training does not support.
What is the difference between a shaman and a medicine man?
Medicine man is an English translation that outsiders applied to a range of Native North American ritual roles that have their own names in their own languages, while shaman is a Siberian word extended by anthropologists. Neither term is native to North America. The roles differ in substance as well: many Native North American specialists work through ceremony, herbal knowledge, prayer and membership of a medicine society rather than through soul flight. Alice Beck Kehoe has argued specifically against importing the Siberian term into North American ethnography.
Are shamanism and witchcraft the same thing?
No. Witchcraft in the modern Western sense covers Wicca and related traditions with their own history, festivals, deities and initiatory structures, most of it assembled in twentieth-century Britain. Shamanic practice as the word is now used centers on a specialist entering an altered state to contact spirits for somebody else. In many of the societies that used the word shaman, witchcraft meant the harmful use of spiritual power, and the shaman was the person who defended against it. Some modern practitioners combine the two deliberately, which is recent.
How old is shamanism?
Nobody knows, and the confident numbers in popular books are not supported. Claims of thirty or forty thousand years rest on reading cave paintings and burials as shamanic, and those readings are contested, because a painted figure in an animal mask can be interpreted several ways. What is documented is much shorter. The Evenki word enters European records in the seventeenth century, and the Siberian practices described in any detail were recorded from the eighteenth century onward. Practices of this general kind are old, but a specific age is not knowable.
Do all shamans use psychedelic plants?
No, and the association is largely Amazonian. Siberian traditions worked mainly through drumming, singing, dancing, fasting and sleep restriction. Fly agaric mushrooms appear in Koryak and Chukchi material from the far northeast and in Khanty and Mansi accounts in the west, while Sakha accounts describe drum and voice rather than any psychoactive preparation, so the drug question splits by region inside Siberia as well. Korean gut runs on percussion, dance and offerings rather than psychoactive plants. No psychoactive substance is documented in Sámi drum divination, and the occasional modern claim that a noaidi used fly agaric is not supported by the historical sources. Amazonian practice does center on plant preparations, ayahuasca and tobacco among them, which is one reason ayahuasca has come to stand for shamanism as a whole in Western coverage.
Can you learn shamanism from a weekend workshop?
You can learn a modern technique in a weekend, and core shamanism was designed to be teachable that way. What two days cannot give you is a tradition, a language, a spirit relationship recognized by a community, or the accountability attached to the role in the societies the word came from. Short courses also carry real risk when they add physical extremity: three people died in a sweat lodge run by a self-help promoter at a retreat near Sedona, Arizona in October 2009, and he was acquitted of manslaughter but convicted in 2011 on three counts of negligent homicide.
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