Shamanism: One Word Doing Too Much Work

What is shamanism, and why does the word resist a single definition?

Imagine you are scrolling late at night and an ad offers a weekend with a shaman in the mountains. Or a friend comes back from a drumming workshop glowing, now calling herself a shaman. Part of you is drawn in. Another part asks: what does that word actually mean, and who gets to use it?

The short answer: 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. It resists one definition because it was never the name of one thing. It started as a single Siberian job title and was stretched to cover the world.

The word came from Evenki, a Tungusic language of Siberia, where it named a particular ritual worker in a particular society. Everything after is extension by analogy. As travelers, missionaries and comparative religionists found shamans in the Amazon, Korea, Nepal, the Arctic and the archaeological record, the term stretched over people whose training, cosmology, social standing and techniques barely overlap, like a coat stretched to fit everyone in the room until it fits no one.

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 their resemblance matters more than their differences, and that is an argument, not an observation. Every competing definition admits some practitioners and quietly excludes others.

Three definitions have done most of the work, each drawing the line differently.

Mircea Eliade's, from 1951, made ecstatic soul flight the test, so a specialist 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 shifts weight from technique to office and helping spirits, admitting specialists whose ecstasy is not soul flight. It still requires ecstasy, so it does not admit every medium, and citing it as wide open overstates it.

Michael Harner's working definition, built for teaching rather than scholarship, centers on a voluntary journey in a deliberately induced state for someone else's benefit.

So one book insists Korean mudang are shamans and another insists they are not. No discipline has the authority to settle it. The word belongs to nobody and survives through convenience and inertia: encyclopedias need a heading for spirit specialists outside an institutional priesthood, and readers type it into search. Careful writers keep it with a note that it is an outsider's category; specialists in one tradition use the local term.

Where does the word shaman come from, and what did it mean in Evenki?

Before you take on a title, it helps to know whose word it was. This one belonged to a small Siberian people.

Shaman comes from saman, a noun in Evenki, a Tungusic language spoken across a wide band of eastern Siberia, naming a ritual specialist who dealt with spirits for a clan. Russians moving east in the seventeenth century picked it up from Tungus speakers, and over the next hundred years it passed from Russian into German, French and English.

The most repeated etymology derives saman from a verb root sa-, to know: one who knows. It is plausible and printed everywhere as settled, but it is a reconstruction, not documented history.

A rival proposal traces it to Sanskrit sramana, a wandering ascetic, which reached Central Asia through Buddhist transmission and could have entered Tungusic through Mongolian or Chinese. 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 closed the argument, and both are still printed as fact.

What the Evenki word covered is narrower than English readers assume. A saman held an office inside a clan, answered to that clan, and worked with named spirits of 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: a saman who lost too many patients lost standing. Payment was normal and expected. The equipment mattered too: 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, much as reading about surgery does not make you a surgeon. Shirokogoroff's The Psychomental Complex of the Tungus, published in 1935, is still the fullest single account of the office.

How did a Siberian job title become a worldwide scholarly category?

How did one people's word end up on retreat flyers worldwide? In three stages.

First, Russian expansion collected the word. Through the seventeenth century, 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, captioned a priest of the devil, and that image circulated for two centuries.

Second, Enlightenment writers made it a specimen. In the eighteenth century, shaman entered French and German print as a general term for a deceiver or a nervous enthusiast: a stock impostor exploiting credulous people, a foil for reasoned religion, and a way to attack priests at home by analogy without naming them. Almost nobody using the word had been to Siberia. The sneer traveled with the term, and traces survive in ordinary English.

Third, comparative religion made it universal. Once anthropology held Siberian, Arctic and Amazonian material in one library, comparing across it looked natural, and a word already existed for what was being compared.

This ran alongside a nineteenth-century habit of seeking one hidden teaching behind every tradition, which produced Theosophy and its claim of an ancient wisdom under all religions (see Helena Blavatsky: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices). An audience trained to expect universals was ready to believe 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 between 1904 and 1909, Jochelson's The Koryak in 1905 and 1908, with the Yukaghir volume running on to 1926. Those books, with Scandinavian work on the Sámi, became the evidence later comparatists read.

Almost none of the comparatists who built the category from those pages had met a shaman. Several fieldworkers who had were describing communities already reshaped by Russian taxation, missionary pressure and epidemic disease.

What did Mircea Eliade mean by technique of ecstasy, and what did that definition leave out?

If you have read anything popular about shamans, you have met Eliade's ideas, named or not.

By technique of ecstasy, Mircea Eliade meant a learned method by which a specialist sends the soul out of the body to travel to an upper or lower world and bring 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; the English translation appeared in 1964 as Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Ecstasy here carries the Greek sense of standing outside oneself, not euphoria.

Around that core he built 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 it left out was possession. If a spirit enters the specialist and speaks through the body, Eliade classed that as something other than shamanism proper, often as a late corruption. That one move excludes or demotes much Korean, Nepali, Amazonian and African practice, including several of the best documented living traditions.

Eliade did no fieldwork with shamans. He read and arranged published ethnography in several languages, a legitimate but limited method: the pattern he found was partly a pattern in his sources, dominated by Siberian material. He also believed archaic religion preserved something modern religion had lost, and read the Siberian practice of his own century as decadent beside a reconstructed original nobody observed.

Historians 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 was detained in 1938 on suspicion of Legionary sympathies. Readers disagree about whether his search for a primordial archaic religion carries anything of that.

The book's reach 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 core shamanism, and how did Michael Harner build it?

If your friend's workshop involved lying down while someone drummed, it almost certainly came from here.

Core shamanism is a stripped-down practice assembled by the American anthropologist Michael Harner in the 1970s, removing everything culturally specific from the shamanic material he had read and experienced and keeping what he judged the universal mechanics.

Harner did fieldwork with the Shuar of Ecuador and with Conibo communities on the Ucayali in Peru in the 1950s and 1960s, and 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 to 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, which has taught and certified practitioners internationally ever since. The extraction was deliberate, and Harner said so: the cultural material is packaging, and the technique underneath belongs to everyone.

Timing explains the welcome. By 1980 a large American audience had passed through the psychedelic and guru counterculture described in Ram Dass: Be Here Now and the Path of the Heart, and many were tired of paying a lineage for a teacher. Two days of core shamanism bought a portable technique and permission to practice without belonging to anybody.

Now the drumming claim, plainly. Harner's foundation describes journey drumming as about five beats per second; researchers who timed his published recordings found near 220 beats per minute, a little under four per second. The workshop figure of four to seven beats per second is not a drum measurement at all. It is the theta brain wave band, four to seven cycles per second, borrowed from EEG and reattached to the drum, which makes the claim sound settled when it is not.

Whether a drum at any tempo drives a distinct, specific brain state has not been tested to a clinical standard. A 2014 comparison 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. Salivary cortisol fell in every condition with no difference between them, while the experiences people reported differed according to the instructions, not the sound.

The honest version: many people find a steady drum helps them concentrate and imagine vividly, and the instructions do much of the work. Harner presented core shamanism as a modern distillation, not a tribal tradition, and his foundation still does, though how consistently his students have kept that distinction is disputed.

What is the flattening critique, and who makes it?

Have you ever been lumped under a label that erased everything particular about you? That is the heart of this critique: the single word shamanism erases the differences between the practices it covers, and those differences are exactly what you need to understand any of them.

Alice Beck Kehoe, anthropologist and archaeologist, made the sharpest version in Shamans and Religion (2000): shaman is a Siberian term carrying Siberian assumptions, applying it to Native North American practitioners imports those assumptions without evidence, and the universal category flatters Western seekers by turning other people's religions into a resource.

Ronald Hutton's Shamans (2001) traces how the Western picture of the Siberian shaman was assembled by people with their own purposes, 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 that 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 your thinking for you, and does it badly.

The flattening has a practical cost: invented origins. Once shamanism is universal, anything can be attributed to it, and a claim about an unnamed ancient tradition is hard to check precisely because none is named. The habit of reading every tradition as one secret teaching in different costumes, set out in Manly P. Hall: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices, makes an unattributed technique sound credible. It recurs whenever a workshop sells something as ancient without saying whose. The crystal skulls are the worked example: sold for a century as pre-Columbian, 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, a problem they did not create.

Defenders of the term answer that comparison is legitimate work and nobody has yet offered a better word.

What actually differs between Siberian, Amazonian, Korean and Sámi specialists?

Put these four specialists in one room and you would quickly see four different jobs. They differ in how the role is acquired, what is done with it, what technique induces the working state, and how their society treats them.

Siberian. Traditions vary, 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. There is 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. Her ritual, a gut, involves possession, a costume change for each visiting spirit, food offerings, live music and a paying client family.

Sámi. The noaidi used a painted drum with a marker that moved across the figures to divine. Sámi practice was suppressed hard enough that the continuous line broke.

Four jobs, four routes in, four 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 them as sharply as money. Korean practitioners are overwhelmingly women, and a male one, a baksu, is unusual enough to be remarked on. Amazonian plant specialists have historically been mostly men, though women practice too and more are training now. Siberian societies had both, and Turkic-speaking Siberia kept a separate word, udagan, for a woman who held the office.

The Sámi case is the clearest, most painful break. Lutheran missionaries confiscated and burned drums through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Thomas von Westen's Norwegian mission collected more than a hundred from 1716 onward. About seventy of those burned in the Copenhagen fire of 1728. Roughly seventy original drums survive worldwide, most 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.

So Sámi practice today is a reconstruction with a documented gap in the middle. Korea is different: practice was harassed under Japanese colonial rule and again by state modernization campaigns in the 1970s but never interrupted. In the Amazon, the pressure came from rubber-boom violence and mission schooling, not a state church.

How should you name a specific tradition instead of saying shamanism?

This comes back to you: what you say, what you sign up for, what you call yourself.

Name the people, the role and the practice in their own terms, and keep shamanism for when you genuinely mean the comparative category. Write Sakha oyuun, not Siberian shaman. Write Korean mudang, or the tradition name musok, not Korean shamanism. Write Shipibo onanya, not Amazonian shaman, and Sámi noaidi, not Sámi shaman. Name the specific practice too: a gut, an icaro, a drum divination.

If you cannot tell which tradition a claim comes from, notice that. A technique with no named origin usually has no verifiable origin.

The same goes for you. Someone trained in Michael Harner's method can say so in one sentence, more informative and less contested than the bare title. Someone apprenticed in a named tradition can name it and the teacher. The word causes trouble exactly where nothing more specific can be said, a useful signal in itself.

Precision is cheap. It costs a clause and gives the reader something they can check, like a return address on a letter.

Local terms also make claims checkable. Write mudang and a reader can find Korean-language scholarship, recordings of gut and the practitioners' own association. Write shaman and they get a global category with no address.

The same holds when you are the one deciding. When a book, workshop or retreat describes its lineage, ask plainly: which people, which language, who taught the teacher, and can anyone in that community confirm it? Practitioners with genuine training answer 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. If something in you is hesitating, listen to it.

Questions people ask