Best Shamanism

What Is Shamanism?

The word shaman comes from the Evenki language of Siberia (saman), and was introduced to Western scholarship through the 18th-century Russian explorer Nikolaas Witsen. But the practices the word describes predate the word by tens of thousands of years. Rock art in southern Africa, cave paintings in France and Spain, and burial sites across Eurasia all show evidence of shamanic worldviews and ritual practices dating back to the Upper Paleolithic period, roughly 40,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Anthropologist Mircea Eliade, in his foundational 1951 work Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, identified shamanism as a technique rather than a religion. Unlike priests or mystics who engage with sacred powers through devotion, doctrine, or contemplation, the shaman is distinguished by the ability to enter controlled altered states of consciousness, typically called the shamanic journey, and to operate deliberately within those states to perform specific healing and divination functions. The shaman journeys; the mystic waits for revelation.

What makes shamanism remarkable from an anthropological perspective is its convergent development across isolated cultures. Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Siberia, Central Asia, Australia, Africa, and Scandinavia all independently developed strikingly similar practices: the use of percussion or monotonous sound to induce altered states, the concept of spirit helpers or power animals, the belief in multiple-layered cosmologies, and healing modalities centered on soul retrieval and spirit communication. This convergence across cultures that had no contact with each other suggests that shamanism is based on genuine features of human consciousness and perception rather than on culturally transmitted mythology.

The Three Worlds: Shamanic Cosmology

Despite emerging independently across isolated cultures, shamanic traditions worldwide share a remarkably consistent cosmological structure: reality consists of multiple layered worlds, typically described as three primary realms, connected by a central axis (the World Tree, World Mountain, or Cosmic Axis) that the shaman can travel between in altered states.

The Lower World is accessed by journeying downward through the earth, typically through a hole in the ground, the roots of a tree, or a cave entrance. Despite its name, the Lower World in most shamanic traditions is not a place of punishment or darkness in any negative sense. It is the realm of nature spirits, animal teachers, ancestors, and the most primal energies of earthly existence. The power animals that serve as a shaman's primary guides and source of healing power are typically found in the Lower World. Many shamans describe the Lower World as extraordinarily beautiful, abundant with plant and animal life in forms that may or may not correspond to familiar species.

The Upper World is accessed by journeying upward through the sky, typically through clouds or by climbing the World Tree. It has a distinctly different quality from the Lower World: lighter, more transparent, associated with teacher spirits who appear in luminous or human-like forms, cosmic principles, and refined spiritual wisdom. Where Lower World encounters tend to be immediate and embodied, Upper World encounters are often more philosophical or instructional in quality. Many shamanic traditions place the spirits of sacred traditions, lineage teachers, and cosmic intelligences in the Upper World.

The Middle World is ordinary reality with its veils partially lifted, the world as it exists at its spiritual depth rather than only at its physical surface. Journey work in the Middle World is used for finding lost objects or people, communicating with the spirits of places, and certain divination practices. The Middle World also contains entities that are less aligned with human wellbeing than the teachers and power animals found in the Upper and Lower Worlds, which is why experienced shamans approach Middle World journeying with more caution than the other realms.

The Shamanic Journey: How It Works

The shamanic journey is the foundational practice of shamanism, the specific altered state of consciousness technique that distinguishes the shaman from other spiritual practitioners. In a journey, the practitioner enters a light trance state (typically described as an eyes-closed, internally focused awareness while remaining conscious and deliberate) and moves through imagery and perception in the spirit worlds with a specific intention or question.

The journey is not meditation in the conventional sense. In concentration meditation, you work to narrow attention to a single object. In mindfulness meditation, you observe mental contents as they arise. The shamanic journey is more active and directed: you enter a specific world through a specific entry point, move through the territory with intention, encounter beings and receive information, and return with what you found. The practitioner maintains agency and direction throughout rather than passively receiving whatever arises.

Research by neuroscientist Michael Winkelman at Arizona State University has proposed that shamanic altered states involve activity in the low-theta brainwave range (4-7 Hz), a state associated with hypnagogia, deep creative insight, and the dissolution of ordinary narrative self-awareness. This state is facilitated by the rhythmic percussion used in most shamanic traditions (typically 4-7 beats per second in drumming traditions). Theta states are associated with reduced activity in the default mode network (the brain's self-referential thought network) while increasing connectivity between brain regions that do not typically communicate in ordinary waking consciousness, which may account for the characteristic vividness and novelty of shamanic journey experience.

Core Shamanic Healing Practices

The shamanic healing repertoire addresses specific diagnoses that shamanic traditions identified as the root causes of illness and suffering. These diagnoses do not map neatly onto biomedical categories. They address the spiritual dimension of health that biomedicine does not typically address, and they are often used alongside rather than instead of conventional medical treatment.

Soul retrieval is the most significant and distinctive shamanic healing practice. The concept of soul loss appears across shamanic traditions worldwide: during experiences of trauma, shock, abuse, grief, or severe illness, a part of the person's vital essence splits off and retreats into the spirit worlds as a protective mechanism. This soul part takes the person's full vitality and capacities with it, leaving behind the diminished, disconnected, or chronically depleted states that many people identify with depression, chronic fatigue, inability to remember periods of their life, feeling like they've never been the same since a specific event, or a persistent sense that something essential is missing.

In soul retrieval, the shamanic practitioner journeys to find the missing soul part, negotiates for its return (the soul part may resist because the conditions that caused the original departure have not changed), and then blows the retrieved soul essence back into the client's body, typically through the crown of the head and the heart. Successful soul retrieval often produces immediate observable changes: a brightening of expression, spontaneous tears of recognition, or a client reporting that they feel more present in their body than they have in years.

Power animal retrieval addresses a different but related diagnosis: power loss or depotentiation. Shamanic traditions hold that every person has access to helping spirits in animal form that provide protection, vitality, and specific qualities of consciousness. When these connections weaken through prolonged illness, depression, severe stress, or simply years of urban disconnection from natural world awareness, the person becomes more vulnerable to illness and misfortune. The shaman journeys to retrieve a power animal and restore the connection, bringing renewed vitality and protective spiritual presence to the client.

Extraction healing addresses intrusions: energies, thought-forms, or entities that do not belong in a person's energy field and are causing localized pain, emotional disturbance, or illness. The shaman perceives these intrusions in the spirit worlds (often as dark patches, foreign objects, or dense areas in the client's energy field) and removes them, typically "blowing" them into a piece of stone or crystal that then holds the extracted energy, or sending them into the element of water or fire for transformation.

Psychopomp work involves guiding the spirits of the deceased who have not fully transitioned into the spirit worlds. Many shamanic traditions hold that spirits can become confused or stuck near the living world, particularly after sudden or traumatic deaths, creating disturbances for both the deceased and the living. The psychopomp shaman journeys to find and guide these spirits toward appropriate transition. This work appears across cultures, from the Greek concept of Hermes as guide of souls to the Tibetan Buddhist Bardo Thodol practices, suggesting a cross-cultural recognition of this spiritual phenomenon.

Power Animals and Helping Spirits

The relationship between the shaman and their helping spirits is the central relationship of shamanic practice. Unlike the solitary mystic or the priest who intercedes for a congregation, the shaman works in conscious partnership with spiritual intelligences, relying on their guidance, protection, and healing power at every stage of the work. The shaman without helping spirits is considered to be in a dangerous position in traditional shamanic worldviews: like a doctor attempting surgery alone in the dark.

Power animals are the most universally recognized category of helping spirit across shamanic traditions. They appear in animal form, though they may shapeshift or present themselves in ways that blend familiar animal characteristics with unfamiliar qualities. The power animal is not a symbol or a psychological projection in the way a Jungian analyst might understand an archetype. In shamanic practice, the power animal is treated as a genuine, autonomous intelligence that has its own perspective, personality, and guidance to offer, separate from the practitioner's own thought processes.

Different animals bring distinctly different energetic qualities and types of wisdom. Bear is associated with healing, introspection, and the ability to access the deeper realms; practitioners whose primary power animal is Bear often show remarkable healing gifts and a natural capacity for therapeutic depth work. Eagle and other raptors are associated with visionary perspective, the ability to see from great height, and connection to the Upper World realms. Wolf brings pack wisdom, loyalty, teaching gifts, and pathfinding. Serpent in most traditions (contrary to its negative reputation in Western religion) is associated with healing, transformation, and the kundalini-like earth energies. Each practitioner develops an understanding of their specific power animal's particular teachings over years of relationship with it.

Drumming and Altered States of Consciousness

The drum is the shaman's most essential tool across traditions that use percussion-based trance induction, which includes most North and South American, Siberian, Mongolian, and many African shamanic traditions. The Siberian shaman's saying, "the drum is my horse," captures the central function: the drum is the vehicle of shamanic transport, the sound technology that carries the practitioner into and through the spirit worlds.

The specific drumming tempo used in journey work, approximately 205 to 220 beats per minute, corresponds to the theta brainwave frequency (4-7 Hz) through a principle of neural entrainment: the brain's electrical activity tends to synchronize with rhythmic external stimuli. Research by Neher in 1962 was the first Western scientific study to document this effect, finding that rhythmic drumming at specific frequencies produced cortical responses in the theta range. More recent research by Hove and colleagues (2016) using fMRI confirmed that rhythmic drumming at shamanic tempos produces significant theta entrainment and characteristic changes in default mode network activity consistent with the subjective reports of shamanic journeyers.

Rattles serve a complementary function in many traditions, particularly for clearing and activating the practitioner's and client's energy field before and after healing work. The irregular, multi-frequency sound of a rattle creates a different quality of stimulation than the sustained, rhythmic pulse of the drum. Other percussion instruments used across traditions include bells, singing bowls, frame drums, and specialized instruments like the Tuvan shaman's chanzy (a bowed instrument used for spirit calling).

In traditions where drumming is not the primary induction method (most notably in Amazonian and other plant medicine traditions), rhythmic vocal techniques serve an equivalent function. Icaros, the sacred healing songs of Amazonian curanderismo, use specific melodic patterns, rhythms, and tonal qualities that practitioners report as having the same consciousness-shifting effect as percussion in other traditions. The common element across all these approaches is the use of monotonous, rhythmic stimulation to facilitate the transition from ordinary waking consciousness into the theta-dominated state in which shamanic perception becomes available.

Plant Medicines in Shamanic Traditions

Plant medicines represent the most widely discussed and debated aspect of shamanic traditions in contemporary discourse. Many of the world's shamanic healing traditions, particularly those of Central and South America, Africa, and parts of Asia, have long used plant preparations containing psychoactive compounds as a primary method of inducing the non-ordinary states of consciousness required for healing and divination work.

In Amazonian traditions, Ayahuasca (a brew combining the Banisteriopsis caapi vine with DMT-containing plants like Psychotria viridis) is the centerpiece of curanderismo, the healing tradition practiced by curanderos and vegetalistas across Peru, Brazil, Colombia, and neighboring countries. The brew is considered not merely a pharmacological substance but a teacher plant with its own intelligence and will: practitioners speak of "the medicine" as an active agent in the healing process, not simply a catalyst for psychological experience. The curandero's years of training involve developing a working relationship with this intelligence, learning its songs, its protocols, and its specific uses for different conditions.

Peyote holds an equivalent central role in the Native American Church and in the Huichol (Wixaritari) tradition of Mexico, where it is considered sacred medicine that connects practitioners to ancestral wisdom, Grandfather Fire, and the divine ordering principle of the universe. The Huichol pilgrimage to Wirikuta, the high desert plateau of San Luis Potosi where peyote grows, is one of the most intact surviving examples of shamanic ceremonial practice and has been practiced continuously for centuries despite enormous external pressures.

Iboga and its purified alkaloid Ibogaine, used in the Bwiti tradition of Gabon and Cameroon, is considered by practitioners to be the most powerful plant teacher in the African shamanic tradition. Iboga initiations, which involve consuming substantial quantities of the root bark over 24-72 hours, are understood as a death and rebirth process, a direct encounter with ancestral spirits and one's own essential nature that reshapes the initiate's relationship to life and identity at a fundamental level. Western clinical interest in Ibogaine for addiction treatment has grown significantly based on promising research in the treatment of opioid addiction.

Modern and Core Shamanism

The 20th and 21st centuries have seen a significant migration of shamanic practices from their indigenous cultural contexts into urban Western settings, producing what scholars call neo-shamanism and what practitioner Michael Harner termed core shamanism. This migration raises important questions about cultural appropriation, efficacy, and the relationship between the form and context of these practices.

Anthropologist and former Jivaro (Shuar) apprentice Michael Harner developed core shamanism beginning in the 1970s through the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. Harner's approach distills the technical elements of shamanic practice (journeying, power animal and teacher work, soul retrieval, extraction) from specific cultural forms, arguing that these techniques are cross-culturally valid and accessible without requiring adoption of any specific indigenous worldview or cultural system. Core shamanism has been taught to hundreds of thousands of practitioners worldwide and has produced a substantial body of experience with Western populations.

The cultural appropriation question is genuinely complex. Many indigenous leaders and scholars argue that shamanic practices cannot be meaningfully extracted from their cultural context, that doing so misrepresents the tradition and harms indigenous communities that have been actively suppressed in their traditional practices. Others, including some indigenous shamans, take the pragmatic position that healing knowledge should be as widely available as possible, and that the spirit intelligences these traditions work with choose to make themselves available to sincere practitioners regardless of cultural background.

From a practical standpoint, core shamanism and modern shamanic circles have demonstrably helped many Western practitioners with healing, guidance, and spiritual development. The question of how to engage with these practices with appropriate respect, acknowledgment, and reciprocity toward the cultures from which they originate is a genuine ethical responsibility for contemporary practitioners.

Beginning Your Own Practice

Engaging with shamanic practices as a contemporary person involves several choices about depth, commitment, and approach. There is a meaningful spectrum from reading and studying the tradition intellectually, to attending workshops and circles, to formal apprenticeship with an experienced practitioner, to decades of dedicated development as a healer in service to community.

The most reliable entry point for most people is learning the shamanic journey through a foundational workshop with a trained core shamanism instructor. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies maintains a teacher directory and offers standardized training worldwide. A basic journey workshop typically involves learning the cosmology, developing your entry point, making your first journeys to meet power animals and teachers, and beginning to trust and work with what you encounter. This foundational skill can then be developed independently or through ongoing training.

Regular practice is essential for meaningful development. The shamanic relationship with helping spirits is exactly that: a relationship, which deepens through consistent engagement over time. A simple practice of one or two journeys per week, with clear intentions and careful recording in a journal, produces remarkable depth over months and years. Many practitioners also develop daily practices that keep them connected to their spirit relationships without formal journeys: brief check-ins, spontaneous communication during nature walks, or bringing the awareness cultivated in journeys into daily perception.

Mircea Eliade and the Academic Study of Shamanism

Mircea Eliade's 1951 work Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (originally published in French as Le chamanisme et les techniques archaiques de l'extase) remains one of the most cited scholarly works in religious studies and anthropology of religion. Eliade, then a professor at the University of Chicago, synthesized ethnographic accounts from Siberian, Central Asian, North and South American, Australasian, and African traditions to argue for a cross-cultural shamanic complex, a coherent set of techniques and worldview elements found across isolated cultures.

Eliade's core argument was that shamanism represents a specific "technique of ecstasy" distinct from possession, mediumship, or mysticism. The shaman, in Eliade's analysis, masters altered states rather than being mastered by them: the spirit descends into the shaman only at the shaman's invitation and direction, unlike the possessed mediums of other traditions who are overtaken by spirits without necessarily having trained control of the experience. This distinction of mastery and intentionality is central to Eliade's definition.

Later scholars, particularly anthropologist Piers Vitebsky in The Shaman (2001) and Ronald Hutton in Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination (2001), have critiqued Eliade's universalizing approach. They argue that Eliade romanticized and homogenized practices that in their indigenous contexts are far more varied, contested, and contextually specific than his framework suggests. The debate between universal and particularist approaches to shamanism remains active in academic anthropology, though most practitioners of modern and core shamanism follow Eliade's universalist framework in practice, whether or not they engage with the academic debate.

Michael Harner and Core Shamanism: A Critical Appreciation

Michael Harner (1929-2018) was an anthropologist at the New School for Social Research who spent years doing fieldwork with the Shuar (Jivaro) people of Ecuador and other Amazonian groups. His 1980 book The Way of the Shaman was the first to present shamanic techniques (particularly the shamanic journey) to a general Western audience in a practical, experiential format. The book has never been out of print and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Harner's most lasting contribution was the distillation he called "core shamanism": the fundamental cross-cultural techniques of shamanic practice stripped of specific cultural clothing, applicable by people of any cultural background. His Foundation for Shamanic Studies, founded in 1987, has trained practitioners in over 30 countries. The three-day Basic Workshop in Core Shamanism, which teaches journey work to the Lower and Upper Worlds and basic power animal and teacher relationships, has been taken by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

The core shamanism framework has been both praised and criticized. Harner's defenders argue that the techniques work regardless of cultural context, that the helping spirits encountered in journeys are genuine intelligences that make themselves available to sincere practitioners from any tradition, and that making powerful healing tools widely available serves a pressing need in a culture with epidemic levels of depression, disconnection, and spiritual hunger. Critics, particularly indigenous scholars, argue that context cannot be stripped from practice without loss, that shamanism divorced from the ecological and communal relationships in which it developed is not the same thing as indigenous shamanism, and that teaching it as a universally accessible technique obscures both its cultural specificity and its serious demands on practitioners.

Plant Medicines: Research and Context

The past two decades have seen an explosion of clinical research on the therapeutic applications of substances used in shamanic plant medicine traditions, driven partly by the global spread of ayahuasca ceremonies and the broader psychedelic renaissance in Western medicine.

Jordi Riba and colleagues at the Sant Pau Research Institute in Barcelona published a series of studies on ayahuasca's psychological and physiological effects beginning in the early 2000s, establishing its safety profile in ceremonial doses and documenting its unique pharmacological mechanism: the MAO inhibitors in the Banisteriopsis caapi vine block the enzymatic breakdown of DMT from the Psychotria viridis leaves, enabling oral activity of a compound that is normally metabolized before reaching the brain. This combination appears to have been discovered independently in multiple Amazonian cultures, which is remarkable given that neither plant alone produces the full psychoactive effect.

Beatriz Caiuby Labate at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and researchers at the Imperial College London (including Robin Carhart-Harris) have documented ayahuasca's effects on the default mode network: the brew temporarily quietens this self-referential brain network, associated with rumination and the narrative self, while amplifying connectivity between brain regions that do not ordinarily communicate. The result is often described as a dissolution of ordinary ego boundaries combined with heightened emotional processing, exactly the conditions that shamanic traditions designed the ceremonies to facilitate.