What is Shamanism? Ancient Healing for Modern Times

The Shamanic Worldview

In the shamanic view, the visible world is only the surface of reality. Behind and within it lies an invisible world of spirit: living, aware, and responsive to human consciousness. Everything that happens in the ordinary world, illness, weather, good fortune, conflict, has a spiritual dimension that can be perceived and worked with by trained practitioners.

Anthropologist Michael Harner, who spent decades studying shamanism across cultures and is considered the foremost modern researcher and teacher of the subject, defined shamanism as "a practice involving a practitioner reaching altered states of consciousness in order to perceive and interact with a spirit world and channel these transcendental energies into this world." This definition captures the universal elements while remaining cross-culturally applicable.

The shamanic worldview rests on three foundational principles: animism (everything has spirit), interconnectedness (nothing exists in isolation), and reciprocity (all relationships require giving and receiving in balance). Violating reciprocity, taking without giving, using without respecting, is understood as the primary cause of illness, environmental destruction, and social breakdown.

Mircea Eliade, the Romanian-American religious historian whose 1951 book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy remains the foundational academic text on the subject, identified "the shaman's journey" as the universal core of shamanic practice across cultures as diverse as Siberian Tungus, Amazonian Shipibo, Mongolian, and Native North American. Eliade writes: "The shaman is the great specialist in the human soul; he alone sees it for he knows its form and its destiny."

Origins and Archaeological Evidence

Shamanism is the oldest spiritual practice documented by archaeology. Cave paintings at Altamira in Spain (estimated at 35,600 years old) and Lascaux in France (17,000 years old) depict hybrid human-animal figures in poses consistent with shamanic trance and transformation. Anthropologist David Lewis-Williams, in his landmark 2002 book The Mind in the Cave, argued that these paintings were made by individuals in altered states of consciousness, possibly induced by sensory deprivation, rhythmic percussion, or plant medicines, and depict the visionary imagery characteristic of shamanic journeying.

A burial site discovered at Hilazon Tachtit in Israel, dated to approximately 12,000 years ago, contains the remains of an individual buried with the bones of over 50 tortoises, a complete eagle wing, a leopard pelvis, and other animal remains, all consistent with shamanic costume and practice. Archaeologist Natalie Munro, who excavated the site, concluded that this was almost certainly the burial of a shaman.

The term "shaman" itself comes from the Tungus language of Siberia (evenki: saman, meaning "one who knows" or "one who is excited, moved, or raised"). The word was adopted by Russian explorers and later by Western anthropologists as a generic term for similar practitioners across cultures. However, each culture has its own terms: curandero or curandera in Latin America, sangoma in South Africa, mudang in Korea, angakok among the Inuit.

The Three Worlds: Lower, Middle, Upper

The non-ordinary reality that shamans journey through is typically mapped into three zones or worlds, connected by a central axis (the World Tree, World Mountain, or similar cosmological structure).

This three-world structure appears, with variations, in shamanic traditions worldwide: the Norse World Tree Yggdrasil connecting nine worlds, the Mayan cosmology of underworld, earth, and sky, the Siberian tree with its roots in the underworld and crown in the sky world. The universality of this structural mapping suggests it reflects genuine features of the non-ordinary reality that shamans across cultures have independently accessed.

Tools of the Trade

Shamanic tools serve to facilitate the alteration of consciousness necessary for journeying and to create the energetic conditions for healing.

The Drum: The single most universal shamanic tool across cultures. The repetitive beat at approximately 4-7 beats per second (the drum typically played in shamanic practice) induces theta brainwave states, the same states associated with deep meditation, hypnosis, and the threshold between waking and sleep. Harner describes the drum as "the horse the shaman rides" to the other worlds. Research by neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg at Thomas Jefferson University has confirmed that rhythmic drumming measurably alters activity in specific brain regions associated with self-awareness and boundary dissolution.

Rattles: Used to break up stagnant energy in the patient's energy field, to call in helping spirits, and to create a specific sonic environment. The sound of the rattle is understood to attract beneficial spirits and disperse harmful ones.

Songs (Icaros): In many traditions, particularly Amazonian, sacred melodies given to the shaman by plant spirits during apprenticeship are among the most powerful healing tools. Each icaro is understood as a direct gift from a specific plant teacher and carries the healing power of that plant's spirit. The Shipibo tradition of Peru is renowned for its extraordinarily complex and specific healing icaros.

Smoke and Plant Medicines: From the tobacco of North American traditions to the ayahuasca of the Amazon to the peyote of the Huichol, plant medicines have been used across cultures to facilitate and deepen the shamanic altered state. These substances are understood in shamanic tradition not as chemicals but as spiritual entities in plant form, teacher plants whose spirits communicate directly with the journeyer.

Core Healing Practices

Shamanic healing works at the spiritual level to address the root cause of illness rather than merely managing its physical symptoms. Three practices are universal across shamanic cultures.

Soul Retrieval: Shamans across cultures report that when a person experiences severe trauma (accident, abuse, profound loss, surgery), a portion of the soul can "leave" as a protective mechanism: dissociation at the spiritual level. The person subsequently feels "not quite all there," chronically depressed, unable to fully engage with life, as if some essential quality is missing. In soul retrieval, the shaman journeys to find the missing soul part, negotiates with it, and returns it to the client. Sandra Ingerman, who trained with Michael Harner and authored the definitive modern text Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self (1991), has documented hundreds of cases in which clients experienced immediate and lasting improvement following soul retrieval, often describing a sense of "coming home to myself" or of gaining access to qualities (creativity, joy, trust) that had been absent since a specific traumatic event.

Extraction Healing: The removal of spiritual "intrusions," misplaced energies that do not belong in the patient's energy field and that cause illness. These are understood not as "evil" but as forms of energy that are simply in the wrong place, like a splinter in the eye. The shaman perceives the intrusion (often as a specific shape, colour, or entity) and removes it using specific techniques, such as sucking (literal in some traditions), or using sound and intention.

Power Animal Retrieval: The restoration of a lost connection to a protective spirit animal. In shamanic understanding, everyone is born with one or more power animals (helping spirits in animal form), but this connection can be lost through trauma, illness, or disconnection from nature. Without a power animal, a person is considered "power-lost" and vulnerable to illness and misfortune. The shaman retrieves the power animal from the Lower World and returns it to the client.

The Shamanic Journey: How It Works

The shamanic journey is the core technique: a deliberate alteration of consciousness used to travel to non-ordinary reality and interact with helping spirits for information and healing.

The practitioner lies down in a darkened, quiet space and begins listening to repetitive drumming, either live or recorded. The drum rhythm induces a shift in brainwave state toward theta. A clear intention is set before the journey: "I journey to the Lower World to meet my power animal" or "I journey to ask for guidance about [specific situation]."

With practice, the journey state is characterised by vivid sensory imagery, a quality of felt presence and aliveness in what is encountered, and information that often surprises or contradicts the journeyer's expectations. The last quality, that genuine journeys often produce unexpected information, is one of the most cited markers distinguishing genuine shamanic journeying from mere daydreaming or wishful thinking.

Harner taught that the drum rhythm at 4-7 beats per second, combined with deliberate intention and the imagery of entering a specific gateway to the Lower World (a hole in the ground, a body of water, the roots of a tree), reliably produces the journey state in most people within a few sessions. He documented thousands of cases in which journeyers received specific healing information, guidance, and even detailed historical information about places and cultures they had never encountered.

Neo-Shamanism and Core Shamanism

The 20th century saw a significant movement to make shamanic techniques accessible to Westerners who had lost contact with indigenous spiritual traditions. Michael Harner's Foundation for Shamanic Studies pioneered what he called "core shamanism," extracting the universal techniques (journeying, soul retrieval, extraction) from their specific cultural contexts to make them available across traditions.

Contemporary neo-shamanism encompasses a wide spectrum: from Harner's rigorously researched core approach to workshop-based "experiential shamanism" to hybrid practices blending shamanic elements with other modalities. The movement has grown significantly, with shamanic practitioner training programmes operating in North America, Europe, and Australia and a growing body of practitioners applying shamanic healing alongside conventional therapy and medicine.

Ethics, Cultural Respect, and Appropriation

The adoption of shamanic practices by Western practitioners raises genuine ethical questions about cultural appropriation, exploitation, and the integrity of lineages.

Indigenous scholars and practitioners have raised important concerns about the commodification of sacred ceremonies, the inadequate training of self-styled "shamans," and the potential for genuine harm when powerful practices are used without proper preparation or ethical grounding. These concerns deserve serious attention rather than dismissal.

A reasonable ethical framework for Western shamanic practice includes: studying with legitimate teachers who have proper lineage or training; avoiding appropriating the specific terminology, ceremonies, or symbols of living indigenous traditions without invitation and consent; being transparent about one's level of training and cultural position; and supporting indigenous communities and practitioners rather than simply taking their techniques. The word "shaman" itself is increasingly considered inappropriate for Western practitioners in many circles; terms like "shamanic practitioner" or "journeywork facilitator" more accurately describe the position of someone trained in shamanic methods without claiming indigenous lineage.

What Science Says

Shamanism's relationship with modern science is complex. The biological mechanisms of the shamanic altered state are increasingly well-documented. The healing claims, while widely attested by practitioners and clients, are largely unstudied in controlled research conditions.

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg's neuroimaging studies have documented that rhythmic drumming at shamanic tempos produces measurable decreases in activity in the parietal lobe, the brain region responsible for the sense of being a separate self in space. This neurological change is consistent with the shamanic experience of boundary dissolution and merger with the environment or with spirit beings.

Psychiatrist and consciousness researcher Stanislav Grof, whose work with holotropic breathwork and LSD-assisted psychotherapy over five decades produced an enormous body of documented cases, argues that shamanic traditions had already mapped the territory he was encountering in clinical research. Grof writes in The Cosmic Game (1998): "The shamanic traditions of the world described with remarkable precision the same realms of non-ordinary reality that I was encountering in my research subjects. This convergence strongly suggests that these traditions are empirical observations about the nature of consciousness, not mythological invention."

Soul retrieval's clinical parallels with dissociation therapy and parts-based approaches (Internal Family Systems, EMDR) are striking and have been noted by trauma researchers. The shamanic framework of "soul loss" following trauma maps closely onto contemporary understanding of dissociative trauma responses, and the reported outcomes of soul retrieval (restoration of affect, memory, and sense of wholeness) parallel the outcomes of successful trauma therapy.

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