Shamanism

Origin

The first systematic European descriptions of shamanism come from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The exiled Russian Orthodox priest Avvakum, banished to Siberia in the 1650s, described shamanic practice among the Tungus in his autobiography. Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt, leader of a Russian Imperial scientific expedition to Siberia (1720-1727), wrote detailed accounts of Khakas and Buryat shamans. The German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas (1771-1776) added further data. By the nineteenth century, ethnographers including Wenceslas Sieroszewski (Yakut) and Maria Czaplicka (*Aboriginal Siberia*, 1914) had produced substantial studies.

The definitive synthesis is Mircea Eliade's *Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l'extase* (1951; English: *Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy*, 1964). Eliade identified shamanism as a coherent religious phenomenon centred on ecstatic ascent or descent of the soul, found in Siberia, Central Asia, Mongolia, North and South America, Southeast Asia, and other regions. The book has been criticised for over-generalising and for projecting Siberian patterns onto cultures that may not share them, but it remains the foundational comparative work. Subsequent scholarship by Anna-Leena Siikala, Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, and Roberte Hamayon has refined Eliade's picture without displacing it.

Practice and worldview

Classical Siberian shamanism rests on a tripartite cosmology of upper world, middle world (the world of ordinary experience), and lower world, connected by a central axis (the world-tree, mountain, or pole). The shaman travels along this axis in altered state, ascending to consult upper-world spirits or descending to retrieve lost souls from the lower world. The shaman is *called* to the vocation through a shamanic illness (often a near-death experience or extended psychological crisis in adolescence or early adulthood), and is *initiated* by older shamans or by spirits directly. Initiation typically involves a symbolic death-and-rebirth, often depicted as the dismemberment of the shaman's body and its reconstitution from new spiritual material.

The drum is the central tool. The Siberian shamanic drum (Tungusic *yangpa*, Khakas *tüür*) is typically a single-headed frame drum of reindeer hide on a wooden hoop, struck with a beater while the shaman sings, chants, and dances. The drum-rhythm (typically 4 to 7 beats per second) induces the altered state through entrainment of brain rhythms; this has been studied neurophysiologically and shown to produce theta-wave EEG patterns consistent with deep meditative or hypnotic states. Other tools include the costume (decorated with iron pendants representing spirit-helpers), the mirror, and the entheogenic substances *Amanita muscaria* (fly agaric) among the Khanty and Mansi, and various Datura preparations in shamanic Americas. See also divination.

In practice

Living Siberian shamanic traditions survived seventy years of Soviet suppression and have undergone a revival since 1991, particularly in Tuva, Khakasia, Yakutia (Sakha), and Buryatia. The shaman Ai-Churek Oyun (Tuva) and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies (led after Eliade by the American anthropologist Michael Harner from 1979) have made the tradition accessible to outsiders. Harner's *core shamanism* extracts the technical practice (drum-induced altered states, lower- and upper-world journeys, retrieval of power animals) from its Siberian cultural matrix; the resulting practice is highly synthetic but accessible.

A non-traditional personal practice: a frame drum or a recorded shamanic drum-track (4 to 7 beats per second, available widely online), a quiet room, twenty minutes of supine relaxation with eyes closed. Set an intention (a question, a problem, a request for guidance). Listen to the drum, and allow visual or felt imagery to unfold without forcing. At the end, record what came. This approach respects the contemporary reality that most readers cannot live within an indigenous shamanic culture, while offering some of its method. See also oneiromancy, divination, and sibyl.

Symbolic depth

Shamanism poses a sharp question about the nature of human consciousness. The shaman, by induced altered state, accesses information apparently unavailable in ordinary consciousness: the location of game animals, the cause of an illness, the whereabouts of a lost person, the disposition of departed kin. Whether this information is genuinely retrieved from a non-ordinary reality, or is generated by enhanced unconscious processing of subliminal cues, is the contested question. Both views agree that the shaman accesses something the ordinary state does not; they disagree on what that something is.

Read at depth, shamanism preserves the most ancient stratum of human religious experience: the conviction that the visible world is one layer in a stratified reality, and that specialists can move between layers. The world-tree, the dismembering initiation, the spirit-helper, the soul-retrieval are recurring features that anthropology has documented across continents. Whether this convergence reflects a universal psychic structure (Jung's archetypes), a common cultural ancestry (the Out-of-Africa hypothesis), or independent invention from common human conditions, is disputed. Continue with oneiromancy, necromancy, sibyl, and divination. The full glossary offers further paths.

Also known as

• Shamanic trance
• Spirit-work
• Ecstatic technique
• Soul-journey
• Tungus shamanism