Nobody can say for certain, as we know of no study that has tested whether traditional shamans were autistic, had ADHD or were otherwise neurodivergent, and the evidence from anthropology is thin. In the early twentieth century, many Russian and Western writers on shamanism went the other way and called shamans mentally ill, a view most people who study shamanism have since moved away from. Therapeutic Shamanism suggests that many shamans were probably not what we would now call neurotypical, sees the original shaman as having the Wild Mind, our undomesticated human nature, and turns the question round, asking whether what passes for ‘normal’ today is itself the Domesticated Mind.
Why do people ask this question? #
Because shamans have always been different. “The shaman has always been someone who sees things differently. Someone who sees the things that other people either cannot see, or choose not to see”, and “a shaman is someone who is somewhat outside of normal society, and precisely because of this, can be of service by being able to see society clearly and more objectively.”1 “The shaman is someone who is often at the edge of society and of the tribe.”2
Many people who are neurodivergent today recognise themselves in those descriptions, and it is natural to wonder whether the shamans of the past were people like them. See What is neurodiversity, and how does Therapeutic Shamanism see it?
Were shamans once thought to be mentally ill? #
Yes. The anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, whose own fieldwork was in Siberia and among the Sora of eastern India, writes that “It was from the turn of the 20th century that scholars and investigators began to emphasise the psychopathology, ‘hysteria’ or ‘neurosis’ of the shaman”, largely because of the dramatic and sometimes frightening performances of Siberian shamans.3 Some Russian writers of the time held that only a mentally disturbed person could become a shaman. George Devereux was blunt about it in 1956: “my position is that the shaman is mentally deranged”.4
Part of it comes from something real in the traditions themselves. In many cultures a future shaman goes through a crisis, which Vitebsky calls initiatory illness, in which they may seem to be losing their mind before they take up the role. See What is shaman’s sickness (initiatory illness)? and Were traditional shamans mentally ill?
What do researchers say now? #
Most now draw a clear line between the shaman and the person with a severe mental illness. Vitebsky compares shamanic initiation with schizophrenia and says that “both psychologically and socially, the differences are great.” Where the shaman’s concentration increases, the schizophrenic’s is scattered; the shaman keeps control of their state of mind; and the shaman’s experience “is always brought back to society and shared for society’s benefit”. Outside trance, he says, “the shaman is usually a normal, even ordinary person.”5
The anthropologist Manvir Singh, in a wide survey of shamanism across cultures, says that “shamans in many societies do not suffer from an abnormal psychology”, and concludes that “that humans experience psychosis seems unnecessary to explain the existence and features of shamanism.” Some of the scientists who responded to him take a middle path, suggesting that people towards one end of a spectrum of unusual experience may be more likely to become shamans, and to learn to master those experiences. Singh accepts that this is plausible.6
One recent study comes close to testing it. The anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann and her colleagues interviewed forty okomfo, priests of the traditional religion in Ghana who speak with their gods, half in the coastal city of Cape Coast and half in the rural areas around it. They suggest that some, though not all, may have experiences like those of psychosis, which their religious practice manages so that they are not ill. Yet none “would meet formal criteria for psychosis, for those criteria require substantial dysfunction in life or in work”, and all were recognised as good at what they do. The researchers accept that their study cannot show whether training made the difference, or whether those people were simply never very ill.7
Therapeutic Shamanism draws the line in its own way. A shaman journeys into the shamanic realms and comes back at will, and “The ability to return at will is one of the differences between shamanism and psychosis, for being stuck in the shamanic realms and unable to return would indeed be a form of psychosis.”8
What about autism, ADHD and sensitivity? #
Here the evidence is thinner still. Almost all the older research is about psychosis and schizophrenia, which are quite different things from autism, ADHD or high sensitivity. Very little in the anthropological record has looked for neurodivergence among the shamans of hunter-gatherer peoples. The evidence is scanty from anthropology, as it is not something anthropologists tended to be looking for nor interested in. We can certainly speculate and make good guesses, though.
There are some pointers. Singh notes that many communities regard people “with some innate peculiarity, such as perennial illness”, an extra finger, epilepsy, or an ambiguous sexual identity as more likely to become shamans.9 His examples come from many kinds of society, not only hunter-gatherers. The psychologist Elaine Aron, who has written widely on highly sensitive people, suggests that sensitivity is valued in cultures living close to the earth, which need their trackers, herbalists and shamans.10
The psychologists Marco Del Giudice and colleagues propose that autistic-like and schizotypal traits are part of the normal range of human personality, and only become disorders at the extremes.11 Their paper does not mention shamans. It also suggests that farming may have increased the advantage of some autistic-like traits, a reminder that the history of human minds is more tangled than any simple story.
What does Therapeutic Shamanism say? #
Many shamans were probably not what we would now call neurotypical. The shaman’s role has always asked for a different way of seeing, and Therapeutic Shamanism sees the original shaman as having the Wild Mind: our original human nature, the way of being humans lived for most of our history as hunter-gatherers, before we tamed ourselves. The original shaman, though, is not neuro-conformist in this way, but neuro-wild; undomesticated. Neurowild is another name for the Wild Mind.
It also questions the frame of the question. Therapeutic Shamanism asks: “Maybe the term neurodiverse is still pathologising us, and incorrectly still seeing neurotypical as normal. What if, instead, we are neurowild, and what passes for normal is neurodomesticated, or neurotamed”. Neurodomesticated is another name for the Domesticated Mind, what we became when we tamed ourselves to fit the crowded, settled and hierarchical cultures that came with agriculture and the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. Seen this way, the question is not only whether shamans were different from the norm, but how the norm itself came to be, and what was lost when human cultures began to tame the minds of their members. See What are the Wild Mind and the Domesticated Mind? and Is neurotypical the same as the Domesticated Mind?
Therapeutic Shamanism also suggests that many shamans would have met the description of what is now called an otrovert. See What is an otrovert?
Does this mean every neurodivergent person is a shaman? #
No. Being neurodivergent does not make someone a shaman, any more than being neurotypical rules it out. Shamanism is a practice and a role of service, learnt over time. What Therapeutic Shamanism offers is a different way of seeing difference, as part of the Wild Mind that is still in all of us, not simply a fault to be corrected. See Will the courses suit me if I am neurodivergent?
