Shamanism is the practical application of animism, the experience that everything is alive, conscious and kin. A shaman is an animist who can also enter a trance at will, travel the shamanic realms, and return with knowledge and healing to be of service to the community. Shamanism rests on direct, personal experience rather than belief, and for most of human history it was simply how people lived.
What does the word ‘shamanism’ mean? #
There is a lot of debate, scholarly and otherwise, about what exactly shamanism is, and no agreed definition. Narrower definitions keep the word for practices built around a trance, or for the Siberian peoples it came from; broader ones use it for any practical application of animism. It is often linked with one region, such as Siberia or North America, but it was practised all over the world, Europe included, and as far as anyone knows no hunter-gatherer people in human history was without it.1 Therapeutic Shamanism uses the word in its broad, modern sense, since the line between shamanism and animism is blurry and, as the philosopher Wittgenstein said, “the meaning of a word is its use in the language”.
How are shamanism and animism related? #
Animism is the experience that everything is alive and conscious, not only humans and other animals but plants, stones, rivers, mountains and the wind, all of them kin. Shamanism is a branch of animism and its practical application. If animism is a way of experiencing the world, shamanism is what people do with that experience.2 A shaman experiences the world as every animist does and can also go into a trance at will, leave their body, travel the shamanic realms and communicate with the beings there. In hunter-gatherer cultures everyone was an animist, and the shaman was simply the person best at the shamanic side of it, in the way someone else was best at hunting or at telling stories. See What is animism?
Is shamanism based on belief? #
No. Shamanism is the direct, personal experience of Spirit, and it asks for no leap of faith. It has no priesthood, no hierarchy, no sacred texts, no creeds and no temples (“nature is our ‘church’”). It held together for tens of thousands of years without any of these because what people experience, are taught and are shown in their journeys is remarkably consistent. The teachings are offered as suggestions to try, and anyone who tries them and finds that they work learns the truth of shamanism from their own experience.
What is shamanic reality? #
Shamanism holds that behind everyday, physical reality (ordinary reality) lies a deeper one, shamanic reality, in which everything is connected to and part of everything else. What looks separate in ordinary reality is, in shamanic reality, like twigs on shared branches, which trace back through Human, Mammal and Animal to the Stone People and Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this herself.3 Hunter-gatherers lived with the two realities running side by side, “one foot in this world and one in the other”, and moved between them at will. Most modern people have both feet in ordinary reality; both feet in shamanic reality all the time is not shamanism but madness. This is why groundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this is the bedrock of the practice.
The shamanic realms are real places, full of real beings, and “Shamanic worlds are not your personal development playground.” No human brain can perceive them as they really are, though, so a journeyer clothes what is there in images and metaphors. A journey is therefore mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this (metaphorically true) rather than logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this (literally true), true in the way a great painting or poem is true. See What are the three shamanic realms?
What is shamanism for? #
Shamanism is used for healing body, mind, soul and spirit, one’s own and other people’s, for personal and spiritual development, and for living in balance with the other beings we share the world with. Within the tribe, the shaman was its wisdom keeper, awake to how the people were living in relation to the more-than-human world, prepared to look at what most people would rather not see, and able to guide the tribe back to right relationship when it strayed. The shaman was the advocate for the other-than-human Peoples too, “the spokesperson, the advocate for the other-than-human people, who will be their voice and speak up for them in the human community”. That is what humans give back for the healing and teaching the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer offer. And the shaman kept the culture’s stories healthy, and with them its sanity: one of the shaman’s central tasks was “to keep the culture sane, grounded, and on track.” Shamans lived at the margins of the tribe, far enough out to see its stories for what they were and close enough in to help. There is no tradition in shamanism of renouncing the world, because the shaman’s role was, and still is, to be of service.4 See What is shamanism for today?
Is shamanism only about journeying? #
No. The shamanic journey is the commonest way of entering a trance to communicate with the spirit world, but it is a means to an end. What makes something shamanic is contact with the shamanic realms, however it happens, and living with ordinary and shamanic reality running together moment by moment. In any shamanic culture, journeying also sat inside a much wider body of knowledge and practice: the realms and spirits, the local Animal, Plant and Stone Peoples, stories, the ancestors and the dead, ethics and taboos, the energy body, protection, and so on.5 The anthropologist Michael Harner kept his core shamanism to little more than journeying, so that it could travel between cultures. Therapeutic Shamanism builds the wider context back around it, with the relationship with a Power Animal at the centre of the practice. See What is shamanic journeying? and What is a Power Animal?
How did shamanism change with the Fall? #
Therapeutic Shamanism distinguishes three kinds of shamanism by how far Taker-cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer thinking has got into them.6 Pre-Fallen shamanism is the hierarchy-free shamanism of hunter-gatherer peoples. The break from animism began with domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and the Neolithic, from around 11,000 to 10,000 BC, and accelerated with 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, the rise of the first city-states, from around 4000 BC. Where shamanism survived in farming and herding societies it became Fallen shamanism, marked by animal sacrifice, spirit possession and hierarchy. Post-Fallen shamanism is the ethical, adaptable shamanism now emerging, which helps people heal from Taker thinking. ‘Traditional’ therefore does not automatically mean healthy, since almost every surviving shamanic society now farms or herds. That is no criticism of those societies; we owe them an incalculable debt for keeping shamanic and animist knowledge alive.
Why does beginner’s mind matter in shamanism? #
Beginner’s mind, a phrase from Zen, means meeting something as if for the first time. People raised in the modern world are steeped in Taker thinking, mostly without knowing it, and bring it to whatever they learn; many Westerners simply “bolt on” shamanism to it, or to New Age, theistic, Celtic or Norse frameworks. Because a journey is co-created between the journeyer and Spirit, what a person brings shapes what they meet. Nobody journeys free of preconceptions, and the practice of hollowing-out sets down as much middle-world material as possible so that the journey can be Spirit-led. Learning shamanism therefore means unlearning as well as learning.
Does Therapeutic Shamanism require wilderness work? #
No. Vision quests, sweat lodges and the like are wild practices and can be powerful, but for people living domesticated, mostly urban lives their effects often wear off within weeks or months.7 Therapeutic Shamanism was developed to make shamanism the basis of daily life wherever people live, so its courses are generally held indoors and do not involve wilderness work. What it asks for instead are practices that “find the wild in the tamed”, keeping the connection with nature alive in town or countryside, with the plants, animals and land where a person actually lives.
What is the difference between a shaman and a shamanic practitioner? #
Following Harner, Therapeutic Shamanism keeps the word ‘shaman’ for people in indigenous cultures who were trained in shamanism from early life and lived it within a culture that supported them. Modern Western people who practise it are shamanic practitioners. In tribal cultures the title is bestowed by the community, never claimed, and a Westerner calling themselves a shaman is “a bit like someone bestowing a knighthood on themselves”. Few Buddhists become a buddha, but anyone can be a Buddhist practitioner, and in the same way anyone can become a shamanic practitioner.8 See What is Therapeutic Shamanism?
Is shamanism a religion? #
No. In the West religion is optional, and for many people it is a small part of daily life. In shamanic cultures nobody was not shamanic, because shamanism was how people experienced and related to the world moment by moment, “literally a way of being”. It has no scripture to argue over, and it has never been used to justify a war. See Is Therapeutic Shamanism a religion or belief system?
Where does the word ‘shaman’ come from? #
The word comes from the Evenki, traditionally hunters and reindeer herders of Siberia and the Mongolian region, where it named their own spiritual practices. It entered English in the 1600s and was gradually applied to similar practices across the world. It is usually translated as ‘one who knows’ or ‘one who can see in the dark’, someone who sees what is hidden from others or what others choose not to see, though both the translation and the word’s exact origin are debated. In England, the original word for shamanism has long been lost. See Where does shamanism come from?
How old is shamanism? #
The answer depends on how shamanism is defined. Some archaeologists read European cave paintings over thirty thousand years old as depicting shamanic practice, and finds left by the hunter-gatherers of Blombos Cave in South Africa, engraved ochre about seventy-five thousand years old and an ochre workshop about a hundred thousand years old, may point further back. Indigenous peoples generally say humans have practised shamanism for as long as we have been human, which would make it as old as our species, some two to three hundred thousand years,9 and far older than any organised religion. See What is shamanic art, and what does rock art tell us?
