A shaman is an animist who can enter a trance at will, travel the shamanic realms and bring back healing and teaching for the community, relying on direct experience and on the spirits rather than on any doctrine. A priest serves a religion’s teaching and stands between people and the sacred within a hierarchy, and needs no trance to do so. A medium lets spirits, very often the dead, speak through them, and ‘medicine person’ is a loose English name for indigenous healers, especially in North America, many of whom are not shamans.
Why are these roles so often confused? #
Partly because there is no agreed vocabulary. The word ‘shaman’ comes from the Evenki of Siberia and was later stretched to cover healers, diviners and religious specialists all over the world, and writers since have used ‘shaman’, ‘medicine man’, ‘witch doctor’ and ‘priest’ almost as if they meant the same thing. Shamans have long been confused, as the shamanic teacher and writer Christina Pratt notes at the start of her essay on non-shamanic healers in An Encyclopedia of Shamanism, with medicine men, witch doctors, sorcerers and healers who work in trance.1
Partly, too, because in this culture we killed our shamans, and with them we lost the precise terms that shamanic peoples had for different roles and relationships.2 So Therapeutic Shamanism defines its words deliberately, and keeps ‘shaman’ for something quite specific. See What is shamanism?
What makes someone a shaman? #
Four things, taken together. A shaman is an animist first of all, someone who experiences the world as alive, conscious and full of beings with personhood. A shaman can also go into a trance at will, travel the three shamanic realmsThree realms. The Upper-World, the middle-world and the Lower-World: the cosmological map of shamanic reality. Rooted first in the Lower-World, then the Upper-World, and only then the middle-world. Read the full answer, and come back, again at will, with gifts of healing and teaching; shamanic peoples moved between the ordinary world and the other worlds with ease.3 That ability is always used in service of the community. And whilst being part of the community, the shaman also stands a little on its edge.4
That place on the edge matters. Hunter-gatherer peoples understood that a culture is made of stories, and that people can stray from the deeper stories that keep them in right relationship with each other and with the other-than-human world, the Original Instructions. Someone a little outside everyday life could see when the culture was drifting and help bring it back on track. See What do tribe and belonging mean, and what is the shaman’s role in a community?
A shaman’s power is not their own, either. It comes from the depth of their connection with their Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer and other GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this; it is the Guides who do the healing, working through a shaman who has learnt to get out of the way.5 See What are helping spirits?
How is a shaman different from a priest? #
In what each relies on, and in where each stands. Shamanism is the direct, personal experience of Spirit, so it needs no leap of faith. It has no priesthoods and no hierarchies, no temples (nature is the church), no sacred texts to argue over and no creeds or sects; nobody has to believe what scripture says or what a priest says.6 Priesthoods arrive with the sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this of the first city-states. Those religions mirror the hierarchical societies they grow up in, with many levels of priesthood and initiation, and ordinary people can no longer be in direct communication with spirit but have to go through priests. With them come, for the first time, religious orthodoxy and the persecution of non-believers.7 The original shaman was a servant of the community, not a master, and never a priest mediating other people’s connection with the other-than-human world. With no sacred texts there is no orthodoxy, and so no heresy. When a society falls into hierarchy, the shaman starts to turn into a priest or a guru, often whilst keeping the title of shaman. See Is Therapeutic Shamanism a religion or belief system?
Writers on shamanism draw the line in much the same place. Christina Pratt describes priests as teaching a particular doctrine, usually with little or no experience of altered states, whereas for a shaman the experience of the mystical is essential and no belief system is taught.8 In the anthropologist Michael Winkelman’s cross-cultural study of religious practitioners, priests were often leaders in societies with political integration and a hierarchical social structure that relied heavily on agriculture.9 The archaeologist Brian Hayden traces the drift back to complex, unequal hunter-gatherer societies, where shamans began to specialise and form hierarchies of their own and their ecstatic role was bent to the political aims of the families who sponsored them; in his reading the trend ends in priests who follow their books with no concern for ecstatic experience or spirit travel.10
In Therapeutic Shamanism the difference is not only one of method. The relationship between priest and parishioner is one of the many relationships of power-over that a hierarchical society is made of, alongside teacher and pupil, boss and worker, politician and public.11 See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
How is a shaman different from a medium? #
Above all in how each relates to the dead. Shamanism and mediumship both accept that the souls of the dead are real. A medium seeks to converse with them, and may even let them speak through their own body as a channel; a shaman makes sure the dead move on and leave the living alone, and never takes them on as guides and teachers.12 See Is mediumship healthy, from a shamanic point of view?
The anthropology shows a second difference, in the kind of trance and the kind of society. Michael Winkelman found that shamans, whose trance takes the form of a soul journey, belong mainly to hunter-gatherer and pastoral societies, where they were usually men of high standing who were thought to control their spirits. Mediums, whose trance takes the form of possession, are found mostly in agricultural societies with political integration beyond the local community; they were predominantly women of low social status, and were thought to act under compulsion from the possessing spirit.13
Christina Pratt sees it differently. For her, shamans and mediums can both be masters of a controlled possession trance, and the difference is that the shaman also takes action in the spirit world, so a shaman may sometimes work as a medium, though mediumship alone does not make anyone a shaman.14 Therapeutic Shamanism follows Winkelman’s reading. Hunter-gatherer societies generally did not experience possession, which is found mainly in agricultural and hierarchical ones, so any possession, helpful or not, is read as a sign of that kind of culture; hunter-gatherer shamans worked with their guides but were rarely, if ever, possessed by them.15 See What is possession, and what is de-possession?
What is a medicine person? #
‘Medicine man’, and the more even-handed ‘medicine person’, are English names given to the healers of indigenous peoples, especially in North America. Christina Pratt points out that the label hides the many different kinds of healer these peoples had, and that healers were just as often women as men. The words ‘medicine man’ and ‘shaman’ have come to be used interchangeably, which spreads confusion. In European writing ‘shaman’ has tended to mean someone who works through mastery of altered states, and ‘medicine man’ someone who heals without them. On that usage most shamans are medicine people, but not all medicine people are shamans.16 Many shamanic cultures also had healers who worked with herbs, massage and other physical methods alongside the shaman, without being shamans themselves.17 Among Native American nations, two-spirit people, whose place was a matter of gender rather than sexual orientation, held roles that included doctors and medicine people.18 See How do gender and sexuality figure in shamanism?
Therapeutic Shamanism does not borrow the titles of any one tradition. It was built as a set of underlying principles rather than with a Celtic, Norse or other cultural flavour, so that people can adapt it to the land and culture they live in.19 Where it speaks of medicine, it means the healing gifts and teaching of the Animal, Plant and Stone People. See What is the medicine bundle?
What about witch doctors and sorcerers? #
‘Witch doctor’ is a somewhat pejorative term, usually misapplied to a sorcerer; in its proper sense, as among some African peoples, it means someone who can doctor the harmful effects of witchcraft.20 A sorcerer works between the worlds as a shaman does, but for personal power and personal aims, and a shaman who turns their skills to harm has crossed into sorcery. Shamanism can certainly be used to do harm, and it is not hard to learn. But it comes at a cost, because it means working with corrupt middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer beings, whose power and knowledge are, in the end, severely limited.21 Winkelman also found that when communities with shamans were drawn into larger, more complex societies, practitioners of the dominant religion often labelled the shamans as witches to discredit them.22 See What is sorcery, and are there ‘dark’ shamans? and Why have shamans been persecuted, and what happened to shamanism under states and world religions?
Is a shamanic practitioner today a shaman? #
Not in the sense Therapeutic Shamanism gives the word. ‘Shaman’ is kept for people in indigenous cultures who were trained from early life and lived the role within a culture that supported it, a title bestowed by the community and never claimed. Modern Western people who practise shamanism are shamanic practitioners, in the same way that anyone can practise Buddhism without being a buddha.23 See What is shamanism? and What is Therapeutic Shamanism?
