Shamanism comes from everywhere: as far as is known, every hunter-gatherer people in human history practised it, so it belongs to no single culture and is the inheritance of all humans. The word itself comes from the Tungusic peoples of Siberia, but the practice is far older than any word for it, probably as old as our species.
Where does the word ‘shaman’ come from? #
From Siberia. The English word comes from the Tungusic-speaking peoples of the Siberia and Mongolia region, usually traced to the Evenki, and it entered English in the 1600s. It was first used of the spiritual practices of Siberian and Mongolian peoples and was then applied to similar practices in Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Americas, as anthropologists gradually realised how widespread and alike they were.1 Every shamanic people would have had its own word; in England, the original one “has long been lost”.
In Therapeutic Shamanism the word is used in its broad modern sense, for any practical application of animism. The role behind the word fits in one line: a shaman is “someone who can see in the dark and see the things that other people cannot, or will not, see.”2 Out of respect, the title ‘shaman’ is kept for people in indigenous cultures who were given it by their community, and a Westerner who takes up the practice is a shamanic practitioner (see What is shamanism?).
Where is shamanism from? #
Everywhere. Beginners often assume it comes from one region, such as Siberia, the Amazon or North America, but “as far as we know there has not been a single hunter-gatherer tribe in the history of the human race that did not practise shamanism”. Europe had its own shamanic cultures too. All of our distant ancestors were animist hunter-gatherers, and so shamanism as a whole cannot be claimed by any one people; it is “the birth right of all human beings”.3
The anthropologist Michael Harner, studying shamanic cultures across the world, found that beneath their very different cultural dress lay a common core: “you could take a shaman from anywhere in the world, say from the Amazon basin, and sit them down with a shaman from Siberia and … they would describe incredibly similar shamanic practices and beliefs.” Harner taught that common core as core shamanism, which Therapeutic Shamanism builds on (see How is Therapeutic Shamanism different from traditional and core shamanism?).
Was shamanism a specialist practice? #
Not originally. In hunter-gatherer tribes there was nobody who was not shamanic, because shamanism was simply how people experienced and related to a living world; the shaman was “the person who was better at it than other people”. “Shamanism is, or was, our natural state. For our human ancestors, it is what it was to be truly human.” It was not a religion that people chose to follow but “literally a way of being”.4
How old is shamanism? #
Very old, though exactly how old depends on how it is defined. Cave paintings in Europe from around 33,000 BCE “are generally thought to depict shamanic practices”, which would make shamanism at least 35,000 years old, and older finds at Blombos Cave in South Africa may take it further back, though the shamanic reading of such finds is debated.5 Indigenous peoples give a simpler answer: “we have been practising shamanism for as long as we have been human.” That would make it as old as our species, some two to three hundred thousand years. Pre-Fallen shamanism is the kind “that we practised for tens of thousands, probably even hundreds of thousands, of years.” The same goes for animism, the ground shamanism grows from. Its age cannot be known for certain, only estimated from the best evidence available. As far as is known, every hunter-gatherer culture ever encountered or recorded has been animist, and hunter-gatherer life changed little over tens of thousands of years, so animism is almost certainly tens of thousands of years old, and probably hundreds of thousands. Asking when it began may even be the wrong question, because animism is less a belief system than the human way of being, and for an immense stretch of time, possibly always, it was simply how it was to be human. (See also What is shamanism? and What is shamanic art, and what does rock art tell us?)
How did shamanism change with farming and the Fall? #
The break from the animist way of life 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, as people began to farm and herd in the Neolithic, from around 11,000 to 10,000 BCE. It accelerated with what Therapeutic Shamanism calls 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 BCE (see What is the Fall?). As societies became settled and hierarchical, shamanism either died out or changed, and three kinds emerged. Pre-Fallen shamanism “is shamanism that is entirely free of Taker cult thinking. It is Leaver cultureLeaver culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the animist tribal peoples, hunter-gatherers above all, who took only as much as they needed and left the rest, living in reciprocal right-relationship for the vast majority of human history. Read the full answer shamanism.” Fallen shamanism survived contact with Taker thinking but was changed by it, bringing in things like animal sacrifice and possession: “Possession is a symptom of the Taker cult.” Post-Fallen shamanism, which is only now emerging, helps people recognise Taker thinking and heal from it.6
Taker cultures were often openly hostile to shamans. The new culture “ruthlessly and systematically would wipe out shamans whenever it came across them”, and in the West “we have mostly killed our shamans”.7
Are today’s shamanic cultures a window on original shamanism? #
Only partly. “Virtually all existing shamanic societies are agricultural. Genuine hunter-gatherer shamanic cultures have all but gone.” Those societies inevitably practise a different kind of shamanism from that of their hunter-gatherer ancestors, and practising shamanism or animism “does not necessarily mean that it is free of Taker thinking”.8
This is no criticism of present-day animist peoples. “We owe a truly incalculable debt to them for keeping shamanic and animist knowledge and practices alive” through the dark times of domestication and the Fall. It is why Therapeutic Shamanism looks past any one surviving culture to the principles of hunter-gatherer shamanism, and translates them for the present.
Is Therapeutic Shamanism mainly ritual-based? #
No. “Shamanism is the direct, personal experience of Spirit”, and it needs no temples, priests or sacred books.9 Some approaches to shamanism are heavily ritual-based, but in Therapeutic Shamanism ritual plays a small part. Paul Francis’s own practice is not very ritual-based: he does not do a lot of ritual work, and the little he does he tends to keep quite simple.10 Where a short ritual is used, such as preparing before a journey, its purpose is practical, to help move awareness out of ordinary consciousness and into the journeying state, not to be honoured for its own sake. Nor does the practice borrow any particular culture’s ceremonies or regalia; it is kept as ‘culture-lite’ as possible.
