Shamans and shamanism: the world's oldest spiritual role
One borrowed word for one of humanity's oldest roles — and a modern weekend-workshop version that is not the same thing.
5 min read · Published 16 August 2026
The short answer
A shaman is a specialist who deliberately enters an altered state of consciousness — a trance — to interact with a spirit world on behalf of their community, for healing, divination and guidance. The word itself comes from the Tungus-speaking peoples of Siberia and was broadened by anthropologists into a general label for a role found across the world, from Siberia and Mongolia to the Amazon and Korea. It is plausibly the oldest spiritual vocation humans have. The trance states are real and have real neurological causes; the literal claim — that the shaman travels to another world and returns with lost souls — is unevidenced. And the 'find your spirit animal' workshop version sold in the West is a recent, decontextualised offshoot, not the tradition itself. AsterNym practises none of this and treats it as anthropology.
Where the word comes from
'Shaman' is not a universal native term. It comes from the Evenki and related Tungus peoples of Siberia — šamán, roughly 'one who knows' — and was carried into European languages by Russian observers, then generalised by scholars, above all Mircea Eliade in his 1951 book *Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy*, into a name for a whole class of practitioner.
That generalisation is useful and also a little violent. Calling a Korean mudang, an Amazonian curandero and a Siberian spirit-worker all 'shamans' groups traditions that are genuinely distinct and that mostly did not think of themselves as one thing. Many Indigenous communities dislike the outside label, and it is worth remembering that the tidy category is an anthropologist's, not the practitioners'.
What a shaman is understood to do
The role is broad but recognisable across cultures. The shaman is the person who can cross into the spirit world and come back: to diagnose and cure illness understood as spiritual in origin, to recover a soul believed lost or stolen, to divine the cause of misfortune, to guide the dead, to find game or foretell weather, and to mediate between the community and the unseen powers around it.
Crucially, this is a service role, performed for others and often reluctantly assumed — many traditions describe the calling as arriving through illness or crisis rather than being chosen. It is closer to a demanding public office than to a hobby, which is one of the sharpest differences from its modern Western imitation.
The trance is real; the destination is the question
The altered state at the centre of shamanism is not imaginary. It is reliably induced by well-understood means — rhythmic drumming (often around the four-to-seven-beats-per-second range that entrains brain activity), dancing to exhaustion, fasting, sleeplessness, sensory deprivation, and in some traditions powerful psychoactive plants such as ayahuasca or certain mushrooms. These genuinely alter consciousness, producing vivid visions and a sense of journeying.
So the experience is real, and often profound. What is not established is the interpretation laid over it — that the visions are a literal voyage to another realm, and that the shaman returns carrying something retrieved from it. The honest split is the same one that runs through this whole subject: the state of mind is real; the spirit world it is said to reach is a claim, not a finding.
Core shamanism: the Western remix
Most people in Europe and North America meet shamanism through 'core shamanism', a system assembled by the anthropologist Michael Harner in the 1980s (*The Way of the Shaman*). Harner stripped what he saw as the common techniques — especially drumming-induced journeying — out of their specific cultures and packaged them as a universal, teachable method: anyone can drum, journey, and meet a 'power animal'.
It is sincere and, for many, meaningful, but it is a modern invention, and it raises real questions of cultural appropriation — lifting practices from living Indigenous traditions, detaching them from the communities and cosmologies that give them meaning, and reselling them. The 'spirit animal' of internet shorthand descends from this, not from any single native tradition.
How to hold it honestly
Shamanism deserves genuine respect: it is ancient, near-universal, and central to how countless communities have understood healing and the world. Its trance techniques are real and are now even being studied — the clinical research into psychedelics is, in part, science catching up with something shamans have used for millennia.
None of that establishes the metaphysics. There is no evidence that anyone travels to a spirit world or retrieves a soul, and the benefits that are real — altered states, ritual, community, meaning, and the direct effects of any plants involved — do not require the literal claim to be true. Respect the traditions and the practitioners; hold the supernatural account as unproven; and treat the weekend-workshop version as the recent, commercial thing it is.
Common questions
- What is a shaman?
- A specialist who deliberately enters a trance to interact with a spirit world on behalf of their community — for healing, divining the cause of misfortune, recovering souls, guiding the dead and mediating with unseen powers. The word comes from the Tungus peoples of Siberia and was generalised by anthropologists into a cross-cultural label.
- Is shamanism a real thing or made up?
- The role is real and ancient, found across many cultures, and the trance states at its centre are genuine and have known causes — drumming, fasting, sensory deprivation, psychoactive plants. What is unproven is the interpretation: that the shaman literally travels to another world and brings something back. The experience is real; the destination is a claim.
- What is core shamanism?
- A system assembled by anthropologist Michael Harner in the 1980s that extracts techniques like drumming-induced 'journeying' from specific cultures and teaches them as a universal method. It is the source of the modern 'spirit animal' idea, and it is a recent Western invention rather than a traditional practice, raising real questions of cultural appropriation.
- Do shamans actually contact spirits?
- There is no evidence that they contact a literal spirit world or retrieve lost souls. The trance is real and often profound, and the benefits — ritual, community, meaning, and the direct effects of any plants used — are real too, but none of them require the supernatural interpretation to be true.