# Shamanism · The Canon · The Atlas · The Congregation of Tomorrow

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The Canon · No. 002
Shamanism
Ecstatic specialist tradition
c.30,000 BCE – present · Indigenous / Folk · Living · Siberia and Central Asia originally; cognate forms worldwide
I. BEFORE HISTORY — c.100,000 – 3000 BCE
### How many
### Who began it
### What it is for
### What it worships
### What it holds
### What it does
### After death
### Its texts
### Its branches
### Of note
### Its timeline
- c.26,000 years ago Burial of a woman with ochre and animal remains at Dolni Vestonice, Moravia, often read as a possible ritual specialist.
- c.12,000 years ago The Natufian burial at Hilazon Tachtit, Israel: an elderly, disabled woman buried with 50 complete tortoise shells, parts of an eagle, a wild boar, a cow, two martens, a leopard pelvis and a human foot. The excavators identify it as one of the earliest known shaman burials.
- c.1650 CE Russian expansion into Siberia; the Evenki word enters European languages.
- 1930s–1980s Soviet suppression. Shamans were classed as exploiters, imprisoned, killed, or in some accounts thrown from helicopters to test whether they could fly.
- 1951 Eliade publishes the synthesis that fixes the global category.
- 1990s–present Post-Soviet revival in Buryatia, Tuva and Mongolia; simultaneously a Western neoshamanism emerges via Michael Harner, widely criticised by indigenous practitioners as extraction.
### Sources
Verified 2026-09-13, against these.
- PNAS, a 12,000-year-old shaman burial from the southern Levant (2008)
- ScienceDaily summary of the Hilazon Tachtit find
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