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
Not counted separately. Practised inside Tengrism, Korean Muism, Mongolian and Siberian folk religion, Amazonian and circumpolar traditions.
Who began it
No founder. The word is Tungusic — saman, from the Evenki people of Siberia — carried into Russian by 17th-century explorers and generalised by Western scholars into a category it may be too broad for. MIRCEA ELIADE's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951) built the global model; specialists now warn it flattened very different traditions together.
What it is for
To supply a technician for crises that ordinary ritual cannot fix. Sickness whose cause is hidden, game that has vanished, souls that have wandered off, the dead who will not settle.
What it worships
Spirits rather than gods: helper spirits, animal familiars, masters of game, hostile spirits of illness. The shaman does not primarily worship them; he bargains, fights, seduces and outwits them.
What it holds
The cosmos has three levels — upper, middle and lower — joined by a world tree, pole or river. The soul is detachable, and most illness is either soul-loss (a piece has gone missing) or intrusion (something has got in). The shaman's own soul can travel to retrieve or expel.
What it does
Initiation by ordeal, typically an involuntary sickness or crisis in which the candidate experiences being dismembered and reassembled with new parts. Trance induced by drumming (often a monotonous 4-to-7 beats per second), dancing, fasting, cold, or plant substances such as fly agaric, ayahuasca or tobacco. Costume with iron pendants, antlers, mirrors and bones. Public performance is essential — the community must witness the journey.
After death
The shaman guides the dead to the land of the dead, a role called psychopomp. Ordinary afterlife follows the local animist pattern. The shaman's own death is treated specially, sometimes with elevated burial or exposure.
Its texts
Oral. Songs and spirit-summoning chants are the closest thing to scripture, and they are usually the shaman's personal property, received in vision rather than inherited.
Its branches
Siberian (Evenki, Buryat, Yakut); Mongolian; Korean Muism; Nepali Jhankri; Amazonian vegetalismo; circumpolar Inuit angakkuq; Sami noaidi.
Of note
The contested question is whether shamanism is one thing at all, or a Western container holding a hundred unrelated local offices. Use the word carefully.
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.