A book cannot teach you to journey. It can only tell you, honestly or not, what you will find when you do.
The best books on shamanism split into four honest categories: the academic foundations (Mircea Eliade, Michael Harner), regional ethnography written by people who actually did the fieldwork (Laurel Kendall, Luis Eduardo Luna with Pablo Amaringo), practical training manuals for beginners (Sandra Ingerman), and a small, necessary category of books that are widely read but should be read with real caution. This list is organised by what each book is actually for, not ranked by popularity.
“Books on shamanism” is one of the most competitive searches in this whole field, and most of the results are interchangeable top-ten round-ups with the same five titles reshuffled. I trained in this lineage, and I still go back to a handful of these books with my own students. What follows is that list, organised the way I actually think about it, not the way an algorithm would sort it.
| Category | Start with |
|---|---|
| Academic foundation | Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy |
| Regional ethnography | Laurel Kendall, Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits |
| Practical training | Sandra Ingerman, Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner’s Guide |
| Read with caution | Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books |
The two books that built the academic field.
Start here if you want to understand the territory before you ever pick up a drum.
Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951, English translation 1964). This is the book that gathered shamanic practices from across the globe into one comparative study and gave the field its academic vocabulary: ecstasy, the axis mundi, the techniques of trance. It is dense and dated in places, and later scholars have pushed back on some of Eliade’s generalisations, but every serious writer on this subject since is in some kind of conversation with this book, whether they admit it or not.
Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman (1980). Harner, an anthropologist who did fieldwork in the Amazon and Siberia, distilled the methods he saw repeating across unrelated cultures into what he called Core Shamanism, and wrote this book as a practical introduction for Western readers. It is the single most influential book in bringing shamanic journeying to people with no cultural lineage of their own, and it is the book behind the core shamanism I teach through this site.
Two ethnographies that took the time most writers skip.
These are the books to read once the overview no longer satisfies you, and you want to know what a specific living tradition actually looks like from the inside.
Laurel Kendall, Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life (1985). Kendall spent years with Korean mudang and wrote the clearest account available in English of how the role is actually lived, not performed for outsiders: the calling, the training, the domestic and social position of a woman who does this work. If you read my own page on Korean shamanism and want the full depth, this is where it comes from.
Luis Eduardo Luna and Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (1991). Luna, an anthropologist, worked closely with Amaringo, a Peruvian vegetalista and painter, to document the visionary cosmology of Amazonian ayahuasca practice through Amaringo’s own paintings and explanations. It is one of very few books where the practitioner’s own account sits right next to the image, rather than being translated and summarised at a distance.
The two books I actually hand to beginners.
Everything above is for understanding. These two are for doing.
Sandra Ingerman, Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self (1991). Ingerman trained with Michael Harner and became one of the clearest living teachers of soul retrieval, the practice of journeying to recover parts of a person that split off under shock or trauma. This book explains the theory and the method without either over-selling it as a cure-all or hiding behind jargon.
Sandra Ingerman, Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner’s Guide (2008). If someone asks me for one single book to start with, this is usually the one. It is short, practical, and walks a complete beginner through the actual mechanics of a first journey rather than circling the subject for two hundred pages before getting there.
One book worth reading, and reading carefully.
I would be dishonest if I left this off the list, because so many people have already read it before they find this page.
Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books, beginning with The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), introduced millions of readers to the idea of an indigenous sorcerer-teacher and shaped the popular Western image of shamanism more than almost anything else on this list. The honest caution: Castaneda presented these books as anthropological fact, and the consensus among anthropologists and former students is that they are substantially fiction, with the figure of Don Juan either invented or heavily embellished. They are worth reading as influential, well-written fiction and as a case study in how the West has imagined shamanism. They are not a reliable source on how any real tradition actually works.
Frequently asked questions about books on shamanism
Sandra Ingerman’s Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner’s Guide is the most practical starting point, since it walks you through the actual mechanics of a first journey rather than spending most of its pages on theory. Michael Harner’s The Way of the Shaman is the next step once you want the fuller framework.
No. His Don Juan books are widely regarded as substantially fictional despite being presented as anthropological fieldwork. They are worth reading as influential fiction, not as a factual account of any real tradition.
Eliade wrote a comparative academic survey of shamanic practices across cultures. Harner, writing decades later, distilled the practical methods common to many of those cultures into a teachable system, Core Shamanism, aimed at readers who wanted to learn the technique rather than only study it.
Yes. Laurel Kendall’s work on Korean shamanism and Luis Eduardo Luna and Pablo Amaringo’s book on Amazonian ayahuasca iconography are both grounded in years of direct fieldwork with specific living traditions rather than broad comparison.
Now it’s your turn.
Which of these have you already read, and did it match what you expected going in? And if there is a book that changed how you think about this practice that I have not listed here, I would genuinely like to know about it in the comments. If you have read your way through this list and want to try the practice itself next, the Elements of Shamanism training is the place I would point you.
About the author. Carolin Mallmann is a shamanic practitioner and teacher and the founder of One Shamanism. She trained in Mongolian and Siberian lineages and in Core Shamanism with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and teaches practitioners internationally.
Shamanic work supports, but does not replace, medical or psychological treatment.
