There is no such thing as “shamanism” in the singular. The word itself is borrowed — it comes from the Tungus šaman of Siberia — and it was later stretched by anthropologists to cover hundreds of unrelated practices that grew up independently on every inhabited continent. What we actually have is many traditions, each rooted in a specific land, language and people, that happen to share a recognisable shape: a person who can shift their state of consciousness deliberately, travel in spirit to help their community, and come back with something useful.
I write this as someone trained primarily in the Western, cross-cultural stream of this work, who has spent more than two decades practising and teaching it — and who has learned to be careful. This page is a map of the world’s living shamanic traditions: what makes each one distinct, what genuinely runs through all of them, and — just as importantly — how to learn from them without helping yourself to what was never offered. If you are trying to understand where the practices you have read about actually come from, this is the place to start.
What Every Shamanic Tradition Shares
Before the differences, the common thread — because it is remarkable that people who never met arrived at such similar practices. Across the traditions below, a handful of features recur so consistently that the anthropologist Michael Harner called them the “core” of shamanism.
- A deliberate shift of consciousness. Drumming, rattling, chanting, dancing, fasting or sacred plants — the method varies, but the aim is the same: to enter, on purpose and then leave again, a state in which the spirit world becomes accessible.
- A layered cosmos and the journey through it. An upper, middle and lower world, often joined by a world tree or central axis, which the practitioner travels to seek help.
- Helping spirits. Power animals, ancestors, plant spirits or deities who guide, protect and lend their power to the work.
- Service to a community. The shaman does not journey for entertainment or self-improvement alone. The purpose is healing, guidance, and keeping the balance between people, land and spirit.
Hold these in mind as we travel, because it is precisely against this shared skeleton that the real character of each tradition stands out.
Siberian Shamanism: The Oldest Root
Siberia is where the word itself comes from, and among peoples such as the Evenki, Buryat, Yakut and Tuvan the tradition is old enough to have shaped how the rest of the world imagines a shaman at all: the drum, the antlered or mirrored costume, the trance that carries the practitioner up the world tree or down into the earth. Here the drum is often understood as the shaman’s horse or boat — the vehicle that carries them across the boundary. The work centres on healing, divination, and guiding the souls of the dead so they do not linger among the living. Suppressed brutally under Soviet rule, Siberian and neighbouring Central Asian shamanism has undergone a real revival since the 1990s.
Mongolian and Tuvan lineages
Across the steppes and mountains of Mongolia and Tuva, closely related traditions endure, practised by the böö in Mongolia and the kam in Tuva. They are known for elaborate costumes hung with mirrors and iron, for shamanic drumming, and — in Tuva especially — for the extraordinary art of throat singing, used to mirror and answer the sounds of the living landscape. Here the spirits are read in every mountain, spring and wind, and the shaman’s role is to keep the community in right relationship with them.
Amazonian Shamanism: The Intelligence of the Forest
The Amazon basin holds hundreds of distinct peoples — the Shipibo, Asháninka, Yanomami and many more — united by a worldview in which the forest itself is alive, intelligent and full of spirits. The healer, often called a curandero or vegetalista, works through an intimate knowledge of plants and their spirits. Much of this tradition is carried by song: the icaros, the sacred melodies that a shaman uses to call in spirits, guide a ceremony, and direct healing. In many lineages the plant brew ayahuasca is used ceremonially to open visionary states — always within a demanding framework of diet, training and preparation that outsiders routinely underestimate. The heart of Amazonian shamanism is relationship: the plants are not tools but teachers, and the knowledge belongs to them.
Andean Shamanism: Reciprocity with the Living Earth
High in the Andes — Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador — a tradition older than the Inca survives in the work of the paqos. Its central principle is ayni, sacred reciprocity: nothing is simply taken, everything must be given back. The earth herself, Pachamama, and the mountain spirits, the Apus, are living beings to be fed and thanked. This is done through the despacho, an intricate offering of coca leaves, seeds, sweets and symbolic objects, bundled and given to the land in gratitude and request. Andean practice absorbed a layer of Catholicism over the centuries without losing its indigenous core, and its deepest teaching is one the modern world badly needs: that a relationship with the living world only sustains you if you sustain it back.
Native American Traditions: Many Nations, Not One
There is no single “Native American shamanism.” The Diné (Navajo), Lakota, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and hundreds of other nations each hold their own distinct ceremonies, cosmologies and healing ways, and many carry them privately for good reason — centuries of suppression, and more recent decades of commercial exploitation, have made discretion a form of survival. What can be said respectfully from outside is that these traditions share a profound reverence for the land as a web of related persons, human and other-than-human, and that the medicine person’s role is woven into the whole life of the community. The specifics belong to those nations to share, or not.
African Traditions: The Ancestors at the Centre
Africa’s spiritual traditions are as varied as its languages and landscapes, and “shamanism” is an imperfect umbrella for them. What recurs across many of them is the central place of the ancestors — the dead remain part of the living community, and keeping right relationship with them through offering and ritual is essential to health and fortune. In Southern Africa the sangoma is called to the work through a recognised illness of initiation and trained rigorously in divination, herbal medicine and communication with the ancestors; in West Africa the dibia and others hold related roles. Spirit and community are inseparable here: healing an individual almost always means healing a relationship — with family, with the dead, with the moral order of the group.
Korean Muism: The Ecstatic Ritual
Korea’s indigenous tradition, Muism, is among the most visibly dramatic. Its practitioners — the mudang, usually women — are called through shinbyeong, a spiritual sickness that only lifts once the calling is accepted. The central rite is the kut: a vivid ceremony of music, drumming, dance and colour in which the mudang becomes a vessel for gods and ancestors, speaking and acting as them to deliver messages, blessings and healing. Suppressed and stigmatised during Korea’s rapid modernisation, Muism is now increasingly recognised as a living part of Korean cultural heritage.
Celtic and Northern European Paths: Reconstruction with Honesty
Here honesty matters most. The pre-Christian shamanic practices of the Celtic and Norse worlds were largely undocumented and then broken by Roman and Christian conquest, so what is practised today as “Celtic shamanism” is a careful reconstruction drawn from surviving myth, folklore, tree lore and the Ogham, rather than an unbroken lineage. That does not make it worthless — for many people of European descent it is the most honest path available, a way of reconnecting with their own ancestral land instead of borrowing someone else’s. But it should be named for what it is: a modern practice, respectfully rebuilt, working with the Wheel of the Year, the Otherworld, and the spirits of trees, wells and hills.
Core Shamanism: The Cross-Cultural Bridge
In the late twentieth century the anthropologist Michael Harner, after fieldwork in the Amazon and elsewhere, distilled the techniques that appeared almost everywhere — journeying to the beat of a drum, meeting power animals, extraction and soul work — into a system he called Core Shamanism, deliberately stripped of any single culture’s specific ceremonies. It is the stream most Western practitioners, including me, are trained in, and its great virtue is exactly its restraint: it lets people practise the universal methods without dressing up in — or selling — the sacred regalia of a living culture they do not belong to. Its risk is that, cut loose from any community, it can drift into pure self-development. Practised well, it keeps the service at the centre.
The Shadow: Appropriation, Safety and Doing This Honestly
No honest guide to these traditions can skip the hard part. The global fascination with shamanism has a real shadow, and it is worth naming plainly.
- Appropriation is not a technicality. Selling ceremonies, titles or sacred objects lifted from living indigenous cultures — especially ones still fighting for survival — causes real harm. The respectful path is to learn the universal methods, work with your own ancestral traditions where you can, and treat closed ceremonies as closed unless you are genuinely invited in by the people to whom they belong.
- Plant medicines are not adventures. The explosion of commercial ayahuasca and other plant-medicine tourism has produced real injuries, and worse, largely because the demanding cultural container that keeps the work safe is stripped away. These are powerful traditions with strict frameworks for a reason.
- Spiritual work is not a substitute for care. Shamanic practice can sit alongside medical and psychological treatment, but it does not replace it. Anyone promising that it does is someone to walk away from.
- Discernment about teachers. Grandiose claims, exorbitant fees, borrowed indigenous credentials and pressure are all warning signs. The genuine article, in every tradition, is marked by humility, service and accountability to a community.
Where to Begin, Honestly
If reading this has left you drawn to one tradition in particular, that pull is worth taking seriously — but the honest first step is almost never to fly somewhere and buy a ceremony. It is to learn the universal foundation and see what it opens in you.
- Understand what the work actually is before you do it. Read what shamanism is and how it differs from religion and from therapy.
- Learn the one universal technique. The shamanic journey is the doorway that nearly every tradition shares, and it can be practised safely and respectfully from anywhere. Begin with the beginner’s guide to shamanic journeying.
- Meet your own helping spirits. Rather than borrowing another culture’s sacred beings, let your own power animals find you. This is the part of the work that belongs to everyone.
- Go toward your own roots first. If a European path calls you, look at your ancestral traditions before reaching for someone else’s. It is usually both more honest and more powerful.
Shamanic Traditions: Questions People Actually Ask
What are the main types of shamanism around the world?
The best-known living traditions include Siberian and Mongolian/Tuvan shamanism, Amazonian plant-based traditions, Andean shamanism, the many distinct Native American nations’ ceremonies, various African ancestor traditions, Korean Muism, and reconstructed Celtic and Northern European paths. Core Shamanism is a modern, cross-cultural system that distils the techniques common to all of them.
Which shamanic tradition is the oldest?
Siberian shamanism is often called the oldest documented form, and the word “shaman” itself comes from the Tungusic peoples of Siberia. In truth, shamanic practices arose independently across the world in the Paleolithic, so no single tradition is the one true origin — Siberia simply gave the phenomenon its name.
What do all shamanic traditions have in common?
Four things recur almost everywhere: a deliberate, reversible shift of consciousness; a layered cosmos travelled by the “journey”; relationships with helping spirits such as power animals and ancestors; and a purpose of healing and service to a community rather than personal experience for its own sake.
Can I practise shamanism if it is not part of my culture?
Yes — the universal techniques, such as journeying and working with power animals, are available to anyone, and Core Shamanism was developed precisely so people could practise them without appropriating a specific culture. The line to respect is closed, culturally specific ceremonies and sacred objects, which belong to the peoples who hold them unless you are genuinely invited in.
Is shamanism a religion?
No. Shamanism is a set of practices and a way of relating to the spirit world, not a doctrine or an institution, and it has coexisted with many religions throughout history. It is experiential rather than belief-based — its authority comes from direct encounter rather than scripture.
Seen together, the world’s shamanic traditions are not one practice with local costumes. They are many distinct answers, grown from many different lands, to the same human questions: how do we heal, how do we stay in right relationship with the living world, and how do we find our way when the ordinary map runs out. The respectful path is not to collect them, but to learn honestly from the one that is genuinely yours to walk.
