Shamanism is humanity’s oldest known spiritual practice: a set of techniques for entering an altered state of consciousness, travelling in spirit, and returning with healing or guidance for the community. The word itself comes from the Tungus-speaking peoples of Siberia, where šaman meant something close to “one who knows”. The practice, though, is far older than the word, and far wider than the region that named it.
What follows is a short, honest history. Not a romantic one. Shamanism has been revered, outlawed, misunderstood, sold and reclaimed, and every one of those chapters shaped what lands in your hands today when you sit down with a drum.
How old is shamanism?
Archaeologists date shamanic practice to at least the Upper Palaeolithic, roughly 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. There is no way to be certain, because trance leaves no fossil. What we have instead are traces that point in one direction.
- Cave art. The painted caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in France include human-animal figures, often called therianthropes, that resemble the way practitioners across cultures describe merging with an animal spirit.
- Burials. A 12,000 year old grave at Hilazon Tachtit in Israel held an older woman buried with tortoise shells, an eagle wing, a leopard pelvis and a human foot. Researchers read it as one of the earliest identified shaman burials.
- Instruments. Bone flutes and frame drums appear early and widely, and rhythmic sound remains the single most common doorway into shamanic trance today.
None of this proves a continuous tradition. What it suggests is something quieter and more interesting: that human beings have been reaching toward the spirit world with rhythm and animal allies for as long as we have been recognisably human.
Where does the word “shaman” come from?
The word entered European languages from the Evenki people of Siberia in the late seventeenth century, carried west by Russian explorers and exiles. Evenki šaman likely derives from a root meaning to know. Early European accounts described what they saw as devilry or theatre. Almost none of them asked the practitioners what they thought they were doing.
That matters, because the word arrived in the West already wrapped in someone else’s judgement. If you want the longer version of that story, I wrote about it in what the word shaman actually means.
The main chapters of shamanic history at a glance
| Period | What was happening | What it left behind |
|---|---|---|
| c. 40,000 to 10,000 BCE | Palaeolithic cave art, animal-human figures, early ritual burials | The oldest visual evidence of trance and animal allies |
| c. 10,000 BCE to 1500 CE | Shamanic practice woven into daily life across Siberia, Central Asia, the Americas, Africa, Northern Europe, Australia and the Arctic | Distinct local traditions: Sami noaidi, Mongolian böö, Amazonian vegetalismo, Korean mudang |
| 1500 to 1900 | Colonisation, missionary campaigns and criminalisation. Drums burned, practitioners persecuted | Massive loss of lineage, plus practice driven underground and preserved in secret |
| 1920 to 1970 | Soviet suppression in Siberia and Mongolia. Anthropology begins documenting what remains. Mircea Eliade publishes his study of shamanism in 1951 | A written record, and a first framing of shamanism as one worldwide phenomenon |
| 1980 to today | Michael Harner’s core shamanism, the Western revival, and a parallel revival of Indigenous practice in post-Soviet Siberia and Mongolia | Accessible training for outsiders, and an ongoing debate about respect, ownership and appropriation |
Was shamanism really practised everywhere?
Almost. Practices that fit the shamanic pattern, a specialist who enters trance, travels in spirit and returns with help, have been documented on every inhabited continent. What differs is everything else: the cosmology, the plants, the songs, the etiquette, the role in the community.
The Sami of Northern Scandinavia had the noaidi and the runebomme, a painted drum that was systematically confiscated and burned during Christianisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Mongolian böö tradition survived Soviet persecution largely in secret and has re-emerged strongly since 1990. In Korea, the mudang, mostly women, have carried a ritual tradition through Confucian disapproval, Japanese occupation and modernisation, and their paintings are now protected cultural heritage. In the Amazon, plant-based traditions developed a pharmacology and a diagnostic sophistication that Western medicine is only beginning to study seriously.
Calling all of this “shamanism” is a Western convenience. It is useful for seeing the pattern. It becomes a problem the moment it flattens the differences. You can read more about the living lineages in the traditions section of this site.
What happened to shamanism under colonisation?
It was criminalised, and in many places nearly destroyed. This is the chapter that gets skipped in gentle introductions, and it should not be.
Missionaries in Sápmi burned drums and executed practitioners. The United States banned Native religious ceremony in practice from the 1880s until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. Soviet authorities in Siberia and Mongolia arrested, deported and killed shamans through the 1930s, in some regions almost completely. Where a tradition passes from person to person rather than through books, one broken generation can end a lineage that took a thousand years to form.
What survived, survived quietly. In family kitchens. In songs sung to children. In healers who called themselves something else. When you hear that a tradition has been “revived”, it is worth remembering the cost of the interruption.
How did shamanism reach the modern West?
Through two doors: anthropology and the counterculture. Mircea Eliade’s 1951 study gave the West a single framework for practices across dozens of cultures. Then in the 1960s and 1970s, anthropologist Michael Harner, who had done fieldwork with the Shuar and Conibo in South America, distilled what he saw as the shared techniques into a teachable method he called core shamanism: the drumbeat, the journey, the lower and upper worlds, the power animal.
Core shamanism made the practice available to people with no cultural lineage of their own. That is its gift and its controversy in the same breath. Stripped of a specific culture, the method travels. Stripped of a specific culture, it also loses the accountability, the community and the ethics that held it in place.
My own view, after years of practice and teaching: the techniques are genuinely universal, the traditions are absolutely not. You can learn to journey without claiming a heritage that is not yours. What is required is that you name where a practice came from, that you do not sell what was given freely, and that you stay a student longer than feels comfortable.
Where does shamanism stand today?
In two places at once. In Siberia, Mongolia, Korea and across the Americas, Indigenous practitioners are rebuilding what was taken, often with state recognition that would have been unthinkable fifty years ago. In Europe and North America, a parallel practice has grown up around drum circles, training courses and one-to-one healing work, drawing on core shamanism and on whatever local traditions can still be traced.
The two are not the same thing, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. What they share is the finding that a drumbeat at roughly four to seven beats per second reliably shifts consciousness in a human being, and that this shift is useful. That was true 30,000 years ago in a cave. It is true tonight on your living room floor.
If you want a sense of where you personally might begin with all of this, the short questionnaire at Find Your Path gives you three concrete next steps in a sensible order, and you can always start with the free ones. Everything else on this site lives at One Shamanism.
Frequently asked questions
Is shamanism a religion?
No. Shamanism is a set of techniques, not a belief system with doctrine, scripture or a founder. It has been practised inside Buddhist, Christian, animist and entirely secular contexts. Two shamans from different cultures may hold completely different beliefs about the nature of the spirit world and still use recognisably similar methods to reach it.
Who was the first shaman?
There is no first shaman, and no origin point we can name. The practice appears to have emerged independently in many places rather than spreading from a single source. The oldest individual we can plausibly identify is the woman buried at Hilazon Tachtit around 10,000 BCE, and she was almost certainly not the first of her kind.
Is core shamanism authentic?
It is an authentic modern method, not an authentic ancient tradition, and it is clearer to call it that. Core shamanism works: people journey, meet guides and experience real change. What it is not is the inherited practice of any specific people. Treating it as a starting point rather than a finished lineage keeps you honest.
Can shamanism be practised outside its culture of origin?
The techniques, yes. The closed ceremonies of a living people, no, unless you have been invited and trained by that people. The practical test is simple: are you learning a skill, or are you wearing someone’s identity? Journeying with a drum is a skill. Selling a ceremony you were never given is not.
Why was shamanism suppressed for so long?
Because it placed spiritual authority in an individual who answered to the spirits and to their community rather than to a church or a state. Missionary churches saw a rival. Colonial and Soviet administrations saw an organiser with influence they could not control. Suppression was rarely about theology alone.
What is the difference between a shaman and a shamanic practitioner?
A shaman holds a role inside a community that recognises and names them as such, usually after long initiation. A shamanic practitioner uses shamanic methods without claiming that title or that lineage. Most people working in Europe and North America today are practitioners, and saying so plainly is a mark of integrity rather than a lack of skill.
