The word 'shaman' entered European languages from the Tungus people of Siberia via Russian explorers in the seventeenth century. The Tungus word 'saman' referred to a specific kind of practitioner — someone who could enter trance states at will, travel to non-ordinary realms of reality, and return with information or healing for the community. The term was subsequently applied by anthropologists to similar practitioners found in every indigenous culture on Earth: the sangoma of southern Africa, the mudang of Korea, the machi of the Mapuche people of Chile, the pajeú of Amazonian Brazil, the angakoq of the Inuit, the völva of Norse tradition, the druid of Celtic Ireland. Despite radical differences in language, culture, geography, and historical period, all of these practitioners share a constellation of features that Mircea Eliade, the Romanian historian of religions, identified as the defining characteristics of shamanism in his foundational 1951 work 'Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.' Eliade's definition has been debated, refined, and partially revised in the seven decades since, but it remains the starting point for any serious study of the phenomenon.
Eliade defined shamanism as a technique of ecstasy — from the Greek 'ekstasis,' literally 'standing outside (oneself).' The central and defining feature of the shaman, in Eliade's analysis, is the capacity for controlled ecstasy: the deliberate alteration of consciousness into a state in which the soul can leave the body and travel to other worlds, and from which the shaman returns voluntarily, with memory, with information, and with the capacity to act on what was received. This distinguishes the shaman from the ordinary person who experiences ecstasy involuntarily (in psychosis, fever, or accident), from the priest who mediates the divine through fixed ritual without personal journey, and from the mystic who seeks union with the divine but does not typically travel and return on behalf of others. The shaman is a technician of the sacred: someone who has learned, through initiation and practice, to operate in the intersection between ordinary and non-ordinary reality with skill and intentionality.
Across cultures, the shamanic vocation is not chosen — it chooses. The most common pathway into shamanism described in ethnographic literature is involuntary: a severe illness, a near-death experience, a crisis of mental health, an overwhelming vision, or an encounter with spirits that the individual did not seek and cannot ignore. Eliade called this the 'shamanic illness' — a period of physical or psychological extremity that serves as the initiatory crisis, the death and rebirth that qualifies the person for the shamanic role. Among the Siberian peoples, the shamanic illness could last years and was sometimes genuinely life-threatening. Among the Tungus, candidates who refused the call were said to die. Among the Mazatec of Oaxaca, María Sabina — the most documented mushroom curandera of the twentieth century — received her vocation through a visionary encounter with the spirit of mushrooms at age six, following the death of her father. Among the !Kung San of the Kalahari, the training begins in childhood with communal trance dances that expose the entire community to the n/om energy, and those in whom it 'boils' strongly are identified as potential healers.
The training that follows the initial calling is rigorous and prolonged. Among the Siberian Evenki, training with a master shaman lasted up to twelve years. The apprentice learned the geography of the upper, middle, and lower worlds; the names and characteristics of the spirits and power animals associated with each realm; the techniques of drumming, singing, and dance for inducing the journey state; the healing methods of soul retrieval and extraction; and the ethical responsibilities of someone who works at the boundary between worlds. The comparison to a medical residency is not inappropriate: the shaman is a specialist who has undergone years of supervised clinical training in the diagnosis and treatment of a specific category of illness — illness understood to have a spiritual as well as physical dimension. The hospital is the cosmos. The patients are the community. The symptoms are not merely physiological.