Between Worlds: A Short History of Shamanism and Its Enduring Conversation with “the Other”
Long before we carved scalpels or synthesized antibiotics, every culture on earth entrusted its deepest wounds—spiritual as well as physical—to one particular kind of healer. The Siberian Evenki called this figure the šaman; the Yakut spoke of an oiun; the Māori revered the tohunga; the Shipibo-Conibo of the Amazon still sing to the méraya. Whatever the local name, each of these specialists learned to slip beyond the visible world, negotiate with powers that dwell there, and return carrying medicines, stories, and renewed harmony for the people who awaited them around the fire.
A Global Tapestry of Ecstasy
When the historian of religions Mircea Eliade published Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy in 1951, he startled Western scholars by demonstrating how widespread—and how structurally similar—these practices are. From Inuit igloos to Tibetan plateaus, shamans undertake what Eliade called the “ecstatic journey”: a voluntary alteration of consciousness that allows the practitioner to ascend skywards, descend into underworlds, or traverse ancestral dream realms. Central to Eliade’s insight was the notion of a cosmic axis—a world-tree or sacred mountain—linking heaven, earth, and the deep below. The shaman climbs or flies along that axis, restoring circulation between planes whenever illness, grief, or communal imbalance has clogged the arteries of existence.
Eliade argued that this is not a relic of “primitive superstition” but an intricate technology of the sacred. It is as systematic as any medical tradition: drums supply rhythmic entrainment, fasting strips sensory noise, breathwork modulates CO₂ and pH, psychoactive plants shift neurochemistry, and mythic imagery maps altered states so the traveler does not lose their way. Where modern biomedicine treats the body as a machine, shamanism treats the cosmos itself as a body—one whose arteries, nerves, and memories can be palpated by ritual.
Healing as Cosmological Housekeeping
Because everything in the shamanic universe is alive, sickness is rarely framed as a random malfunction. Sometimes vital essence wanders off after trauma; other times an intrusive spirit settles in, or an ancestor’s grievance festers unacknowledged. The shaman’s task is diagnostic, diplomatic, and surgical all at once: locate the missing soul-fragment, persuade it to return, extract the intrusive presence, or broker peace between quarrelling forces. Healing songs transmit instructions to immune cells as well as to river spirits.
Anthropologists have often noted that the shaman’s real genius lies in narrative orchestration. During a night-long ceremony in the Amazon, an ayahuasquero’s icaros weave botanical knowledge, clan history, and dazzling visions into a single storyline that rewrites the patient’s internal script. High in the Altai Mountains, a Siberian kam might dramatize the client’s affliction by hammering a miniature iron spear into the patient’s chest, only to pull it out—physical proof that the invisible arrow of sorcery has been removed. Such theatre triggers a cascade of meaning, expectation, and autonomic regulation that Western placebo studies are only beginning to quantify.
Meeting “the Other” in Modern Therapy
If the classic shaman mediates between humans and spirits, contemporary psychotherapists increasingly find themselves negotiating a similar borderland—albeit with different cosmologies. Robert Falconer’s work with Internal Family Systems (IFS) explores “unattached burdens,” energies that present not as child parts of the psyche but as foreign voices or presences. Rather than banishing them, IFS invites respectful curiosity. When these presences feel seen, they often transform into wisdom-bearers or depart peacefully—remarkably close to a shamanic extraction ritual undertaken in the language of modern psychology.
Meanwhile, anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann has shown how disciplined imagination, sensory training, and social reinforcement make gods and spirits palpably real to charismatic Christians, Tibetan monks, and contemporary pagans alike. Her research suggests that the line between hallucination and holy encounter is not pathological but learned. A shaman is simply an expert at that learning, cultivating attentional skills that allow relationship with beings most of us ignore.
These convergences matter because they relocate shamanism from the museum into the clinic. Trauma therapy, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and somatic ritual are rediscovering what village healers always knew: affliction often resides as much in the story-space between self and cosmos as in flesh. Change that story with enough sensory conviction and physiology follows.
Renewal and Responsibility
The twenty-first-century revival of shamanic techniques—from neo-Siberian drumming circles to Amazonian ayahuasca tourism—carries both promise and peril. On the one hand, millions are tasting first-hand the integrative power of ecstatic states. On the other, extraction of Indigenous knowledge without reciprocity risks repeating colonial wounds. Genuine apprenticeship involves learning the language of the land you stand on, honoring its guardians, and letting local elders—not Instagram algorithms—decide how ceremonies are shared.
Eliade believed that modern humanity suffers from a “terror of history”: a sense that we are stranded in linear time, cut off from mythic renewal. Shamanism counters with circular maps. A healer who can dissolve the walls of the ordinary reminds us that the forest still listens, ancestors still speak, and the future is already whispering back to us through dreams.
A Living Tradition
To walk the shamanic path today is not to cosplay a distant culture but to court relationship—with breath, drum, memory, plant, grief, and the aching intelligence of the planet itself. It is arduous work; the spirits, wrote one Greenlandic angakoq, “demand much food from the heart.” Yet it is also exquisitely beautiful. Each successful journey returns not just a cured individual but a refreshed ecology of belonging.
That may be the most enduring gift shamanism offers a world in ecological and psychological crisis: the conviction that healing is never solitary. We mend by widening the circle of what we are willing to call “we.” On the far side of trance, the shaman steps back into ordinary daylight carrying that wider citizenship—an embodied reminder that no river, ancestor, neuron, or star is truly Other when greeted with attention, song, and reverence.