There are those who travel spirit worlds. They may know that those worlds only exist in their minds, or they may believe that those worlds are real. They use drugs to enter altered states, sometimes in combination with music. They burn herbs, they paint their bodies, they put on masks, they fast and put themselves through other deprivations. They claim to have healing or divination powers, and sometimes, by making those claims convincingly enough, they acquire them. Their affiliation with the institutions of respectable society, including organized religion or the medical and psychiatric professions, is tenuous. They are mostly men.
Anthropologist Manvir Singh has made an unfortunate choice in name his book Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. As he writes himself, shamanism isn’t a kind of proto-religion that modern, organized religions evolved from, but something that exists independently of those religions, even when they more often than not are opposed to shamanism.
Singh has done anthropological research living with the Mentawai people off the coast of the main island of Sumatra, where he observed their Shamans. He makes the point that Shamanism is a human universal, not because it’s a unified religion, but because it keeps arising through convergent cultural evolution. The final chapters of Shamanism are also the most interesting ones. Singh writes about the Shamans of Western societies. This includes Shamandome at the Burning Man festival, psychiatrists who through theatrics cure their patients, Pentecostal preachers speaking in tongues and ayahuasca retreats. According to Singh, they are all modern manifestations of Shamanism. This is an interesting and defensible proposition.
Singh also speculates about paleolithic shamans, but cautions that it’s impossible to really know what they were up to. This means we can imagine, as Kim Stanley Robinson does in his novel Shaman, which is one of my favorite books.
Nehaveigur 