SHAMANISM

Conceptual graph

The Knowledge Map

Branches of the comparative study of shamanism. Entries are analytic, not devotional: where scholars disagree, the disagreement is the content.

Definitions

1

What is 'shamanism'?

A comparative category, not a world religion. The word travelled from Evenki through Russian ethnography into a global label that its subjects rarely chose.

Cosmology

2

Animism and the more-than-human world

From Tylor's 'primitive error' to the new animism: how anthropology stopped treating other-than-human persons as a mistake about the world.

Spirits, owners and helpers

Not one category. Ancestors, animal masters, place powers, disease agents and helping spirits behave in different ways and demand different treatment.

Ritual

3

Initiation and the calling

Election by illness, dream or lineage; a period of crisis; instruction; and finally a public recognition that makes the role real.

Possession

A spirit speaks through a body. Who may host, who may speak, and who may not, tells you about the society as much as the cosmology.

The drum

Instrument, map, mount, weapon and spirit dwelling. Also the object colonial authorities burned first.

Consciousness

3

Trance, ecstasy and journeying

Altered states are induced, structured, culturally scripted and evaluated. They are skills, not accidents.

Neuroscience of altered states

What imaging and EEG can and cannot say about trance — with the overclaims marked as overclaims.

Culture and consciousness

The same altered state is described, valued and used entirely differently depending on where you are standing.

Healing

1

Healing systems

Diagnosis names a cause, ritual addresses it, and the community witnesses the repair. Efficacy is judged socially as well as physically.

Plants & Medicines

2

Plants and psychoactive sacraments

Present in some traditions, absent in most. Where present, hedged with preparation, restriction, ritual authority and law.

Ayahuasca: tradition, diaspora, industry

A regional Amazonian preparation that became a global category in fifty years — and a case study in how that transformation works.

Mythology

3

World tree, axis and layered worlds

A genuinely widespread motif — and a textbook example of how a comparative pattern can be overstated into a universal.

Ancestors, death and the psychopomp

Escorting the dead is one of the most widely attested tasks of the ritual specialist.

Animals and transformation

Helper, teacher, prey, kin, adversary and alternate body — rarely the 'spirit animal' of the online quiz.

Archaeology

2

Entoptic phenomena and rock art

The neuropsychological model of cave art is influential, elegant, and much less secure than popular accounts suggest.

Prehistory and archaeology

Burials, objects and images give real evidence of ritual specialists — and every inference from them is graded.

Anthropology

3

Perspectivism and the ontological turn

In parts of Amazonia, the question is not what you believe about the jaguar, but what the jaguar believes it is drinking.

Gender and the ritual role

In many traditions the majority of practitioners are women, and several recognise roles outside a male/female binary.

The specialist in the community

Healer, diviner, mediator, archivist, entertainer, and occasionally suspect.

Ecology

2

Sacred landscapes

Mountains, springs, caves and groves as parties to a relationship, with rules attached and legal consequences following.

Ecology and the ethics of relationship

Ritual restraint often functions as resource management — but 'the ecological Indian' is a stereotype, however flattering.

Controversies

4

Colonialism, suppression and survival

The history of shamanism is inseparable from the history of the states that tried to end it.

Museums, collections and repatriation

Drums, masks, medicine bundles and ancestral remains sit in institutions that acquired them under conditions no one would accept today.

Cultural appropriation

A question about power, consent and consequence — not about who is allowed to be interested.

Ethics: for readers, writers and practitioners

The rules this atlas holds itself to, stated so they can be checked.

Modern

2

Neo-shamanism and core shamanism

A twentieth-century Western movement with its own real history — best understood as itself, not as a version of Indigenous practice.

The shamanism industry

Retreats, certifications, plant tourism and influencer healers — the economics that now shape the field.