What Is Shamanism?

Shamanism has rapidly become a renewed spiritual path in the West over the past few decades—much like the rise of yoga thirty or forty years ago. Many people have begun gathering and integrating ancient practices that survived in different Indigenous cultures around the world, seeing them as precious wisdom for modern life.

Around the world, shamans appear in many forms and under many names. Among Indigenous peoples of South America, they are often known as curandero. In parts of Africa, they might be called witch doctors. In ancient China, they were called Wu(巫female shaman) or Xi (覡, male shaman). Their practices, rituals, and lineages differ, but they all engage in the same essential work:

They have one foot in the physical world and the other in the non-physical world.
They bridge the two worlds.
They connect humans with the spirits.
They bring back information from the non-ordinary reality.

Shamans access these realms by intentionally altering their consciousness—from what we normally recognize as ordinary reality into non-ordinary reality. Ordinary reality is the physical world we perceive with our senses. Non-ordinary reality is the spiritual world that cannot be seen with the naked eye and can only be perceived through an altered state of consciousness.

Through this shift in consciousness, shamans and shamanic practitioners travel into non-ordinary reality to connect with their helping spirits or power animals, seeking guidance, insight, and healing on behalf of a person or community.

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Where the Word “Shaman” Comes From?

The word shaman comes from the Evenki language, spoken by a Tungusic Indigenous group in northern Russia, later spreading across regions that are now Mongolia, Heilongjiang, and Siberia. According to Finnish linguist Juha Janhunen, the term may have existed for at least two thousand years.

It first appeared in Western written history around 1552, when Tsar Ivan IV conquered the Kazan Khanate.

When Western anthropologists later studied the peoples of Siberia, Mongolia, and other groups using Tungusic languages, they noticed that many of their ancient spiritual practices shared similar features. Over time, researchers found something even more remarkable: Indigenous cultures all over the world—across Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—shared core understandings about the spirit world, the nature of healing, and the structure of the universe.

Many of their rituals, cosmologies, and healing methods were strikingly similar, even though these cultures had never been in contact.

Because of these universal or near-universal patterns, the western anthropologists adopted shamanism as an umbrella term to describe these ancient spiritual traditions. In other cultures, they all have different names in current time.

Although the word shaman itself may be two thousand years old, the practices behind it are far older—stretching back many thousands of years. Our ancestors used shamanic techniques to enter altered states of consciousness, leave the physical body, and access the deeper wells of spiritual wisdom and power. They did this not only for themselves but also to bring back knowledge, healing, strength, and guidance for their people.