Tribes separated by oceans and thousands of years arrived at almost the same practice: a person who enters trance, walks into a world the rest of us cannot see, and returns carrying what the community needs. Modern brain scans now confirm that the shaman’s drum reaches a real and distinct state of consciousness, which reframes the world’s oldest spiritual tradition as something far from finished.
A practice with no single origin
Tribes in the Siberian taiga, the Amazon basin, the North American plains and the Australian desert, separated by oceans and thousands of years, arrived at almost the same practice. A person enters a trance, travels into a world the rest of us cannot see, and comes back carrying something the community needs. No shared scripture passed between them. No missionaries carried the idea across continents. Anthropologists only settled on a single name, shamanism, once they noticed how many cultures were already living it.
The word itself comes from the Tungus people of Siberia. Saman is usually translated as “one who knows”. Underneath every regional version of the practice sits one assumption: that the world is alive. Not alive as a comforting figure of speech, but literally. Animism holds that the river, the stone, the wind and the animal each carry a spirit, and that a trained human being can speak with them. Some of the cave paintings we have, tens of thousands of years old, appear to show figures caught mid-change between human and animal form, which suggests this way of seeing is about as old as art itself.
When the historian Mircea Eliade surveyed these traditions in 1951, he described shamanism as a technique of ecstasy, using the older meaning of the word: standing outside oneself. In his account, the shaman was healer, magician, priest and poet all at once, and that range still holds. Across cultures, the work usually includes:
- Healing, on the understanding that sickness can begin as a loss of spirit or a break in a person’s energy long before it shows up in the body
- Soul retrieval, recovering the parts of a person that shock or trauma has split off and left behind
- Divination, reading signs through bones, stones, or direct contact with spirits
- Guiding the dead, escorting a soul through its passage so the living are not haunted and the dead are not lost
- Keeping the community in balance with the land, the animals and the weather
Same doorway, different keys
The shared doorway leads to a spirit world. What differs is the key each culture uses to reach it.
Siberia
Siberia is usually called the cradle of the tradition, and its shamans were regarded as travellers who moved between the earth, the sky and the world below. Many reached that state through the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, a red-capped fungus potent enough to be dangerous and requiring real skill to prepare. The yurt was more than shelter here. Its central smoke hole was understood as a passage to the cosmos, the point through which the shaman’s spirit left and returned. Soviet authorities spent decades trying to stamp the practice out as backward superstition. It survived them. Today Tengerism, a modern shamanic faith centred on reverence for nature, has gained standing across Siberia and Mongolia.
The Amazon
In the rainforest, the practice runs close to the jaguar, an animal of power whose spirit some shamans work to embody. The best-known medicine is ayahuasca, a brew that opens the participant to the spirit world across a long and often gruelling ceremony. What guides the journey is sound. The shaman sings icaros, songs said to carry spiritual force, threaded through with the shake of a rattle. Every chant and beat works as a thread back to the hidden world, and to the self the participant is trying to recover.
North America
Across Native American cultures, the figure is often called a medicine man or medicine woman, and the role reaches past the individual to the health of the whole community and its land. Rather than plant medicine, many reach the altered state through fasting, isolation and ceremonial hardship, carried by the drum and the chant. In the Arctic, the practices share deep roots with Siberia, a lineage that crossed the top of the world and held its shape on both sides.
What the drum does to the brain
The romantic reading of all this files it under the past. The measurable reading says something else entirely.
In 2021, researchers publishing in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience wired up 24 experienced shamanic practitioners and 24 people with no such training, then recorded their brain activity while they drummed. The practitioners’ brains did something the control group’s did not. Gamma-wave activity rose sharply during the drumming, and it tracked closely with the visions and shifts in perception they reported afterwards. When the team set these states beside the brains of people under psilocybin, ketamine and MDMA, the felt experience overlapped, but the underlying neurology did not match. The shaman was reaching a distinct state of consciousness, under their own power, with nothing but a drum.
The drum is not incidental to this. A steady rhythm in the theta range, around four beats a second, reliably nudges the brain toward trance, and that is close to the tempo shamans in unconnected cultures independently settled on. The instrument is simply a stretched skin and a beater. It acts on the nervous system with a precision that modern equipment is only just recognising.
The call, and who it answers to
This is where the tradition refuses the modern logic of choosing a path. In most cultures, you do not decide to become a shaman. You are chosen, and often against your own wishes.
The signal tends to arrive as a crisis. A serious illness that medicine cannot explain, a near-death experience, a run of vivid and disorienting dreams; what many cultures simply call shamanic sickness. Refusing the call is said to deepen the turmoil. Accepting it marks the beginning of the training, which in traditional settings means years of apprenticeship under an elder, learning to enter the unseen world and, more importantly, to come back from it intact.
Modern seekers complicate the picture. Many now approach shamanism as a route to personal growth rather than a lifelong duty handed down by spirits, and both versions coexist. The tradition holds that the calling is not a career choice, despite the market that has grown up around it, which increasingly treats it as one.
Walking the path in a crowded market
The revival is real, and so is the noise around it. Weekend intensives, retreat packages and certificate courses have multiplied, some led by people with decades of genuine transmission behind them, some by people who read a book last year. Discernment is the whole task.
The most reputable modern route runs through the anthropologist Michael Harner, whose Foundation for Shamanic Studies distilled the shared techniques found worldwide into what he called core shamanism, taught through journeying, soul retrieval and divination. Traditional apprenticeships still exist for those who can find and earn them. What no format can shortcut is the substance of the thing. A shaman is answerable to a community and to the land, does deep and uncomfortable personal work, and treats the ability to walk between worlds as a responsibility rather than a credential to collect.
That is the line worth holding between the practice and its packaging. Shamanism survived Soviet suppression, colonial contempt and centuries of being written off as primitive because it was never really about costume or exotic ritual. It rests on a claim that industrial life quietly trained out of us: that the world is alive, that it can be spoken with, and that some people are called to do the speaking on everyone’s behalf. The seekers arriving now are not discovering something new. They are remembering something the modern world agreed to forget, and learning, slowly, how to tell the real thing from the souvenir.
Original Inspiration: Gaia
Join the Conversation
Have you ever felt a genuine calling arrive as a crisis rather than a choice, something that unsettled your life before it made sense of it? And where do you draw your own line between authentic spiritual practice and the version sold back to us as a product? Share your experiences and insights below.
