Return of the Shaman

Manvir Singh’s new Shamanism: The Timeless Religion ranges widely, introducing us to all sorts of shamans and neo-shamans and proto-shamans. We meet the cigarette-loving tribal healers among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, whom Singh, an anthropologist, has studied since 2014. We meet the psychiatry and medicine professor at Johns Hopkins who reckons that his clinical interventions and against-the-odds healings are the stuff of classic shamanic practice. And we meet the money managers and “hedge wizards” who traffic quasi-shamanically with the capricious spirits of the global market.

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It’s a panoramic survey: Singh has done the fieldwork, the legwork, and the drugwork. (“Then, with the immediacy of waking up, my trip ended. I became aware of my surroundings. People were watching us through the doorway. Vomit was everywhere.”) But his book lacks something I need—namely, an account of how neo-shamanism and its visionary baggage have looped around into conspiracy theory and burn-it-down far-rightism. It doesn’t, in other words, quite take us up to the present American minute.

So who or what is a shaman? Singh gives us a handy definition: “A shaman is a specialist who, through non-ordinary states, engages with unseen realities and provides services like healing and divination.” You can achieve a non-ordinary or altered state with drugs, drumming, dancing, fasting, meditation, whatever floats your boat—floats it into the beyond, that is. Once there, you might battle with demons, fly across the sky, plunge into the underworld, enlist the help of power-animals, or commune with the souls of the dead. You might undergo a terrible supernatural ordeal, a violent unmaking or scattering of the self. Crucially, though, you come back stronger. You return from the other realm remade, with strange new capabilities. You can heal. You can prophesy. (I have a certain resistance to Singh’s characterization of Jesus as a shaman—one of the things I like about Jesus is how un-esoterically he distributes his message, how dazzlingly straightforward and inclusive it is—but I get it: “By interacting with a powerful spirit being, he cured, exorcized, and foretold the future.”)

The shaman’s progress is archetypal, of course: It’s the hero’s journey, complete with thrills and spills. “Candidate shamans,” the religion scholar Mircea Eliade wrote in his pioneering 1951 study, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, “sometimes find themselves in apparently desperate situations. They must go ‘where night and day meet,’ or find a gate in the wall, or go up to the sky through a passage that opens but for an instant.” Which makes me think of Luke Skywalker, celestially steered by the Force, putting two proton torpedoes right up the thermal exhaust port—the passage fleetingly revealed—of the otherwise impregnable Death Star. After an experience with yopo, a “hallucinogenic snuff” (its main psychoactive compound seems to be bufotenine, unfamiliar outside South America), Singh is told about a similarly evanescent moment of danger and opportunity, a split second in the trip when “you need to concentrate on your goal.” “The transition point is fast,” he is advised by a seasoned user, “and if you do not focus, yopo will carry you off.”

Ultimately, though, Singh is less interested in the specific contents of trance states, or in a psychic map of shamanic otherness, than in shamanism as a world-historical phenomenon, popping up all over, almost a function of human consciousness. It starts, for him, in the same place that religion starts: in the wobbly conditions of life, in the dicey nature of our contract with existence. He calls it “a compelling technology for dealing with uncertainty.” Against a welter of contingency and fucked-up stuff that won’t stop happening, the shaman intercedes on our behalf; he can negotiate with chaos because he’s plugged in to the invisible grid behind it.

You can see where all of this might link up with conspiracy theory and—one short step further—psychosis. Hovering beyond our day-to-dayness is another order of reality, fiery and supercharged and copiously populated with entities. The shaman has gotten the coordinates. He has wrangled, or been wrangled by, the monsters of this zone and its tutelary spirits. So he has power. He can change the weather. He can suck out the infection. He can reverse the curse and erase the malaise.

Shamanism: The Timeless Religion

By Manvir Singh

To connect to the paranoid side of neo-shamanism, try listening to The Occult Apocalypse Show, a podcast from 2023 hosted by Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman. In an episode called “D.C. Deep State,” Chansley and his co-host explore/abhor “the current occult culture in the deep state.” Here, in a rushing monologue, are the most baroque trappings of conspiracy theory: the adrenochrome, the golden owls, the 33rd-degree Freemasons. In this telling, the ruling class has been infested with demons from the beginning. “It actually goes all the way back,” Chansley says, “to ancient occultic rituals in places like Sumer, Egypt, Babylon, the Canaanites, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and, yes, the Aztecs, and even the English in England.”

A healthier way to fight the war of the spirits is with art. Anyone who saw the D.C. punk rockers Bad Brains in their prime, for example, knows that the front man, H.R., was a shaman: a mouthpiece for divinity, a bringer of celestial heat. For Ted Hughes, a devoted reader of Mircea Eliade, there were shamanic capacities—capacities, that is, for healing and prophecy, derived from a special consciousness—in great poetry. “In a shamanizing society,” Hughes wrote, “Venus and Adonis, some of Keats’ longer poems, The Wanderings of Oisin, Ash Wednesday, would all qualify their authors for the magic drum.” Hughes saw William Butler Yeats, in his inspired public aspect, as shamanic: “His outspoken political statements all glow at some point into a shamanic flame.” T. S. Eliot, too, responding to the “tribal disaster” of modernity, was a less eager but perhaps more powerful shaman; he was “able to contain within himself, more fully than any of his contemporaries,” Hughes felt, “the spiritual tragedy of his epoch.”

Neo-shamanism in America came bobbing up, like so much other stuff, in the general pagan churn of the ’60s and ’70s. Carlos Castaneda’s mega-selling The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge—one of his “Is it anthropology or is it a novel?” creations—was published in 1968. Michael Harner’s The Way of the Shaman arrived in 1980: a how-to guide for apprentice shamans in which the harrowing shamanic voyages relayed by Eliade—with their blindings and dismemberments and organ replacements—were swapped out for a program that one could follow in one’s living room, Jane Fonda–style. (“Without stopping, increase your rattle-shaking to approximately 180 times per minute.”) Singh goes to Burning Man to check out the healing sessions at the Shamandome and is struck by the shift in focus: the individual rather than the tribe, mental states rather than bodily ailments. “Trauma and harmful patterns of thinking,” he writes, “have usurped the position often filled by witchcraft, taboo violations, and resentful spirits.”

Is this the endgame for shamanism—absorption by the therapeutic Western self? Or is the teeming otherworld of the shaman simply finding new containers, new metaphors? Harner’s The Way of the Shaman draws a useful distinction between the Shamanic State of Consciousness and the Ordinary State of Consciousness: The shaman can toggle between the two; he can go up Jack’s beanstalk and come back down again. The rest of us, these days, tend to get stuck either here or there. Look at our politics. Look at the state of our brains. Divergent realities, untranslatable, incompatible. Castaneda, coming down from his first peyote trip in The Teachings of Don Juan, found himself deeply dismayed by his return to sanity: “The sadness of such an irreconcilable situation,” he wrote, “was so intense that I wept.” It’s going to take some very nimble shamans to guide us out of this one.

This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “Return of the Shaman.”