Shamanism: The Timeless Religion (2025)
The figure of the shaman beguiles anthropology. The scientific gaze of the anthropologist, sent into the remote culture to gather facts, snags upon the enigmatic shaman, and like in the Weezer song, unravels their objectivity as the shaman walks away. “What is a shaman?” the anthropologist cries, and goes on to write enormous books answering this question. Sometimes the anthropologist, after entering the trance guided by a shaman, abandons their own field and decides to become a shaman. Today we can all become shamans by going to Burning Man and getting ordained by a shaman at the Shamandome.
Manvir Singh is the most recent anthropologist to wade into this magic pool. His relatively short book of popular anthropology: Shamanism: the Timeless Religion, is yet another attempt to answer the burning question; what is shamanism? Written in the privileged skyscraper style of a New Yorker article—for whom behavioral psychology is the bleeding edge of the known world—the book is nevertheless a highly readable foray into the shamanic hinterland. It is a hinterland that is not as far away from us as we might like to believe.
While it is typically assumed that the shaman is an atavistic remnant from a bygone superstitious age, Singh makes the credible claim, per his subtitle, that shamanism is no vestigial waystation on the way to modernity, but rather an integral and perennial mode of humankind; the shaman does not develop over time to become a priest, or an MD, but rather serves a necessary function independent of these more institutional figures of authority—even while those figures may take on certain shamanic attributes from time to time. One of the functions of the shaman is to mediate uncertainty; because humankind remains beset by uncertainty, the shaman is always in vogue; therefore the shaman is transhistorical.
I am not entirely sure why Singh refers to shamanism as a religion and so the book is rather confusing in this regard. In fact, he makes a fair argument that the shaman is usually found at the borders of religion, is even at times antithetical to it, and that institutional religion often regards the shaman as a heretic, if not a devil worshiper. This does not prevent Singh from claiming that, according to his criteria, several old testament prophets are shamanic and Jesus is too, obviously.
Spirit is the other universal category Singh gives to the shaman. The shaman operates in an unseen reality that may consist of a literal spirit realm, complete with a variety of gods and demons, or more ambiguously, the zone of uncertainty and misfortune into which animate spirit is inevitably projected. As such, unfortunate events can increase the need of a shaman with whom one may mediate an apparently malevolent force, whether it is a crocodile god, a tsunami, or a severe economic downturn. Actual spirits are one of the more weird features perennially haunting the world of the shaman. The anthropologist Michael Harner, who has been integral in the rise of neo-shamanism—a la the shamandome—and who has written the best-selling book The Way of the Shaman (1980), had a death-by-astonishment style encounter with the spirit world when administered ayahuasca by an amazonian shaman. This is typical of a certain kind of trance, often brought about by psychoactive medicines, in which the recipient who, prior to the event, was skeptical if not disbelieving towards the existence of spirits, but who afterwards becomes a convicted believer—even while the world of spirit remains strictly unbelievable. “I can’t believe it!” Terence McKenna said, repeatedly, after his own encounter with the (related) spirits of the DMT Realm. “I just can’t believe it!”
Singh, for his part, does not believe in spirits. Viewing the world squarely from inside the enlightenment castle, Singh pins spirit to an obscure feature of psyche that is projected outwards—basically same the argument Freud made in Totem and Taboo (1913) but without recourse to the unconscious.
Hedge wizard is Singh’s amusing name for the financial advisor, or start-up CEO, who deploys the more performative elements of the shaman—feigned expertise, extraordinary work-ethic, weird diets—in order to convince a clientele that they can predict what is, properly speaking, unpredictable—namely, financial markets. Humankind’s tendency to superstitious ritual is, for Singh, a natural and rational response to an unpredictable and chaotic reality; it is the ego’s attempt at organization and mastery—attempts that, as I would argue, are for the most part unconscious. The rational agent, as described in economic textbooks, is really quite superstitious and irrational, but all without they, or the economist, being aware of it.
Because Singh remains square within the borders of science-based psychology, he does not name the unconscious, and yet it would seem that the fact of the unconscious is everywhere in this book and in particular in his theory of the placebo effect. That sugar pills routinely produce real effects in the body, as demonstrated time and again by scientific studies, is, for Singh, an example of how the magic of the shaman becomes real; one does not have to believe in the power of the shaman in order for that power to have effect. The shaman/placebo acts upon the patient (unconsciously) even while the patient is fully conscious and perhaps even suspicious of the shaman/placebo.
In this sense the figure of the shaman is built-in to the structure of the psyche and culture. We might go so far as to say that there is a shaman shaped hole in our psychical apparatus, a basic susceptibility, or need, for an unusual person to negotiate, on our behalf, the many invisible forces that beset us. Psychoanalysis offers a variety of elegant concepts with which to explore this necessity—the subject-supposed-to-know, desire, enigma, identification and so on—but Singh, clinging fast to the establishment, sticks to clunky behavioral explanations, together with lame Steven Pinker quotes.
The third universal feature by which Singh defines his shaman is that of the trance. If the shaman typically operates at the borders of society, living in a self-imposed exile—like residing in a cave for example—it is the trance that allows them to leave behind society altogether and to travel to the other world. The trance of the shaman comes in a great variety of modes and techniques and as a state it is unified by only one characteristic: it is non-ordinary. Even still Singh finds the basic features of trance-like behavior in certain phrases: something came over me; he was besides himself, what has gotten into you? I was not myself. The old definition of ecstasy—to stand outside oneself—is not only found in archaic Greece, but appears variously and with some regularity throughout diverse languages from Chinese to Spanish, German, to Arabic. What could possibly produce this near universal fascination with the soul that momentarily departs the habitual boundaries of the waking psyche?
Whatever it is the shaman seems to be in touch with it.
Departure, 1952, Agnes Pelton
