Shamans. Inspired, ecstatic, and charismatic individuals, male and female, with the power to control spirits, often by incarnating them, and able to make journeys out of the body, both to ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’. The word is traced to the Tungu in Siberia (where shamanism is common), though the claim is also made (but not universally accepted) that the origin is in the Skt. śrāmaṇa, reaching China in the form of shamen and Japan of shamon. The word is now used of a wide variety of people who enter trance and ecstatic states, and make ‘out of the body’ journeys. The inducing of ecstatic states is accomplished in many ways, including exclusion of general sensory stimuli through drumming, concentration on a mirror, etc., and through tobacco, alcohol, and hallucinogens (see M. J. Harner (ed.), Hallucinogens and Shamanism, 1973). The spirits involved are not regarded as inherently either good or evil: the outcome depends on context and on whether they are controlled. The shaman removes threat to an individual or community by incorporating potentially destructive spirits into his or her own body and thereby neutralizing them. The ability to make journeys to upper or (more often) lower worlds is a part of the protective role of the shaman extended from its main focus on this earth.

Careful observations of shamanism make the analysis of M. Eliade (Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaiques de l'extase, 1951) improbable, although it has had wide influence. He attempted to separate two forms, regarding the ascent as a survival of archaic religion, to be called ‘pure shamanism’ (but by other writers ‘white shamanism’), with the descent and contest against malevolent spirits as innovations (‘black shamanism’). There is no serious warrant for these distinctions in the practice of shamanism as observed.