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The Shaman : Voyages of the Soul - Trance, Ecstasy and Healing from Siberia to the Amazon
A richly illustrated guide to the world of shamanism, this book looks at both its historic and its present-day manifestations, from the snowscapes of Siberia to the jungles of the Amazon.
Includes more than 250 illustrations, mostly in full-color, presenting a unique pictorial record of shamanism
Describes key themes such as healing, visions, initiation, cosmology, the shaman’s drum, and mental health
Is written by a leading world expert, based on a synthesis of many years of research and field work
Features a detailed region-by-region survey of shamanism, with full-color maps
Explores both spiritual and psychological aspects of the subject, as well as the relevance of shamanism to contemporary Western culture Includes a directory of shamanic cultures
Includes more than 250 illustrations, mostly in full-color, presenting a unique pictorial record of shamanism
Describes key themes such as healing, visions, initiation, cosmology, the shaman’s drum, and mental health
Is written by a leading world expert, based on a synthesis of many years of research and field work
Features a detailed region-by-region survey of shamanism, with full-color maps
Explores both spiritual and psychological aspects of the subject, as well as the relevance of shamanism to contemporary Western culture Includes a directory of shamanic cultures
184 pages, Paperback
Published July 18, 2001
About the author
Piers Vitebsky
19 books16 followersPiers Vitebsky is an anthropologist and is the Head of Social Science at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, England.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 12, 2017
The description of this book on Goodreads is way off the mark, and, apparently, is meant for another book altogether. If anyone can solve this mystery, please let me know. The Piers Vitebsky book I am holding in my hand is about shamans, not about some Lebanese story.
An entertaining view of shamans around the world.
An entertaining view of shamans around the world.
July 24, 2013
Wow, what a slippery subject this book tackles. What is a shaman? Possibly the oldest form of something that could be called more or less organized religion in the world? Yes, that seems to be case, though it is not “just” religious, as a shaman is interested in a great many practical, hands-on things, like healing. The most widespread religious phenomenon in the world, with shamans being found everywhere from north of the Arctic circle to the Amazon rain forest to modern South Korea and with apparent shamanistic elements found even among the ancient Greeks? Yes, but to put all of these shamans under one neat title is to invite frustration. Even the term shamanism is not really a truly useful term; it has no set texts (or really usually texts of any kind), it does not have a set doctrine or philosophical ideals or goals, and varies tremendously in terms of the influence of the culture it came from on it and even to the degree from which it is separated from other cultures and religions. At best one can speak of shamanisms, but how many? Twenty? A hundred? Two hundred? A thousand?
What author Piers Vitebsky did was to look at a variety of cultures around the world and how shamans operate, what they believe, how they become shamans, and how they are viewed by their people and outsiders. He studied such cultures as the Sora (a “tribal” people in the state of Orissa, India), the Eskimo (he does get into whether or not this is a correct term or if Inuit is a better term), the Mazatec of Mexico (users of the psilocybe mushrooms), the Huichol (also of Mexico, users of peyote cactus), the San (or Bushmen), and the Evenk (Siberian hunters; it is from their language that the word shaman originated) just to name a few.
In a subject perhaps maybe too large for this book, Vitebsky takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of shamans through the ages and around the globe. He does find common elements among many types of shamanisms around the world. There seems to be near universal belief in a spirit world, one populated by good spirits and bad spirits, though this world can be just an unseen part of our world (something the shamans can see, perhaps only through special means), and/or another separate world, above and/or below us (but not necessarily heaven or hell per se). Spirits might consist of nature spirits of various land forms, animal spirits, ancestral spirits, and/or monstrous entities. Spirits can be the cause (or a cause) of a great many things, such as disease or injury, either through their own actions or by being used by others (such as other shamans or enemies of the shaman or tribe), or have to be interacted with to provide a tribe or a clan with enough animals to hunt for the coming season or year, successful childbirth, or good crops. Shamans interact heavily with spirits, not only fighting them or sacrificing to them but also serving as conduits for them, but are not possessed by them in a Christian “exorcist” sense; the shamans are in control. The means to interact with the spirit world, either to interact with spirits directly or to journey to other realms, often involve trances and spirit journeys, with altered states of conscious needed, though the way to this can vary a great deal (some groups, particularly in the tropical Americas, use plants or fungi for psychedelic drugs, though this is by no means universal among shamans).
Shamans don’t seem particularly interested in spreading their religion as say adherents of Christianity are, but rather focused on much smaller groups; the clan, the tribe, the family, or even themselves (in some cultures a large percentage of adults may be “shamans”). Shamans seem to have a fairly practical focus, protecting people from hostile spirits, healing disease or injuries, seeing to the overall success of a tribe or clan, and attending to the souls of their people in the afterlife. Physical objects play a huge role with many shamans, though they are not necessarily sacred or holy relics as one might find among some sects of Christianity, but more like tools, whether they are drums or rattles or rather culturally specific objects to do certain things (a favorite was the kikituk, an animal effigy carved by Alaskan Eskimo shamans, usually produced from wood or ivory, an item that could be used to heal patients by biting the spirits attacking them but also be sent to kill an enemy by burrowing into their heart).
The author ended the book with a discussion of the history of shamans in general, how they interact with other cultures, the modern world, and discussions over whether or not shamans are “insane.” The section on neo-shamans and shamans in New Age religions didn’t particularly interest me.
I hope I did a fair job of summarizing some of the points of the book. It had a very odd format for a book for me. It was heavily illustrated, and had many sub sections with different sized fonts and many sidebars to discuss things such as mythic tales of particular shamans, the function of some shamanistic tools, shaman costumes, modern stories of shaman healings and initiations, etc. The author never seemed to get really deep into a subject before whisking the reader off to another subject. I couldn’t tell if this was because the author was just trying to write a very general introduction, didn’t want to get bogged down on one particular subject or a certain culture, or if this was meant to be a browse book of sorts, a coffee table book to just leaf through (smallish in size for a coffee table book though it may be). Though it had lots of text, it had lots of pictures, and with all the easy to read bold captions and obvious sidebars, could be picked up and read by a very casual reader. To its credit, it did have an extensive bibliography and a discussion of other sources (I looked up some, some are out of print and/or quite expensive).
What author Piers Vitebsky did was to look at a variety of cultures around the world and how shamans operate, what they believe, how they become shamans, and how they are viewed by their people and outsiders. He studied such cultures as the Sora (a “tribal” people in the state of Orissa, India), the Eskimo (he does get into whether or not this is a correct term or if Inuit is a better term), the Mazatec of Mexico (users of the psilocybe mushrooms), the Huichol (also of Mexico, users of peyote cactus), the San (or Bushmen), and the Evenk (Siberian hunters; it is from their language that the word shaman originated) just to name a few.
In a subject perhaps maybe too large for this book, Vitebsky takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of shamans through the ages and around the globe. He does find common elements among many types of shamanisms around the world. There seems to be near universal belief in a spirit world, one populated by good spirits and bad spirits, though this world can be just an unseen part of our world (something the shamans can see, perhaps only through special means), and/or another separate world, above and/or below us (but not necessarily heaven or hell per se). Spirits might consist of nature spirits of various land forms, animal spirits, ancestral spirits, and/or monstrous entities. Spirits can be the cause (or a cause) of a great many things, such as disease or injury, either through their own actions or by being used by others (such as other shamans or enemies of the shaman or tribe), or have to be interacted with to provide a tribe or a clan with enough animals to hunt for the coming season or year, successful childbirth, or good crops. Shamans interact heavily with spirits, not only fighting them or sacrificing to them but also serving as conduits for them, but are not possessed by them in a Christian “exorcist” sense; the shamans are in control. The means to interact with the spirit world, either to interact with spirits directly or to journey to other realms, often involve trances and spirit journeys, with altered states of conscious needed, though the way to this can vary a great deal (some groups, particularly in the tropical Americas, use plants or fungi for psychedelic drugs, though this is by no means universal among shamans).
Shamans don’t seem particularly interested in spreading their religion as say adherents of Christianity are, but rather focused on much smaller groups; the clan, the tribe, the family, or even themselves (in some cultures a large percentage of adults may be “shamans”). Shamans seem to have a fairly practical focus, protecting people from hostile spirits, healing disease or injuries, seeing to the overall success of a tribe or clan, and attending to the souls of their people in the afterlife. Physical objects play a huge role with many shamans, though they are not necessarily sacred or holy relics as one might find among some sects of Christianity, but more like tools, whether they are drums or rattles or rather culturally specific objects to do certain things (a favorite was the kikituk, an animal effigy carved by Alaskan Eskimo shamans, usually produced from wood or ivory, an item that could be used to heal patients by biting the spirits attacking them but also be sent to kill an enemy by burrowing into their heart).
The author ended the book with a discussion of the history of shamans in general, how they interact with other cultures, the modern world, and discussions over whether or not shamans are “insane.” The section on neo-shamans and shamans in New Age religions didn’t particularly interest me.
I hope I did a fair job of summarizing some of the points of the book. It had a very odd format for a book for me. It was heavily illustrated, and had many sub sections with different sized fonts and many sidebars to discuss things such as mythic tales of particular shamans, the function of some shamanistic tools, shaman costumes, modern stories of shaman healings and initiations, etc. The author never seemed to get really deep into a subject before whisking the reader off to another subject. I couldn’t tell if this was because the author was just trying to write a very general introduction, didn’t want to get bogged down on one particular subject or a certain culture, or if this was meant to be a browse book of sorts, a coffee table book to just leaf through (smallish in size for a coffee table book though it may be). Though it had lots of text, it had lots of pictures, and with all the easy to read bold captions and obvious sidebars, could be picked up and read by a very casual reader. To its credit, it did have an extensive bibliography and a discussion of other sources (I looked up some, some are out of print and/or quite expensive).
December 20, 2015
[3.5] This was an impulse purchase over ten years ago, so I can't really blame it for not being structured as I'd like now.
Laid out like a kids' or coffee table non-fiction book, it has plenty of pictures, short 'articles' of 2-5 pages and text boxes all over the place with tangentially related info and anecdotes. It's arranged thematically, using examples from all over the world (particularly a handful of Siberian tribes, the Sora of India, and Amazonian and Central American groups); whilst some idea of each culture builds up as you read, frustratingly, a fuller sense of their worldviews and religion isn't present as it would be if each tribe was given a proper chapter of its own. That could then be followed by further chapters of comparison and synthesis. Dates for the collection of stories, or lives of the named shamans are hardly ever given - to the historian for whom context also means 'when', this looks sloppy. There are some references in the back, but they are far from detailed. As it is, it might be good reading for a teenager wondering whether to apply for an anthropology degree - it's an introductory guide by a Cambridge academic - but otherwise it seems too superficial for what most adult readers might want from a book on this subject.
The tone is that of a sympathetic academic, and reminded me a little of Ronald Hutton's work on British pagan traditions. I'm genuinely mystified by another GR reviewer, one of whose comments states Vitebsky "probably has to professionally disbelieve everything". At almost any page one could open the book and find paragraphs written in a manner that respects the shamans' beliefs. "The shaman is chosen by the spirits..." it says, not 'the shaman reports/says/thinks/believes he is chosen by the spirits', or worse. When contradictory beliefs of different groups are compared close by, there is necessarily more detachment, but it's never dismissive. And underneath the professional phrasing, there is clear dismay at those who've destroyed indigenous beliefs, missionaries, Communists and others.
Vitebsky is, unlike Hutton, not always sympathetic to neopagan forms, perhaps because they can affect and interact with surviving ancient tribal practices in a way that, say, a modern druid can't change Celts who've been dead for centuries. For instance he contemplates contemporary neo-shamans being critical of indigenous tribes from vegetarian and feminist viewpoints, and as hunting magic may have been the earliest origin of shamanism, seems to feel there's something fundamentally inauthentic about vegetarian shamanism - although both relate to the practitioner feeling attuned to nature in a way appropriate at the time their belief system was formed. In fairness, he does have respect for some other aspects of these practices, and was writing 20 years ago.
A general impression is that in the north of Asia - Siberia - shamanism is dominated by men (I recalled Colin Thubron saying that much Siberian tribal lore gave women a low status, and that at least one tribe considered them to be given souls by men), whilst further south, for instance among the rural Sora, and in Korea where forms of shamanism survive in a fairly commercial context, most shamans are women. The book concentrates on spiritual shamanism that involves spirit journeys, ritual display and psychological forms of healing that may take place through an apparent placebo effect, or in ritualised conversations akin to psychotherapy - it isn't about herbal medicine at all. The book portrays a good combination of fascinating practices alongside aspects of life that now sound frustrating - most people of both sexes were subject to strict social roles that seemed necessary to the survival of these small communities; the shaman, psychologically a sort of outsider with unusual experiences, was sometimes employed to make them return to or conform to those roles. Some interpretations of the world were personally quite depressing: e.g. an Amazonian tribe that considers all illness to be caused by evil darts from enemies, and that the only cure is to send the darts back to the enemy tribe - cure inevitably involves the intent to make someone else ill again, and they are engaged in an eternal spiritual warfare with their neighbours.
There was nothing about development of reasoning or possible use of unconscious cues, which I'd always thought was interesting in the context of traditional healers and magicians; all the discussion is about what's done outwardly or the stated beliefs about spirits. For example, I assumed that a shaman over time would learn by observation about which ailments and people were and were not likely to get better by themselves, and their forecasts would be based on that. Or that the 'right time' for a hunting ritual might be announced because the shaman had, not necessarily consciously, registered some change in nature associated with abundance of animals in previous years. And - something more pertinent historically than as late as the twentieth century - did some of them experiment with different treatments? I'm sure many intelligent humans all over the world must have independently come up with a form of scientific method before it became a widespread way of thinking ... but of course such people didn't leave records.
An interesting enough book, but not substantial enough on any of its topics, unless perhaps you're completely new to the subject.
And in case you were wondering, the guy on the cover is from Nepal.
Laid out like a kids' or coffee table non-fiction book, it has plenty of pictures, short 'articles' of 2-5 pages and text boxes all over the place with tangentially related info and anecdotes. It's arranged thematically, using examples from all over the world (particularly a handful of Siberian tribes, the Sora of India, and Amazonian and Central American groups); whilst some idea of each culture builds up as you read, frustratingly, a fuller sense of their worldviews and religion isn't present as it would be if each tribe was given a proper chapter of its own. That could then be followed by further chapters of comparison and synthesis. Dates for the collection of stories, or lives of the named shamans are hardly ever given - to the historian for whom context also means 'when', this looks sloppy. There are some references in the back, but they are far from detailed. As it is, it might be good reading for a teenager wondering whether to apply for an anthropology degree - it's an introductory guide by a Cambridge academic - but otherwise it seems too superficial for what most adult readers might want from a book on this subject.
The tone is that of a sympathetic academic, and reminded me a little of Ronald Hutton's work on British pagan traditions. I'm genuinely mystified by another GR reviewer, one of whose comments states Vitebsky "probably has to professionally disbelieve everything". At almost any page one could open the book and find paragraphs written in a manner that respects the shamans' beliefs. "The shaman is chosen by the spirits..." it says, not 'the shaman reports/says/thinks/believes he is chosen by the spirits', or worse. When contradictory beliefs of different groups are compared close by, there is necessarily more detachment, but it's never dismissive. And underneath the professional phrasing, there is clear dismay at those who've destroyed indigenous beliefs, missionaries, Communists and others.
Vitebsky is, unlike Hutton, not always sympathetic to neopagan forms, perhaps because they can affect and interact with surviving ancient tribal practices in a way that, say, a modern druid can't change Celts who've been dead for centuries. For instance he contemplates contemporary neo-shamans being critical of indigenous tribes from vegetarian and feminist viewpoints, and as hunting magic may have been the earliest origin of shamanism, seems to feel there's something fundamentally inauthentic about vegetarian shamanism - although both relate to the practitioner feeling attuned to nature in a way appropriate at the time their belief system was formed. In fairness, he does have respect for some other aspects of these practices, and was writing 20 years ago.
A general impression is that in the north of Asia - Siberia - shamanism is dominated by men (I recalled Colin Thubron saying that much Siberian tribal lore gave women a low status, and that at least one tribe considered them to be given souls by men), whilst further south, for instance among the rural Sora, and in Korea where forms of shamanism survive in a fairly commercial context, most shamans are women. The book concentrates on spiritual shamanism that involves spirit journeys, ritual display and psychological forms of healing that may take place through an apparent placebo effect, or in ritualised conversations akin to psychotherapy - it isn't about herbal medicine at all. The book portrays a good combination of fascinating practices alongside aspects of life that now sound frustrating - most people of both sexes were subject to strict social roles that seemed necessary to the survival of these small communities; the shaman, psychologically a sort of outsider with unusual experiences, was sometimes employed to make them return to or conform to those roles. Some interpretations of the world were personally quite depressing: e.g. an Amazonian tribe that considers all illness to be caused by evil darts from enemies, and that the only cure is to send the darts back to the enemy tribe - cure inevitably involves the intent to make someone else ill again, and they are engaged in an eternal spiritual warfare with their neighbours.
There was nothing about development of reasoning or possible use of unconscious cues, which I'd always thought was interesting in the context of traditional healers and magicians; all the discussion is about what's done outwardly or the stated beliefs about spirits. For example, I assumed that a shaman over time would learn by observation about which ailments and people were and were not likely to get better by themselves, and their forecasts would be based on that. Or that the 'right time' for a hunting ritual might be announced because the shaman had, not necessarily consciously, registered some change in nature associated with abundance of animals in previous years. And - something more pertinent historically than as late as the twentieth century - did some of them experiment with different treatments? I'm sure many intelligent humans all over the world must have independently come up with a form of scientific method before it became a widespread way of thinking ... but of course such people didn't leave records.
An interesting enough book, but not substantial enough on any of its topics, unless perhaps you're completely new to the subject.
And in case you were wondering, the guy on the cover is from Nepal.
March 25, 2011
So far there is a lot of interesting detail and information both general and specific. Which is what I bought it for. BUT, the author manages to repeatedly misunderstand shamanic motives and lifestyle, and does NOT seem to have a high opinion of women. :(
Having read the book, I agree with what I said above after reading only the first bit. I find it odd how academics can study something all their lives, become greatly respected experts on it, and never understand anything about it. And he really does not care for women!
Having read the book, I agree with what I said above after reading only the first bit. I find it odd how academics can study something all their lives, become greatly respected experts on it, and never understand anything about it. And he really does not care for women!
June 8, 2022
Words cannot describe how much I loved this book. I really appreciated all the images to make better sense of what what was being discussed. I appreciated the different subjects, the differences and similarities between shamans and the practices around the world. I also appreciate how engage it is and not overly academic in its writing style. Excellent book! Highly recommend for any interested in Anthro or interested in learning a bit more about shamanism and shamans.
August 31, 2022
No new age jajajajja
Una de los efectos de la popularización de los movimientos tipo hippie y New Age es que por su interés por los temas típicos del chamanismo diversas editoriales han traducido y publicado textos antropológicos muy útiles e interesantes que normalmente se quedarían en editoriales académicas, revistas o no tendrían traducciones
Una de los efectos de la popularización de los movimientos tipo hippie y New Age es que por su interés por los temas típicos del chamanismo diversas editoriales han traducido y publicado textos antropológicos muy útiles e interesantes que normalmente se quedarían en editoriales académicas, revistas o no tendrían traducciones
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June 29, 2010non-fiction,religion
March 28, 2026
A very good book. The author is amazingly knowledgeable and the many photographs brings everything said to life.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews