The Shamanic Renaissance: What Is Going On?

Signs of the Times

Like Dandelion in the spring, her golden locks popping up out of the snow and the weapons of plant destruction, shamanism calls out today, “Hi! I’m back!” The signs are everywhere, leading some scholars to exclaim, “Shamanic studies has exploded, to everybody’s amazement” (Taylor & Piedilato, 2002, p. 131). In developed countries, people are rediscovering their shamanic roots (Brunton, 2014; Winkelman, 2003). The Celtic and Norse spiritual traditions, for example, are increasingly popular in Europe, as are Native American practices like vision quests and sweat lodges in North America. In developing countries too, shamanism is experiencing a renaissance, as growing numbers reject the pitfalls of modernization and start searching for power from their ancient past.

If you google “shamanism,” no less than a million websites will pop up, and almost one-half million for the closely related mediumship. Compare these figures with 1.1 million for Anglicanism, 0.3 million for Methodism, 0.5 million for Presbyterianism, 0.7 million for Episcopalianism, and 0.8 million for Lutheranism.

But it is more than just websites. Already a pair of two-volume encyclopedias, compiled by Mariko Walter and Eva Fridman (2004) and by Christina Pratt (2007), now occupy library shelves. Popular films have honored shamanic apprentices (Emerald Forest) and exorcists (Ghostbusters) while TV series too have featured shamanic apprentices (Northern Exposure) and psychopomps (Ghost Whisperer). Art is imitating life.

Workshops proliferate. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies alone offers hundreds of training sessions—for example, in dream interpretation—to thousands annually across the world. Its extended course in shamanic counseling offers practitioners a number of tools, such as soul-trip journeys to power animals and other spirit guides, to use with clients. Shamanic drumming circles also abound in North America and elsewhere.

University courses on shamanism appeared, as did respected journals like Shamanism Annual, Shaman’s Drum, Journal of Contemporary Shamanism, Journal of Shamanic Practice, and Sacred Hoop. When shamanism gets “campus cred,” something important is going on.

In health care, aboriginal shamans in Central Australia work in nursing homes, doctors’ offices, clinics, and prisons. In the United States, shamanism is being integrated into health care as a legitimate modality (Carson, 2013).

In other realms, shamanic perspectives have been adopted. Some New Christologists, for example, see Jesus as a shamanic practitioner, as evidenced in such books as Pieter Craffert’s Life of a Galilean Shaman (2008). Indeed, some modern shamans accept Jesus as a spirit guide. In literature, magical realism takes up shamanic themes, as in Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude (2006) and Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits (2005), as does the wildly popular Harry Potter series. Paleolithic art historians increasingly view ancient pictographs as shamanic representations (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1988; Ryan, 1999). In environmentalism, a major strain looks at the shamanic spirituality of nature, as seen in subfields like Deep Ecology and Ecopsychology (Kowalewski, 2000, 2002). In particular, the disappearing wilderness has led many to appreciate the primitive spirituality—specifically the sacred ecology—that had protected and even venerated it for millennia, namely shamanism (Peterson, 1990). In sum, more and more people are coming out of their “spiritual closets” to embrace shamanic principles and practices (Cowan, 1996, p. 21).

What Is Going On?

Certainly shamanism, despite its tribulations, never really went away, for which a number of explanations can be adduced. Some small but highly inaccessible and therefore isolated pockets of largely hunter-gatherer peoples, with their shamanic practices, managed to hide from the incursions of civilization, even into the 20th century. Too, cross-cultural research has confirmed that almost all societies have at least some people using altered states of consciousness, the key method of shamans, to interact with the spirit world on behalf of their communities (Winkelman, 2015). Indeed, shamanism may in fact derive from the basic ways in which the human brain functions, namely from psychobiology—an original “neurotheology” so to speak (Winkelman, 2003, 2010). But while such explanations may help account for shamanism’s persistence over the millennia, how do we explain the recent wave of interest?

What is going on, I suggest, is the erosion of the major global structures that have constituted the collective arrangement of power and status since the dawn of civilization, and particularly since the dawn of materialism. Most recently, the activities of these structures have led to a set of global crises seemingly beyond anybody’s control and threatening us all, but not entirely unexpected by the world’s shamans. These crises, to name a few, include growing inequalities (Carnia, 2004), financial breakdowns (Lewis, 2008), psychological depression and suicidality (Ingram, 2009), microbial epidemics (Farmer, Kleinman, Kim, & Basilico, 2013), proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (Joyner, 2009), terrorism (Juergensmeyer, 2003), and climate change (Houghton, 2015; Kolbert, 2015; Maslin, 2009). What is needed, then, according to growing numbers of people, is global magic of the most powerful kind.

Why? Not only are these structures failing to adequately address the crises but at the same time they have ironically facilitated a return to the very shamanic practices they deplored in the past. Let us start with governments. Political pollsters and pundits rarely agree on anything except for one thing: The world’s governments are facing growing popular alienation because of their incompetence, corruption, and repression (Nye, 1997). Above all today, recent policy failures in the face of global crises have fostered a devolution of power toward more local independence and self-sufficiency. In particular, indigenous rights movements have challenged governmental persecution of native tradition while promoting their ancient spirituality.

Yet at the same time, legislation granting greater latitude to indigenous spiritual practices, like the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 in the United States, and the lifting of prohibitions against shamanic practices elsewhere, bolstered by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007, not only fostered the pride of indigenes in their spiritual heritage but encouraged shamans to come out of hiding and conduct their ceremonies openly (Kalweit, 1992). These practices, in turn, were fiercely defended by militant groups like the American Indian Movement. Put colloquially, it simply became “uncool” for governments to kill others for God, much less burn witches.

Indeed, some governments began to recognize shamanism as a spiritual asset. For example, in Norway it is accepted as an official religion, in South Korea as an “Intangible National Resource,” and in Tuva as a protected healing system. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (2003) has sponsored research on its medical potential.

Religions too face growing alienation. Certainly the secularism of modernity has done its damage. Too, many observers have noted the legitimacy threat to religious bureaucracies from widely publicized scandals. Yet something more basic is driving people away, namely the inability to explain or remediate the growing global crises. Too, the feminist movement challenged the patriarchy of the established monotheistic desert religions, and began searching for more female-friendly spiritualities. The most remarkable trend has been the growing numbers of “spiritual but not religious” people, who are rejecting the Enlightenment’s identification of spirituality with religion and instead are starting to ask, as a shaman might, “How can I call myself spiritual if I don’t interact with spirits?” (Butler & Butler, 2014).

Yet at the same time, established religions have generally become more tolerant toward all spiritual beliefs, as seen in the ecumenical movement starting in the 1960s, which began to undermine monotheism, exclusionism, and fundamentalism while encouraging pluralism. This tolerance, in turn, was fostered by the globalization of transportation and communication infrastructure that allowed growing millions to become familiar with faraway faiths. The Internet, for example, has been a major source of global information on spirituality, enabling millions to investigate a wide range of unconventional traditions, including shamanism, with mere clicks of a mouse.

In North America, Eastern traditions like Buddhism and Yoga gained a foothold and grew rapidly. These Eastern traditions, importantly, have retained many more shamanic elements than have Western ones. In parts of Asia today, for example, exactly where a classical shaman begins and a Buddhist lama ends is hard to tell.

The demise of the Soviet Bloc, too, dealt major blow to atheism (“a theism” in its own right one might argue), unleashing not only a resurgence of shamanism there but also a widespread search for spiritual meaning beyond the discredited materialistic “goulash communism.”

Sciences too face growing alienation, as rising numbers question their wisdom and ethics, from the manufacture of dangerous biocides to the cooperation of psychologists in torture investigations. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) dealt a crippling blow to the establishment’s myth of “objectivity,” a myth to which no self-respecting shaman would ever have subscribed. In medical science, the shine of modern technology started to fade, as millions turned to alternative, especially mind-body, therapies (Eisenberg et al., 1998; Inlander, Levin, & Levin, 1988). Shamanism is one such modality and in fact—it can be said without exaggeration—is the world’s oldest holistic medicine (Kowalewski, 2007).

Yet at the same time, the sciences have started taking a new look at the spiritual realm. The Enlightenment, having thrown out the spirituality baby with the religion bathwater, has brought science to a materialistic dead end, which is now hindering its very progress. Some scientists are realizing that this was a big mistake, and one they need to recover from. As a result, growing numbers are taking “consciousness” (you might read: “spirituality”) more seriously, as quantum physics increasingly exposes the limits of materialistic “scientism” (Radin, 2006). Quantum physics today, for example, with its notions of observer effect, retrocausality, and entanglement/nonlocality, is totally consistent with what shamans have been saying for millennia. Nonlocality, in fact, is one of the most popular topics for doctoral dissertations in quantum physics today (Plante, 2005). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, some quantum physicists and other scientists have gone out of their way to study with indigenous shamans in their native lands (Turk, 2011; Wolf, 1991).

Academic field research by social and other scientists in remote areas, also facilitated by infrastructural globalization, has increasingly looked at shamanic cultures. Pioneers like Richard Evans Schultes and Michael Harner introduced the world to psychoactive “entheogens” (substances enabling contact with the divine) used by some shamans to take their soul-trips to the spirit world. These and other intrepid psychonavigators who “went native,” much to the chagrin of many colleagues, opened up the shamanic book on nonordinary reality to millions.

In the medical sciences, researchers are taking alternative therapies like shamanism seriously (Fugh-Berman, 1996). Indeed, some studies have shown that shamanic techniques do in fact help heal modern maladies (Dobkin de Rios, 2002; S. Harner, 2010; S. Harner & Tryon, 1996; Vuckovic, Gullion, Ramirez, Schneider, & Williams, 2007). Note, though, that shamans do have bad days, and their communities will not patronize those who have “lost the medicine” and instead will go to others who now have it. Literally “it takes a village” to make a shaman, the community determining who is one and who is not (M. Harner, 2008-2011).

In the psychological sciences, a century of studies in parapsychology has evidenced some of the ancient claims of shamans (see Cardeña, Lynn, & Krippner, 2013). Research has provided support for telepathy, psychokinesis, and the like, all of which are old hat to the shamanic tradition (Radin, 1997, 2006; Tart, 2009). Some scholars have doubted the reality of such phenomena (Alcock, Burns, & Freeman, 2003; Hyman, 1989, 1996). Yet a number of meta-analyses have seriously damaged the “house of skeptics,” some of whom have finally thrown in the towel (see Carter, 2012). Extensive research on near-death experiences has lent substantial support for the notion of the soul’s survivability (van Lommel, 2011). Studies of afterlife communications are producing positive results about discarnate souls and their ability to communicate with the living (Ring, 2006). We see a growing acceptance of such scientific findings in university courses; national conferences; and publications like the Journal of Near-Death Studies, Journal of Scientific Exploration, and Explore: A Journal of Science and Healing.

Parapsychology, in fact, now suffuses popular culture. Psychics, for example, frequently appear on radio and TV talk shows. In particular, the media blitz has targeted the existence of ghosts with an amazing number of reality TV shows such as Paranormal State and Ghost Hunters. According to my own count, no less than 40 such series appeared from 2010 to 2014. To shamans, of course, ghosts are normal—not “paranormal” at all.

Not surprisingly, then, new schools of psychology—transpersonal and humanistic—have sprung up to address the new demand for parapsychological experiences (see Lines, 2002). Specifically, not only has shamanism been increasingly depathologized but these psychologies have paid more and more attention to it as a legitimate healing modality (Kowalewski, 2012; Walsh, 2001). Some practitioners I have met, for example, have suggested that the self-actualization of humanistic psychology might be seen as a progression from “ordinary reality” to “nonordinary reality,” such that at least some peak experiences may in fact be ecstatic encounters with the shamanic world of the spirits. Such progression, though, may be impeded by soul-loss, hauntings, and so on—classical diagnoses of shamanic healers. At the least, traditional psychologists are starting to be displaced by those less likely to dismiss claims of child “imaginary friends” as mere fictions, or “possession” as simple paranoia (Betty, 2015).

Shaman Voices

Into this soil, indigenous shamans started planting their seeds. For centuries, they had hid not only their secrets but even their social identities, for simple protection. Now, however, they openly teach and practice their skills. In 2002 and 2003, for example, shamans from across the world gathered at Omega Institute in New York State to tell us, “You’re dreaming the wrong dream.” Other international gatherings, bringing together shamans from South Korea, Mexico, Chile, Sweden, Mongolia, and other countries, have occurred in Russia and elsewhere (Liesowska, 2014). These indigenous “elder siblings” are teaching their modern immature “younger siblings” who are destroying the planet how to live in harmony with it (Ereira, 2014).

They are also teaching the modern populace to stop ruining native people’s lives, to stop threatening what little of their cultures, native lands, and populations is left (Doore, 1988). Since many indigenous people have been seduced by modernity and abandoned their own heritage, shamans want to keep alive the cultural traditions that have provided social support for their work but that have almost disappeared (Sun Bear, 1992). More broadly, shamans realize that, as the first global spirituality, their practices are closest to the very roots of human culture itself and so must be enlisted to protect it (Larsen, 1988).

They are also saying, then, that modern cultures are just as endangered as ancient ones because of spiritual malaise, which shamanism can heal. This disease, they say, lies at the root of the global crises, meaning that the earth cannot be healed by physical means alone (Brown, 1996). The global crises, in a word, are fundamentally spiritual, and so cannot be solved simply by the bureaucratic governments, religions, and sciences that not only allowed the problems to appear but in some cases even made worse. Unless the malaise is healed, modern peoples themselves may self-destruct (Somé, 1995). As Rarámuri shaman Augustín Ramos put it, “There are things we can share with the white man . . . otherwise we will die with our philosophy, and white people will starve as they . . . exchange the animals and trees for things manmade” (Jacobs, 1998, p. xii).

As the preeminent spirituality of nature, then, shamanism may be able to teach modern people how to avoid the looming ecocatastrophe, a prognosis with which many scientists today might agree (Heinberg, 2015; Levy & Patz, 2015; Tol, von Storch, & Floser, 2007). Shamans are warning us about serious natural calamities, suggesting that we are “on the eve of destruction” (Deatsman, 2011). Modern people’s devastation of the earth impels shamans to come out of hiding and teach openly how to close the separation of nature from spirituality (McGaa, 1995). It is not so much that the earth needs healing; modern people need it. Otherwise a disastrous “cleansing” involving worldwide chaos is on the horizon (Kalweit, 1992). A return to primitive spirituality will be needed to withstand such a “world reversal” or “cosmic transformation” (Miro-Quesada, 2015).

Indeed, shamans say that the spirits have been telling them since the 1960s that times had changed so much that the spiritual knowledge long kept hidden now had to be revealed. According to Lakota shaman Wallace Black Elk (1996), for example, “The spirits authorized me to go teach all over the world to yellow and white and black as well as red people” (see too Black Elk & Lyon, 1991). The mandate to tell all has been backed by prophetic visions showing modern people acting “like Indians” (Boyd, 1974, p. 139; see too Jones & Krippner, 2012). Amazonian shamans recall ancient prophecies which say that the efforts of all peoples will be needed to bring the world back into balance (Whitaker, 1991). Such prophecies cannot be casually dismissed, since precognition has some basis in scientific research (Dossey, 2009; Tart, 2009).

Indeed, these traditional shamans are saying that the new shamans of the developed world will be in the best position, and have the greatest power, to turn things around in the physical realm. These new modern shamans, in turn, will teach their brothers and sisters how to treat the earth with respect (Whitaker, 1991). In the words of Q’ero shaman Fredy Quispe Singona, “the path of the paqo [shaman] . . . is . . . for everybody nowadays (Wilcox, 2004, p. 184).

Shamans say, too, that the spirits are doing their part to promote the renaissance. Why? It is because of the global crises, one shaman told me. “Things are getting so bad,” he said, “that the spirits are cutting us more slack than ever before.” In terms of sheer volume of knowledge and wisdom, they are downloading much more to us than in the past (Illis, 2009). In the U.S. Southwest, for example, Kachina spirits are reported as saying that the time has come for them to connect with people everywhere since “human survival depends on [it]” (Hartley, 2014, p. 14).

Not all indigenous people, though, are happy with this teaching of shamanism to modern ones. Some resist, anxious about distortion and misuse of the traditions. They are highly critical of modern “culture vultures” expropriating native practices willy-nilly for material gain. They fear the watering down of the power if everybody learns it. They fear retribution from the ancestors who, they say, told them to keep the knowledge secret. The shaman teachers counter by claiming that “being Indian” is not a matter of blood but a way of life, and that they teach only respectful modern people. As a result, native ceremonial practice started shifting from exclusivity to inclusivity, since serving all, according to some Native American elders, “is the way of the future” (Mehl-Madrona, 2014, p. 34).

Born-Again Shamans

History is full of ironies. The very structures that nearly decimated shamanism in the past are not only suffering popular disillusionment themselves, especially by failing to respond adequately to the current global crises, but in fact are also fostering the very currents and infrastructural development that has prepared the way for shamanism’s resurgence. This conjuncture of structural failure, mounting crises, and developments brought about by those very structures has led to a global search for the healing power of the primitive, resulting in a paleolithic spirituality for the 21st century. The shamanic renaissance is not a retro fad, it is rooted in stark reality.

As the earth hurtles toward a cliff, then, more and more people are turning toward the spiritual roots of the crisis and becoming “born-again shamans.” They are saying that the crises can no longer be solved by physical means alone. “A Better Earth through Better Shopping” is a fool’s errand, the last gasp of a materialistic mind-set. Accessing the full power of shamanic principles and practices, they say, is needed to extricate us from the mess. Traditional shamans, facing criticism at home but attuned to the voices of the spirits, have emerged from the shadows to teach modern people how to do just that.