Long before there were shamans, there was animism. Archeologists thought until recently that the oldest spiritual belief system was about 50,000 years old, according to evidence found in a cave in Siberia. Recently they discovered a cave in Africa containing a 70,000-year-old shrine to a python spirit.

No one even knows exactly how old animism is, but they do know that fully modern human beings like us have existed for at least 250,000 years. Shamanism developed from animism. And although no one knows for certain just when shamanism arose, there is evidence for it going back about 27,000 years, which means it could be much older.

In his wonderful book, Dawn Behind the Dawn: A Search for the Earthly Paradise, historian Geoffrey Ashe traces many myths, legends, and beliefs of Europe, Asia, and the Near and Middle East all the way back to shamanic roots in Siberia.

The book seems to be out of print, but here's where you can buy an inexpensive new or used copy of Dawn Behind the Dawn: A Search for the Earthly Paradise As of April 2007 you could buy a paperback for less than $2 or a hardback for less than $1, and there were plenty of copies at that time.

Russian Anthropologists Discovered Shamans

Geoffry Ashe describes how Russian anthropologists "discovered" shamanism when they studied tribal nomadic herders in Siberia in the 19th century. After their detailed descriptions of the unique set of practices of the spiritual practitioners and healers they observed, whom the tribesmen called shamans, were published, the term came to be used by anthropologists worldwide.

The term shaman was a useful sort of shorthand for anthropologists. It described a certain role in society that they observed time after time in gathering-hunting cultures. They coined the term shamanism because it stood for a specific set of beliefs and practices that anthropologists began to recognize in gathering-hunting cultures around the world.

Until the late twentieth centure, most people had never heard the terms shaman and shamanism. Anthropologist Michael Harner popularized the terms with his best-selling book, The Way of the Shaman.

In Dawn Behind the Dawn, Ashe goes on to explain the later findings of Russian linguistic researchers who discovered that those original Siberian tribes had all branched out over thousands of years from one ancient original tribe. The researchers found that the words for a male shaman are actually different in each of the tribes, proving that the words were borrowed or invented long after the tribes branched apart.

Women Were the First Shamans

The startling news about the later Russian linguistic research on the shamanist tribes they first studied in Siberia is that the words for female shaman are very similar in all the tribes. All the words for female shaman are derived from the same root word in the original tribal language, which also means bear.

The most important thing about their findings is that it proves that originally, before the tribes grew apart and went their separate ways, the only shamans were female. Women were the first shamans!

There's a fascinating article by Max Dashu on the history of women as shamans.at www.suppressedhistories.net. It includes a bibliography for further reading.

Mircea Eliade Was Wrong

Because he wrote one of the first widely read books on shamanism, Mircea Eliade is still considered by many to be an expert on shamanism. In fact, though, he was too much a product of his time and his religious training to be objective. He judged shamanic cultures by his own.

Eliade downplayed the shaman's journeys to the lower world, perhaps associating it unconsciously with the Christian Hell. He emphasized shamanic journeying to the heavens instead. You could say that his world tree was top-heavy: It had hardly any roots.

What is worse, he considered the fact that some shamans were women to be a degradation of shamanism. He considered shamans to be priests, and in his world, priests could only be men. Anything else was sacrilege.

We now know that Eliade was wrong. The lower world has nothing at all to do with Hell. And women were the first shamans, and apparently the only shamans for thousands of years.

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