A shaman is a person who fills the specific role in an animist community of healing and harmonizing the humans with nature and the spirits. The shaman is someone who has the ability to journey to the spirit world to find important information (such as where to find food, water, or shelter) and to do spirit work such as retrieving lost souls.

Where Are Shamans Found?

Shamans are found in many parts of the world, but they generally do not exist outside of animist cultures. That means shamans hardly ever exist except in gathering-hunting, nomadic animal-herding, or horticultural (gathering and gardening) communities.

Once a culture turns to agriculture, the religion changes from animism to something else, usually worship of goddesses and/or gods, and shamanism disappears, though some cultures retain some elements of shamanic practice longer than others.

A Shaman, Sketch for "Yermak Conquers Siberia," 1893 Giclee Print
Surikov, Vasilii...
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All Shamans are Healers. Not All Healers Are Shamans.

An important task of all shamans is healing the community and individual members, and so all shamans are healers. But not all healers are shamans. Gatherers learn a great deal about the use of plants as food and as medicine. Shamans use such knowledge, but so do others.

A shaman is a particular kind of healer and magical practitioner who is on a path of service in an animist/shamanist culture. To understand what a shaman is, you must remember that while all shamans are healers, only a certain type of healer is a shaman.

A culture may have several kinds of healers who work in different ways. To be a shaman, a person must journey to the spirit world to do healing or other work that benefits the community or the spirits connected with the people or place the shaman serves.

A shaman may also be an herbalist. But a healer can be an herbalist without being a shaman (without journeying to the spirit world).

Who Can Become a Shaman?

Shamans are created by spirit, not by humans, though in some cultures shamans may receive extensive training, sometimes from childhood. However, a shaman, like a mayor, must have a community to serve.

You can't be a shaman just because you have the training. But if you have a true calling from spirit, your community may find you. Still, a shaman must be in service to a community.

In the language of shamans (and of anthropologists), a "shaman" who serves himself is a sorceror. Such people are feared and often hated by their community, and their lifespan (for various reasons) tends to be short.

Generally speaking if you do not live in an animist culture, you probably can't be a shaman, though you may learn the practices and become a shamanic healer in your own culture.

How Are Shamans Chosen?

Most shamans are chosen by spirit, either as children or as adults. Such people really have little choice but to become shamans. Spirit will plague them with visions or with illness or ill luck until they heed the call.

Such shamans are referred to in the Saami culture of Lapland in northern Finland as elk shamans. They are considered the most powerful of shamans.

Some families seem to pass shamanic abilities, and the calling from spirit to use them, by inheritance. Those who inherit the talent are generally trained from a young age in cultural knowledge, teaching stories, herbalogy, and other skills, though they may not be taught to journey till some culturally defined age (teen, adult, or middle aged).

Because shamans are essential to the well-being of their people, when shamans are scarce, people may volunteer to serve or be chosen by the community or other shamans to train for the job. The Saami call such people reindeer shamans. They are considered less powerful but are respected for their service to their people.

Sometimes people offer themselves to spirit, asking to serve their people. They can be any age, and of either sex. If spirit accepts them and gives them healing abilities, then once they have demonstrated their abilities, they are accepted in the community for what they can do.

Please note that the word shaman is highly controversial among some American Indian groups, who object to the term on political grounds (because it is a foreign word, not their own people's term). With all due respect, we are using the term here when the documented practices of the individual (what they say they do and what people have witnessed them doing) fit the definition of shamanism, as with Frank Fools Crow in Fools Crow Wisdom and Powerand some others.

When Is "a Shaman" Not a Shaman?

What the shaman is called in a given culture depends on the language that culture speaks. Bear in mind that people often casually and mistakenly describe any indigenous healer as a shaman. That creates confusion.

Also, the various terms for native healers are sometimes wrongly translated as shaman by linguists who don't truly understand what shaman means.

Much more information coming soon on what a shaman is.

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