Is Shamanism Real?

The cute response would be to say, “Here, ingest this psychedelic substance and find out.” Anyone who’s taken a plant medicine knows that far from the cliche of it producing fantasies, it invokes a dramatic confrontation with reality.

However, to answer the question squarely is oddly difficult. Not because people imagine it’s merely a placebo, but because it’s simply a bad question. Anthropologists have been researching Shamanism for over 100 years, with psychologists not far behind. Shamanism is a universal expression of humanity's fundamental spiritual impulse to live in harmony with the cosmos.

The study of shamanism has taught us a tremendous amount about our early ancestors and, in turn, the deepest aspects of our psychology. How does one question that reality?

That leads us to the crux of the matter and the true question! People don’t actually wonder if Shamanism is real, but if their claims are. For the vast majority of human existence, ghosts, premonitions, and some sort of divine consciousness were a core part of people's waking reality. Our modern age stands in direct opposition to thousands of years of human experience. Do these same people ever wonder if they simply lost touch with a world that goes on all around them?

More often than not, if you talk to them long enough, they will admit that they’ve had some strange precognition once or maybe saw a ghost. They had some earth-shattering experience that they couldn’t explain by rational means alone and have boxed away. I politely tell them that my work focuses on those spaces.

I’ve come up with all sorts of clever arguments and analogies to describe how real shamanism is. But, at the end of the day, without having experienced it yourself or, at a minimum, the curiosity to have an experience, then is there really anything I could say?