Anthropology / Shamanism
The First Specialists: Why Every Human Culture Invented the Shaman
Across tens of thousands of years and every inhabited continent, cultures that never met each other independently arrived at the same figure: a person who travels between worlds so the rest of us don't have to.
The Idea
The shaman is often framed as a curiosity — a relic of 'primitive' religion, or a romanticised symbol of mystical wisdom. Both framings miss what is genuinely strange and fascinating about the phenomenon. Shamanism is not a religion in the way that Buddhism or Christianity are religions. It has no creed, no founding text, no centralised institution. It is better understood as a technology — a set of practices for entering altered states of consciousness in order to negotiate with forces that the community believes are shaping their lives: illness, weather, animals, the recently dead. What makes this anthropologically remarkable is the convergence. Siberian Tungus peoples, Amazonian Shipibo healers, Korean mudang, and the San Bushmen of southern Africa all developed structurally similar roles involving trance, spirit intermediaries, and social function — with no contact between them. This is not borrowing. It suggests something about how human minds, under certain social pressures, tend to generate the same solution. The leading hypothesis is that shamanism emerges wherever small-scale societies need a specialist who can manage the boundary between the known and the unknown — someone whose perceived access to hidden causality makes them useful when ordinary knowledge runs out. Sickness with no visible cause. A hunt that keeps failing. A grief that will not lift. The shaman's role is to make the invisible legible. Whether or not spirits exist, that function is entirely real.
In the World
In 2008, archaeologists excavating a burial site at Hilazon Tachtit in northern Israel uncovered the grave of a woman who died around 12,000 years ago — among the oldest intentional burials ever found. What made the grave extraordinary was its contents. She had been laid to rest with fifty complete tortoise shells, the pelvis of a leopard, the wing of a golden eagle, the tail of a cow, the foot of a human, and the foreleg of a wild boar. Her own skeleton suggested she had a physical disability that would have given her an unusual gait. Archaeologist Leore Grosman, who led the excavation, argued this was almost certainly a shaman's burial. Every element pointed to a person of unusual social status whose identity was bound up with animal intermediaries — creatures that, in shamanic traditions worldwide, serve as spirit guides or vehicles for travelling between states of being. The tortoise shells alone, stacked carefully around her body, indicated a ritual significance that went far beyond practical burial. What stays with you about this find is the timeline. This woman lived 12,000 years ago — before agriculture, before cities, before writing. And yet a community of hunter-gatherers chose to mark her death with elaborate ceremony and deliberate symbolism. The role she played mattered enough to memorialise. Shamanism, it turns out, may not be a detour in human history. It might be close to the beginning of it.
Why It Matters
There is a temptation to treat shamanism as a pre-scientific placeholder — something humans needed before they had better tools for understanding illness or weather. But that framing tells us more about our own assumptions than about the practice itself. Communities that maintained shamanic traditions often did so alongside practical knowledge, not instead of it. The shaman did not replace the healer who knew which plants reduced fever; they addressed the layer of experience the healer could not — the meaning of the suffering, the relationship between a person and their community, the psychological weight of uncertainty. That is not nothing. Modern medicine is beginning to catch up with this, through research into ritual, placebo, and the therapeutic effects of felt meaning. Knowing that the shaman was, in some deep sense, humanity's first attempt to hold together what cannot be easily separated — the physical and the psychological, the individual and the collective, the known and the unknown — might make you more alert to where that work still gets done today, and by whom.
A Question to Ponder
In your own life, who or what plays the role of the shaman — the thing you turn to when ordinary knowledge runs out?
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