Unique among animals, we humans cultivate altered states of consciousness in our efforts to contact the beyond.

Pinpointing the origins of shamanism thus requires thinking not about the psychology it taps into but about the broader social and cultural context. Shamanism requires sophisticated cultural learning. It requires being so cooperative that people turn to one another for specialized tasks. It requires linguistic skills at a level where clients can

The power of a specialist is that they can change the stories we tell ourselves. If you believe you are fatigued for a medical reason, a powerful doctor should be able to fix you. If you believe that vengeful ghosts haunt you at night, an effective medium should be able to chase them away. To the extent you consider a specialist powerful, you give

… the more foreign a state is from normal behavior, the more it demonstrates special powers and supernatural contact. A shaman who chitchats with an audience in their everyday voice is likely to be considered a fraud. One who thrashes violently, speaks in a strange voice, and then doesn't remember anything afterward is more conceivably doing

Through this survey, we will confront a paradox of shamanism: when it comes to healing, the stronger the illusion, the more potent the effects.

In 2015, the psychologist Bruce Wampold showed that, while some treatments might be better than others, these differences are small compared to the effects of contextual factors, like patient expectations, the relationship with the healer, and a shared understanding of the reason for suffering. Much of healing, whether by Colombian shamans or Johns

The theory that shamanism is a compelling technology for dealing with uncertainty explains the spectrum of shamanic activities. Illness, weather, and beached whales are not scattered, unrelated events but members of a single class: big outcomes that we want control over and for which we are apt to suspect supernatural involvement. Shamans are not

Shamanism is not an elaborate hoax put on by tricksy con artists. To the contrary, it is a dazzling institution that culturally evolves, assuring specialist and client alike of the practitioner's otherworldly powers.

The recurrent emergence of shamanism is not conjecture based on universality; it is informed by our understanding of human psychology and cultural evolution. Our desperation to control uncertainty, our suspicions that agents cause misfortune, our tendency to accept special powers when people move beyond humanness—all of them interact to produce a