I’m lying on my back in a dark room, eyes closed, the scent of a joss stick in the air, while a voice summons my spirit guides to heal me. I’m here for an appointment with Louise, a qualified “shamanic healer” in Hackney. Louise places her hands first on my temples, then on my shoulders, belly and knees, breathing deeply and occasionally breaking out into a rhythmic hum. Today, Louise is just channeling healing energy to clear away any blockages, but she often works with people who are seriously ill, struggling with money worries, or searching for love. After nearly an hour, she thanks the spirits and informs me that she managed to unblock a lot of trapped energy. She also tells me that I have a deep psychic connection to ancient Egypt, and that my spirit animal is a gorilla.
I was curious to visit Louise because I had been reading Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, an absorbing new book by the anthropologist and New Yorker writer Manvir Singh. Singh — who has lived with and studied indigenous peoples from Indonesia to the Amazon — points out that shamanism is having a moment. In the 2021 UK census, 8,000 people said their religion was shamanism — more than Rastafarians or Zoroastrians. Celebrities from Madonna to Will Smith have testified to the transformative powers of ayahuasca, a psychedelic plant used by Amazonian shamans, inspiring a busy trade in Western tourism to South American retreats. And, of course, you don’t need to leave your home to meet a shaman: Durek Verrett, who claims to be a reptile and whose clients include Gwyneth Paltrow, is just one of the more popular shamanic influencers online, with more than 400,000 Instagram followers.
Shamanism — the word comes from 17th-century accounts of hunter-gatherer religion in Siberia — may strike us as profoundly alien. Siberian Chukchi shamans claimed to turn into reindeers and travel through the underworld, and Durek Verrett offers to cleanse women’s vaginas of evil spirits. But in his book, Singh makes a striking claim: shamanism isn’t some primitive stage in the evolution of religion proper, or some kooky New Age parody of ancient superstitions. Instead, it’s about as natural to human beings as storytelling or dance — and it’s our institutional religions, with their bishops, churches and creeds, that are the peculiar innovations of a new age.
Singh’s argument is worth paying attention to, because if he’s right — if humans instinctively gravitate towards shamanism — then it means that the practices of the Chukchi don’t just tell us about our primordial past. They may also help us understand the spiritual yearnings that beset us today — and offer clues about where we are headed in the future. And if it’s true, as many claim, that secular Western societies are undergoing a “meaning crisis”, perhaps we’ll end up turning for answers not to traditional religions but to new forms of shamanism.
“She tells me that I have a deep psychic connection to ancient Egypt, and that my spirit animal is a gorilla.”
Singh’s argument starts from the fact that, when Europeans began exploring and colonising the globe after the 15th century, everywhere they went they encountered peoples with remarkably similar religious practices. From the tundras of Siberia to the plains of North America to the islands of the Pacific, traditional societies recognised certain men or women as religious visionaries who used their special access to the supernatural to offer services like healing and prophecy. They explained what they were doing in different ways — Nepali shamans extracted ghosts from people’s bodies, whereas eskimo shamans travelled to the moon and turned into bears — but beneath this diversity were some conspicuously similar characteristics.
Shamans everywhere advertise their connection to the unseen by entering altered states, whether through drugs, ecstatic dance, dreams or visions. They emphasise their difference from ordinary people by undergoing rituals of transformation, and by depriving themselves of food or sex. Although their work brings money and prestige, shamans are often society’s outsiders: some seem to be mentally ill, prone to weeping or psychosis; and some (like the bujasa of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi) were what today we would call trans. Certain ideas — like “soul journeying” and metamorphosis into animals — occur among shamans again and again.
The fact that shamanism is virtually universal in traditional societies, despite their separation by millennia of historical development, calls for an explanation. It must be, argues Singh, that shamanism evolved again and again because it meets a fundamental human need — similar to how wings have evolved separately among insects, bats and birds to solve the challenge of how to navigate through the air.
The tragedy of human life is that we crave order in a wildly unpredictable universe. We want our crops to grow in a world of hail storms and drought. We want our loved ones to survive and stay healthy in a world of danger and disease. And when things go wrong, we find it virtually impossible to accept that they do so for no reason. We look out at the chaos of reality and see a universe saturated with agency. When bad things happen — the medieval Black Death, the Covid pandemic, the death of a child — we have a natural tendency to think unseen agents must be to blame. As a result, we are always susceptible to the claims of charismatic individuals who can convince us that they have special access to the world of invisible causes.
Singh’s account implies that, at the root of the human religious impulse — deeper even than a desire for community or existential purpose or moral guidance — is something far simpler: a craving for magic. We want good things to happen and bad things not to happen, and we want to believe that certain people have the power to make it so. This is the basis of shamanism, which means it was most likely the basis of religion everywhere for 95% of our species’ history, before agriculture triggered the development of civilisations and institutional religions. Not until the appearance of those newfangled faiths did the gods become obsessed with monitoring our behaviour and beliefs. Most human religions have had nothing much to do with morality or doctrine.
Today our post-Enlightenment religions go to great lengths to prove they are respectably rational. The spooky and miraculous have largely been banished from church. The pope pays obeisance to Darwin, apologists write books reconciling God and science, and talk of miraculous healing is for most part the preserve of embarrassing cranks. Priests pray that God will grant us wisdom and compassion, not that he will hold off plagues and tornadoes, stymie witches or curse our enemies.
But if Singh is right, it may be that the problem with mainstream Western religion is not that it is insufficiently rational but, rather, that it is nowhere near irrational enough. It’s now a commonplace that Westerners are dissatisfied with a coldly rationalistic worldview, and are increasingly seeking answers in a panoply of spiritual practices — or perhaps even rediscovering a belief in God. But reading Singh I began to wonder if the standard explanations for why this is happening — a loss of community, a breakdown in moral values, a search for transcendent meaning — ignore an even deeper cause.
Western societies like Britain didn’t rapidly become more secular after the Second World War because people began to reject Thomas Aquinas’s Five Proofs, or because we were busy reading On the Origin of Species. We stopped attending church because the modern state increasingly performed the functions of the ancient gods. First the Industrial Revolution and then the creation of welfare states helped us make staggering strides towards eliminating the role of chance in human affairs. Decades of postwar peace and economic growth meant we were living longer, healthier and more prosperous lives. And shrinking inequality and expanding welfare systems meant most of us no longer dreaded catastrophic reversals of economic fortune or social standing.
That era may now be coming to an abrupt halt. Climate change means the weather is again becoming a matter of existential concern. Covid destroyed our faith in the state’s ability to protect us from plague. The unthinkable prospect of great power war and nuclear apocalypse has again become thinkable. Flatlining economic growth may not look like a disaster in the grand scheme of human history, but when the very rich are capturing an ever-greater share of wealth, it translates to lower living standards for most and humiliating losses of status for many. Secularism advanced quickest in egalitarian Scandinavia, and slowest in the United States, where high inequality and patchy state support left people more exposed to the vagaries of fate. A more uncertain future may very well be a more religious one.
But reading Singh and visiting Louise made me sceptical that we are about to see people flocking back to church pews — despite recent headlines trumpeting a revival of religiosity based on scanty data. According to Singh, institutional religions like Christianity never replaced the innate human attraction to shamanism, but merely captured and suppressed it. New religions, he argues, tend to be founded by shamans — Jesus, St Paul, Muhammad and Joseph Smith all gathered followers by hearing voices and performing miracles — and echoes of shamanism can be found in “charismatic” Christian churches. But shamans are unruly, and mainstream religions tend to maintain order and authority by stamping them out. Even so, the human fear of uncertainty means that shamans crop up again and again in the form of prophets, gurus and cult leaders.
This is particularly true in times of social upheaval. At the beginning of the 20th century, a social crisis was triggered in Polynesia when ships bearing American cargo confronted native peoples with previously unimaginable hordes of wealth. Indigenous societies were thrown into confusion, their settled worldviews overturned. Shamanic prophets emerged to lead “cargo cults”, promising a coming age of salvation when the heavenly ships would return. Rituals were invented to hasten their arrival, such as beating drums while marching up and down the shore.
Our own age of confusion has thrown up its own shamans with their own promises of salvation. Guru-influencers like Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand gain followers by promising healing based on their special insight into mysterious psychic realities. Like traditional shamans, they advertise their spiritual otherness via weird lifestyles based on self-deprivation (Brand abstains from animal products, drugs and alcohol; Peterson lives on steak). Like traditional shamans with their trance states, they weep and promise transcendence in ecstatic tirades of semi-comprehensible language. Only a little kookier than Brand and Peterson is Joe Dispenza, who tells his 1.36 million YouTube followers that he healed his broken back with positive thinking, and teaches techniques to use quantum physics to cure cancer and bring wealth.
Our new shamans may seem like the bizarre products of our strange new age of smartphones and algorithms, but in the long view of human history they make perfect sense. It’s the human condition to seek, in Peterson’s phrase, antidotes to chaos. A world of lavish wealth for a few and growing anxiety for many is one where charismatic individuals promising magical transformation will flourish. Now when I think of our current craze for Kundalini yoga and reiki, meditation and affirmation, ayahuasca and psilocybin, I consider those Polynesia islanders undergoing their own meaning crisis a century ago. Frightened by changes beyond our control, and stirred into ecstatic longing by wealth we can barely understand, we beat our drums and gaze out over the horizon, praying for the coming age of riches and renewal.
