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In Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, anthropologist Manvir Singh offers an illuminating and at times provocative exploration into one of humanity’s most enduring spiritual traditions. Drawing on his academic background (Singh is Harvard-trained and a contributor to The New Yorker) and extensive fieldwork, Singh takes the reader on a journey across cultures and continents, from the jungles of Indonesia to the Colombian Amazon, in pursuit of the question: What is it that shamans actually do? And why has this practice persisted for so long?
At its heart, the book explores a deceptively simple idea: that across time and culture, shamans are people who enter altered states of consciousness to interact with unseen forces on behalf of others. They heal, divine, and protect, often through song, dance, ritual, or the use of psychoactive plants, and they do so not as priests of dogma, but as mediators between worlds.
The book is compelling, not only because of Singh’s global approach, but because he treats the subject with both rigour and humanity. He doesn’t romanticise shamanism, nor does he dismiss it. Instead, he presents it as a deeply human response to the uncertainty and fragility of life, a system rooted in transformation, discipline, and a belief in more-than-visible realities.
A Word on the Word
Of course, any modern exploration of shamanism must acknowledge the complexity and controversy surrounding the term itself. “Shaman” is, historically, a word of Tungusic origin (from Siberia), and its widespread application across disparate cultures has rightly raised concerns about cultural appropriation and oversimplification.
And Singh doesn’t shy away from this. He treats the term “shamanism” more as a useful shorthand, a lens through which we can observe spiritual practices that share similar structures and intentions, even if they emerge from vastly different contexts. That said, as readers and practitioners, we might still ask ourselves whether it’s time we found new language, something less entangled with colonial legacies, and more specific to the practices we’re actually describing.
The Magic of Transformation
What resonated most deeply in Singh’s writing is his treatment of shamanism as a technology of transformation. Through initiations, music, trance, and sometimes psychoactive substances, the shaman becomes, or appears to become, something other. Not just a person in costume or ceremony, but a being imbued with the power to heal, protect, and restore balance.
In that sense, Singh’s description of shamanic practice is not just anthropological; it’s fundamentally magical. If magic is the art of transformation and the navigation of unseen forces, then what shamans do, and have done for millennia, is perhaps one of the most ancient magical arts of all.
Final Thoughts
For those disillusioned with organised religion but still seeking the sacred, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion is a beautifully written, thoughtful exploration of the world’s oldest spiritual craft, that offers a compelling glimpse into a form of spirituality that is both ancient and adaptive. Singh doesn’t preach, but he does invite the reader to reconsider what it means to be spiritual, and whether, perhaps, the figure of the shaman still speaks to something deeply human in us all.
It’s not a perfect book, and it certainly doesn’t (nor could it) capture the full cultural nuance of every tradition it touches. But as a well-researched, thoughtful, accessible, and respectful entry point, it’s well worth your time.
