Mircea Eliade defined a shaman strictly as an ecstatic whose soul leaves his body and ascends to the sky or descends to the Underworld. If this trait were not present, said Eliade, the person was not a shaman but a healer or magician. This definition excluded African spirit practitioners from the category of shamans and had a delaying effect on the exploration of the spirituality of African healing and ritual. However, since the time of his book, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, first published (in French) in 1951, new studies of what is clearly shamanic work in Africa, have even outpaced the ethnography of shamanism in Eurasia.

 

The anthropologist Colin Turnbull knew, but could not fully put the matter into words. "The bodies [of the singers] were empty"-they were gone. Turnbull said that the Mbuti's songs and their sense of the forest very definitely included whatever is implied by God and Spirit.

An important aspect here is divination where objects may be collections of bones, figurines, or palm nuts, the naturally formed footprints of wild animals, or the appearance of the internal organs of a hunter's newly caught quarry. The random pushing of a pole along the ground may also be a divining test. These objects or circumstances tell the diviner the nature of the trouble the sick person is suffering, whether it is from ancestor affliction or from witchcraft, what steps the relatives should take, or whether they should undertake a ritual appealing to the ancestor spirits or an anti witchcraft ritual or herbal treatment.

In divination, the practitioner feels a shaking or burning, a great sensitiveness to disturbance, and a sense of his or her tutelary spirit taking over. In a state of heightened awareness, the practitioner will put pertinent questions about the trouble in question. The diviner in the sacred state is able to reverse a downward trend in a person's life. In some cases the diviner (or oracle) may not remember anything about the séance afterwards. The diviners, therefore, are shamans; they perform extractions of harmful intrusions, reconcile a person's ancestor spirit to make him or her a guardian and protector, and may heal with herbs or physical treatments.

In ancient Egyptian , the spirit qualities of bulls and jackals are noted, the part-human, part-animal nature of gods, and the dismemberment and rebirth theme of the god Osiris. There existed knowledge of multiple souls, along with the practice of trance by priests, which brought them gifts like those of shamans.

Igbo Shamanism in Africa notes how the primary spirit entity, Agwü, empowers the "man of knowledge" (dibïa) in his craft, and how a deceased dibïa grandfather will teach a new dibïa in his dreams. At present the dibïas (now frequently women) do not treat disease so much as disorders due to lifestyle, corruption, dishonesty, and abuse. And in Hausa practices, Bori spirit doctors in Nigeria owe the efficacy of their healing and wisdom to the spirits.

Among the Hausa, Muslim and non-Muslim practices sometimes intermingle and are sometimes in opposition. In the Gungawa section of the Hausa region, shamanic mediums, often benign or trickster figures, are held in high repute, while at the same time displays of power by any of them are frowned upon.

Among the Ndembu’s, the shaman-diviner attains all the typical powers of universal shamanism: healing, interacting with the dead and other spirits, finding lost objects, bringing animals to the hunter, changing the weather, and speaking from insight and foreknowledge.

African piety toward ancestors was respected by the Greeks of the classical era as a good example to be followed. For the Akan in Ghana, humans are descended from spirits who are descended from God. The priest-mediums of the ancestor cults are called to their work by supernatural agents. In their initiation there occurs a temporary paralysis, like trance.

Among the Asante, the okomfo or priest is possessed by spirits of nature who impart the knowledge for the okomfo to cure illnesses and assist people in other ways. Similarly, in Cape Nguni, the healer-diviners are called to their professions by the ancestors. More women than men become mediums in this region of Africa.

In Mami Wata Religion" (mother of water), the deity inhabits bodies of water and is revered, along with water spirits, in the West African coastal area. Initiates are called to the priesthood through signs of being drawn to water. They then set up unique individualistic shrines to Mami Wata, incorporating non-African images and objects that were brought into West Africa by European and Indian trade and cultural contact since the fifteenth century.

The Swahili healers and Spirit Cult shows the intermingling of Islamic and pre-Islamic ways of understanding healing at all levels of the craft: contacting and treating spirits, divination, astrology, geomancy, and magic. For healing, Qur'anic passages are written on a cup or plate, washed with water, and the ter, and the water given to the patient to drink. Possessing spirits will use humans as their "chair"; the spirits are ambitious and desire fine things.

The Yaka’s have a religious view based on an awareness of the world in which everything is alive and an ecstatic communion can take place between humans, spirits, and the life world. Yaka diviners often operate within the framework of a healing church. In "Zarma Spirit Mediums," the zima is described as a holy man who variously combines spirit possession, healing, and magic through ritual in an effort to manipulate spirits.

The Marabouts variously combines divination, magic, healing, spirit manipulation, and ecstatic prayer. And the Cape Nguni’s emphasize the role of the diviner, who interprets the messages of ancestors in order to heal the patient. Herbalists also have knowledge of magic, but do not possess the occult powers of the diviner. The author notes that certain aspects of Xhosa ecstatic divination may be derived from the cosmology and shamanic practices of the Kung-such as the ecstatic healing dance.

Kung Healing, protect people from evil spirits by entering into trance. A major feature of Kung shamanic practices is the ritual trance dance, also practiced by the Xhosa, a ceremony entered into in order to placate malevolent deities; music is a key factor in the Kung trance dances.

The Akan, a Ghanaian people include the ritual to draw the deity into twins, showing how the twins are tested, fall into trance, and are finally purified.

Although there is plenty of evidence that the majority of so called 'Shamans' today (including in earlier times) are women has popularly been termed 'Shamans' by the students of Mirceau Eliade plus followers of Carlos Castaneda and so on, formed among others basis for psychological healing practices in hunting and gathering societies. The emergence of sedentary agricultural societies, political integration, and class structures had significant effects upon the psychobiological foundations of shamanism, but their origin in innate brain structures and functions of consciousness assured the persistence of similar practices.
Ethnocentric Scholars during the first part of the 20th century sometimes imposed models of cultural evolution onto their studies, like a template. And found animism (a belief in souls in all things, including inanimate objects), which they formulated as a characteristic of the most primitive forms of religion in shamanism, when in fact it was not there. Also Richard Noll pointed out in 1983, that Shamans are not psychotic, a Western (and Soviet) ethnocentric distortion based on the misapplication of psychiatric/medical schemata to certain practices.

A more fundamental consideration is whether the culture has, in a sense, "told" the shaman how to act, how to experience and recount the experiences. That is, are the forms of shamanic behaviors and experiences modeled by the shaman's culture (in which case they function as symbols) or do they depend on the mental state of the individual shaman (in which case they can be seen as symptoms)?

If there are cultural beliefs about how the shamanic experience should be, the shaman would have been imbued with these beliefs long before having any shamanic experiences, and thus the shaman's experience would potentially have been shaped by them.

An example of the Guajiro Indians of Venezuela and Colombia is revealing. The Guajiro have specific cultural beliefs about the traits of the ideal shaman, and these traits coincide, generally, with the Western cultural representation of hysteria. Consequently, Westerners readily misjudge the Guajiro shaman's behaviors as reflecting hysteria instead of Guajiro culture.

Another area easily subject to ethnocentric evaluation is the shaman's use of conjurers' tricks during séances, and particularly during healing. For instance, Siberian shamans have been observed cutting off their own heads, opening and closing their own or their patients' bodies, mysteriously creating complex soundscapes of animal spirit calls everywhere and seemingly out of the blue, and, as most often reported the world over, sucking out disease-causing objects from their patients, after having secretly inserted them in their mouths before the magical surgery (called “Psychic” Surgery in the Philippines). Such tricks of the trade suggest to many scholars that shamans are simply exploitative charlatans.

The placebo effect is a real phenomena, Don Handelman asked a Washo Indian shaman of western Nevada about the healing tricks he had observed in the shaman's work, and the shaman explained that the tricks were like the other paraphernalia and really be­side the point: "I use them only to gain attention of the sick person, nothing more".

Another example is the Kwakiutl Indians in Canada, who believe that the "tricks" are actually techniques for directing the spirits, who, they believe, mimic the shaman's moves. When the shaman is sucking on a patient, the spirits are also sucking, and when he removes the disease-causing object (which he has palmed), the spirits remove the real cause of the disease. That's why, amongst the Kwakiutl, a shaman would consult another shaman when ill. He believes the techniques, if precisely executed, ensure the spirits' proper curative actions. Thus, in the context of a shaman's own system, the "tricks" may well be part of the shaman's healing techniques and integral to beliefs about inducing spirits to heal, and not at all manifestations of charlatanism, as those who look at the phenomena from an ethnocentric perspective assume.

In fact there even is a not entirely unrelated philosophical term for this in Ancient Greece, the ‘scientific’ art of Memisis (mimicking). The writer Seneca (4 B.C.E.-65 c.E.), recounting the doctrines of the Stoic Posidonius  tells us that bread was discovered when a philosopher decided to imitate the workings of the teeth, throat, and stomach. Seeing that the teeth crushed grain, which was then lubricated with saliva, transferred to the stomach by the throat, and cooked slowly by the process of digestion, this enterprising intellect invented the mill, the process of making dough, and the baking of bread. Seneca himself rejects this historical theory, not because it is absurd, but because it demeans the philosopher by relegating him to the status of technician (Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, tr. Robin Campbell, 1969, epistle 90, pp. 169-170).

Stanley Krippner, in his article on "Conflicting Perspectives on Shamans and Shamanism," published in 2002, concluded that the broad term of ‘Shamans’ referred to generally“ talented individuals with higher than average concentration and control of mental imagery.”

We will start this overview of world beliefs by using the term Shamanism in general but in case of the specific examples we use other terms to describe more varied local examples.

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