How visionary healers became a fixture of contemporary American culture and politics

By James Parker

Manvir Singh’s new Shamanism: The Timeless Religion ranges widely, introducing us to all sorts of shamans and neo-shamans and proto-shamans. We meet the cigarette-loving tribal healers among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, whom Singh, an anthropologist, has studied since 2014. We meet the psychiatry and medicine professor at Johns Hopkins who reckons that his clinical interventions and against-the-odds healings are the stuff of classic shamanic practice. And we meet the money managers and “hedge wizards” who traffic quasi-shamanically with the capricious spirits of the global market.

It’s a panoramic survey: Singh has done the fieldwork, the legwork, and the drugwork. (“Then, with the immediacy of waking up, my trip ended. I became aware of my surroundings. People were watching us through the doorway. Vomit was everywhere.”) But his book lacks something I need—namely, an account of how neo-shamanism and its visionary baggage have looped around into conspiracy theory and burn-it-down far-rightism. It doesn’t, in other words, quite take us up to the present American minute.

So who or what is a shaman? Singh gives us a handy definition: “A shaman is a specialist who, through non-ordinary states, engages with unseen realities and provides services like healing and divination.” You can achieve a non-ordinary or altered state with drugs, drumming, dancing, fasting, meditation, whatever floats your boat—floats it into the beyond, that is. Once there, you might battle with demons, fly across the sky, plunge into the underworld, enlist the help of power-animals, or commune with the souls of the dead. You might undergo a terrible supernatural ordeal, a violent unmaking or scattering of the self. Crucially, though, you come back stronger. You return from the other realm remade, with strange new capabilities. You can heal. You can prophesy. (I have a certain resistance to Singh’s characterization of Jesus as a shaman—one of the things I like about Jesus is how un-esoterically he distributes his message, how dazzlingly straightforward and inclusive it is—but I get it: “By interacting with a powerful spirit being, he cured, exorcized, and foretold the future.”)

The shaman’s progress is archetypal, of course: It’s the hero’s journey, complete with thrills and spills. “Candidate shamans,” the religion scholar Mircea Eliade wrote in his pioneering 1951 study, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, “sometimes find themselves in apparently desperate situations. They must go ‘where night and day meet,’ or find a gate in the wall, or go up to the sky through a passage that opens but for an instant.” Which makes me think of Luke Skywalker, celestially steered by the Force, putting two proton torpedoes right up the thermal exhaust port—the passage fleetingly revealed—of the otherwise impregnable Death Star. After an experience with yopo, a “hallucinogenic snuff” (its main psychoactive compound seems to be bufotenine, unfamiliar outside South America), Singh is told about a similarly evanescent moment of danger and opportunity, a split second in the trip when “you need to concentrate on your goal.” “The transition point is fast,” he is advised by a seasoned user, “and if you do not focus, yopo will carry you off.”