Shamanism

![CDATA[Although its derivation is uncertain, the term ‘shaman’ most likely originated from the Tungusspeaking Evenki people of northern Siberia and referred to a person from the community who possessed particular abilities to use helping spirits to ward off evil, to ensure well-being, or to explain causes of misfortune. The Tungus word for this practitioner was ‘saman’, which, on one translation, means ‘to know’ and referred to the ability of the specialist to see what was hidden to ordinary vision. Another translation is ‘to heat’, which implied the high state of excitement the shaman experienced when going into a trance. The popular idea that the shaman is a universal figure, which resulted in the core religious concept ‘shamanism’, can be traced to the seminal work of the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, whose translation from French into English in 1964 of his book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, originally published in 1951, influenced academic and popular ideas about religious specialists, primarily in Indigenous societies, who entered into ecstatic states to manipulate unseen forces that affected the community’s well-being, for good or evil. Eliade placed particular stress on the journeys of the shaman to upper, middle, and lower worlds and made the travels of the shaman during ecstatic states the key element in his definition of shamanism.]]