Shamanism is a broad family of practices, found across many cultures on every inhabited continent, in which a specialist enters altered states of consciousness in order to interact with a spirit world on behalf of the community. The shaman is held to send their soul on journeys to other realms, ascending to upper worlds or descending to lower ones, to guide the souls of the dead, retrieve the lost souls of the sick, negotiate with the spirits of game animals, and bring back knowledge and healing. The trance is typically induced by rhythmic drumming, dancing, chanting, fasting, or, in some traditions, psychoactive plants, and the shaman's vocation often begins with a crisis, a serious illness or a "shamanic initiatory crisis" understood as a dismemberment and rebirth by the spirits.
The word itself comes from the Tungusic peoples of Siberia (saman), and it was the Siberian and Central Asian material that the historian Mircea Eliade used to define shamanism, in his influential study, as "archaic techniques of ecstasy." "Shamanism" as a single worldwide category is partly a scholarly construction, and its use has been criticized for flattening very different local traditions and for the way modern Western "neo-shamanism" has extracted and commercialized practices from their cultural contexts. But as a descriptive term it captures a genuinely recurrent human religious pattern, the mediator who travels in ecstatic trance between the human community and a world of spirits, attested from Siberia and the Americas to Africa, Australia, and beyond, and reaching back, many scholars believe, into deep prehistory.