By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 5, 2026
What Is Modern Shamanism, and Why Has It Surfaced in Cities?
Modern shamanism is a contemporary spiritual practice that adapts trance, drum journeying, and spirit-relations from older Indigenous and Eurasian traditions for use in urban, secular settings. It travels through workshops, online courses, and apartment-living rooms rather than longhouses. Its practitioners work with breath, rhythm, plants, and ritual to address grief, burnout, and meaning, often outside formal religion.
The word shaman entered European languages in the late seventeenth century from the Tungusic šaman, recorded by Russian travelers in Siberia. For most of its modern life, the term named something studied at distance, by ethnographers and museum curators. Then, in the late twentieth century, the practice came home with the researchers. Anthropologist Michael Harner (1929-2018), trained among the Conibo and Jivaro of South America, founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies in 1985 and began teaching what he called core shamanism to office workers, therapists, and seminarians. The classroom was a yoga studio in San Francisco. The drum was a pre-recorded cassette.
What followed is the strange, layered history this guide traces. Cities have become unlikely greenhouses for trance practice. The same century that built freeways and routed grief through pharmacies also produced thousands of weekend journeyers, ayahuasca circles in converted lofts, and a small industry of teachers, ethics boards, and lawsuits. Reading the phenomenon honestly requires holding several frames at once within the broader landscape of mystical and occult practices: the old practices, the new contexts, and the questions of accuracy and respect that every transmission raises.
From Siberian Tundra to Studio Apartment: A Short History
Shamanism, as a comparative category, is younger than the practices it tries to describe. Russian and German ethnographers used the word through the nineteenth century to label trance specialists across Northern Eurasia, the Americas, and Inner Asia. Mircea Eliade‘s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, first published in 1951 and translated into English in 1964, gave the word its twentieth-century shape, treating ecstatic flight as the defining trait. Later anthropologists, including Caroline Humphrey and Piers Vitebsky, complicated the picture by showing how varied local traditions resist any single definition.
The Harner Hinge
Michael Harner’s 1980 book The Way of the Shaman is the document most responsible for the practice’s urban turn. Harner stripped what he considered the universal techniques, percussion-driven trance, journeys to upper and lower worlds, work with helping spirits, from their cultural particulars and packaged them as a teachable curriculum. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, this synthesis fed directly into the wider New Age movement, where it intertwined with body-mind therapies and ecological spirituality. Harner’s students, in turn, taught their own students, and core shamanism diffused into hospice work, addiction recovery, and corporate wellness rooms.
The Plant Medicine Wave
The second wave arrived through pharmacology. Ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, and iboga, plants and fungi long used in Amazonian, Mesoamerican, West African, and other traditions, began moving through global networks in the 1990s. Anthropologists Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Henrik Jungaberle have documented the ayahuasca diaspora in close detail, mapping retreat centers from Iquitos to Berlin. By the early 2020s, the city-based ceremony, often led by a non-Indigenous facilitator trained briefly with a vegetalista lineage, had become a cultural commonplace from Brooklyn to Tel Aviv.
What Urban Practitioners Actually Do
The texture of modern shamanism in a city is not what the word might suggest. There are no firelit clearings most weeks. There is a sublet on a Tuesday night, a circle of folding chairs, a Bluetooth speaker playing a recorded drum loop, and someone saying the smoke alarm has been taped over so the palo santo will not trigger it. The practice fits where the city allows it.
Drum Journeys and Altered States
The signature technique inherited from core shamanism is the drum journey. Participants lie on the floor while a steady percussion track plays, typically between four and seven beats per second. Harner argued, citing earlier work by neurophysiologist Andrew Neher in the 1960s, that this rhythm entrains the brain into a theta-dominant state. The journeyer visualizes a descent through a tree root, a cave, or a body of water and emerges into what is called the lower world, where helping animals, ancestors, or images deliver answers to a posed question. Sessions usually last fifteen to thirty minutes.
Plant Medicine Ceremonies
Ayahuasca circles run on different time. A typical urban ceremony begins after sunset, runs five to seven hours, and centers on two or three doses of brewed Banisteriopsis caapi vine combined with a DMT-containing leaf, usually Psychotria viridis. Participants sit or lie on yoga mats with a bucket nearby. Songs called icaros, learned from Peruvian or Colombian teachers, structure the night. According to a 2017 review in the Journal of Psychopharmacology archive on PubMed, the brew’s serotonergic and MAO-inhibitory pharmacology produces measurable, predictable shifts in mood and perception that practitioners interpret through ritual frames.
Soul Retrieval and Other Healing Modalities
Beyond the journey itself, urban shamanic practitioners offer specific services with names borrowed from Harner’s typology. Soul retrieval addresses what the practitioner reads as fragments of self lost during trauma. Extraction work removes intrusive energetic objects. Ancestral lineage healing, popularized by Daniel Foor’s 2017 book of that name, walks clients back through a family line to clear what is presented as inherited grief. Sessions typically run sixty to ninety minutes and cost between one hundred and three hundred dollars in major North American cities.
Why Now? The Conditions That Made the City Hospitable
Modern shamanism did not appear in cities by accident. Several specific cultural shifts made the soil ready. Religious scholar Robert Wuthnow, in After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (1998), described a generational move from a “dwelling” spirituality, anchored in inherited churches, to a “seeking” spirituality, assembled from many sources. The seeker has time, mobility, and a commute long enough to listen to a podcast. The seeker also tends to live alone.
Loneliness and the Ritual Vacuum
The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness reported that roughly half of American adults experience meaningful social isolation, with measurable health effects comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Mainline Protestant attendance has been falling since the 1970s, and Pew Research data shows the share of Americans unaffiliated with any religion rising past twenty-eight percent by 2021. Into this vacuum, ritual frameworks that promise community without doctrine carry obvious appeal. A drum circle does not ask for a creed.
The Therapeutic Turn
A second condition is the increasing willingness of mental health professionals to take altered states seriously. The 2017 FDA breakthrough designation for psilocybin therapy and the renewed clinical work at institutions like Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London have softened the membrane between the clinic and the ceremony. Many urban shamanic practitioners hold therapy or social work credentials. Their clients often arrive after, or alongside, conventional treatment.
The Appropriation Question
No survey of modern shamanism is complete without naming the discomfort that runs through it. The practices being adapted belong to specific living peoples. The original shamans of Tuva, the curanderas of the Sierra Mazateca, the taitas of the Putumayo are not historical figures. Their communities have current opinions about how their practices travel.
The 1993 Lakota Declaration
In June 1993, representatives of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota nations issued the “Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality.” It named non-Native plastic shamans, charging fees, leading sweat lodges, and selling pipe ceremonies as exploitation, not exchange. The declaration remains a touchstone in critical discussions and is archived in full by AIM and other Native organizations. It does not say all sharing is theft. It says some specific kinds are.
What Indigenous Critics Are Asking For
Scholars including Wendy Rose (Hopi/Miwok) and Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), and contemporary writers such as Suzanne Owen in The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (2008), have laid out the substantive questions. Are practitioners learning from a named teacher in a real lineage? Are they paying that lineage anything? Are they teaching what they were taught, or repackaging it under a personal brand? Have they considered that their fee structure may compete with the traditional teachers their pricing draws from? Honest urban practitioners differ on these questions. Few of them ignore them.
What the Evidence Says About Whether It Works
The empirical literature on modern shamanic practice is uneven. Most rigorous studies focus on the chemical agents, especially psilocybin and ayahuasca, rather than the ritual envelope around them. The clinical findings are striking on their own terms. A 2021 paper in Nature Medicine by Carhart-Harris and colleagues compared psilocybin to escitalopram for moderate-to-severe depression and found comparable efficacy with different side-effect profiles. Long-term follow-ups by Roland Griffiths and his team at Johns Hopkins have reported sustained improvements in mood and meaning-making at six-month and one-year intervals.
What the Studies Do Not Yet Cover
The drum journey, soul retrieval, and ancestral healing have far thinner evidence bases. Small pilot studies, including a 2014 trial by Scharfetter and colleagues, have documented self-reported reductions in anxiety after Harner-style sessions, but sample sizes are limited and control conditions weak. Practitioners and skeptics agree, for different reasons, that the field is under-studied. The interesting open question is whether the ritual structure itself contributes effects beyond expectation and group support, the kind of question consciousness researchers are only beginning to design experiments around.
How Practitioners Distinguish Serious Work From Performance
Inside the urban scene, working teachers tend to share a quiet vocabulary for separating careful practice from theater. The signs are mundane. They surface in how a session is structured, how money is handled, and how the teacher talks about their own training.
- Named lineage: Serious teachers cite specific human teachers, dates of training, and the limits of what they were authorized to share. Vague references to “ancient wisdom” without provenance are a flag.
- Pre-screening: Plant medicine facilitators ask about psychiatric history, medications, particularly SSRIs and lithium, and recent grief. Circles that skip intake are skipping the part that prevents harm.
- Integration framework: Reputable practitioners build in days or weeks of follow-up after intense ceremonies. Single-session experiences without aftercare have been linked to destabilization in clinical literature.
- Reciprocity to source: Some teachers donate a portion of fees to Indigenous-led organizations or to the specific community where they trained. Others publish how they spend their tuition. The transparent practitioners tend to assume scrutiny.
- Restraint about claims: Careful teachers do not promise cures for cancer, chronic illness, or trauma in a single session. Grandiose marketing is a reliable warning sign.
Where Modern Shamanism Goes From Here
The next decade will probably tighten the field rather than expand it. Regulatory pressure from FDA-approved psilocybin therapy, state-level psychedelic legislation in Oregon and Colorado, and ongoing conversations between Indigenous councils and Western researchers are pushing the practice toward formal credentialing. Some practitioners welcome that. Others read it as a second enclosure of practices that have already been moved twice.
What seems likely to persist is the city’s appetite for trance done well. Urban people will keep needing places where they can lie on a wood floor for thirty minutes with a steady drum and emerge with a question they did not have an hour earlier. Whether the people running those rooms are accountable to a tradition, to a science, to a community, or to none of the above is the question the next generation of teachers will answer in public, under more scrutiny than the founders ever faced.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is modern shamanism a religion?
Most contemporary urban practitioners describe what they do as a spiritual practice rather than a religion. There is no central authority, no shared scripture, and no creed. Some traditions, including Brazilian Santo Daime and Native American Church peyote ceremonies, are organized as religions with legal recognition, but core shamanism and most ayahuasca circles are not.
Do you have to use plant medicine to practice modern shamanism?
No. The Harner-derived core shamanism explicitly relies on percussion-driven trance, not plant compounds. A large share of urban practitioners work entirely with drums, breathwork, and visualization. Plant medicine has its own traditions and risks that some practitioners avoid on principle.
How is a shaman different from a medium or a psychic?
Mediums and psychics typically claim to receive information without entering altered states themselves. A shaman, in the Eliade definition still used in most academic work, undertakes a deliberate journey of consciousness on behalf of a community and returns with knowledge or healing. The role is more active and more explicitly bound to a tradition’s cosmology.
Is the term “shaman” itself appropriate to use?
The word originated in Tungusic Siberian usage and was generalized by ethnographers. Many Indigenous practitioners outside Siberia prefer their own community’s terms, such as curandera, taita, or medicine person. Some non-Native practitioners now use “journey practitioner” or “ceremonialist” instead. The choice signals how a practitioner positions themselves.
Are urban ayahuasca ceremonies legal?
In the United States, ayahuasca remains a Schedule I substance under federal law except for two recognized churches, União do Vegetal and Santo Daime, granted religious exemptions through court rulings. In most countries, possession is illegal. Some states and cities, including Oakland and Denver, have decriminalized personal use of certain plant medicines, but ceremonial sale generally remains prosecutable.
What does a soul retrieval session actually involve?
In Harner-derived practice, the practitioner enters a trance state, often via drumming, while the client lies nearby. The practitioner reports journeying to recover what they describe as fragmented soul parts associated with past trauma and returning these to the client through breath or touch. The session usually closes with conversation about what was perceived. Sessions run sixty to ninety minutes.
Did Mircea Eliade get shamanism right?
Partially. Eliade’s framing of shamanism as a coherent global category centered on ecstatic flight was widely influential and gave the field its mid-century shape. Later anthropologists, particularly Piers Vitebsky and Caroline Humphrey, have argued that the category papers over real differences between Siberian, Amazonian, and African traditions. Most contemporary scholars use Eliade carefully rather than wholesale.
How do I find a teacher without falling for a fraud?
Ask for a named lineage, including the human teachers’ full names and where they live. Ask whether the teacher has ever been challenged on appropriation or harm and how they responded. Look for restraint in marketing, willingness to discuss failures, and an integration plan after any intense session. Inexperienced teachers often promise too much. Experienced ones describe the work in narrower terms.
