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THE TIMELESS RELIGION

MANVIR SINGH SHAMANISM

Shamanism

Manvir Singh Shamanism

The Timeless Religion

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To the people of Madobag, Ugai, and Buttui Surak sabeu

And to my Evelyns, Nina and Zora, for the ecstatic

author’s note ix

chapter 1 Setting O 17

chapter 2 The Mind Behind the Magic 37

chapter 3 The Xenized 55

chapter 4 Dramas of Otherness 72

chapter 5 Behold the Birdhead 90 Part Two

chapter 6 The First Religion 113

chapter 7 The Rebel and the Redeemer 135

chapter 8 Ouroboros 152

chapter 9 Meet the Shamanistas 166

author’s note

In order to respect the privacy of certain individuals mentioned in this book, some names have been changed.

Shamanism

Introduction

Opa, a man of about ﬁfty, was to be initiated. His nephew had trekked upriver to share the news, arriving at my house just as I was waking up. He explained that Opa had been sick for weeks, debilitated by a savage blend of fever, diarrhea, and an icy body pain that spidered through his joints. His eyes had turned yellow. He could barely pick himself up. His family had summoned shamans, hunted for herbs, visited the clinic, even invited a pastor to muster the benevolence of the Christian god. But until yesterday, nothing worked.

“Sounds like witchcraft,” my assistant Rustam said.

“No,” said Opa’s nephew. “Kerei.” Shaman.

He explained that, two days before, the shamans stopped trying to heal Opa and started to initiate him. They suspected his illness might be a sign that his spirit longed to become a shaman. And they were right, it seemed. Like a soul returning to its body, a new vitality possessed Opa, energizing him to participate in the ﬁrst of many trance dances required for initiation.

“Will you join?” asked the nephew.

“Of course,” I replied.

By this point, I had made four trips to the Indonesian island of Siberut, spending nearly a year in total with its inhabitants, the Mentawai. I had lived with shamans, studied healing rituals, and

Introduction

interviewed people about gods, black magic, and deprivation. I spoke the Mentawai language and had a small house. To observe an initiation was a dream.

The nephew told us to come at midday. “Bring some money for the shamans,” he said. “And we need fuel for the generator.” “No problem.”

“And bring oleh-oleh,” he added, using the Indonesian word for gifts and referring to market-bought goodies like tea, sugar, co ee, and cookies. “This will be good.”

Through his initiation, Opa would ascend from simata, a word that refers to both non-shamans and uncooked food, to sikerei, a shaman. Like other sikerei, he would be able to see people’s souls and the legions of spirits that occupy our world. He would enter trance in nighttime ceremonies. He would learn the plants for treating infections and the songs for calling souls to feverish bodies. He would be expected to wear a loincloth and, depending on his commitment, tattoo his body and grow out his hair. The process would imbue him with spiritual power. As a result, he would have to forgo some of the tastiest animal ﬂesh and have considerably less sex. Violate these prohibitions, the Mentawai say, and one invites illness, bad luck, and even death.

When I first visited the Mentawai, in 2014, I knew to expect shamans. I had seen photos of them, the so-called flower men, shirtless and loinclothed, decked out in leaves and headbands and red and white blossoms, their wiry bodies contoured by trim charcoal-ash tattoos. But I didn’t appreciate how important they were. Mentawai shamans are healers, of course, but they are also diviners, spiritual guides, feared sorcerers, and walking archives of cultural knowledge. They are entertainers, alone permitted to perform some of the most riveting routines. Their tattoos and ceremonial garb—including not just leaves, flowers, and heaps of beads but also face paint and a turmeric body coating—make them particularly attractive. When conflicts arise, they arbitrate. When they speak, people listen.

The Mentawai aren’t unique in having shamanism. To the

Introduction 5

contrary, similar practices have appeared around the world. Inuit angakok coaxed illness-causing ghosts into igloos before slaughtering them with snow knives. Zande ira avure in Sudan ate medicines and danced before entering altered states and divining. Some Kalahari hunter-gatherers held all-night ceremonies in which ecstatic healers were said to nearly die from the boiling upsurge of spiritual energy. Unique among animals, we humans cultivate altered states of consciousness in our e orts to contact the beyond.1

When I tell people I study shamans‚ I usually encounter one of two views. The ﬁrst is that shamanism is “primeval wisdom”—a repository of ancient knowledge, a remnant of our once-true spirituality and genuine connection to nature. With the shift to modern industrialized societies, the story goes, people abandoned this wisdom, subjecting themselves to depression and meaninglessness.

According to the alternate view, shamanism is “superstitious savagery”—a relic of a backward era, a spectacle produced by crafty showmen to exploit naïve credulity. For this camp, the apparent decline of shamanism represents a triumph—of science over magic, reason over irrationality.

The clash between primeval wisdom and superstitious savagery is about more than shamanism. It is a disagreement about Western industrialized societies and their relationship to human history. Are we—the people of these societies—corrupted? Or are we enlightened? Have we divorced ourselves from nature and true understanding? Or have we overcome irrationality, harnessing science to improve our well-being? These two views serve as political props, casting industrialized societies as either failures in need of fixing or achievements to be defended. Whatever their disagreements, both sides agree that industrialized societies depart radically from the rest of humanity. Each is committed, in other words, to a story of extreme exceptionalism, to a yawning chasm separating them from us. On one side, we find not just shamanism but also magic, myths, nature, and tribal communalism. On the other side, we find the exemplars of modernity: reason, science, capitalism, Abrahamic religions.

As an anthropologist, I tend to be skeptical of stark lines like

this. Yes, rich Western societies di er in important ways from the rest of humanity. But ﬂashy di erences blind us to the everpresent expressions of human nature. They tempt us to see the history and institutions of Western societies as utterly unique, devoid of cross-cultural parallels. If you’re looking for a thesis for this book, turn to Ecclesiastes, chapter 1. The famous line is “There is nothing new under the sun,” but I prefer what comes next:

Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

This is a book about an institution that was here long before us and will survive long after. Shamanism, I argue, is neither primeval wisdom nor superstitious savagery. Rather, it is a near inevitability of human societies—a captivating package of practices and beliefs that appears over and over because of its deep psychological appeal. It characterized the earliest human religions, echoes in industrialized societies today, and will perpetually reemerge. In their eagerness to limit shamanism to archaic or faraway societies, commentators have denied the universality of its principles and the intrinsic needs it addresses.

While working on this book, I was sometimes asked about my view on the morality of shamanism. Are shamans good or bad? Helpful or exploitative? Yet the question is based on a false premise. It’s like asking if artiﬁcial intelligence is bad, or if blockchain is bad, or if drones are bad. Shamanism is like most technologies. Its morality depends on how it’s used and the value system you adopt when considering it. As we’ll see, Kalahari trance healing is an egalitarian, communal institution that seems well designed to alleviate anxiety. From many perspectives, it is good. Some CEOs, meanwhile, use shamanic techniques to cultivate personas of extraordinariness, misleading themselves and others about their usefulness. Many people, I’m guessing, would see this as bad. To insist that shamanism is either good or bad is to impose a singular morality on a practice that is far more dynamic.

Another question I often got was whether I believe in shamanism. I am trained as an empiricist and, as you will see, do not think we can conclude that shamans heal, divine, or change the weather by interacting with gods, ghosts, ancestors, or any other non-ordinary beings. Yet I have also tried to inhabit the worlds of shamans, their clients, and their communities. I have been transported by the drumming and throat singing of a Tuvan shaman. I have inhaled psychedelic snu s and been propelled into parallel realms. I have soul journeyed with neo-shamans and stood on the brink of spirit possession during all-night dances with the Mentawai. And, perhaps most importantly, I have seen patients leave shamanic healing ceremonies feeling less distressed. I have tried to write this book both as a scientiﬁc researcher and as someone who appreciates the experiential profundity of shamanism.

One of my favorite things about anthropology is its power to turn the strange familiar and the familiar strange—and this is nowhere clearer than with shamanism. For many people, shamans are quintessentially strange. Depending on the culture, they may be said to fly, turn invisible, speak to the dead, or transform into jaguars. They may walk on fire, swallow hot coals, fire deadly pellets at each other, or claim to have been swallowed and regurgitated by a bear. They may, as among the Yanomami of Venezuela, snort a hallucinogenic powder and call upon tiny beings that pirouette down invisible trails, the males wearing fiery haloes, the females with glittery wands protruding from their vaginas. They may become prophets and trumpet new religions.2

And yet: take some time, and this strangeness makes sense. Like so much of culture, shamanism adapts to the contours of the human mind. And just as studying popular foods can teach us how taste works, journeying into shamanism provides us with a new lens to understand human nature—a lens that alters how we see the world around us.

This book is the culmination of a decade spent researching the psychological origins of religion. Aside from living with the Mentawai, I have combed through ethnographies and databases, mapping out patterns in myth, witchcraft, and shamanism. I have studied healing songs and sought out curers and diviners in India, the Andes, and the northwest Amazon, observing music, drug

use, and healing ceremonies wherever I could. I have chased modern resurrections of shamanism, from Harvard Square to the Nevada deserts.

This book is organized into two parts. The first is a shamanic orientation. We’ll begin in 2014, when I first landed on Siberut Island. I will acquaint you with the sikerei I first met, as well as with the thrills and anxieties of arriving in a remote community with little more than a backpack. We will then zoom out from Siberut, locating in this corner of Indonesia an echo of a puzzling human tendency. The sikerei, it turns out, share striking similarities with specialists around the world. They enter altered states. They commune with unseen realities. And they channel that connection for ends like curing and prophecy. What is it about our minds and societies that leads shamanism to develop over and over? Across three chapters, I propose an answer. The secret of the shaman’s success, I argue, is psychological resonance. People are inclined to believe in unseen forces and to rely on rituals for control. They want their fevers to subside, their crops to grow, and their hunts to succeed. They want to know whether it will rain next week and whether their business will prosper. As they seek this control, specialists discover and incorporate the most attractive services, driving the evolution of shamanism almost everywhere humans go.

Like the best virtual reality technology, shamanism creates an enthralling, simulated experience. Through combinations of dance, touch, music, theater, and psychotropic drugs, shamans and their communities construct mystical realities in which a specialist appeals to otherwise unseen worlds for blessings, protection, and information. Key to this performance is transformation: the shaman appears to become a di erent kind of entity—one possessed with powers normal humans lack.

My use of the word “performance” might bother some readers. It might evoke images of crafty magicians fooling a gullible clientele. But this is a limitation of language. Shamans aren’t scammers, and their clients aren’t suckers. Rather, people under-

stand the reality of shamanic practices in ways that are much more nuanced. On the one hand, people are often skeptical of shamans’ abilities. Shamans and their clients recognize that they use sleight of hand, and they often question the authenticity of trance. On the other hand, clients and specialists experience the power of shamanism. A shaman might see their colleagues use stage tricks on Monday and then visit them on Tuesday after falling sick. Moreover, shamans and their communities collaborate to create as moving a healing experience as possible. In trying to reconcile these contradictions, we will go beyond familiar notions of belief to better understand the sophisticated ways people think about the supernatural.

This new view of shamanism explains many curious patterns, from self-denial to intense initiations. Yet the feature I’ll spend the most time on is trance. Although they disagree on the function of altered states, leading writers like Michael Harner and Michael Winkelman have insisted that shamans across the globe enter a similar trance state, which they call the “integrative” or “shamanic state of consciousness.” Shamans themselves describe wildly varied experiences, however, and the evidence we’ll review suggests that Harner and Winkelman have been mistaken. Like a global legion of psychonauts, shamans have discovered innumerable ways to tweak their consciousness, from dancing to darkness to deliriants.

This diversity forces us to reconsider the function of trance, and, again, I’ll emphasize transformation and performance. For now, su ce it to say that, like other shamanic practices, altered states create stirring experiences for both specialist and audience. A shaman who communes with a sky god in a normal voice looks like a fraud. One who loses consciousness, froths at the mouth, and then speaks in a spirit tongue is more conceivably doing something us normal humans cannot. Altered states can also feel divine, of course, and we will explore in rich detail the link between shamanic trance and mysticism.

Part 1 ends with the most common question about shamanism: Does it work? Given what we know, I’m not convinced that shamans contact beings from the beyond to cure, prophesy, and change the weather. But do they heal? For years, I was doubt-

Introduction

ful. Speaking to the most ardent proponents, I noticed that their conviction was grounded less in empirical research and more in a rosy image of archaic wisdom. Yet my views have since changed, and I’ll present some of the people and evidence that have convinced me otherwise. Through this survey, we will confront a paradox of shamanism: when it comes to healing, the stronger the illusion, the more potent the e ects.

With shamanism’s appeal established, I spend part 2 tracing it across time and social contexts. We journey into its timelessness. We behold its relentless drive to exist.

The material here roughly follows the arc of history and religious evolution, beginning with Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Deciphering our deep past is like reading a book with all but one of the pages torn out, and this applies just as much to studying ancient shamanism as to anything else. We’ll visit a cave in southwest France that supposedly holds one of the earliest signs of shamanism before turning to other standard pieces of evidence, like trippy rock art and impressive burials. None of it is conclusive, and, in fact, most of it is ﬂimsier than often claimed. This doesn’t mean Stone Age religion is unknowable, however. Combing history for the pristine emergence of shamanism, I’ll present complementary evidence for its antiquity—evidence that not only corroborates archaeological ﬁndings but also pushes estimates of shamanism’s debut to the origins of cognitively modern humans, if not earlier.

For many people, the story stops somewhere between here and the rise of world religions. Shamans, they assume, are conﬁned to ancestral societies and premodern tribes. I call this the “Pokémon theory” of religious history: like Squirtle or Bulbasaur, shamans are treated as an evolutionarily earlier stage, replaced by more sophisticated forms such as priests, bishops, and ayatollahs.

The next three chapters show how misguided this view is, starting at the beginnings of organized religions. Shamans, it so happens, have a knack for becoming prophets. Survey world history, and you’ll see that messianic movements often have sha-

mans at their helms. Leveraging their supernatural connection, possessed healers promise salvation and renewal. They amass followings that destabilize the social milieu. They inspire selfsacriﬁce and become shrouded in myth.

Messianic shamans featured in contexts ranging from New Guinean cargo cults to Japanese millenarian movements, but the ones I spend the most time on are Judeo-Christian prophets. Many people reject e orts to examine these ﬁgures through a comparative lens, especially ones that stress similarities with shamanism. Others assert that shamanism “loses meaning” as soon as it applies to hallowed Western ﬁgures. But drawing on a revisionist turn in biblical scholarship, I’ll show that this resistance is hard to justify. Hebrew prophets like Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha qualify as shamans. The early Christian church was shamanic, and Jesus likely was, too. The impulse to view Abrahamic prophets as beyond comparison is driven less by empirical evidence and more by a prejudice that separates Western heritage from the rest of humanity.

From their origins, we will track the rise of organized religions, where, again, the Pokémon theory turns out wrong. Rather than superseding shamanism, organized religions have been locked in an unending battle to subdue it. As ecstatic provocateurs, shamans threaten religious authority. They emerge constantly and o er access to the supernatural that is more direct, more engaging, and aimed at everyday goals. The most successful among them siphon adherents away from organized religions and introduce competing takes on doctrine and divine will. To check these ﬁrebrands, o cials condemn shamanism, or at least delegitimize it among laypeople. The Spanish Inquisition attacked shamans, as did Polynesian chiefs. Even today, new religions undergo a predictable evolution, starting out shamanic before turning on their ecstatic origins. But shamans persist, as they always have.

Still, the prognosis for religion in Western countries seems dire. Between 2012 and 2017, 11 percent of the U.S. population stopped describing themselves as “religious.” The situation is grimmer in European countries like Sweden and the Czech Republic, where roughly three-quarters of people have no reli-

Introduction

gious a liation. In a curious turn, though, shamanism seems to grow stronger. New practices, collectively known as “neoshamanism,” are ﬂourishing. For the ﬁrst time in the history of the British census, in 2021, thousands of respondents declared their religion to be “shamanism.” Surveys in the United States suggest that hundreds of thousands of Americans consult shamans regularly. We’ll visit some of these practitioners and discover that, despite accusations of inauthenticity, varieties of neo-shamanism are as shamanic as anything else covered in this book. Sure, they have their quirks, but these exemplify the blend of universal tendencies and local idiosyncrasies that characterizes so much of human culture.

Many readers might still be skeptical. They might acknowledge everything to this point but maintain that they never interact with shamans. This may be technically correct, but I will present the unrecognized ways that elements of shamanism appear in seemingly enlightened spaces. We’ll probe the reliance on what I call “hedge wizards,” or experts who promise control over uncertainty despite no evidence of e cacy. Epitomized in money managers, these ﬁgures compete among themselves to convince clients they can control the uncontrollable. Although they don’t enter trance, their models, degrees, personalities, and superhuman work schedules assure clients of their abilities to discern otherwise opaque forces. We are all endowed with the same cognitive architecture, all captivated by promises that forecasters with special gifts can tame uncertainty. Recognizing this not only reminds us of shamanism’s ubiquity—it also reveals the strangeness of institutions we so easily take for granted.

Part 2 concludes by addressing the hype. No book on shamanism, especially one on its modern expressions, can ignore psychedelics. In the last decade or so, psychedelics have gone from the fringe to the mainstream, from countercultural playthings to medical marvels. At the center of this renaissance is the ﬁgure of the shaman. According to numerous proponents, psychedelic therapy is not a newfangled practice but a recapitulation of an ancient, worldwide shamanic tradition. This narrative might feel good, but we’ll see that it mangles history in service of ideology. In so doing, it reinforces a distinction between primitive

and civilized while projecting images that are Western-centric and attention-grabbing onto the diversity of the world’s spiritual practices. The ﬁnal stop of our journey into shamanism leaves us with an important lesson. Elements of shamanism may always recur, but comparison needs to be done with care. We should be wary of hallucinating similarities in contexts where they don’t exist.

Opa’s house was teeming with activity when we arrived. Guests wearing T-shirts and beaded necklaces gossiped on the front veranda. Inside, the shamans’ wives tucked ﬂowers into their hair and wrapped meters of beaded strings around their wrists, elbows, and necks. The oldest one teased me about my feet—how do I always end up with so much dried mud caked on them? In the kitchen, two boys rapped on snakeskin drums as their cousins beat bamboo tongs on a cauldron. On the back veranda, a pile of tubers sat waiting to be cooked. Beside it, two monstrous boars bound in palm fronds wriggled in agitation.

Opa arrived shortly after us, accompanied by ﬁve shamans. He had clearly come close to dying. Before his illness, he had bronze skin and muscular legs. Now he looked like a ghost on stilts: as pale as a palm grub with bird-bone legs.

Opa’s main teacher was Teu Rami, a chocolate-colored goofball who liked to crack penis jokes and always squeezed my biceps when I ran into him, needling me for tobacco. Teu Rami was a shaman but, aside from his loincloth, didn’t fully look the part. His hair was short, and he hadn’t yet tattooed his body. Yet none of that mattered. No one healed like Teu Rami. In ceremonies, he was serious and professional—but also much more. When spirits approached him after a bout of dancing, he became sacred yet obscene, a hollow cadaver possessed by a wild, inhuman force— jerky, bizarre, ancestral. To watch him was to be invited to believe in something powerful and beyond ourselves, like seeing a corpse come back to life. It was little wonder he had been selected to be Opa’s instructor.

For the next two hours, I followed Opa and the shamans like

Introduction

a preteen trailing his older brother’s friend group. I assiduously chronicled everything they did, snapping photos, jotting down notes, waving around my audio recorder. Each action had significance. Opa and his wife ate in a doorway rather than inside. They ate smoked meat rather than recently netted fish. The shamans collected in the kitchen, where they examined Opa’s salipa, the trunk containing a shaman’s amulets and other magical curios. They recited protective mantras and tied leaves to one another’s necklaces. They sacrificed a chicken and sang together. Eventually they collected in a large room, where they pulled out their trunks and started to get dressed. They fastened cloth skirts around their waists and tied bundles of chicken feathers to their hair. They tucked flowers into their headbands and redand yellow-veined leaves into their loincloths. Draped in beads, nature, and bold-colored fabrics, they were beautiful, not just for humans but for spirits and wandering souls, as well. They were getting dressed, my assistant explained, for perhaps the most important ceremony during a shaman’s initiation. This one wasn’t about learning songs or having the right items. Rather, it was Opa’s transformation—the very genesis of his shamanic powers—and all of us would get to watch.

Part One shamanism

Anciently, human beings and spirits did not mix. But certain persons who were so perspicacious, single-minded, reverential, and correct that their intelligence could understand what lies above and below, their sagely wisdom could illumine what is distant and profound, their vision was bright and clear, and their hearing was penetrating. Therefore the spirits would descend upon them.

— from the fourth- century bce chinese text Kuo-yü

Setting O

It was morning when Siberut ﬁrst came into view. The date was June 21, 2014; I was barely twenty-four. I remember seeing the island in the far-o distance—an oasis of rain forest in a vast, violent ocean. I had just spent fourteen hours on a creaky wooden ferry with an Indonesian man who grinned a lot and referred to me only in the third person. (“Is this the ﬁrst time Manvir is in Indonesia?”) His aim, I think, was to be polite, but I was new to Indonesian norms and found him hard to trust.

I met the man—I’ll call him Happy—the day before at a university in the Sumatran city of Padang. A professor introduced us, explaining that Happy was headed to a community in Siberut’s interior. Did I want to join him? Sure. The professor and Happy made a ﬂurry of phone calls—to whom, I had no clue—and by the end of the day, Happy and I were on the deck of the ship, rolling out sleeping pads under the stars and going over Mentawai vocabulary.

The ferry pulled up at Siberut’s southern port and disgorged the passengers. Most were not Mentawai. Rather, they were merchants, administrators, and family members from elsewhere in Indonesia, mostly Sumatra. They had colonized Siberut’s southern port, turning it into a generic facsimile of semi-urban Indonesia. There were some Mentawai people, too—although I couldn’t

point them out yet—as well as a gang of Western surfers, who used Siberut as a jumping-o point to visit the world-class waves nearby.

I felt unmoored getting o the ferry. Everything was unfamiliar. The air was wet and salty and had the faint scent of incineration. I didn’t trust Happy but had to rely on him. I knew nine hundred words of Indonesian, and even those I had trouble discerning. People greeted one another. They exhaled smoke that smelled like spicy trees; they yelled and laughed and coughed and pushed past and climbed onto motorbikes. I felt like I was in the way. My backpack, heavy with gifts, was the size of a baby dolphin, but I felt wary of putting it down. I had been told to look out for thieves.

Happy pulled me to two men standing next to motor scooters. They were athletic and had prominent cheekbones. Happy said that they were Mentawai. He handed his bags to one of them and climbed onto his scooter. I did the same with the other man. We set o , the sea to our left and a blur of jungle to our right. We rode over a crumbling cement road and, after several turns, ended at a thatched house. Happy went and sat on the porch. I was rushed inside, where I met a crew of ﬁve people: a woman, a baby, an older man, one of the motorbike guys, and, most memorably, a man named Lala.

I knew about sikerei at this point. And Lala, I could tell, was a sikerei. He seemed to revel in the shaman look. He wore a loincloth along with a T-shirt featuring a grinning Balinese demon— a gift, presumably, from a tourist who passed through. His face, arms, hands, and legs were decorated with a cobweb of tattoos. His ears were pierced. In one earlobe, he wore a small hoop. In the other, he had inserted a half-smoked hand-rolled cigar.

“Anda sikerei?” I asked in my bare-bones Indonesian. (“You sikerei?”) Lala smiled, squinted, and arched his eyebrows. This is a facial expression I have encountered only with the Mentawai, but even then I recognized the mix of conﬁrmation and self-satisfaction.

The conversation shifted to practicalities. I explained as best as I could that I was a student and that I wanted to stay with one of the communities in the island’s interior for the next six

weeks. I also said I was looking for Rustam. Another American anthropologist, Chris Hammons, had told me to find Rustam, who he said was trustworthy and knew some English. But I was out of luck. They knew Rustam but did not know where to find him. Instead, they said, one of the motor-scooter guys could take me. He would be my cook and porter and would charge 250,000 rupiah—about $20—per day. When I finally found Rustam, I could hire him as well. Both would take me to a region called Attabai, but they would have to accompany me for the entire six weeks. Naturally, they added, I would also have to pay for food, gifts, and accommodations, as well as the cigarettes for both of my guides.

It seemed like a scam, or at least like way more than I needed. I wondered whether Happy had set me up and distrusted him even more. I needed more information. After struggling to negotiate, I declined their o er and paid for the motorbike ride. The sun bore down like punishment as I walked to the port town.

This is book about shamanism. It is a book about the timeless appeal of a particular package of practices and beliefs, and how that appeal challenges assumptions we make about the arc of history and how di erent societies compare. Before we get to the argument, though, it helps to understand what shamanism is and how I came to study it—which brings us to Siberut.

Siberut is the largest and northernmost island in the Mentawai archipelago. It is a wet, wild place, receiving more than four times as much rain annually as Seattle and nearly eight times as much as London. Lying seventy miles o the west coast of Sumatra, the archipelago is fabled among surfers for its hard-hitting, glassy swells fed by Indian Ocean storms. The waves, some more than a story high, have carved steep cli s on Siberut’s west coast. Boats are not safe there. The east coast, which is what I saw for the ﬁrst time that morning in 2014, is a checkerboard of coral beaches and spidery mangroves. The hilly interior is carpeted with dense jungle, much of it swampy and crammed with palm trees. Rivers snake through the valleys and empty into the sea.1