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Manvir Singh isn’t your typical academic anthropologist. He writes regularly for The New Yorker on subjects ranging from the fictional languages of Dune to the history of all-meat diets to why he wears a turban (to mark his Sikh heritage). He seems to relish knocking down received wisdom.
Singh cut his ethnographic teeth doing field work on a remote island in Indonesia, living in Mentawai villages and getting to know the local shamans, known as sikerei. He watched these traditional healers transform themselves, painting their faces and covering their bodies with all manner of adornments, and then singing and dancing as they entered a trance-like altered state.
Singh says much of what we believe about shamanism is mistaken—both the romanticized view of what he calls “primeval wisdom” and the cynical perspective of “superstitious savagery.” His book Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, draws on his own field work and a cross-cultural study of shamanism. He makes the case that shamanism, in one form or another, was the original human religion.
Was Jesus a shaman?
Jesus clearly exhibits the features of a shaman. He’s engaging with unseen agents, exorcising demons, and calling upon the power of the Holy Spirit. He’s also healing. Very frequently he’s divining, he’s prophesying. So, then the question is, does Jesus enter altered states? This is something that theologians argue over. In the New Testament, Mark describes a scene where Jesus is healing. And people are flocking to him to be healed. Depending on the translation, he’s described as being out of his mind or astonished. People even say he’s demon-possessed. Stevan Davies, a theologian, has argued that this plausibly is describing an altered, possessed state.
As long as we’ve had recognizable religion, we’ve probably had shamanism.
More generally, we know the Eastern Mediterranean during this time was very shamanic. We know the Hebrew tradition was shamanic. And the Greeks were shamanic. The Neo-Assyrians had shamanic practices. So, here we have an individual who’s healing, divining, and engaging with other beings. And then he’s followed by the early Christian Church, which is very ecstatic. The Day of Pentecost is people speaking in tongues. Paul the apostle talks about the gifts of speaking in tongues and healing. It’s a very ecstatic place, a context that looks very shamanic. I think we should readily entertain the hypothesis that Jesus was a shaman. We also know that after this ecstatic period, as the Christian church centralized, there was a big turn against ecstatic behavior. So, there may have been a desire to ramp down that kind of behavior in the early Gospels.
Would you call shamanism the first religion?
I think shamanism likely characterized the earliest religious practices of behaviorally or cognitively modern humans. As long as we’ve had recognizable religion, we’ve probably had shamanism. I’m an anthropologist, but also someone who thinks a lot about psychology. The approach that I’ve taken is that religion and shamanism are incredibly psychologically compelling, that we live in an uncertain world. And we converge on ways to explain it and to intervene in it to manage that uncertainty. Our explanations and understandings of uncertainty manifest as religious belief. Then the ways we try to manage uncertainty, control uncertainty, tame uncertainty, is religious ritual, with shamanism being a compelling version of that.
Imagine we are in an environment where people get sick. People randomly die, it’s hard to predict the rain. We know that very reliably, across cultures, to understand these uncertain events, people converge on explanations that invoke unseen agents, gods, spirits, ghosts. Then the question becomes, how can you engage with these unseen agents who are believed to oversee uncertainty? If I come to you and I say, “Hey Steve, I know a family member of yours is sick. I can talk to the rain goddess, or I can talk to the illness demon. I can fight them off.” That might not be compelling to you. But if I seem like a fundamentally different human to you, if I have lost my skeleton and have crystals inside my body, and engage in some kind of practice that makes it feel like I’m fundamentally transforming in your eyes a different kind of being, then I think that makes me much more compelling to you. I am interacting with these agents that oversee uncertainty. I think that’s very centrally what’s going on with shamanism: Altered states and fundamental transformation make compelling cases for everyone involved. You are tussling with the forces that are believed to control the uncontrollable.
I think we should readily entertain the hypothesis that Jesus was a shaman.
Is religion fundamentally about experience or belief?
That’s a fascinating question because sometimes there is this approach among cognitive anthropologists to think, “Oh, the mind produces religious beliefs.” Something that Tanya Luhrmann’s research has really reinforced for me is that the mind, through experience, produces the belief—that if I’m just sitting here, in my room, am I going to start believing in unseen spirits, or is it actually experience of spirits? That will feed belief. Is religion experience or belief? I would instead respond that I think experience is increasingly appreciated as a very powerful engine of belief.
My first summer at Mentawai in Indonesia, observing a shaman healing ceremony, there was a kid who woke up paralyzed and there was a ceremony, and he came away not being paralyzed. I was very struck by that. There are different explanatory frameworks that you can have for that. Maybe it was conversion, maybe he’s implicitly performing illness. But I was very struck after that and talked to friends about what it might have been. Placebo could potentially be a mechanism for making them feel better.
But what I found so striking about these healing ceremonies is how jubilant and celebratory and festive they feel. I was a receptionist in high school in a hospital, and my great uncle contracted cancer and died. Everything around it was so somber. But then I go to Mentawai, and someone’s foot seems like it’s going to fall off, and everyone is dancing, and they’re feasting, and you’re staying up all night, and after the shaman’s dance, other people are dancing. Social affirmation is a source of healing. 
More from Nautilus on shamans, religion, and rituals:
“The Ancient Rites That Gave Birth to Religion” Sacred beliefs likely arose out of prehistoric bonding and rituals
“Guided by Plant Voices” Plants talk to this ecologist. They tell her how to do better science.
“The Real Magic of Rituals” We might call them superstitions or spells, but they genuinely drum anxiety away
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Lead image: Shutterstock / Zwiebackesser
