An Encyclopedia of Shamanism by Christina Pratt. New York, NY: Rosen Publishing, 2007. Biblio; index; notes; 8.5” x 11.25”, 616 pp.; two vols.; $200.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Timothy White. Reprinted from Shaman's Drum, Number 75.

In An Encyclopedia of Shamanism, Christina Pratt has compiled a potentially useful—although rather expensive—reference tool that bears testimony to how far shamanology has come in the last few decades.  Thirty years ago, shamanism was rarely discussed outside of collegiate anthropological circles.  Today, we find this two-volume encyclopedia set offered by a mainstream academic press that specializes in educational books for young readers.  Moreover, the set’s contents are rich enough to provide shamanic practitioners with some stimulating windows into the transformative worlds of both traditional and contemporary shamanisms. Unlike many cross-cultural overviews on shamanism, the essays and many of the entries in these volumes are enriched by the author’s personal background in several experiential shamanic traditions—including Michael Harner’s core shamanism, Malidoma Somé’s Dagara traditions, and some unidentified Ecuadorian, Nepalese, and Tibetan traditions. 

This two-volume set—which includes a stimulating series of introductory essays  on shamanism, followed by approximately 750 entries on specific shamanic terms, practices, and cultural traditions—ably introduces an astounding variety of shamanic traditions and concepts, with surprisingly few errors of fact.  Nonetheless, I would be remiss not to observe that the “uncorrected proof” that I reviewed included some embarrassing typos, as well as some significant misinterpretations, which I will address later.  Hopefully, most of the technical errors were corrected before the encyclopedia was released to the public.  However, I fear that production on this edition had progressed too far to remedy its principal limitation—the fact that both the essays and many of the entries tend to be short on supporting documentation, forcing readers to adopt a trust-it-or-chuck-it-all approach.  Pratt does include a few bibliographic references at the close of most essays and entries, but she rarely provides citations or qualifying attributions identifying her sources en situ, which would have greatly enhanced the overall educational value of the volumes. 

On the whole, I was impressed by Pratt’s  personal understanding of diverse shamanic trance methodologies and ceremonial traditions, and her ability to explain those practices  in unambiguous language.  In fact, I was often touched at how she manages to deftly turn seemingly conventional statements into insightful teachings.  For example, during a section explaining the shaman’s relationship with spirits, she states:  “It is not just the knowledge of how to access a powerful spirit that is important, but the ability to develop a long-term relationship with that power or spirit and to work with it again and again” (page xi; emphasis added).

Pratt’s forté is that she explains and interprets shamanological concepts from the experiential perspective of a practitioner.  For example, during a passage  explaining the concept of the shamanic journey, she states, “It is the capacity to act with intention while in the journey that makes shamanism effective and distinguishes the shaman’s work from journeys of novices.  Human beings, in general, are capable of reaching altered states of consciousness and of accessing many of the same realms of non-ordinary reality that the shaman does.  Shamans, however, take action in these realms” (page xii).  Her contention that shamans are distinguished by their ability to act with intention while functioning in altered states of consciousness is, in my opinion, a simple but insightful observation.  Regrettably, she doesn’t provide examples to  illustrate how shamans act intentionally in altered states.

Despite her many innovative insights, Pratt occasionally slips into repeating outdated shamanological clichés.  For example, in her essay “Shamans and Non-Shamanic Healers,” she repeats a platitude—popularized by Mircea Eliade and others—that “shamans have been confused with medicine men, witch doctors, sorcerers, and healers who work in trance states” (page xxv).  In my opinion, the confusion has been perpetuated by cognicentric anthropologists who refuse to recognize that spirit embodiments are a classic form of shamanizing, and I propose that it is time for shamanologists to retire that worn-out cliché.  It is true that, in less enlightened times, explorers and even ethnographers misapplied various pejorative labels to practitioners who might have been better called shamans.  For example, early travelers and ethnographers tended to dismiss the sangomas of South Africa as witch doctors and sorcerers, although Pratt appropriately refers to them as shamans.

For slightly different reasons, some scholars continue to argue that Native American medicine men should not be called shamans.  Not all Native American medicine people may function as shamans, but many clearly invoke spirit communications, engage in spirit journeys, and facilitate spiritual healings—and if they do, I see no confusion or harm in calling them shamans.  For example, Lakota yuwipi rituals exhibit intriguing similarities to certain Inuit and Siberian forms of shamanizing.  While Pratt’s encyclopedia entry on the yuwipi appropriately refers to those ritualists as shamans, some scholars can’t abide the association.

In the same essay, Pratt extends Eliade’s cliché and suggests that magicians, wizards, witches, warlocks, and sorcerers also should not be considered shamans.  She may be correct in suggesting that there are subtle differences between shamans and other practitioners of spiritual magic, but her distinctions seem to be based primarily on stereotypical moral assumptions.  Although some witches and warlocks may draw on spirit energies, as she contends, “to serve their own intentions,” the same accusation can be made of many traditional shamans.  I appreciate the moral imperative behind Pratt’s contention that “when shamans use their skills and their relationship with the helping spirits to malevolent ends, they have crossed the line into sorcery” (page xxvi).  However, ethnographic records indicate that sorcery and shamanizing have been used traditionally for both benevolent and malevolent purposes.

Pratt’s assumption that traditional shamans engage the spirits only for benevolent purposes that serve the needs of their community is an idealistic but inaccurate projection.  In many shamanic cultures—for example, the Evenki,  Yanomami, Diné, and Lakota—the dividing line between shamans and sorcerers is very thin.  While I wholeheartedly support the ideal of benevolent shamanism, I contend it is naive to suggest that shamans are entirely benevolent, or to argue that magicians, witches, and sorcerers are inherently malevolent.  Based on the etymology of the word sorcery, which derives from sortilege, or casting lots, I define it as a technique or methodology that uses ritual actions and symbolic objects in order to engender desired physical results.  The Huichols of Mexico use “prayer arrows” to transport their personal requests into the spirit realms, the Q’ero of Peru use symbolic objects and ritual enactments to manifest personal desires, and Evenki shamans used iron pendants and amulets to invoke protective spirits.  Such basic sorcery techniques may be used by both shamans and nonshamans, but when employed by shamans, they can be transformed into effective tools for focusing healing work.

Revisioning Shamanology

In her opening set of ten essays, Pratt explores a litany of key shamanological topics, introducing many well-known shamanic concepts and various cross-cultural themes.  The titles of the essays—such as “The Origins of the Word ‘Shaman,’” “The Shaman’s Trance,” “Shamans and Spirits,” and “The Shaman’s Universe”—may be uninspired, but Pratt efficiently introduces many important aspects of shamanic practice in unambiguous language.  For example, in “The Shaman’s Trance,” she offers a terse but informative description of shamanizing: “The shaman uses specific practices or sacred technologies to enter into a narrow range of altered states of consciousness … that allow the shaman to work in partnership with his or her helping spirits” (page xxxiv).  As a shamanic practitioner, I appreciate Pratt’s no-nonsense definition.  As an editor, I think it would have been instructive if Pratt had provided one or two examples showing how various types of trance practices have been used to induce altered states conducive to working with spirits.

Although Pratt’s essays include much food for thought, she rarely provides citations and illustrative examples to support her views. For example, in “The Shaman’s Trance,” she casually introduces a key shamanic principle:  “The shaman creates change in the physical world by crafting a solution at the source of the problem in the spirit world” (page xii).  That statement hints at a potent shamanic teaching, but Pratt doesn’t elaborate on how problems can be solved by tracking them back to their originating sources, before they became serious, and transforming their spiritual energy.  In comparison, the benefits of providing supporting evidence can be seen clearly in Pratt’s essay “Shamans and Spirits” when she describes how shamans cultivate working relationships with personal spirits.  There, she effectively illuminates some key points by quoting narrative statements from an Eskimo angakok (shaman) and a Goldi shaman.  The descriptive details in these quotations ably support her views on the importance of working with spirits.

Pratt’s essays succintly introduce many prevailing assumptions about the fundamental nature of shamans.  For example, in “Shamans and Non-Shamanic Healers,” she writes, “The shaman is distinguished by his or her ability to utilize a particular trance state in which the shaman’s soul leaves the physical world and travels into the invisible world to make an experiential connection with spirit” (page xxv).  A little later, she adds:  “The shaman becomes  an energetic bridge between the physical realm and the spirit world through trance” (page xxv).  However, in some of her essays, Pratt champions more radical assumptions about the fundamental nature of shamanisms.  For example, she confidently asserts that “shamanism is not a religion” but “a group of shared activities, practices, and experiences.”  While I basically agree with her, it would have been instructive to include some evidence to support that position.

On the whole, Pratt does a good job of reducing complicated shamanological theories into easy-to-grasp concepts, but I propose that the encyclopedia’s usefulness as a research tool could have been enhanced immensely by providing more thorough attributions and citations en situ, rather than merely listing a few closing references for each essay or entry.  The limitations of not providing attributions—as well as the utility of providing them—can be seen in the essay “The Origin of the Word ‘Shaman.’” Initially, Pratt describes several etymologies for the Evenki word saman—without identifying their sources.  Since scholars have proposed different meanings and etymologies for the word, it would have been instructive if Pratt had cited sources for each concept introduced—as she did for a definition by Ake Hultkrantz of an unidentified Tungus term “related to saman.” 

In the same essay, Pratt demonstrates the value of providing attributions and citations for key concepts.  She introduces Sergei Shirokogoroff’s thesis that “the most basic attribute of the [Tungus] shaman’s trance is the mastery of spirits, or embodiment of the helping spirit,” and then she contrasts it against Eliade’s thesis that “the true shaman’s trance is the visionary ecstasy of spirit flight, or the shamanic journey” (page xxxiv).  In amazingly succinct language, Pratt manages to champion the universality of both forms of shaman­izing—spirit flights and spirit embodiments—without getting bogged down in the shamanological debate over the nature of shamanic trance.  First, she diplomatically challenges Eliade’s idealized but reductive flight thesis—using his own observation “that the shaman’s embodiment trance was an effective, universally distributed phenomena.” Then, she respectfully acknowledges that Eliade’s classic journeying trance, or spirit flight, has also been reported in a wide range of shamanic cultures.  Finally, in order to bolster her hypothesis that spirit flights and spirit embodiments are both valid types of shamanic trance state, Pratt cites the research of psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who discovered that both types of trance develop spontaneously during LSD-induced altered states, and who consequently argued that “both are primordial spiritual phenomena, belonging to not culture in particular but to humanity as a whole” (page xxxiv).  By accurately representing well-known sources and providing appropriate attributions and citations, Pratt persuasively supports her thesis.

In general, I found most of Pratt’s experiential insights to be quite perceptive, but I did question the relevancy of some of her interpretations.  For example, in the essay “Ritual and Ceremony,” she argues that ritual and ceremony are two substantially different shamanic tools.  In my opinion, Pratt draws some rather arbitrary distinctions between the two terms.  In the essay, she writes, “Ritual is the domain of the shaman, magician, and sorcerer.  Ceremony can be used by any leader or religious functionary who has the skills to connect with and engage the unseen” (page xxxi).  I agree that ceremonies are more conservative and rituals are more improvisational.  However, in a later entry, Pratt goes further and proposes that rituals raise energy that spirals unpredictably and uncontrollably upward toward spirit, and that ceremonies spiral energy downward, drawing spirit into community (page 345).  In my experience, the intent of the practitioners determines whether energy moves upward or downward in ceremonies or rituals.  Pratt’s revisioning of the two terms seems out-of-sync with most standard definitions, and her failure to provide illustrative examples in support of her distinctions weakens her argument.  Moreover, many of her later entries use the two terms interchangeably, so I am not sure why she felt called to focus an entire essay on revisioning them.

In another essay, “The Shaman,” Pratt slips deep into a shamanological swamp when she tries to formulate an all-purpose set of criteria for defining shamans. While acknowledging that anthropologists and scholars have proposed varied definitions, ranging from very restrictive culture-bound ones to broadly inclusive cross-cultural ones, Pratt proposes what she considers a “mid-range definition.”  In her words, “The shaman is a practitioner who has developed the mastery of:  1. accessing altered states of consciousness, controlling themselves while moving in those states, and returning to an ordinary state of consciousness at will;  2. mediating between the needs of the spirit world and those of the physical world in a way that can be understood by the community, and whose mastery …  is used 3. to serve the needs of the community that cannot be met by practitioners of other disciplines such as physicians, psychiatrists, priests, and leaders” (page xxii).  Her first two criteria strike me as functionally sound, but I suggest that the third one is a modern concession that doesn’t apply well to indigenous cultures, where shamans often function simultaneously as physicians, psychiatrists, priests, and leaders.

Pratt may be justified in challenging some of Eliade’s narrow culture-based criteria—mastery of fire, initiatory dismemberment, and animal guardians—but some of her theoretical criteria for defining shamans can be equally exclusionary.  For example, Pratt argues that trance divinations and healings without trance should not be considered shamanic.  I contend that ethnographic literature includes numerous accounts of shamans using trance states to diagnose illnesses and prescribe herbal treatments, as well as accounts of shamans who conduct healings without inducing trance states.  Ironically, Pratt describes various shamanistic practices (the use of trance postures, popularized by Felicitas Goodman, and the divination practice of skrying) that push the boundaries of her own definitions.

In my experience, shamanizing rarely conforms to linear scholastic definitions, and it is easy to find vital exceptions to nearly every defining criterion proposed by shamanologists.  Instead of agonizing too much over whether particular spiritual practices do—or don’t—fit theoretical definitions, I would encourage scholars to focus on understanding how shamanistic techniques work, and why some are more effective than others. 

Encyclopedia Entries

In direct contrast to the broad cross-cultural approach taken in Pratt’s introductory essays, the overwhelming majority of her encyclopedia entries are focused on culture-specific traditions and terms.  Pratt deserves accolades for efficiently introducing more than fifty shamanic cultures and hundreds of key shamanic terms, with minimal errors.  Regrettably, the depth and relevancy of her entries are not always consistent.  In some cases, she offers appropriately lengthy entries on key ethnic traditions  (for example, the Buryat, Celtic, Dagara, Hopi, Huichol, Lakota, Mayan, and Tuvan), and those entries provide perceptive overviews, systematically introducing the special rituals, trance methods, instruments, costumes, and other shamanistic elements used in the culture.  In other entries, she offers stimulating discussions about significant shamanistic concepts, such as cleansing, core shamanism, diagnosis, dismemberment, ecstasy, and embodiment. 

In contrast to the major entries, however, the encyclopedia also includes a great many short entries, mostly describing indigenous names for shamans (for example, huuku, a type of Northern Maidu shaman, and i-wa-musp, a gender-variant shaman of the Yuki), ethnic titles for other specialized practitioners (ranging from hmuga, a type of Lakota sorcerer, to netdim maidü, a type of Northern Maidu seer), and terms for culture-specific concepts (ehldilna, a Wintun healing ritual, and gagohsa, a Seneca word for certain basswood spirit masks).  While these entries are factually accurate, I was troubled to find that more than one hundred of the shortest ones were borrowed—and barely rephrased—from William S. Lyon’s Encyclopedia of Native American Shamanism, while a considerable number of ethnic terms for “gender-variant shamans” were adopted from The Spirit and the Flesh by W. L. Williams.  In addition, many other short entries repeatedly reference a limited group of general shamanological texts—Shamanism by Mircea Eliade, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, The Shaman by Piers Vitebsky, Dreamtime and Inner Space by Holger Kalweit, and Lyon’s  Encyclopedia of Native American Shamanism—plus a couple of entheogenic texts—Plants of the Gods by R. E. Schultes, A. Hofmann, and C. Rätsch, and Vine of the Soul by R. E. Schultes and R. F. Raffauf. There are obvious advantages to extracting and paraphrasing one’s entries from such texts—one can describe a lot of terms without having to consult a multitude of primary sourcebooks—but, as I will soon show, relying on secondhand sources can result in repeating embarrassing errors of fact. 

Many other short entries seem to have been scavenged from Pratt’s more detailed entries on specific tribal traditions.  For example, in a relatively esoteric entry on “bala,” the text explains it is a hereditary totem spirit that is handed down from father to son during a boy’s initiation, but it doesn’t specify the origin of the term or elaborate on its significance, beyond offering some cross-references:  “See also helping spirits and Wurunjerri.” In the main entry on the Wurunjerri, Pratt explains that the Wurunjerri are a tribe of Australian aboriginal people, and that bala is a hereditary spirit, connected to the power of a sacred place, that is sung into shamanic initiates. 

I suggest that it would have been more efficient if the volume had listed these specialized ethnic terms in a separate glossary, or if it had indexed them better.  As a researcher, I find it makes more sense to describe specialized ethnic terms within the context of the originating culture.  Interestingly, Pratt does precisely that when she describes three Celtic forms of divination—Tenm Laida, Dichetal do Chennaib, and Imbas Forosna—within her entry on Celtic spiritual traditions.  Although I assume that general readers might be more inclined to seek out these Celtic divination terms than the Wurunjerri term bala, I found it ironic that none of the Celtic divination terms were listed in her index or provided separate entries. 

Considering the mammoth task involved in compiling over seven hundred entries on shamanic practices and concepts from over fifty traditional cultures, Pratt does a commendable job of avoiding factual errors and misinterpretations.  Most of the errors that I found were relatively minor.  For example, after providing a good overview of Huichol, Cora, Tarahumara, and Native American Church peyote traditions, Pratt includes a second entry on “the peyote hunt.” In that entry, she states that Huichol peyote pilgrims “remove the white tufts, leave them as offerings, peel the tough skin, and eat from the first peyote of the hunt” (page 347).  My understanding is that the first peyote found on the hunt is cut into segments—skin still attached—that are shared among the pilgrims.  The alkaloid-rich skin is only peeled if buttons are being prepared for drying, and then it is the skin itself that is dried for consumption. 

I also came across other passages that involve subtle misinterpretations. The entry on the Native American Church (NAC) describes the religious practices of the church as being centered “around the sacramental use of the entheogen peyote in a vision-questing ritual” (page 318).  Pratt’s view that the ceremony is a “vision-questing ritual” struck me as off the mark.  Vision questing may play a significant role in the peyote hunt rituals of the Huichols, but it is an incidental aspect of most NAC ceremonies.  I have heard many NAC roadmen caution newcomers to ceremonies that peyote is not a psychedelic, and that the ceremony is not about seeking visions.  Moreover, the ritual structure of the NAC ceremony rarely allows much time for vision seeking. 

I mention these errors not because they are horrendous mistakes, but because they highlight the problem of relying on secondhand sources, and they illustrate the value of providing citations for fact checking.  The lack of citations made it difficult to track down the sources of Pratt’s errors, but I  eventually found one missing link—a short note in Plants of the Gods claiming that the NAC ceremony was a “vision-quest ritual.”  Because that comment appeared in a tabular chart listing common names, botanical names, and historic uses for a variety of psychoactive plants, I assume the original error involved an editorial blunder.  Nonetheless, if Pratt or her editors had submitted the specialized texts to appropriate reviewers for feedback before publication, some of these errors might have been avoided.

There is one last feature that I must call attention to:  internet descriptions of the encyclopedia indicate that it has been released in two versions—one with photos and the other without.  Unfortunately, the version that I was sent for review didn’t contain photos.  I am hopeful that the illustrated version will offer readers a stunning overview of shamanisms;  however, at the list price of $433.50, it is beyond my budget.  Despite the aforementioned limitations and weaknesses, both versions of Pratt’s encyclopedia should provide readers with a wellspring of information about indigenous and contemporary shamanic practices.

Timothy White is the founding editor of Shaman’s Drum.

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