Shamanism and Crisis: Why the Occult Returns in Uncertain Times

© cornelia es said: Transmission (2025), Oil on Linen, 60 x 150 cm, Series: Digital Shamans

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mongolia’s economy collapsed with it. Privatization devastated rural communities. Healthcare retreated. Within months, shamans appeared across Buryat territory — practitioners who had been suppressed for seventy years. The anthropologist Manduhai Buyandelger, who conducted fieldwork in eastern Mongolia’s Bayan-Uul district between 1996 and 2000, documented this revival in forensic detail: people sought spirit consultations to navigate economic anxiety, illness, and the loss of institutional safety nets.^[1]

The pattern repeats with precision. Shamanism and crisis have been coupled for as long as humans have formed societies. Where the structures that organize survival erode — through famine, plague, economic collapse, or imperial disintegration — people turn to specialists who claim access to forces beyond the visible. The question worth asking is what this reveals about the architecture of human cognition, and why the same pattern now reasserts itself in the algorithmic present.

A Cognitive Technology for Uncertainty

Manvir Singh, anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, whose fieldwork with Mentawai shamans in Indonesia began in 2014, published Shamanism: The Timeless Religion in 2025.^[2] His central argument: shamanism is a cognitive technology — a culturally evolved system that exploits specific psychological biases to generate the experience of control over uncontrollable outcomes. Illness, weather, harvest, war, financial markets. Wherever outcomes matter and remain unpredictable, human societies produce specialists who perform mastery over those outcomes.

Singh identifies three essential qualities shared across shamanic traditions worldwide: the achievement of non-ordinary states of consciousness, communication with spiritual or unseen forces, and the provision of services — healing, divination, protection — to a community. His definition is deliberately capacious. It allows him to draw a line from Paleolithic cave paintings to speaking in tongues to what he calls “hedge wizards” — the fund managers and tech executives who perform a structurally analogous role in contemporary markets.^[3]

This is the decisive insight. Shamanism does not return in crisis because people become irrational. It returns because the cognitive architecture that generates shamanic practice — the search for ways to influence uncertain events — is a permanent feature of the human mind. Crisis does not create the need. It strips away the institutional layers (medicine, law, insurance, state welfare) that normally satisfy it through secular means. When those layers fail, the older technology resurfaces.

Interior din Muzeul Cărții și Exilului Românesc. 28 March 2024. Author: Elena Ancu Damian

Eliade’s Framework and Its Limits

The academic study of shamanism as a coherent field begins with Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, first published in French in 1951.^[4] Eliade proposed that shamanism constituted a kind of universal, primordial religion, with the ecstatic journey to the spirit world as its defining characteristic. His work provided the conceptual vocabulary — “archaic techniques of ecstasy,” the “axis mundi,” the shaman’s cosmic journey — that still structures the discourse.

Eliade’s framework, however, has been substantially criticized. Anthropologist Alice Beck Kehoe argued that the term “shamanism” should apply only to the Siberian Tungus peoples who originated the word. Singh’s 2025 work builds on Eliade’s universalist impulse but replaces the romantic-primitivist framing with a cognitive-evolutionary model: shamanism recurs not because it preserves an archaic wisdom, but because the psychological needs it addresses are permanent. The distinction matters. Eliade’s approach invited reverence toward an imagined past. Singh’s approach demands analysis of a present mechanism.

The Crisis Pattern: A Cultural History

The Buryat revival of the 1990s is one instance in a pattern that spans continents and centuries.

In China, the dismantling of collective healthcare after the post-Mao reforms pushed rural populations back to spirit mediums and healers. The anthropologist Hong Zhang, who conducted fieldwork in a Hubei village in the early 1990s, documented how female practitioners — locally called huo pusha, “living gods” — returned to public visibility after the severe persecutions of the Cultural Revolution. People needed spirit consultations to navigate economic anxiety and misfortune when they were left with only their immediate family resources.^[5]

In 1889, during the final years of Native American resistance against settler colonialism, a Paiute elder named Jack Wilson received a vision of a sacred dance that would enlist the spirit armies of the dead. The Ghost Dance united previously warring tribes from Oklahoma to California. It was simultaneously a spiritual practice and a political mobilization — powerful enough to terrify the U.S. government and contribute to the escalation that culminated in the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.^[6] The Ghost Dance demonstrates that shamanism in crisis is rarely just spiritual. It organizes collective action.

The International Society for Academic Research on Shamanism (ISARS) dedicated its 2022 conference to the theme “Shamanism and Crisis: Seeking Human Identity,” defining crisis broadly: overwhelming and rapid change, economic and political collapse, environmental catastrophe. The conference explicitly sought to move beyond the distinction between “classically animist” societies and “modern” ones — because the phenomenon cuts across both.^[7]

Stroking a(n In)visible Horse it#1, by cornelia es said

Europe’s Own Shamanic Traditions

The contemporary Western turn toward shamanism is routinely framed as cultural appropriation from indigenous peoples of other continents. This framing, while partially accurate, erases a crucial fact: Europe had its own shamanic and animistic traditions, systematically destroyed through Christianization.

The best-documented European shamanic practice is the Old Norse seiðr — a complex of divination, trance work, and spirit communication associated with the goddess Freyja and practiced primarily by female specialists called völur (seers). The völva wandered from settlement to settlement, offering prophecy, healing, and curse work in exchange for hospitality and payment — structurally the same itinerant specialist role that Singh describes cross-culturally. The etymological root of seiðr — Proto-Germanic *saiðaz — is cognate with Proto-Celtic *soito-, “sorcery” (which gave Welsh hud, “magic”), pointing to shared pre-Christian magical traditions across northern and western Europe.^[8]

The scholar Peter Buchholz argued in 1968 that seiðr practices may trace back to beliefs of European hunter-gatherer cultures in pre-agricultural Europe, predating the Viking Age by millennia. The Sámi noaidi tradition — the patrilineal shamans of northern Scandinavia — represents the most continuous surviving link to these older strata.^[9] Celtic druids, meanwhile, operated as ritual specialists mediating between the community and the Otherworld — a function recognizable within Singh’s framework, even if academic consensus resists applying the term “shaman” to them directly.

The systematic destruction of these traditions through Christian conversion — and later through witch trials, which targeted precisely the female ritual specialists who had carried animistic and healing knowledge — is itself a crisis pattern. What was lost was not merely a set of beliefs, but an entire infrastructure of meaning-making. That the modern Western wellness market now imports fragments of indigenous practice from other continents reflects, in part, the depth of that loss.

Joseph Beuys. Comparación de dos tipos de sociedad. Mapa conceptual en que Beuys expone como funciona una democracia ciudadana directa sin mediación de estructuras políticas. 9 April 2016. Author: Dosemil

From Beuys to the Algorithm

In contemporary art, the shaman figure has been present since at least Joseph Beuys. Beuys built his entire artistic persona on a shamanic origin myth: his claim that, after his Luftwaffe plane crashed in the Crimea on 16 March 1944, he was rescued by nomadic Tatars who wrapped his injured body in felt and fat. This narrative — repeated in nearly every interview for decades, and still cited as fact in his New York Times obituary — has been conclusively disproved. Military records show Beuys was recovered by a German search commando while conscious; a 1944 letter from Beuys to the mother of his dead co-pilot Hans Laurinck describes the crash with no mention of Tatars, felt, or fat. Art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh dismantled the story in a 1980 Artforum essay.^[10]

The fiction, however, is analytically more interesting than the fact. Beuys constructed a textbook shamanic initiation narrative: crisis (near-death crash), rescue by indigenous healers (the Tatars), and transformation (rebirth as artist-shaman). That he needed to fabricate this narrative — that it proved powerful enough to sustain an entire career — confirms Singh’s thesis from a surprising angle. The cognitive demand for a shamanic origin story is so potent that it generates one even in the absence of real events.

The line from Beuys to the present runs through several nodes. Nam June Paik described his own practice in relation to Korean shamanism and new media. Maya Deren explored ritual and the unconscious from an early feminist perspective. The 2021 exhibition Technoshamanism at Kunstverein Braunschweig assembled artists who regard shamanism as a technology in its own right — and deploy speculative technologies to seek out shamanic energies.^[11]

The 2025 Seoul Mediacity Biennale, titled Séance: Technology of the Spirit, pushed the inquiry further. Its curators mapped the specific Korean trajectory: shamanism suppressed under Japanese occupation, then repressed again by the postcolonial state as “backwards,” then rehabilitated in the 1980s as national indigeneity, and now commercialized as “K-occult” — blockbuster films about geomancers and communication with the dead. The biennale proposed an alternative to this commercialization, while including artists like Shana Moulton who directly address the commodification of spirituality.^[12]

The Appropriation Problem

The term “shaman” itself — derived from the Tungusic šamán — was globalized by Western anthropologists who applied it indiscriminately to unrelated spiritual practices across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. The words “shaman” and “shamanism” do not accurately describe the variety and complexity of indigenous spirituality. Each nation and tradition has its own terminology, its own cosmology, its own protocols.

Three figures shaped Western neo-shamanism: Mircea Eliade, whose 1951 work posited a universal primordial religion (severely criticized for overgeneralization); Carlos Castaneda, whose Teachings of Don Juan (1968) is now widely regarded as fiction; and Michael Harner, whose “Core Shamanism” deliberately stripped indigenous practices of cultural specificity to make them marketable to Western seekers.^[13] Each step in this lineage increased accessibility and decreased accountability. What arrived in the Western wellness market was a product emptied of the obligations, relationships, and reciprocities that sustain shamanic practice in its original contexts.

Singh’s framework offers a more honest approach. By treating shamanism as a recurrent cognitive technology rather than a tradition to be borrowed, his model acknowledges the universality of the underlying psychological mechanism without pretending that one culture’s practice can be transplanted into another without loss — or harm. And the existence of Europe’s own suppressed traditions (seiðr, the noaidi, Celtic druidic practice) complicates the appropriation narrative further: part of the Western hunger for shamanism may reflect an unresolved severance from indigenous European animism, not only a desire to consume the exotic.

An illustration of a shaman in Siberia, produced by the Dutch explorer Nicolaes Witsen in the late 17th century. It is the earliest known pictorial depiction of a Siberian shaman to have appeared in Europe, where Witsen’s account first popularised the term “shaman”. Source and Author information are missing.

Digital Shamanism and the Cosmic Girlboss

The current resurgence of occult seeking operates within a specific infrastructure: platform algorithms, attention economies, and gendered financial precarity. The Cosmic Girlboss — the figure at the center of the current exhibition at Berlin’s Galerie im Turm — embodies this intersection. She treats systemic crises as spiritual challenges, replaces collective action with individual manifestation, and funds her practice through the same platforms that produce her precarity.

This is shamanism filtered through neoliberal logic: the specialist role has collapsed into the client, the community ritual into the individual scroll session, the sacred substance into the dopamine hit. TikTok tarot and algorithmically curated horoscope apps are not shamanism. They are its residue — fragments of a cognitive technology repurposed for monetization.

Meanwhile, artists working in the field of digital shamanism attempt something more rigorous: to use the tools of the digital age — AI, networked communication, immersive environments — as vehicles for the kind of consciousness-shifting that shamanic practice has always pursued. The distinction is critical. The platform economy exploits the need for meaning in crisis. The artistic practice investigates it.

Shamanism and crisis are structurally coupled. Wherever uncertainty intensifies beyond what existing institutions can absorb, human cognition reaches for older technologies of meaning-making. Understanding this requires no belief in spirits. It requires the willingness to take seriously what billions of people across millennia have recognized: that the visible world is insufficient, and that the specialists who navigate its edges serve a function that secular modernity has suppressed but never replaced.

Notes

^[1] Manduhai Buyandelger, Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Buyandelger, a Buryat-Mongolian anthropologist at MIT, conducted fieldwork in Bayan-Uul between 1996 and 2000. Her account documents the proliferation of shamanic practice in the context of “ongoing economic impoverishment, failed expectations of democracy, disbelief in the government.” See also her article “Dealing with Uncertainty: Shamans, Marginal Capitalism, and the Remaking of History in Postsocialist Mongolia” (PDF, MIT) and the MIT News profile of her research. ↩

^[2] Manvir Singh, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025). Singh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis, with degrees from Brown and Harvard. Publisher page (Penguin Random House). ↩

^[3] The “hedge wizard” analogy is discussed in the Kirkus review of Singh’s book (published online 1 February 2025): “When evangelists pray over Donald Trump, they’re practicing (perhaps black) magic, and hedge-fund wizards speculate no more scientifically than a so-called witch doctor seeking a cure for spirit possession.” Full review at Kirkus. See also the peer review in Asian Ethnology: Michael F. Brown, review of Singh, Asian Ethnology 84:2 (2025), pp. 303–306. Open access. ↩

^[4] Mircea Eliade, Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase (Paris: Payot, 1951). English translation: Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Bollingen/Princeton University Press, 1964). Eliade’s universalist claims were contested by, among others, Alice Beck Kehoe and Åke Hultkrantz; Singh engages critically with Eliade’s framework throughout his 2025 book. ↩

^[5] Hong Zhang, “Contemporary Chinese Shamanism: The Reinvention of Tradition,” Cultural Survival Quarterly. Full article. Zhang conducted fieldwork in a Hubei village in the early 1990s with four female practitioners. ↩

^[6] The Ghost Dance is discussed in the Aeon essay “Why Did Shamanism Evolve in Societies All Around the Globe?” (2021): Full essay. The same essay provides the Buryat post-Soviet example that opens this article: “Following the collapse of socialism in 1989-91, the economic rug was pulled out from under the Buryat.” ↩

^[7] ISARS 2022 Conference, “Shamanism and Crisis: Seeking Human Identity,” Sarawak, Malaysia. Conference theme (long version). ↩

^[8] On seiðr: the etymology tracing Proto-Germanic *saiðaz to Proto-Celtic *soito- is documented in the Wikipedia entry on Seiðr, citing standard linguistic references. On the völva’s itinerant practice, see the account in the Saga of Erik the Red. Clive Tolley provides the most thorough academic treatment in Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic, 2 vols. (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2009). ↩

^[9] Peter Buchholz, “Schamanismus bei den Germanen?” (1968), discussed in “Shamanism and Old Norse Seidr” (The Wicked Griffin), which summarizes the scholarly debate. ↩

^[10] On the Beuys crash: Military records and the 1944 letter from Beuys to Laurinck’s mother are discussed in detail in: “Fat, Felt and a Fall to Earth: The Making and Myths of Joseph Beuys,” Thaddaeus Ropac (originally published in The Guardian), which states: “This narrative […] has by now been conclusively disproved. Beuys was in a plane crash, which killed his pilot and badly injured him, but there were no tribesmen, no fat nor felt.” Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s critique appeared as “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol,” Artforum, January 1980. See also “The Legacy of a Myth Maker”, Tate Etc., Issue 3, Spring 2005. ↩

^[11] Technoshamanism, Kunstverein Braunschweig, October 2021. Exhibition announcement (e-flux). ↩

^[12] Séance: Technology of the Spirit, 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2025. Curators’ interview: Frieze. ↩

^[13] On Castaneda’s fictional status and Harner’s “Core Shamanism,” see the Wikipedia entry on Neoshamanism, which summarizes the academic consensus. Also: Molly Coen, “Why Shamanic Practices Are Making a Comeback in Contemporary Art,” Artsy, 2019. ↩