Not just smoke and feathers!

Reading | Anthropology

Elizabeth Jean Currie, PhD, MS | 2026-02-06

Analytic Idealism may have much to learn from an unlikely source, which became clear when I was watching a recent interview of Bernardo Kastrup with Dr Mayim Bialik, “Is Reality a Dream? Consciousness, Intuition and Life After Death” [1]. In discussing the notoriously poorly understood (by modern western biomedicine) placebo effect, Dr. Kastrup referred to shamanism as a good example of something that seems to use (to the uninitiated observer) obscure, apparently meaningless rituals of: “cigarette smoke blowing and waving feathers and dancing and screaming,” but which nevertheless can achieve impressive healing results, thus quintessentially placebo in character.

I have been a researcher into the phenomenon of shamanism for many years. Recently, I concluded a study that examined the cosmology, beliefs and practices of ancestral healing traditions in the Ecuadorian Andes. This was part of the overall purview of the project, involving a survey of three Indigenous highland communities, which included a number of traditional healers including community shamans [2]. This study and the survey information it draws upon explored in great detail the way that shamans—called in the Indigenous Kichwa language ‘yachak/pl. Yachakuna’—operate: the traditions they draw upon, the way they were inducted into their profession, and the beliefs and related methodologies they employ to diagnose and heal [3].

Firstly, I understand that drawing attention to the placebo effect was done to highlight the mysterious, apparently mental power of a phenomenon about which too little is still understood. I understand that shamanism was included as an example of the way that placebo can operate, with a modern biomedical example of simulated knee surgery also discussed, as well as the standard orally administered sugar pill. However, I am disinclined to agree that shamanism is a good example of the placebo effect at all, given that ‘classical shamanism’—that is, the practices of traditional religious specialists drawn from a long ancestral tradition, not the sadly proliferating class of modern and ‘neo shamans’ too commonly seen now—employs distinct methodologies to effect diagnosis (itself an aspect of ‘divination’) and healing, set within their containing culture’s particular understanding or ‘map’ of the universe, of ‘reality’ as they experience it.

Let me start by explaining what shamanism actually is, as it is a very widely used term now and often used inappropriately with many romantic, superstitious or ‘New Age’ assumptions as to what shamans are and how they operate.

There are many definitions … from that narrowly employed to mean spiritual specialists from Northern, Arctic and Sub-Arctic cultures, to those sharing a broadly similar set of beliefs and practices occurring pan-globally and across time and existing before the spread of organised dogmatic religions such as Islam, Buddhism and Christianity. Shamanism may be understood as the expression of a peoples’ spiritual beliefs and experiences and their understanding of metaphysical reality, centering upon the employment of states of altered consciousness. Shamanistic beliefs and practices, sometimes better understood as folkloric traditions, still persist in many parts of the word now, continuing as a sub-stratum beneath organised religion and modern culture. We know from the archaeological record and depictions of shamans, often undergoing trance states of transformation into their animal tutelary spirits, and kindred themes, that shamanistic religion was the common basis of spiritual experience in autochthonous Amerindian societies up to the impact of the conquest by the Spanish imperium in the New World in the 16th century and the imposition of an alien religious/spiritual creed based upon Christianity. [4]

Despite an observable, wide diversity in the way that shamans operate across the world, they nevertheless do conform to some basic consistencies, one of the most important being the induction of altered states of consciousness through which they navigate other metaphysical worlds in what is known as ‘soul flight’ or ‘journeying.’ The structure of the universe, according to shamans, is multi-dimensional—tiered—which the shaman navigates in these states of altered consciousness along the central axis mundi or ‘world tree’, which links them. There is the middle world of perceptual reality common to most ordinary people, there is the underworld below this (the realm of spirits, chthonic entities and the dead), and then the highest, celestial, upper world above. Each of these worlds is itself multi-tiered, like Dante’s seven circles concept.

I suggest that these other dimensions that shamans experience and navigate through are extensions of our own, usually sense-limited, seemingly ‘material’ world that, with their expanded capacity for experience, they are able to perceive, generally through the induction of trance. In their capacity as ‘psychopomp’—the guide of souls on their journey through the underworld and the retriever of souls that have become lost—a shaman will navigate these different planes.

Shamanism in South America is widely diverse in specifics, with the Amazonian traditions being very different from the highland and the Pacific coastal ones. For example, it is understood that the Ecuadorian and more northerly manifestations conform to something called ‘the Northern Sorcery Tradition,’ which does not include ‘soul journeying.’ Yet, interviews conducted with Ecuadorian shamans, one of which is reported below, revealed that he did, in fact, ‘travel’ in this manner, in what seemed to be a state similar to lucid dreaming [5].

The rituals shamans employ are symbolic interactions with the other cosmological dimensions in which divination and healing are sought, sometimes through an intermediary such as the shaman’s spirit guide, or some proxy of the source of power they are approaching. The shaman I worked with in the Ecuadorian Andes employed different items, including stones from a local sacred hill called Kinlli Urku, which was revered as one of the local power sources, and through these he gained insight into his clients’ condition and the means of healing them:

The connection with the spirits of knowledge and power is very difficult to explain. The power and knowledge to cleanse evil spirits come from mountains, candles, stones and medicinal plants. In addition, they tell me how and what process to perform or treatment to apply to the person, so that with the support of the natural elements I can know the dimension and the magnitude that the evil has been appropriated in the person. … The stones tell me how unwell [and in what manner] the person is, and they tell me what to do. Therefore, I do only what the stones tell me to do. ….. When I move the candles around the person’s whole body and blow aguardiente [puntas] over it [6], this ritual act for me is like an X-ray, because I see what happens with the person in the candle, obviously with the permission and knowledge given by the stones. … As I said before, power and knowledge come from the mountains, hand stones used in the ritual, medicinal plants and including the spirit of Taita Punta Rumi. They all tell me what to do, how to do it. All of them give me the same advice, the same knowledge and the same power. [7]

The rituals and activities that shamans perform are therefore distinctive methodologies conducted within an overall context of a formal framework for the understanding of illness, itself uniquely (in this case) Andean, and definitely not done ‘just for effect,’ or to impress clients or an audience. Including them under the rubric of placebo effect is, therefore, a misunderstanding of what it is, as there are important differences.

With the placebo effect, there is no understanding of the healing mechanism other than the context and the external mediator: sugar pills, simulated invasive or operatic procedures, within a broad therapeutic context of reassurance to the patient that the procedure should be beneficial—i.e. suggestion. The procedure itself, together with this suggestion of benefit from the clinician performing it, is what is thought to effect or activate, in some way, the healing outcome [8].  Sometimes the patient is aware that they are receiving a placebo, although in many cases they are not.

To ‘unbelievers,’ or people from modern biomedical backgrounds, shamanistic rituals might seem like ‘mumbo jumbo’ achieving a placebo-like result, but it is my view—and that of many—that they are in fact performing distinctive procedures in other cosmological dimensions of a far wider ‘reality.’ As described earlier, they may visualize the illness itself, they may see disease intermediaries in the form of ‘evil spirits’ that they then cleanse from the patient, and so on.

In the context of healing methods, it should also be borne in mind that the whole notion of what illness—‘disease’—is, is itself widely different in traditional and especially pre- and non-European cultures, as are the conceptions of ‘embodiment’ (what constitutes a body and what it means to be in one), what the soul is and how it is constituted (there can be several aspects to it), whether people have a separate spirit and ‘shadow,’ all of which present a very broad and complex set of alternative perspectives. The project I undertook examined these in some depth through different survey sections. Suffice it to say that traditional Andean classifications of illness and their etiology are very different from those of modern Europe, yet we persist in treating concepts of health and illness under the modern Eurocentric biomedical classifications as if they were the only valid ones [9].

Many of the kinds of illnesses that shamans treat are within the psychosocial spectrum, wherein lies their particular skills. But as we increasingly accept mind and body as being aspects of the same thing, there are many illnesses that are potentially amenable to this way of treatment. Christine Greenway describes an ancestral ‘soul calling’ ritual in the Peruvian Andes, which offers an extraordinary view of the way that shamans perform healing in symbolic interactions with the ‘otherworld’ [10]. Medicines (here called ‘hampi’) are employed as ritual offerings (despachos) in ceremonies to cure the ‘fright illness’ (mancharisq’a in Peru, susto/espanto in Ecuador), responsible for ‘soul loss.’ Greenway describes how medicines assume their potency as the embodiment of the patient’s spirit (animu) and the cultural construction of the patient’s identity, explaining how the transformation of medicines into the embodiment of the patient occurs during the cure and is a catalyst for healing. The items that make up despachos represent the loss of animated energy at the beginning of healing rituals, and then later the elicited presence of the essence. Symbolic inversions of the ritual processes and preparations of medicine bundles for health and good fortune represent the disorder and ‘non-humanness’ of the sick person:

The medicinal objects are more than the metaphorical representation of a sick person. During the ritual such objects become the person, and this effectively transforms the patient from one state of being (weakened, inanimate, and vulnerable) to another (healthy, animated, and vital). This Andean case broadens the Western concept of the individuated human body and contributes to theorizing about embodiment. [11]

The ceremony achieved the outcome of ‘returning’ to the patient (an adolescent child) what might be interpreted as a dissociated aspect of their personality, itself understood in Andean terms as ‘soul loss,’ commonly attributable to ‘susto’‘ or ‘soul fright’ (shock/trauma), although in the case described it was the child’s spirit (ánimu) rather than soul per se which had been thought lost  [12]. The ‘soul’ (psyche) in many ancestral/traditional societies is not necessarily understood as ‘one,’ but may be a composite of several aspects, any of which may become displaced in an experience possibly comparable with dissociation. There are many such examples of shamanistic healing interventions, which, although varying in the specifics of symbol and associated ritual, nevertheless demonstrate the argument being made here.

I contend therefore that a better understanding of the way that shamans operate and the cosmologies they operate within would offer to Cosmopsychism and Analytic Idealism a real opportunity to explore how a mental universe operates, and to demystify to some extent these otherwise arcane practices. As it stands in our present world, still dominated by physicalism, they are the uncomfortable intrusions of a different order of reality into the materialist worldview, and generally attract much dismissive skepticism as a consequence. For one thing, modern biomedicine, drawn from the materialist perspective as it is, commonly dismisses experiences or practices that do not conform to its reductionist explanations of ‘reality,’ classifying and even pathologizing people who are able to experience a non-material dimension and engage with attendant forces in it as psychotic (within the range of schizophrenic disorders set out in the DSM5 [13]).

I understand that the remarks I am critiquing here were made in the context of a much longer interview of very wide breadth and probably have a kind of ‘throw away’ feeling to them, of necessity very generalized. Unfortunately, Dr Kastrup’s comments, which reflect well enough the general modern prejudices and misunderstandings about shamans and shamanism, don’t come over well and tend to confirm the biomedical or scientific view of ‘mumbo jumbo’—snake oil that gullible people take and, given the placebo effect, some find benefit from. Perhaps we will never really ‘understand’ how shamans operate and how they achieve healing from our ‘Western’ mindsets, but a more sincere acknowledgment of and open-mindedness towards their ancient ancestral practices might afford us the means of building a better ‘map’ of the metaphysics of the mental universe they operate within. Unfortunately, there is a lot of mumbo jumbo out there, in much New Age activity. It serves to confirm prejudices and undermine the legitimacy of these ancestral systems, exposing them to incredulity and even ridicule by their modern scientific and biomedical judges. I have written about this specific danger elsewhere [14].

Different times and different metaphysics produce very different interpretations of the same dynamics. In Catholic Europe of the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries, such practices were uniformly interpreted (and condemned) as heretical recourse to idolatry and sorcery. The many trial records of religious specialists in the Andes in the early post Spanish conquest Colonial period, especially in the 17^th century, demonstrate starkly how the due-processes of evangelical law were brought against the many Indigenous plaintiffs attempting to practice their ancestral craft. The very name of this campaign initiated by the Jesuits in their efforts to enforce orthodoxy demonstrates this: ‘Extirpación de las Idolatrías’—the uprooting of idolatries. In a way, modern biomedicine, as firmly situated in the materialist understanding of ‘reality’ as it still is, does something similar, in pathologizing the experiences and practices of modern shamans, or indeed people who have mystical experiences more generally.

The shamanic universe, the way shamans see/understand it and interact with it, offers an important portal, an alternative lens, into what our mental reality really is. It may even offer clues to how and why the placebo affect works as well as it does.

On a wider note, I feel that a better knowledge of pre-European Indigenous Amerindian metaphysics would in fact be very illuminating to those interested in exploring non-materialist conceptions of ‘reality.’ Remember that the so called ‘New World’—the entire western hemisphere—was itself pristine and ‘uncontaminated’ by ‘Old World’ beliefs about the cosmos, until Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1492. As we understand, the Americas were originally populated by different groups of hunter-gatherers back in the late glacial period, when ice sheets still joined the body of Asia with what is now America. The last contact between these populations is therefore ancient, millennia before classical philosophers in the Old World began to speculate upon the nature of ‘reality.’ The shock of contact with, and dominion by, Old World ontologies and epistemologies and their associated theologies was profound and, in many ways, reverberates still. But that is another story [15].

 

References

1. “Is Reality a Dream? Consciousness, Intuition and Life After Death.” Bernardo Kastrup interviewed by Dr Mayim Bialik 30^th September, 2025. https://youtu.be/RB0PtR0wMow?si=5jTLESfnJrm0g-xV at: 1.33.10: The Placebo Effect Built a Case for the Shaman.
2. The project “Indigenous Concepts of Health and Healing in Andean Populations: Understanding the Relevance of Traditional MEDICINE in a Changing World” (abbreviated to MEDICINE), was funded by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, as an Individual Fellowship in the Call: H2020-MSCA-IF-2015 (Project ID: 705225). The project took place between 1 November 2016 and 31 October 2019. and was a partnership between the University of York and the Universidad San Francisco Quito (USFQ, Ecuador). Professor John Schofield was the project PI and Elizabeth Currie named post doctoral researcher in the Archaeology Department, and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Department for Health Sciences at the University of York, United Kingdom.
3. Elizabeth Currie and John Schofield 2025. “Indigenous Concepts of Health and Healing in Andean Populations: Understanding the Relevance of Traditional MEDICINE in a Changing World”. London and New York, Routledge.
4. Currie and Schofield, 2025: Chapter 4. “Survey Results”. Sections 6,7 and 8 Traditional Healers: 108. There are several authoritative works on shamanism, including Mircea Eliade, 1992. Shamanism. Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press and Michael Ripinsky-Naxon, 1993. The Nature of Shamanism: Substance and Function of a Religious Metaphor. Albany: State University of New York Press.
5. Sax, M.  2019. Southern Sacrifice and Northern Sorcery. Mountain Spirits and Encantos in the Peruvian Andes. In Rivera Andia, J. J. (ed.), Non-humans in Amerindian South America. Ethnographies of indigenous cosmologies, rituals and songs, 97-125. Oxford, New York: Berghahn. Rachel Corr (2010) who carried out a study of the mythology and rituals of the Salasaka people also reports that induction of trance is not part of Salasaka shamanism, but it is clear that, at least in the particular case reported here, it is. It was during my visit to the workshop of this shaman that he described his ‘soul journeying’ and the experiences he had on them. Rachel Corr, 2010. Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
6. He fills his mouth with the strong cane spirit (aguardiente/puntas) and ‘blows’ it through the candle flame held in front of the patient, causing the patient to be briefly engulfed in the flame caused by the alcohol. In this way he ‘sees’ the cause of the illness.
7. Excerpted from the full interview with the Salasaka yachak. See: Currie and Schofield 2025, Chapter 3. “Healing Cosmology and Traditions in the Northern Andes”. Cosmological and Ritual Framework for Healing: a shaman from Salasaka, 42. The original interview was carried out in Kichwa, the Indigenous language of the region, and has been translated into English.
8. The subject of placebo has attracted a very large literature. I have myself explored the subject out of interest, but any further discussion of it is beyond the scope of this present essay.
9. Currie and Schofield 2025. Chapter 8. “Modelling Health Beliefs in Traditional Populations. Culturally Integrative Models of Care Provision: The Study Region” discusses culturally constructed approaches to illness, and the problem of the modern mind-body divide in some detail. Figures 8.1 – 8.6 present schematic approaches to understanding Andean categories of illness within their metaphysical context and how these might relate to modern biomedical categories.
10. Christine Greenway,1998. Objectified Selves: An Analysis of Medicines in Andean Sacrificial Healing. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12, 147-167.
11. Greenway ibid: 147-148.
12. The Indigenous terms used differ between the Ecuadorian Kichwa and the Peruvian dialect Quechua.
13. American Psychiatric Association 2018. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm
14. https://elizabethcurrie.info/use-and-abuse-of-psychoactive-substances/; and Currie and Schofield 2025, Chapter 9. “The Tale of Juana Icha. A Trial by Three Models. The psychological impact of evangelisation.” Comments, Discussion and Cautionary Tales, 183-184.
15. Currie and Schofield 2025, Chapter 9. “The Tale of Juana Icha. A Trial by Three Models. The psychological impact of evangelisation.” 173.  Also Nicholas Griffiths, 1996. The Cross and the Serpent. Religious Repression and Resurgence in Colonial Peru. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.