Spirits & Spookiness: Etymologies & Definitions of "Shaman"

The first challenge I experienced in writing this history was defining what I’m actually talking about. 

In fantasy, “shaman” is a vague and often generic term that may be used to describe a wide range of characters. They might be a traditional healer, an old wise person, a spooky skull-wearing witch, a wielder of elemental magic clad in furs and summoning wolf spirits, or any number of other things. As a child I uncritically ate every single one of these aesthetic stereotypes up, and even today I struggle to completely disentangle my own writing from automatic and unthinking recycling of those tropes.

By my reckoning, the only thing fictional shamans have in common is that they are often coded as foreign or exotic to whatever the “normal” of their fantasy world is. Compare it with how terms like “witch doctor” and “medicine man” are thrown around in other media.

So if the fiction is so garbled, what can real life history tell us about the meaning of the word “shaman”?

Well, it turns out it’s not quite as concrete an answer as we might hope for.

Much like in pop-culture, there are many overlapping or contradictory definitions of shaman and shamanism in academia, developed over centuries of study. I think this is due in part to the fact that a lot of what we believe we know about shamanism(s) stems from a European, sometimes colonialist understanding of the indigenous cultures of the world, particularly Siberia where many of the traditions we associate with shamanism and even the word shaman itself originate.

Buryat böö offering a libation of milk.
Wikimedia Commons

Etymology

As far as we know, shaman is a word of Tungusic origin that reached Europe by way of becoming a Russian loanword in the Early Modern Period. The Russian Empire encountered the Tungusic peoples while they were conquering and colonizing large sections of North Asia, much the same way Western Europeans were colonizing the Americas at the time.

The Tungusic language family includes Manchu, Evenki, Jurchen, and other related languages found in Siberia and Manchuria.¹

Shaman derives from the Evenki word şamān (or samān or hamān, depending on the dialect in question) which itself might come from the root word şa- which means "to know". There are some linguistic irregularities in this theory that make it only plausible rather than concrete fact, and other proposed roots include sebe- ("spirit/idol"), nïmƞa- ("to tell tales"), and yaya- ("to sing shamanic songs"). All of them are words of indigenous Evenki origin, however.²

There are other theories that shaman derives from outside sources, like the Sanskrit word śramaṇa (an ascetic Buddhist monk) or even Arabic shaiṭān (a demon or devil). I find these theories doubtful, partly because of the huge area of land and the number of different peoples living within it that employ different cognates of the word shaman, many of whom didn't have extensive exposure to Buddhism or Abrahamic religions up until after they entered the written historical record, at which point shamans were already an established group. We have archaeological evidence of shamanic practices going back millennia, and the idea that all their descendants suddenly came to be uniformly referred to by a term that was imported from another religion feels far-fetched to me.³

You may have noticed by now that I use the plural “shamans”. You might be used to the singular and plural forms both being just “shaman”, and that’s fine. Both are acceptable in English. If you wanted to be a stickler about it, the etymologically-consistent plural for shaman uses the uncommon marker -sal to make shamasal.⁴ I was tempted to use that form, but I’m not that pretentious, so I will continue to use "shamans" in this series for the sake of familiarity. Terms like shamen are hyper-corrections caused by the visual similarity between shaman and English words like fireman. We will see it pop up occasionally in D&D, and I will try not to grind my teeth at it- my dentist already yelled at me once.

I would have been equally disparaging of terms like shawoman, shamanka (-ka being a feminine Russian suffix), and shamaness had I written this history a few years ago. But I’ve learned things recently that helped me re-contextualize those terms and stop thinking of them as entirely without merit.

Consider how most Siberian cultures with a masculine shamanist tradition also seem to have a parallel but distinct feminine tradition with a separate set of roles and a separate name. Note also that most feminine Siberian shamanic titles derive from the name of the old Turkic and Mongolic mother goddess Etügen, whose name also has connotations to the earth or womb depending on language and context. Examples of the gendered shamanism divide include Evenk; šaman (masculine) vs udugan (feminine), Mongol/Buryat; böö (masculine) vs idugan/udagan (feminine), Tatar; qam/kham (masculine) vs üdege (feminine), etc.

Several anthropologists over the centuries have argued that this implies a widely shared origin of feminine Siberian shamanism unlike their disparate and more local masculine counterparts, although that is beyond the scope of my work here.⁵

All of this is to say that I prefer gender-neutral terminology wherever and whenever possible, but there’s certainly a case in my mind for the phenomenon of female shamans to have their own discrete word, as it were.

Definitions

Now that we have established where the word shaman probably comes from, we have to address how it’s actually used.

As I alluded to before, there is no single definition for “shaman” in 21st century academia. Scholars do at least seem to acknowledge that English use of the term is a construct meant to group together what people see as similar practices and belief systems; but what those similarities are is up for debate. There are at least three or four conceptions of shaman, depending on how nuanced you want to get.⁶ They vary in scope, each with broad overlap as well as specific differences. The pre-Christian religion and modern paganism historian Ronald Hutton divided them this way in his 2001 book Shamans, and I will be following his lead here because I think it's a useful starting point:

• At its most narrow, shaman refers to no one except the traditional practitioners of the indigenous Siberian religions that the word shaman comes from. These practitioners interact with the spirits and other supernatural beings in order to effect worldly change on behalf of their communities, often by way of altered states of consciousness.
• More broadly, shaman can be inclusive of any sort of priest or other magico-religious specialist who is believed to contact the spirit world, usually at the behest of others such as their tribe or community, regardless of geographical origin in the world.
• Some scholars who use the above definition try to find a particular mechanism or technique that sets shamans apart from similar specialists like mediums and aforementioned witch doctors, but nobody can agree on what that defining feature is. Even the ecstatic trance and drumming that are commonly seen as central to shamanic practice are not so ubiquitous.
• The widest definition of shaman includes anyone who is believed to contact the spirit world in an altered state of consciousness for any reason. This definition encompasses aspects of other world religions such as Shintoism and several Native American or Sub-Saharan African faiths, as well as all manner of modern syncretic neopagan movements.⁷

That last one is the definition of shaman that attracts the most criticism. Rolled up in its usage are accusations of cultural appropriation, gross oversimplification, and misuse, and I tend to agree with that criticism- it’s extremely broad. Hutton himself ran afoul of that in his own presentation of medieval Scandinavian Seiðr and Sámi traditional religious practices. Full disclosure, I've used this kind of cultural equation gloss many times in my own writing for the sake of convenience, and it's a tricky habit to kick.

Whether or not something pings as shamanic also affects the rest of a religion or tradition surrounding it. Shamanic practitioners are often the most "visible" facets of a belief system to outsiders, and that can sometimes lead to the assumption that they are also the most important aspect of it. In the process, complex and diverse religious traditions that include at least one arguably shamanic practice or substrate sometimes get glossed as "shamanism" in their entirety.⁸

Of course you don’t have to listen to anything I say here as if it's gospel; I’m not your auntie, and I'm not trying to make you shift your terminology; although it's always good to be mindful. Outside of certain avenues of discourse where definitions are extremely important, I lean toward a descriptive as opposed to prescriptive approach to everyday language; we use words how we use them, and make new ones when we feel the need. Heck, I’m the guy who says “remound” instead of “reminded” all the time.

I lay these definitions out not to pick which one is “correct” (my stated opinions aside), but to give you an idea of the range of shamans that we’ll come across in our survey. This list is by no means exhaustive- it doesn't even scratch the surface of the even more weird and/or wonderful interpretations of shamanism that exist only within D&D, let alone the full breadth of genre fiction.

Speaking of which, I should probably get on to the actual D&D already. 

Onward to the 1970s!

Or click here to return to the Shamans in D&D archive.

¹ Please note that "Tungus" originated as a pejorative exonym used by the Evenks’ neighbors, who were mostly Turkic-speaking peoples. Tungus most likely derives from the Old Turkic word tongaz which means “pig” or “wild boar”. A competing etymological theory posits that Tungus actually derives from the Donghu people or “Eastern Barbarians” referenced in Han Chinese histories, but that isn’t very flattering either. Hence I only use the term Tungusic languages here for lack of a more neutral equivalent. Get on it, linguists!

² Janhunen, Juha. “Siberian Shamanistic Terminology.” Mémoires De La Société Finno-Ougrienne 194, 1986. P. 98-99.

³ Personal bias time, it also just feels weird to try and attribute such an important element of several indigenous cultures to the actions of their more urbanized and politically dominant neighbors at the time. In the absence of hard supporting evidence, it just feels like kind of an unfair claim to make.

⁴ Howard Isaac Aronson, Dee Ann Holisky, and Kevin Tuite. “Dialect Continua in Tungusic: Plural Morphology”. Current Trends in Caucasian, East European, and Inner Asian Linguistics. 2003. P. 103

⁵ If those topics interest you, I recommend you check out the body of research that began with the Polish anthropologist Maria Czaplicka way back in the day. Her original theory was that feminine shamanism actually predates masculine traditions, though I don't know if that idea has proven to have merit or if it has gone the way of the Great Goddess hypothesis and other ideas of uniform prehistoric matriarchy. You can find some of her stuff over on the ISTA. Please note that being over a century old, the academic language used by Czaplicka and the sources she cites is sometimes racist, sexist, homophobic, and/or transphobic. "Berdache" and all that sort of stuff.

⁶ Hutton, Donald. Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination. 2001. P. VII-VIII.

⁷ Arguably, it even includes that uncle of yours who used to go to Woodstock and keeps trying to loan you his collection of Alan Watts CDs because they really “opened him up”.

⁸ This is why you might see traditional Turkic and Mongolian religions referred to as shamanism, despite the fact that most people interact with shamans rarely and only for specific reasons, and more often seek community leaders or other specialists for daily practices. Heck, at various points throughout history such as the height of the Mongol Empire or the 20th century Burkhanism movement among the Altai, there was even strident anti-shamanist sentiment among political elites and common people that drastically reshaped religious practice.