Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

In 2025 Everyone Is a Shaman

2 November 2025 · 2 min read

One of the most interesting things about 'Shamanism'1 and all religious traditions that practice it, is that when Shamanism first appeared, some 24k years ago near Lake Baikal2, only a very very small minority of people had the Shaman's Gift, but in 2025 ~90% of people seemingly do. This forces you to recontextualize how the ancients speak about those with the 'Gift' of sooth3, it was spoken about as rare, needing lengths of validation, yet when you look at many of the barriers to entry, take for instance the Sanskrit Tantric tradition4, many of them are just the basic capacity for visualization, basically "Don't have aphantasia5".

Another barrier to entry is the subjects ability to be aware of duality6. It may seem strange to Modern and even many Medieval or Late Classical People, but the further you go back in time, the less people have a full grasp of dualism in their lived lives, this was the common and natural state of man, before duality as a cognitive tool was discovered. This allowed the ego to develop, and with it kingdoms and empires, and essentially the start of history7.

Nowadays we seem to have the opposite problem, people are so stuck in duality they completely forget about non-duality, our primordial state, and this causes extreme psychosis and neurosis in people, as such; spiritual traditions in modernity focus not on bringing people into the material world of matter and energy, but directing them backwards into the womb of non-duality, reconnecting their umbilical cord with Mimir's Well8.

These days you are hard pressed to find someone without the ability to visualize and who is able to exist in a non-dual state. In the Ancient world, people spend their entire lives trying to visualize things in their mind's eye and to develop an understanding of matter & energy well enough to dig inspiration from the Heavens and take chisel to it upon the Earth.

Therefore, I think it is very important to reconsider how we approach Shamanry in the world we now exist within, the Ancients had a completely different context, but now most people have powerful & latent shamanic abilities if they try at all, the objective of our ancestors to make everyone into a shaman basically was successful, but 24k years is a long time, and most of that was spent sleepwalking with our newfound ability to do things, and so we stand here eyes open in a bustling empire with cars & electricity, and the last thing we remember is the dark icy cold winters of Siberia9.

Notes

By the editor.

  1. The word shaman reached English through Russian from a Tungusic word, probably Evenki. Mircea Eliade defined shamanism as a 'technique of religious ecstasy' in which the shaman mediates between the human and spirit worlds. Shamans often describe being called by dreams, signs or an initiatory illness, and training takes years, which is the background to her point about rarity. source ↩
  2. The Mal'ta–Buret' culture, about 24,000–23,000 years ago, lay northwest of Lake Baikal on the Angara. Its ivory birds (swans, geese, ducks) and about thirty female figurines have led researchers who compare them with Siberian shamans' objects to suggest a 'fully developed shamanism'. A boy buried there was also the source of the genome in New York City Ethnography. source ↩
  3. Sooth is the old English word for truth, from Old English sōþ, cognate with the Sanskrit satya and sat, 'true' and 'being'. It survives in soothsayer. For her reading of the root and what lies under all ancient magic, see Jhana Is Possession by Kami, or Ur-Sooth. source ↩
  4. Visualisation sits at the centre of tantra. In Tibetan Buddhism the practice is deity yoga, devatāyoga, imagining oneself as the deity in body, speech and mind. In What the Ghosts Actually Are she calls ghostsooth the practice she teaches most and says it is the Sanskrit deity yoga, so the barrier she names is the first door. ↩
  5. The numbers support her. Zeman's 2015 study put complete aphantasia at about 0.7 percent. A 2022 study found 0.8 percent complete and 3.9 percent with dim imagery, and a 2024 pooled sample of 9,063 people found 0.9 percent aphantasia and 6.1 percent hyperphantasia. Galton's 1880 'Breakfast Table' study is the earliest evidence of differences in imagery. See You Do Not Have Aphantasia (Probably). source ↩
  6. Julian Jaynes made a related claim in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976): early humans experienced their thoughts as commands from external gods, and bicameral mentality was the normal state as recently as about 3,000 years ago. He dated its breakdown to the second millennium BCE and the Late Bronze Age collapse. source ↩
  7. History in the strict sense begins with writing, and the first writing, the Uruk tablets of about 3400–3000 BC, was bookkeeping. She traces the same rise of kingdoms and abstractions in True Polytheism Has Never Been Tried, where the shift from many spirits to one principle follows the birth of record keeping. source ↩
  8. In the Völuspá, Odin's eye lies hidden in Mímir's well (stanza 28, though that line is a conjectural emendation from Snorri's paraphrase). The eye is a pledge for wisdom. I Don't Know is her poem of Odin hanging from the tree for lack of it, and in What the Ghosts Actually Are she quotes the Völuspá's ash Yggdrasil wet with white water. source ↩
  9. This matches the climate. The Last Glacial Maximum ran from about 26,500 to 20,000 years ago, with ice at its greatest extent. Southern Siberia was mammoth steppe, the air very dry, and permafrost reached as far south as Beijing. The Mal'ta boy lived inside that cold. Medusa mourns the same ice and hunger as the hard old days of freedom. source ↩