Michael Harner and the Birth of Core Shamanism: Bringing Ancient Practice to the Modern World

The Anthropologist Who Became a Shaman

Michael James Harner (1929-2018) occupies a singular position in the history of Western engagement with shamanism. He was not a New Age guru who stumbled upon indigenous practices and repackaged them for profit. He was a rigorously trained anthropologist — PhD from UC Berkeley, professor at Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, and the New School for Social Research in New York — who, through decades of fieldwork and personal experience, came to the conclusion that shamanism was not merely a cultural artifact to be studied but a living technology of consciousness that could transform lives.

Harner’s journey from academic observer to shamanic practitioner and teacher is one of the most consequential crossings between indigenous wisdom and Western understanding in the twentieth century. What he created — Core Shamanism — has become the most widely practiced form of shamanism in the Western world, and it remains both deeply influential and intensely debated.

From the Academy to the Amazon

Harner’s path into shamanism began in 1956-57, when as a graduate student he undertook field research on the culture of the Jivaro (Shuar) people of the Ecuadorian Amazon. His doctoral dissertation at Berkeley, completed in 1963, was titled “Machetes, Shotguns, and Society: An Inquiry into the Social Impact of Technological Change among the Jivaro Indians,” and it became the basis for his ethnographic book “The Jivaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls” (1972).

It was during this fieldwork that Harner first encountered shamanic practices, but it was his later experiences that truly cracked open his understanding. In 1960-61, working with the Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon, Harner participated in ayahuasca ceremonies. The visions he experienced under the influence of this powerful plant medicine were so vivid, so internally consistent, and so aligned with what indigenous practitioners had described for millennia that Harner found his materialist worldview fundamentally shaken.

He wrote about these experiences in his seminal article “The Sound of Rushing Water” (1968), one of the first serious academic accounts of the experiential dimension of shamanic practice. He returned to the Jivaro in 1964, 1969, and 1973, where he also learned the use of maikua (Datura brugmansia), another powerful entheogen used in the Shuar tradition.

What distinguished Harner from other anthropologists was that he did not merely observe and record. He participated. He allowed the experiences to transform his understanding. And he began to notice something remarkable: beneath the surface differences of culture, costume, and cosmology, shamanic practitioners around the world were doing essentially the same things. They were entering altered states of consciousness, journeying to other realms, encountering spirit beings, and returning with healing power and knowledge.

The Insight That Changed Everything

Harner’s key insight was both simple and revolutionary: if shamanic practices worked across so many different cultures, there must be a universal core to shamanism that transcended any particular tradition. He began to wonder whether this core could be extracted, studied, and made accessible to people who did not belong to any indigenous tradition.

This was the seed of Core Shamanism.

In the early 1970s, Harner began giving small training workshops in Connecticut, teaching people the basic techniques of shamanic journeying using monotonous drumming rather than psychoactive substances. He discovered that ordinary Westerners — teachers, therapists, business people, artists — could learn to enter the shamanic state of consciousness and have meaningful experiences with spirits, power animals, and non-ordinary reality.

The results were startling in their consistency. People with no background in shamanism, no exposure to indigenous cultures, were reporting experiences that closely paralleled what indigenous shamans had described for thousands of years. The three-world cosmology, the encounter with animal spirits, the sense of entering a reality that felt more real than ordinary waking life — all of this emerged spontaneously from the experiences of Western practitioners.

”The Way of the Shaman” (1980)

In 1980, Harner published “The Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Healing” through HarperCollins. The book was groundbreaking for several reasons. First, it was written by a credentialed academic with decades of field experience, lending it a legitimacy that previous popular accounts of shamanism lacked. Second, it was practical — it did not merely describe shamanic practices but taught readers how to do them. Third, it presented shamanism not as a primitive superstition but as a sophisticated technology of consciousness with demonstrable results.

The book became an international bestseller and has remained continuously in print for over four decades, translated into more than twenty languages. It introduced millions of readers to concepts like the shamanic journey, power animals, non-ordinary reality, and the shamanic state of consciousness. More than any other single work, it brought shamanism from the pages of academic journals into the living practice of Western seekers.

What Is Core Shamanism?

Core Shamanism, as developed by Harner, is a system of shamanic practice based on what he identified as the universal or near-universal elements found in shamanic traditions worldwide. It is deliberately stripped of culture-specific elements — no particular mythology, no specific deities, no traditional costumes or rituals from any one tradition. Instead, it focuses on the fundamental techniques that appear again and again across cultures:

The Shamanic Journey: Using rhythmic percussion (typically drumming at approximately four beats per second) to enter an altered state of consciousness and travel to non-ordinary reality for the purpose of healing, guidance, and knowledge.

The Three Worlds: The cosmological framework of Lower World (accessed by journeying downward through a tunnel or passage, home of power animals and nature spirits), Upper World (accessed by ascending, home of spirit teachers and celestial guides), and Middle World (the spiritual dimension of ordinary reality).

Working with Helping Spirits: Establishing relationships with compassionate spirits — power animals, spirit teachers, ancestors — who provide guidance, protection, healing power, and knowledge.

Non-Drug Techniques: Core Shamanism deliberately uses sonic driving (drumming, rattling) rather than psychoactive substances to achieve the shamanic state of consciousness, making the practice accessible and safe for Western practitioners.

Healing Practices: Including power animal retrieval, extraction of spiritual intrusions, soul retrieval, and divination techniques drawn from cross-cultural shamanic traditions.

Harner emphasized that Core Shamanism was not a religion. It had no dogma, no required beliefs, no clergy. It was a practice — a method for accessing non-ordinary reality and working with spirits for healing and knowledge. Practitioners were encouraged to have their own direct experiences rather than accepting anyone else’s theology.

The Foundation for Shamanic Studies

In 1979, together with his wife, clinical psychologist Sandra Harner, Michael Harner founded the Center for Shamanic Studies, which in 1985 became the Foundation for Shamanic Studies (FSS). The Foundation became the organizational vehicle for teaching, research, and preservation of shamanic knowledge.

In 1987, Harner made the pivotal decision to resign his academic professorship and devote himself full-time to the Foundation’s work. This was not an easy choice for a man who had spent decades building an academic career, but it reflected his conviction that shamanism was not just a subject for study but a living practice that the modern world desperately needed.

The Foundation developed a comprehensive curriculum that includes:

• The Way of the Shaman Basic Workshop: The foundational training in shamanic journeying and core practices, serving as the prerequisite for all advanced training.
• The Healing Series: Advanced training in shamanic healing methods including extraction, soul retrieval, depossession, and psychopomp work.
• The Knowledge and Power Series: Advanced work in divination, working with spirits of nature, and deepening shamanic relationships.
• The Two-Week Shamanic Healing Intensive: An immersive advanced program covering the full range of shamanic healing methods.
• The Three-Year Program of Advanced Initiations in Shamanism and Shamanic Healing: The Foundation’s most advanced training, originated by Harner himself, involving residential sessions twice yearly for three years with practical assignments between meetings.

The Foundation also conducts the Shamanism and Health Program, which has engaged in scientific research to communicate the value of shamanic methods to the mainstream medical community. Research by Dr. Sandra Harner and others has examined the immunological and psychological effects of shamanic journeying, with results published in various scientific journals.

Legacy and Passing

Michael Harner passed away peacefully on February 3, 2018, surrounded by family and friends near his home in Mill Valley, California. He was 88 years old.

His legacy is immense. He is widely recognized as the person most responsible for bringing shamanism to the contemporary Western world. The Society for Shamanic Practice described him as “one of the most influential spiritual entrepreneurs of the past 100 years,” comparing his practical impact to the intellectual legacy of the great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade.

His final book, “Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality” (2013), drew on more than 2,500 reports of Westerners’ experiences during shamanic ascension, highlighting the striking similarities between their discoveries and providing evidence for the reality of the spirit worlds that shamans have visited for millennia.

Through the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, which continues to operate and teach worldwide, Harner’s work ensures that the ancient practice of shamanism remains alive and accessible. Thousands of FSS-trained practitioners around the world continue to practice shamanic healing, carry forward the tradition, and introduce new generations to the shamanic path.

The Ongoing Debate

Harner’s work has never been without controversy. Indigenous scholars and practitioners have raised legitimate concerns about cultural appropriation — the extraction of sacred practices from their cultural contexts and their commodification for Western consumption. Critics like Daniel C. Noel have argued that Core Shamanism, by stripping away cultural specificity, actually misrepresents the very traditions it claims to honor and opens the door for “plastic shamans” who commercialize sacred practices.

From indigenous perspectives, the concern is that non-native practitioners spend a short time in workshops and then call themselves “shamans,” when traditional practitioners are required to spend years or decades in apprenticeship. The commercialization of practices regarded as sacred, without appropriate cultural permission, raises deep ethical questions.

Harner and the Foundation have maintained that Core Shamanism does not borrow specific practices and ceremonies from indigenous peoples but instead identifies and teaches universal human capacities for engaging with the spirit world. They argue that shamanism is the birthright of all humanity, not the property of any single culture, and that every ancestor of every human being practiced some form of shamanism.

This debate is ongoing and important. It reflects real tensions between the universal human capacity for spiritual experience and the particular cultural contexts in which that capacity has been developed and transmitted. Neither side has a monopoly on truth, and the conversation itself is part of the larger process of humanity’s coming to terms with its spiritual heritage.

What remains undeniable is that Harner opened a door. Through that door, millions of people have walked into a direct, personal experience of non-ordinary reality, of communion with spirits, of healing power that transcends the purely material. Whatever one thinks of the politics or the packaging, the experiences themselves — the journeys, the healings, the encounters with the sacred — are real to those who have them, and they change lives.

That is Harner’s legacy: not a doctrine, but a doorway.

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Sources: Foundation for Shamanic Studies (shamanism.org), Wikipedia entry on Michael Harner, Counterpoint Knowledge obituary, Society for Shamanic Practice tribute, shamanism-asia.com on Core Shamanism principles.