Shamanism (Tradition)

Shamanism, as a religious tradition rather than an academic discipline, is the general practice in which a shaman interacts with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness such as trance, typically to direct spirits or spiritual energy for healing, divination, or otherwise aiding the community. It is practiced in many culturally distinct forms across Siberia, East and Southeast Asia, the Americas and elsewhere, each with its own named tradition, such as Siberian Shamanism, Manchu Shamanism and Hmong Shamanism, all separately live in this atlas. In this atlas, this entity is used for a member entity recorded generically as belonging to shamanism as a class of religious practice rather than to one specific named shamanic tradition; it is deliberately distinct from the separately live Shamanism discipline entity, which represents the scholarly study of shamanic practice rather than the devotional practice itself, so a person revered within shamanism as a tradition is correctly linked here rather than to the discipline entity.