SHAMANISM & THE DRUM · LESSON 3 OF 12 · 13 MIN
Harner and Core Shamanism
How an anthropologist's workshops turned the shaman's journey into a method anyone can learn — the drum, the three worlds and the helpers — and what the critics say.
Almost everyone in the West who "journeys" today learned it, directly or not, from one man. Michael Harner (1929–2018) was an American anthropologist who did fieldwork among the Shuar (Jívaro) of Ecuador and the Conibo of Peru, took part in their ayahuasca ceremonies, and came home convinced he had met something real. From the early 1970s he began teaching small workshops in which people reached a similar state with no plant at all: only a steady drumbeat.