Shamanism
Shamanism is pre-eminently a religious phenomenon of Siberia and Central Asia, and throughout this vast area the religious life of society centres on the figure of the shaman, at once magician and medicine man, healer and miracle-worker, priest, mystic and poet.

The same phenomena and techniques occur elsewhere in Asia, in the Pacific Islands, in the Americas and among the ancient Indo-European peoples. Mircea Eliade, writing as a historian of religion, synthesizes the approaches of psychology, sociology and ethnology. He analyses the ideology of shamanism and discusses its techniques, its symbolisms and its mythologies. For Eliade shamanism is, precisely, a technique of ecstasy.

‘This has become the standard work on the subject and justifies its claim to be the first book to study the phenomenon over a wide field and in a properly religious context’ - The Times Literary Supplement