Shamans Versus Priests

While con­duct­ing research for my doc­u­men­tary, I’ve fre­quent­ly been asked about the dif­fer­ence between priests and shamans.

Many schol­ars have the­o­rized that all of the major world reli­gions have shaman­ism at their very foun­da­tion.  So, whether the founder was Abra­ham, Moses, Jesus, Muham­mad, the Bud­dha, et al.…

these reli­gions grew out of attempts to describe, depict, and explain the super­nat­ur­al expe­ri­ences of their founders – who were, by any stan­dard, shamans of the high­est order. ¹

Shaman’s Mask

And, as the anthro­pol­o­gist West­on La Barre assert­ed: 

all our knowl­edge of the super­nat­ur­al derives de fac­to from the state­ments made by reli­gious vision­ar­ies and ecsta­t­ics (i.e. prophets and shamans) – the Priests only admin­is­trate the eccle­sia estab­lished on this super­nat­ur­al basis. ²

A fur­ther review of the anthro­po­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture indi­cates that while some over­lap may occur as to what con­sti­tutes a shaman ver­sus a priest — shamans pri­mar­i­ly obtain their pow­ers from direct con­tact with spir­its — and priests earn their cre­den­tials through spe­cial train­ing asso­ci­at­ed with their par­tic­u­lar reli­gion. ³

Bot­tom line, shamans have the direct expe­ri­ence and priests are part of the reli­gious bureau­cra­cy that begins to build over time…although there are always exceptions.