The Way of the Shaman

The Way of the Shaman distills Michael Harner's anthropological fieldwork into a practical manual of what he termed core shamanism. Its central claim is that beneath the diverse cosmologies of the world's shamanic cultures lies a common, teachable method for entering altered states and traveling to "non-ordinary reality" to seek guidance and healing.

The book's method is deliberate state induction. Harner strips shamanic technique of any single culture's mythology and presents the shamanic journey—steady, monotonous drumming used to induce a "shamanic state of consciousness" in which the practitioner meets helping spirits and power animals. Trance is reframed not as pathology or indigenous preserve but as a learnable skill of directed attention.

Through this distillation and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, Harner made deliberate altered-state work a widespread practice in the modern West. The book became the foundational text of Western neo-shamanism and embedded drum-induced journeying in contemporary healing culture.