Michael Harner

Michael Harner (1929–2018) was an American anthropologist who, after fieldwork with the Conibo of the Peruvian Amazon and the Jívaro (Shuar) of Ecuador, left conventional academia to become the leading architect of Western neo-shamanism.

In The Way of the Shaman (1980) and through his Foundation for Shamanic Studies, he distilled what he argued were the common, cross-culturally recurring elements of shamanic practice into a stripped-down, teachable method he called core shamanism — deliberately decoupled from any single culture’s cosmology so that contemporary Westerners could practice it.

His signature technique was the shamanic journey: using monotonous drumming (around 4–7 beats per second) to induce a “shamanic state of consciousness” and travel, in imagination/perception, to “non-ordinary reality” to meet helping spirits and retrieve guidance or healing.

For the mind-power lineage, Harner matters as the figure who made deliberate altered-state induction a household practice in the modern West. He reframed trance not as pathology or as the preserve of indigenous specialists but as a learnable skill of directed attention — a portable technology for accessing inner imagery, “power animals,” and healing.

This consciousness-shifting-on-demand model dovetails with the broader mind-power thesis that states of awareness are tools one can intentionally select and steer, and it seeded much of the journeying, visualization, and “inner guidance” practice that flows through transpersonal psychology, energy healing, and New Age manifestation circles.

His method has been critiqued as decontextualized “plastic shamanism,” but its influence on popular consciousness practice is substantial.