shaman
Pluralshamans
- 1In certain traditional societies, a person believed to have access to and influence over the spirit world, who typically enters a trance during rituals and acts as a healer and diviner.
The shaman entered a trance to carry the villagers' questions to the spirits.
Anthropologists recorded the songs the shamans sang during each ceremony.
Note
English applies the word well beyond the Evenki, to comparable figures in many tribal societies, and science fiction borrows it too: BioWare's Mass Effect 2 has a chief shaman who speaks of rites that scar the soul. Medicine man, medicine woman, priest-doctor and witch doctor overlap with it, but shaman puts mediation with the spirits first and healing second.
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Origin
English took the word from German Schamane, which came from Russian šamán. The Russian word comes from Evenki şamān or samān, which in turn goes back to Proto-Tungusic *samān. The Evenki word possibly comes from the root şa- (“to know”). Another possibility is borrowing from ṣamāne (“monk”) in Tocharian B or from Chinese shāmén (“Buddhist monk”), traced through Pali samaṇa to Sanskrit śramaṇa (“ascetic, monk, devotee”), itself derived from śrama (“weariness, exhaustion, labor, toil”). Under this explanation, shaman would be a doublet of sramana.