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The type of religion which once prevalied among all the Ural-Altaic peoples (Tungusic, Mongol, and Turkish), and which still survives in various parts of Northern Asia. The Shaman, or wizard priest, deals with good as well as with evil spirits, especially the good spirits of ancestors.

The type of religion which once prevalied among all the Ural-Altaic peoples (Tungusic, Mongol, and Turkish), and which still survives in various parts of Northern Asia. The Shaman, or wizard priest, deals with good as well as with evil spirits, especially the good spirits of ancestors.

An intermediate stage between polytheism and monotheism, which assumes a "Great Spirit", with lesser deities subordinated. With the beginnings of shamanism there was the advent of the medicine man or witch doctor, who assumed a supervisory relation to disease and its cure. Formally, shamanism is a religion of Ural-Altaic peoples of Northern Asia and Europe, characterized by the belief that the unseen world of gods, demons, ancestral spirits is responsive only to shamans. The Indians of North and South America entertain religious practices similar to the Ural-Altaic shamanism. The word shaman comes from the Tungusic (Manchuria and Siberia) saman, meaning Buddhist monk. The shaman handles disease almost entirely by psychotherapeutic means; he frightens away the demons of disease by assuming a terrifying mien. (From Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine, 4th ed, p22; from Webster, 3d ed)

A general name applied to the idolatrous religions of a number of barbarous nations, comprehending those of the Finnish race, as the Ostiaks, Samoyedes, and other inhabitants of Siberia, as far as the Pacific Ocean. These nations generally believe in a Supreme Being, but to this they add the belief that the government of the world is in the hands of a number of secondary gods both benevolent and malevolent towards man, and that it is absolutely necessary to avert their malign influence by magic rites and spells. The general belief respecting another life appears to be that the condition of man will be poorer and more wretched than the present; hence death is an object of great dread.