Decoding The Gurus
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Shamanism and the Art of Charismatic Otherness with Manvir Singh
🕑 Added 2025-06-07 05:42:33 +0000 UTCThe Decoders welcome back cognitive anthropologist Manvir Singh for a continued exploration into the social and cognitive dimensions of shamanism. Building upon their earlier conversation, this episode involves further discussion of the psychological mechanisms and cultural patterns that make shamanic practices a recurring feature across human societies. Drawing from Singh's latest book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion (2025), the discussion addresses how these ancient practices persist and adapt in modern contexts.
Taking our standard meandering conversational journey with Manvir, we traverse topics such as whether Jesus and the Buddha were shamans, the parallels between the Siberian tundra and Silicon Valley, the potential emergence of AI-driven shamans within virtual reality environments, and whether dialogos with Hermes counts as a soul flight.
Something for all the family!
Links
Buckner, William. 2022. "A Deceptive Curing Practice in Hunter–Gatherer Societies" Humans 2, no. 3: 95-103. https://doi.org/10.3390/humans2030007
Comments
Kelly Maguire
Would cures fit anywhere in this Chris? Any in your family? Also, I couldn't get Paul stamets out of My head. His story about taking the mushrooms and climbing a tree and the big rainstorm and wanting his stutter to go away ...then it did. Then he said he had a vision about a flood and dead cows. Which he said came true (sounds like jung actually) but ye. He's the shaman of mushrooms now?@
Linda Sears
We poor humans. I can totally understand why people would create AI “gods” as oracles. It reminds me of those silly magic 8 balls from my childhood. “Cannot predict now.” No! I want certainty now!
chuckboy
Re: Manvir’s comments about AI inherently having a quality of otherness that can be spiritualized- Rolling Stone magazine has published two articles recently about people using AI as a conduit to god/spiritual enlightenment! Here’s an archive link to one (“People are Losing Loved Ones to AI Fueled Spiritual Fnatasies”): https://archive.is/2t8qx And a regular (paywalled) link to anothe: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-god-religion-answers-1235347023/
