What exactly is a shaman and what is his job?

I followed a link to an article at quora.com and decided to look around a bit. I had to register to read there and found some interesting questions. I wrote the following in response to one question but decided to post it here rather than in a closed forum.

What exactly is a shaman and what is his job?

This is a complex question about a very complex subject. First off, I'm suspicious of the idea that anyone can "exactly" pin down what a shaman is and, secondly, the idea of the "job" of a shaman might also be problematic. In some societies a shaman is a hereditary role and in others a shaman is initiated by great spiritual powers, sometimes in powerful dreaming or through great life crisis of many years and many trials. Does that sound like a "job" or something that can be "exactly" delineated? I'm more inclined to interpret the question as what role does a shaman play in a society and what kinds of experience are common to shamanic practitioners.

The wikipedia article mentioned here is a good introduction to the subject but is perhaps a bit overly academic and lacking in the perspective of shamanic practitioners. Mircea Eliade's book on the subject gives a good idea of the breadth and depth of the topic from a religion researcher's view. Michael Harner's works place shamanism in a context approachable by modern western laymen. And Ingerman and Wesselman have published "Awakening to the Spirit World: The Shamanic Path of Direct Revelation" which goes into the experience of shaman practitioners in a very clear manner.

As far as I can tell all human societies have (or once had) people who fill the role of the shaman. A shaman is often on the fringes of society, yet can also have a leadership position. A shaman is often called by spirit to the role and often is in service to the community at large. They are often given the role of healer and as messenger between human society and beings from other realms or orders of being.

The shamanic world view sees our shared waking reality as one component of many layers of reality, or as one of a number of worlds. Is it very common to divide reality into at least three levels, the underworld, our middle-world and the upper-world, but many variations are possible. One task of the shaman is to travel between the different worlds, often to get information or perform some action like recovering a lost part of someone's soul for healing, or interceding with with a great spiritual power for the sake of the community.

Shamans are great dreamers and travelers into non-ordinary realities and it is common to see them describe our waking reality as a lesser version of the dream world. Shamans travel though time and space and will communicate with ancestors and follow the chain of events into the past to find the causes of problems. A shaman will travel into great hierarchies of imaginal realms, which are not to be confused with fantasy or hallucination but which are realities of a different order than our waking world. The shamanic world view sees all of reality as being alive and able to communicate. All of the things we see while waking are alive and infused with spirit. Not only that but there are orders of beings beyond the common understanding, beings like gods or angels or the spirit of animals or of natural forces.

Shamanic practitioners have developed a set of spiritual technologies that are now common to many religions and spiritual practices. A very basic one is the shamanic journey, the ability to move into other realities or non-local reality. It is often fueled by drumming or ecstatic movement or even by (dangerously, to my mind) ingesting some substance with consciousness changing properties. A journeying shaman will often be assisted by animal powers or spiritual beings or even ancestors or other shamanic practitioners. They will sometimes travel into the realms of the dead and often are called to assist the newly dead find their way.

Shamanic practitioners have developed spiritual power and use it as needed. They often develop rituals as a means of action or protection or to maintain good relationships with spiritual beings. They are often driven to create art as part of their work. Shamanic practitioners often work as healers or to heal communities, but not all of them act for the common interest and there are dark shamanic practitioners who use their power for personal gain.

This is just a start at trying to describe the complexity of the subject. It is not meant to be taken as a list of "shoulds" or "musts" but only as a rough sketch of the topic as I see it and as it relates to human experience. After years of immersing myself in the subject I can see that it spreads out in many interesting directions, many more than I will ever be able to study in one lifetime. The biggest aspect of shamanic reality is that it is open to direct experience. Most people can use drumming to visit some of the nearby spiritual realities that a shaman visits regularly and therefore they can form their own understanding based on their own experience. A journey fueled by drumming to the underworld to talk to a power animal will teach you more about the subject than any amount of reading about it will ever do.