Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century

This book examines the concept of shamanism in eighteenth-century European thought, tracing how writers, philosophers, and artists engaged with reports of shamans from Siberia and other regions. Flaherty argues that shamanism served as a provocative model for debates about imagination, religion, and the origins of culture, influencing figures from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. The work shows how European intellectuals alternately dismissed shamans as charlatans or idealized them as primitive geniuses, reflecting broader tensions between reason and mysticism.

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Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century. Gloria Flaherty. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. 320 pp. $35.00 (cloth).