Amerindian shamanism has always had this ambiguous aspect, as a force for both good and evil, that it is very much in the hands of the individual shaman to control. This in itself would tend to promote a close association of power and individuality which plays easily into the kinds of post-colonial political contexts that have been outlined here. More broadly this allows us to appreciate aspects to shamanism’s darker side that are missing in accounts of personal curing and particular allegations of sorcery. To some extent anthropology in Amazonia has already recognized that social and political dimension to witchcraft (Rivière 1970) but only recently has this come to focus on the intimate connections between shamanic ideas and the forms of political action, as in the case of kanaimà (Butt-Colson 2001, Whitehead 2001). Equally, while general questions at to how shamanism, as a typically personalized and non-institutional form of spiritual action might have been harnessed to, or suppressed by, the State (Thomas and Humphrey 1996) have been considered in a number of global contexts, the way in which occult forms of ritual action become the accepted processes of the State has not yet received the attention it deserves. This need for closer attention to the shamanic aspects of State power and authority does not arise just because it happens to be an interesting issue of political science, but because it is a key cultural difference between ourselves, supposedly practitioners of a rational and spiritually neutral political process, and others, who are seen as immured in a superstitious past. Moreover, unlike some commentators on this theme (Comaroff & Comaroff 1993, 1998, Coronil 1997, Taussig 1997), we do not just see the role of the sprit world as providing a ‘local’ idiom for the work of a trans-national or ‘global’ capitalist ideology but as a unique idiom and understanding of power that is part of an original and independent post-colonial political condition. It is this use of dark shamanism as a legitimate expression of political power that has therefore been the focus of this chapter. We hope also to have shown that dark shamanism is integral to the cosmological understanding of Amazonian peoples.