To the best of our knowledge the present book is the first to cover the entire phenomenon of shamanism and at the same time to situate it in the general history of religions. To say this is to imply its liability to imperfection and approximation and the risks that it takes. Today the student has at his disposition a considerable quantity of documents for the various shamanisms—Siberian, North American, South American, Indonesian, Oceanian, and so on. Then too, a number of works, important in their several ways, have broken ground for the ethnological, sociological, and psychological study of shamanism (or rather, of a particular type of shamanism }. But with a few notable exceptions—we refer especially to the studies of Altaic shamanism by Holmberg (Harva)—the immense shamanic bibliography has neglected to interpret this extremely complex phenomenon in the framework of the history of religions. It is as a historian of religions that we, in our turn, have attempted to approach, understand, and present shamanism. Far be it from us to think of belittling the admirable studies undertaken from the viewpoints of psychology, sociology, or ethnology; we consider them indispensable to understanding the various aspects of shamanism. But we believe that there is room for another approach—that which we have sought to implement in the following pages.