The first half of the book deals with scholarly, literary, and travelers’ perceptions of shamanism before the 1960s, when shamanism did not interest anybody except ethnographers and psychologists and when the word was reserved primarily for the description of indigenous religious practices in Siberia and western North America. Much of my story in this part of the volume naturally concerns the literature on Siberia and North America. The second half of the text deals with the growing appreciation of the shamanism idiom among spiritual seekers and academics since the 1960s. Here, I also discuss the emergence of neo-shamanic practices and the current state of shamanism studies. This part of the book is focused mainly on American scholarship and American spiritual communities, not only because neo-shamanism sprang up and now shines better in the United States, but also because I am more familiar with the American cultural scene and American writings on the topic. At the same time, for comparative purposes, I also draw on materials about neo-shamanism in other Western countries. Furthermore, in my last chapter, I return to Siberia to explore the fate of the shamanism idiom in its motherland in the twentieth century. My idiom and the history of Western perceptions of shamanism— implies mining a large amount of relevant literature. This has defined the major sources I used for writing The Beauty of the Primitive, which are published materials: books, proceedings of shamanism practitioners’ meetings, spirituality periodicals, and newspapers. Doing research for the second half of the book, which discusses neo-shamanism, I also relied on my conversations and interviews with academics who do research on shamanism and with spiritual seekers who situate their activities as shamanic. Mostly, these talks were informal conversations and discussions. At the same time, with several of them, I had long formal interviews.