Michael J. Harner

Michael James Harner (April 27, 1929 – February 3, 2018) was an American anthropologist, educator and author. His 1980 book, The Way of the Shaman: a Guide to Power and Healing, has been foundational in the development and popularization of core shamanism as a New Age path of personal development for adherents of neoshamanism. He also founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.

Career Harner was born in Washington, D.C., in 1929. He initially worked in the field of archaeology, including studying the Lower Colorado River area. As a graduate student in 1956-57 he undertook field research on the culture of the Jívaro (Shuar) people of the Ecuadorian Amazon and began to pursue a career as an ethnologist. His doctoral dissertation, "Machetes, Shotguns, and Society: An Inquiry into the Social Impact of Technological Change among the Jivaro Indians" (U California-Berkeley 1963), became the basis for his book, The Jívaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls.

In 1960-61 he reported experimenting with the Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca with the Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon, and "The Role of Hallucinogenic Plants in European Witchcraft" (1973). Harner returned to the Jívaro in 1964, 1969, and 1973 where he learned the use of the entheogen maikua (Datura brugmansia).

In 1983, Harner founded the Center for Shamanic Studies, which is today known as the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.

He died on February 3, 2018, at the age of 88.

Development of Core shamanism After traveling to the Amazon where he reported ingesting the hallucinogen ayahuasca, Harner began experimenting with monotonous drumming. In the early 1970s he started giving training workshops to small groups in Connecticut. In 1979 he founded the Center for Shamanic Studies in Norwalk, Connecticut.

In 1980, Harner published The Way of the Shaman: a Guide to Power and Healing, Influences cited by Harner also included Siberian shamanism, Mexican and Guatemalan culture, and Australian traditions, as well as the familiar spirits of European occultism, which are said to aid the occultist in their metaphysical work.

Students in the United States and Europe began to take his classes in what he was now calling "core shamanism" (as differenced from traditional, Evenk shamanism, or other Indigenous, ethnic and historical practices that have been referred to as "shamanism" in anthropological texts). Most authors in the field, especially Harner's critics, consider Harner's core shamanism to be the primary influence on, and foundation of, the Neoshamanic movement.

Harner later integrated his Center for Shamanic Studies into the nonprofit Foundation for Shamanic Studies. The Foundation received financial support primarily from the Core Shamanism courses and workshops he taught, supplemented by private donations. From the early 1980s onward, he invited a few of his students to join an international faculty to reach an ever-wider market. In 1987, Harner resigned his professorship to devote himself full-time to the work of the foundation. He largely ceased publishing, except for occasional articles in the publication "Shamanism."