The purpose of soc.religion.shamanism is to provide a forum for discussion and exchange of questions, ideas, views, and information about historic, traditional, tribal, and contemporary shamanic experience. Everything that a shaman does depends upon this experience. Without it, there is no shaman.
— Charter of soc.religion.shamanism, 1994

The Group and Its History

soc.religion.shamanism was one of the earliest moderated Usenet newsgroups devoted to the study and practice of shamanism. Founded in 1994 through the Big-8 Management Board's formal newsgroup creation process, it occupied a more scholarly and definitionally rigorous position within the Usenet hierarchy than the contemporaneous alt.* shamanism groups — a distinction visible in its founding charter, which carefully distinguished shamanism from the broader category of "native religion" and anchored the group's purpose to "historic, traditional, tribal, and contemporary shamanic experience."

The newsgroup was moderated from its inception. The founding moderators included Dean Edwards, the author of the General Overview FAQ that defined the group's vocabulary; Skip Watson; and Al Billings. Doug Freyburger subsequently joined and became the primary active maintainer, posting the two canonical FAQs monthly from 2006 through 2007 and serving as the group's institutional memory. Tim Skirvin served as Technical Moderator. The group was formally removed from the Usenet soc.* hierarchy in April 2009 following a period of inactivity and sustained spam flooding — a fate common to specialized Usenet groups in the 2008–2010 era as Usenet traffic migrated to the web.

The preserved Giganews corpus spans 2005 to 2009, capturing the group primarily in its late period. Earlier discussion, from the mid-1990s through roughly 2004, is not represented in this archive.

The Canonical Documents

soc.religion.shamanism produced two foundational texts that were posted monthly throughout the group's active life:

The General Overview FAQ (Shamanism — General Overview — Frequently Asked Questions, by Dean Edwards, copyright 1993–1996, maintained by Doug Freyburger) was the group's primary scholarly document. Running to nearly a thousand lines, it defined the core vocabulary of shamanism — Eliade's definition, the three types of ecstasy, the Post-Shamanic framework, the role of trauma in calling, the distinction between shamanism and adjacent practices — and provided an extensive tradition-by-tradition bibliography covering Siberian, Central Asian, Finno-Uralic, Celtic, contemporary, Native North American, South American, African, East Asian, and ethnobotanical sources. Joseph Bearwalker Wilson contributed the central section on trance states (copyright 1978, 1995 Wilson, reprinted by permission). This FAQ is preserved in full in this archive.

The Newsgroup FAQ (soc.religion.shamanism — Frequently Asked Questions, by Doug Freyburger) contained the charter, moderator policies, submission guidelines, etiquette rules, and crucially Section IX — "Reader comments on shamanic terms and concepts" — a community-assembled glossary that defined terms like Core Shamanism, Shamanics (Kenneth Meadows), Techno-Shamanism, the Harner Method, and Shamanic Tradition through the voices of the practitioners who contributed to the group's vocabulary.

The General Overview FAQ in Context

Dean Edwards' FAQ occupies an important place in the history of shamanism studies on the internet. Written in 1993 — when the internet was academic and the neo-shamanic movement was still consolidating around Michael Harner's Foundation for Shamanic Studies — it represented an attempt to bring scholarly precision to a vocabulary that was already splintering between traditional anthropology, neo-shamanic revival, academic comparative religion, and popular appropriation. Edwards' Post-Shamanic framework (1995), with its eight-condition model for identifying societies that show shamanic motifs without living shamanic practice, was a genuine theoretical contribution that remains useful.

The FAQ is a document of its decade: its bibliography is almost entirely pre-internet scholarship (Eliade, Halifax, Harner, Kalweit, Hoppal, Dioszegi), and its framing reflects the comparative religion of the 1970s–1980s more than the postcolonial critique that would reshape the field in the 2000s. But as a record of how serious practitioners were thinking about shamanism at the moment the internet first made those conversations publicly accessible, it is irreplaceable.

Relationship to alt.religion.shamanism

The two newsgroups — soc.religion.shamanism and alt.religion.shamanism — existed simultaneously but served different communities. soc.religion.shamanism was the more formally moderated, definitionally rigorous group, anchored in comparative religion scholarship. alt.religion.shamanism was larger, more practitioner-focused, and drew a more diverse community of independent practitioners — the people who actually journeyed, worked with power animals, and wrote about their experiences in first person. The alt.* group produced the extraordinary community archive that the Good Works Library has also preserved: journey accounts, practical guides, place-writing, community philosophy.

The two archives together give a more complete picture of the early internet shamanism conversation than either alone.

Colophon

Introduction written for the Good Works Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, March 2026. Source: Internet Archive, Giganews Usenet Collection, soc.religion.shamanism.20140308.mbox.gz.

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