Pathway 01 — Ethnobotany
Pathway 03 — Plant Medicine Traditions
Pathway 05 — consciousness & spirituality
The Shamanic Art of Healing
What does it mean to heal? Wade Davis explores the shamanic worldview from the Arctic to the Amazon — the plants, the rituals, the mind-body convictions that have guided healers for millennia, and what modern medicine still refuses to ask.
● 5 modules
● 16 lessons
● 1 hour
● All levels
Wade Davis, PhD
Anthropologist · Harvard Ethnobotanist · Explorer-in-Residence, National Geographic
course overview
“The shaman does not merely treat symptoms — the shaman addresses the roots of disorder. Long before modern medicine, men and women throughout the world sought to understand illness as a rupture in the balance between the individual, the community, and the cosmos. What they discovered, we are only beginning to take seriously”
what you will learn
Understand the foundations and global history of shamanism as a universal human response to illness, death, and the unknown
Explore core principles of the shamanic worldview — the cosmology, the spirit realm, and the healer’s role as mediator between worlds
Discover diverse techniques for achieving altered states — from entheogenic plants to drumming, ordeal, fasting, and trance dance
Learn the role and traditional use of key entheogenic plants including Brugmansia, coca, ayahuasca, and ichthyotoxins in shamanic healing practice
Compare shamanic healing methods with modern medical approaches — and understand where the two traditions converge and diverge
Trace shamanism to the origins of religion — the agrarian shift from shaman to priest, and what was lost in the transition
course sYllabus
free preview — Module 1 · Lesson 1
watch free
Addressing the Roots of Disorder
In this opening lesson, Wade Davis establishes the central argument of the course: that the desire to invoke altered states of consciousness — through ecstasy, trance, entheogenic plants, or ordeal — is so universal in the human record that it must be understood as a fundamental human appetite, not a cultural aberration. Healing, in the shamanic worldview, begins not with the symptom but with the rupture — the break between the individual, the community, and the cosmos.
aprox: 4 minutes
about the instructor
Wade Davis, PhD
Anthropologist · Harvard PhD in Ethnobotany · Explorer-in-Residence, National Geographic Society
Wade Davis has spent a lifetime documenting the knowledge systems of cultures at the edges of the industrialized world — from the Amazon basin to the Tibetan plateau, from Polynesia to the Arctic. Holder of degrees in anthropology and biology from Harvard, and a PhD in ethnobotany under Richard Evans Schultes, he authored 24 books including One River and The Wayfinders. As Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 2000 to 2013, he produced eight-hour documentary series on the world’s disappearing cultures. Member of the Order of Canada, Honorary Citizen of Colombia, and recipient of 12 honorary degrees — Davis teaches not from a distance, but from fifty years of earned presence.
Ethnobotany
Shamanism & healing
Cultural anthropology
Entheogenic plants
Biocultural diversity
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