Indigenous and shamanic cultures around the world have developed rich traditions of soul knowledge, including beliefs about the soul’s journey after death, the possibility of rebirth, and the techniques by which shamans navigate the spirit world. These traditions have shaped human understanding of life, death, and meaning for tens of thousands of years.

Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

Mircea Eliade’s landmark study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951/1964) defined shamanism as a distinct religious phenomenon centered on the shaman’s ability to enter altered states of consciousness (ecstasy) and travel to other worlds — the upper world (sky), lower world (underworld), and middle world (earth).

Key features with relevance to rebirth:

Initiatory sickness and dismemberment — In many traditions, the shaman’s vocation involves an initiatory crisis in which the spirit world “dismembers” and rebuilds the candidate, symbolizing death and rebirth.
Soul journey — The shaman travels to retrieve lost souls (soul retrieval) or guide the souls of the dead.
Animal spirits and transformation — Shamans may take animal form, reflecting a worldview in which human and non-human beings share a common soul-stuff and can transform into one another — overlapping with beliefs in cross-species transmigration.

Animism

Graham Harvey’s Animism: Respecting the Living World presents animism not as a primitive error but as a sophisticated relational ontology in which the world is understood as a community of persons — human, animal, plant, and other-than-human — all of whom participate in personhood and agency.

In animist frameworks, the soul’s journey does not end at death. Ancestors remain present and active; rebirth into the family or community is common. The relationship between the living and the dead is ongoing and reciprocal.

Soul Retrieval

Sandra Ingerman’s Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self presents the shamanic practice of recovering parts of the soul that have been lost due to trauma. This practice, found in many indigenous cultures, holds that:

Parts of the soul can fragment and become separated during traumatic experiences.
These fragments may remain in non-ordinary reality.
A shaman can journey to recover and reintegrate them.
Soul retrieval restores wholeness and vitality — a form of healing that complements the broader framework of the soul’s journey across lives.

Malidoma Patrice Some: African Shamanism

Some’s Of Water and the Spirit presents a first-person account of his initiation as a shaman among the Dagara people of Burkina Faso. The Dagara worldview includes:

The soul’s pre-existence and choice of parents and life circumstances.
The role of ritual in maintaining connection with the spirit world.
Communication with ancestors and the guidance they provide to the living.
A cosmology in which reincarnation is a natural part of the soul’s journey.

Mesopotamian and Archaic Traditions

Samuel Noah Kramer’s History Begins at Sumer documents the first recorded human civilization and its beliefs about death and the afterlife: the Sumerian underworld, the descent of Inanna, and the tale of the resurrection of Dumuzi. The Gilgamesh epic — the earliest surviving work of literature — explores the human quest for immortality.

Thorkild Jacobsen’s The Treasures of Darkness traces the development of Mesopotamian religion, showing how conceptions of the soul’s existence after death evolved from the grim shadow-existence in the underworld (Kur / Arallu) to more developed ideas of divine judgment and the possibility of renewal.

Archaic Ontology and the Eternal Return

Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return (see Cyclical History and the Eternal Return) describes the archaic ontology underlying many indigenous and traditional cultures: the belief that reality is constituted through the repetition of archetypal acts and that time can be periodically regenerated. In this framework, death is not an end but a return to the source — and rebirth, whether cosmic or individual, is the pattern of all existence.

The Sacred and the Profane

Eliade’s distinction between sacred and profane modes of being (The Sacred and the Profane) illuminates the shamanic and indigenous understanding of the cosmos as a living, meaningful reality in which the soul’s journey — including the possibility of rebirth — is embedded in the fabric of a sacred universe.