So who or what is a shaman? Singh gives us a handy definition: “A shaman is a specialist who, through non-ordinary states, engages with unseen realities and provides services like healing and divination.” You can achieve a non-ordinary or altered state with drugs, drumming, dancing, fasting, meditation, whatever floats your boat—floats it into the beyond, that is. Once there, you might battle with demons, fly across the sky, plunge into the underworld, enlist the help of power-animals, or commune with the souls of the dead. You might undergo a terrible supernatural ordeal, a violent unmaking or scattering of the self. Crucially, though, you come back stronger. You return from the other realm remade, with strange new capabilities. You can heal. You can prophesy. (I have a certain resistance to Singh’s characterization of Jesus as a shaman—one of the things I like about Jesus is how un-esoterically he distributes his message, how dazzlingly straightforward and inclusive it is—but I get it: “By interacting with a powerful spirit being, he cured, exorcized, and foretold the future.”)