“What is now generally known of Shamanism is very little; and that has been perverted, like the rest of the non-Christian religions. It is called the “heathenism” of Mongolia, and wholly without reason, for it is one of the oldest religions of India. It is spirit-worship, or belief in the immortality of the souls, and that the latter are still the same men they were on earth, though their bodies have lost their objective form, and man has exchanged his physical for a spiritual nature. In its present shape, it is an offshoot of primitive theurgy, and a practical blending of the visible with the invisible world. Whenever a denizen of earth desires to enter into communication with his invisible brethren, he has to assimilate himself to their nature, i.e., he meets these beings halfway, and, furnished by them with a supply of spiritual essence, endows them, in his turn, with a portion of his physical nature, thus enabling them sometimes to appear in a semi-objective form. It is a temporary exchange of natures, called theurgy.
Shamans are called sorcerers, because they are said to evoke the “spirits” of the dead for purposes of necromancy. The true Shamanism – striking features of which prevailed in India in the days of Megasthenes (300 B.C.) – can no more be judged by its degenerated scions among the Shamans of Siberia, than the religion of Gautama-Buddha can be interpreted by the fetishism of some of his followers in Siam and Burma. It is in the chief lamaseries of Mongolia and Tibet that it has taken refuge; and there, Shamanism, if so we must call it, is practiced to the utmost limits of intercourse allowed between man and “spirit”. The religion of the lamas has faithfully preserved the primitive science of magic and produces as great feats now as it did in the days of Kublai-Khan and his barons.
The ancient mystic formula of the King Srong-ch-Tsans-Gampo, the Aum-mani padme houm”, effects its wonders now as well as in the seventh century. Avalokitesvara, highest of the three Boddhisattvas, and patron saint of Tibet, projects his shadow, full in the view of the faithful, at the lamasery of Dga-G’Dan, founded by him; and the luminous form of Son-Ka-pa, under the shape of a fiery cloudlet, that separates itself from the dancing beams of the sunlight, holds converse with a great congregation of lamas, numbering thousands; the voice descending from above, like the whisper of the breeze through foliage. Anon, say the Tibetans, the beautiful appearance vanishes in the shadows of the sacred trees in the park of the lamasery.
At Garma-Khian (the mother-cloister) it is rumored that bad and unprogressed spirits are made to appear on certain days and forced to give an account of their evil deeds; they are compelled by the lamaic adepts to redress the wrongs done by them to mortals. This is what Huc naively terms “personating evil spirits”, i.e., devils. Were the skeptics of various European countries permitted to consult the accounts printed daily at Moru, and in the “City of Spirits”, of the business-like intercourse which takes place between the lamas and the invisible world, they would certainly feel more interest in the phenomena described so triumphantly in the spiritualistic journals.
At Buddha-Ila, or rather Foht-Ila (Buddha’s Mount), in the most important of the many thousand lamaseries of that country, the sceptre of the Boddhisgat is seen floating, unsupported, in the air, and its motions regulate the actions of the community. Whenever a lama is called to account in the presence of the Superior of the monastery, he knows beforehand it is useless for him to tell an untruth; the “regulator of justice” (the sceptre) is there, and its waving motion, either approbatory or otherwise, decides instantaneously and unerringly the question of his guilt. We do not pretend to have witnessed all this personally – we wish to make no pretensions of any kind. Suffice it, with respect to any of these phenomena, that what we have not seen with our own eyes has been so substantiated to us that we endorse its genuineness.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 