There is a universal respect on the part of animistic cultures for their shamanic workers. Shamans occupy a very unique place within their cultures, a position of ambiguity wherein they are often allowed to violate the boundaries of "normal" behavior. Their violation of these boundaries and other social norms is perceived by others within the society as a sacred thing- an expression of the mysteries beyond that the shaman is privy to by virtue of their ability to interact with the unseen worlds. Shamans can be feared and cherished at the same time by their own people, and their necessity is never doubted.
In most cultures, shamanic workers become representatives of their people in this world to the powers of the unseen world, and they become the emissaries of their people when they go into the unseen, seeking for answers to dangers and questions that face their people.
The shaman becomes the penultimate "border crosser", leaving the civilized world of the tribe or of the community, and going into the unknown, which is represented by both the dangerous and untamed wilderness that surrounds human communities, and the unseen world itself, which can be likened to a dense or trackless wilderness populated by spirits. The shaman, having access to this mysterious world, can also pass into the land of the dead, the ancestral country or unseen world where the spirits of the dead travel. Having access to the dead gives the shaman access to the great fund of wisdom and human experience that is carried by the many generations that have now passed away.
The shaman represents the keeper of the special wisdom that deals with the most sacred realities. Through the shaman's power-stories, sacred dramas, and songs, they mediate the experiences of unseen powers into the sphere of concrete consciousness by which non-shamans can receive it and understand it in their own way. Without shamanic specialists, one might say that a tribe would be cut off from a direct channel of communion with both the unseen world, and its own inner life.
In the modern day, in non-animistic societies that lack shamanic specialists, artists and people of the "countercultural" type often fill the role of the shaman, though they seldom fulfill every aspect of the spiritual vocation represented by the shaman in primal cultures.
With the rise of monotheistic religions in Europe and in other parts of the world, the animistic worldview was largely interrupted and destroyed, and with it, shamanic workers of those lands tended to either vanish, or become villainized as evil sorcerers who traffic with dangerous spirits in the unknown. Historically, missionaries of monotheistic religions have attempted to undermine the influence of native shamanic specialists wherever they met them, in their attempts to wrestle spiritual power away from them, and to claim it for themselves in the name of their creed.
