Interest in shamanism and shamans today is very great, and there is no reason to believe that it will soon weaken. At the same time, the number of available scientific papers on this topic can be counted on one hand. It is all the more gratifying that one of the first attempts in the world to systematize and generalize materials on shamanism was the work of the Russian historian and ethnographer V. M. Mikhailovsky. It is unique in the amount of ethnographic information that an enthusiastic reader will clearly appreciate.