A farmer can watch a shaman perform a rain ritual, see clouds gather, and then watch the rain arrive before the day is over. To the people standing there, the sequence can be overwhelming: the ritual happened, the rain followed, and the world seemed to answer. But a remarkable 2026 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics suggests that the deeper mystery may be almost the opposite of what the story first appears to say. Researchers examined rainmaking traditions across 1,208 ethnic groups and found that such rituals are substantially more common in places where the probability of rain naturally rises after a prolonged dry spell. In other words, the ritual may become most convincing precisely where the weather itself is already moving toward rain. The shaman does not have to control the clouds. The ritual only has to begin at exactly the moment when the clouds are becoming more likely.
That distinction changes everything. The new research does not demonstrate that rainmaking works, does not uncover a hidden mechanism for manipulating atmospheric systems, and certainly does not reveal a civilization secretly “hacking” a simulated reality. The authors reach a more unsettling conclusion: rainmaking can persist because it appears persuasive. A ritual performed during a drought is followed by rain often enough, in the right climates, to reinforce the belief that the ritual caused it. Over generations, successful memories survive while unsuccessful ones become easier to forget, and a religious practice can become deeply embedded in a community without ever violating a single law of physics. The strange part is not that humans somehow learned to command the sky. It is that humans became extraordinarily good at finding meaning in the moment the sky changes.
The Rain Ritual That Doesn’t Need to Control the Rain
The study, by José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez, Salvador Gil-Guirado and Nicholas Ryan, was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2026. The researchers assembled an original dataset from 370 anthropological sources and coded whether 1,208 ethnic groups traditionally practiced rainmaking. They found evidence of rain rituals among roughly 39 percent of the groups for which they could code the practice, across every settled continent. That alone is remarkable. But the most interesting result came when the researchers compared those traditions with the statistical behavior of rainfall in the groups’ ancestral environments.
Rainfall does not behave the same way everywhere. In some climates, the probability of rain remains relatively flat after a dry spell. In others it falls. But in some environments the probability rises the longer a dry spell continues. That creates a peculiar psychological trap. A community waits through days of drought, anxiety rises, the need for rain becomes urgent, and eventually someone performs a rain ritual. If the local probability of rainfall has already been increasing, the ritual may be followed by rain at exactly the moment when everyone is watching for it. The observer sees the sequence, ritual, then rain, and has no direct way to observe the alternative timeline in which the ritual never happened.
The researchers’ global result is striking. Groups facing an increasing rainfall hazard were 14 percentage points more likely to practice rainmaking than groups facing a non-increasing hazard, equivalent to a 47 percent increase relative to the baseline. Agricultural dependence mattered as well: societies whose livelihoods depended heavily on agriculture had stronger incentives to seek control over rainfall. But the authors’ interpretation is not that these societies discovered a supernatural technology. Their model instead proposes that local weather patterns can make religious claims about rain more persuasive, allowing those beliefs to survive and reproduce across generations.
That is a much more interesting explanation than simple superstition. It means a ritual can survive because it repeatedly encounters the right kind of coincidence. A drought begins. The community becomes desperate. The ritual starts. Rain arrives. The ritual is remembered as a success. Nothing has been “hacked,” yet a powerful feedback loop has been created between climate, memory, expectation and belief. The weather supplies the coincidence, the culture supplies the interpretation.
Why the New Study Does Not Prove That Shamans Make Rain
This is where the original mystery needs its most important correction. The 2026 paper does not say that rain rituals persist because they genuinely produce rainfall. In fact, the authors explicitly construct their model around a religious leader who cannot bring the rain but can persuade people that the leader can. The crucial variable is not supernatural effectiveness. It is timing. If prayer or ritual is initiated when rainfall is becoming more likely, the apparent success rate can be high enough to sustain belief.
The authors demonstrate the logic particularly clearly through historical records from Murcia, Spain. Catholic rain prayers were recorded there for centuries, and the researchers assembled daily information on prayers and notable rainfall events between 1600 and 1836. The prayers strongly predicted subsequent rainfall. But that does not mean the prayers caused the rainfall. Murcia’s rainfall hazard made the timing of the prayers unusually compatible with later rain, allowing a religious practice to look effective even when the weather was doing what the climate made increasingly likely.
There is something almost eerie about that result. A person does not need to know anything about probability distributions, rainfall hazards or atmospheric dynamics to discover that a particular ritual “works” more often when performed after a long drought. The information can be accumulated socially without ever being expressed scientifically. A community does not need a weather station if it has generations of people watching the same sky. It needs only memory, and memory is very good at preserving spectacular confirmations.
And This Is Where Shamanism Enters the Story
There is an important distinction that modern discussions often blur: rainmaking is not synonymous with shamanism. Rain rituals appear inside many different religious systems, including traditions with no historical relationship to Siberian shamanism. “Shamanism” is itself a broad scholarly category applied to enormously diverse religious specialists and practices, particularly across northern Eurasia and among Indigenous peoples elsewhere. The English word shaman is commonly traced to the Manchu-Tungus linguistic world, particularly the term saman, although the precise etymology has been debated by linguists and historians of religion for more than a century. Other traditions have their own names for their ritual specialists, which is precisely why treating every trance practitioner on Earth as belonging to one universal religion can become misleading.
That problem became especially influential through Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, first published in 1951. Eliade’s work became one of the most influential comparative studies of the subject, emphasizing trance, ecstatic experience and journeys between different realms. But his synthesis also became controversial. Later scholarship has repeatedly argued that the category “shamanism” can flatten major differences among Siberian and other Indigenous traditions, turning distinct religious systems into variations of a single universal phenomenon. The criticism matters because the real history is more complicated, and therefore more interesting, than the idea of one ancient technology shared unchanged across humanity.
The same caution applies to the famous World Tree. Trees connecting different levels or regions of the cosmos do occur in northern Eurasian traditions, and the image has been important in scholarship on Siberian ritual. But even specialists who study the motif have challenged the assumption that every Siberian World Tree represents one standardized “axis mundi” connecting an upper, middle and lower universe. Different communities gave the image different meanings, and its historical development is more complicated than a universal diagram of three cosmic servers. Even the idea that humans construct models of reality becomes more interesting when we stop forcing ancient symbols into modern technological metaphors.
The Soviet Union Really Did Try to Break the System
If there is a part of this story that genuinely resembles an attempt to erase an entire way of understanding reality, it is not hidden technology. It is twentieth-century state repression. Across the Soviet North, authorities mounted sustained campaigns against indigenous religious practices, including shamanism. Ritual specialists could be branded enemies of socialist modernization, ceremonial objects were destroyed or confiscated, drums were burned or removed to museums, practices were driven underground, and some practitioners were arrested or died in detention. The repression varied by place and period, and historians are still reconstructing its full scale. But the basic fact is not mysterious: the Soviet state attempted to suppress indigenous religious life as part of a much broader anti-religious and assimilationist project.
The Nanai record illustrates the pattern particularly clearly. Ethnographic research describes anti-shamanic persecution continuing through much of the Soviet period even though the practice survived in Nanai communities. The destruction was not merely ideological. When drums, costumes, ritual objects, songs and specialist knowledge disappear, an entire chain of cultural transmission can be damaged. A community may still remember that something existed while losing the people and objects necessary to reproduce exactly how it was done. That is cultural loss in its most literal sense.
And there is an important reason not to manufacture a perfectly rounded number for this history. The full scale of Soviet repression of shamans remains difficult to establish because people were not always arrested under a category as simple as “shaman.” Some were charged with other offenses, some practices continued secretly, and documentary records are incomplete. A Swedish Research Council-funded archival project has specifically examined repression of people identified as shamans in the Soviet North from the late 1920s through the 1950s. The uncertainty in the historical record is not evidence of a hidden purge whose numbers have been deliberately concealed. It is what fragmented archives and decades of repression actually look like.
The Drum Really Can Change the Brain
There is another reason shamanic ritual can look extraordinary without requiring anything supernatural: the human nervous system is exquisitely responsive to rhythm. Repetitive drumming and other rhythmic sounds can alter attention, absorption and subjective experience, and EEG experiments have found measurable coupling between neural activity and rhythmic auditory stimulation. Researchers have studied these effects for decades, and newer reviews continue to investigate how rhythmic sound interacts with brain networks involved in attention, perception and altered states of consciousness.
But even here, the seductive explanation needs to be resisted. “Neural entrainment” is a useful description of some forms of synchronization between rhythmic stimulation and brain activity, it is not a magic key that has solved the neuroscience of trance. Modern research finds different effects under different experimental conditions, and reviews emphasize that the evidence remains limited and that some earlier claims about simple auditory driving were stronger than the data justified. The brain is responding to rhythm. That much is real. Exactly how rhythmic sound produces the full phenomenology of trance is still an active research question.
That uncertainty makes the phenomenon more fascinating, not less. A person sitting beside a ceremonial drum does not need to imagine entering another dimension for the experience to become profoundly different from ordinary waking consciousness. Rhythm can narrow attention. Repetition can reduce awareness of competing stimuli. Expectation can shape perception. Group participation can intensify emotion. Belief supplies an interpretive framework. And once all of those factors converge, the experience can feel like contact with something outside the ordinary self regardless of whether one interprets that experience spiritually, psychologically or neurologically.
Michael Harner and the Invention of “Core Shamanism”
The modern Western version of shamanism adds another layer to the story. American anthropologist Michael Harner conducted fieldwork among Indigenous communities and eventually developed what he called “core shamanism,” a deliberately generalized set of techniques that he presented as common elements distilled from different traditions. In 1980 he published The Way of the Shaman, and he later founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. His work became enormously influential in bringing shamanic journeying and rhythmic practices to Western spiritual seekers.
But this is precisely where the word “universal” becomes dangerous. Harner’s approach was designed to strip practices of specific cultural and ceremonial contexts so they could be taught as a generalized method. Supporters have regarded that as a way of preserving and making accessible techniques that might otherwise disappear. Critics have argued that removing practices from the communities, histories, languages and obligations that gave them meaning can turn radically different Indigenous traditions into a single exportable spiritual product. Both sides of that debate exist, and neither needs a conspiracy theory to explain it.
The Real “Weather Hack” Is Human Pattern Recognition
Now the pieces begin to fit together without requiring an invisible computer. A farming community faces an uncertain climate. People watch the sky every day because their survival depends on it. Certain weather patterns reliably precede rain. A ritual is performed during a drought. Rain arrives. The ritual is remembered. Another generation repeats it. Eventually the practice becomes tradition, and the tradition becomes evidence in the minds of the people performing it: we have always done this, and the rain has always come.
But the 2026 study suggests something more precise. The ritual is especially likely to become persuasive where the weather itself produces the most convincing coincidences. That means the tradition does not need to contain a secret meteorological formula. It can emerge from ordinary human learning operating inside a non-random climate. People are not simply hallucinating the correlation. The correlation may genuinely be there. What they cannot directly observe is the counterfactual: what would the weather have done if nobody had performed the ritual?
That is one of the oldest problems in human reasoning. If you perform an action immediately before something happens, the sequence feels causal even when the two events are unrelated. Medicine, politics, finance, sports and everyday life are full of the same trap. Rainmaking is simply one of the most dramatic versions because the stakes are enormous. When a community’s crops depend on rainfall, a coincidence between ritual and weather can become more than a coincidence. It can become a tradition.
So Did the Shamans Believe They Were Controlling Reality?
That question is harder to answer than the weather question. A modern observer can describe a ritual in terms of symbolism, social cohesion, altered consciousness or cognitive bias. The practitioner may describe exactly the same event as an encounter with spirits, ancestors, animals, gods or another realm of existence. Those explanations do not necessarily occupy the same conceptual universe. Calling every spiritual experience a primitive misunderstanding of meteorology tells us as little as declaring every trance experience proof of access to another dimension.
The responsible position is narrower. We can document what people did. We can document what they believed. We can measure some of what rhythmic stimulation does to the brain. We can model the probability of rainfall. We can reconstruct the historical persecution of ritual specialists. What we cannot scientifically establish from the existence of these traditions is that shamans possessed an external mechanism for commanding atmospheric systems. Nor can we establish that their experiences were “just” neurological events in the reductive sense that word sometimes implies. The evidence gives us several layers of reality without giving us permission to collapse them into one.
The Strange Truth About the Ritual
The most important finding in the new research is therefore almost the opposite of a supernatural revelation. Rainmaking rituals do not need to change the weather to become powerful. They only need to occur in environments where weather naturally creates convincing coincidences. A drought raises the stakes. The ritual begins. The probability of rain is already rising. Then the clouds arrive, the ground becomes wet, and everyone sees the same sequence. The ritual has acquired another successful memory.
Do that for generations and something extraordinary happens. A response to uncertainty becomes a tradition. A tradition becomes a religious institution. A religious institution accumulates stories of success. Stories shape expectation, expectation shapes perception, and perception helps preserve the practice. None of this makes the people who practiced it foolish. They were living inside the information available to them, observing the same natural world we observe, and trying to survive conditions in which a failed harvest could mean hunger or death.
And that is why the real story of shamanism does not need to be rewritten as a simulation, a hidden operating system or a form of supernatural engineering. The actual history is stranger in a quieter way. Humans can build elaborate systems of meaning from genuine observations of the natural world, genuine altered states of consciousness, genuine social memory and genuine historical trauma. They can be persecuted for those systems, preserve them in secret, reinvent them in modern societies and argue about their meaning for centuries.
The rain still falls for reasons written in atmospheric physics. But the ritual can remain powerful for reasons written somewhere else: in memory, expectation, culture and the human need to believe that when we speak to the world, the world sometimes speaks back.
That is not evidence that the weather was hacked. It may be something more revealing: evidence of how easily human beings can turn coincidence into knowledge, knowledge into ritual, and ritual into a way of surviving uncertainty.
