Shamans enabled audiences to sense a force greater than themselves

Evidence

Shamans, far from being mere charlatans were, as Herder more famously declared, oral poets, sacred musicians and healing performers who—for all the tricks they might use—enabled their audiences to sense in their own souls a force greater than themselves. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 244

Categorization

• XREF: Same move Asad tracks throughout: rescuing ritual from ‘fraud’ by aestheticizing it as art/perception rather than taking its claims seriously.