Encyclopaedia Divine - Shamans - The Call of the Wild

It is said that when the gods created the world, they gently blew life into it, awakening the conscience in every piece of their work. Trees, rocks, rivers, wind, mountains... all of them received the holy breath, and all of them worshipped the gods before the first race set foot on the face of the world. They were the animae, the souls of all things: the spirits. These beings are the heart of Creation, overseeing the turning of the seasons, the cycle of predator and prey and even the falling of each flake of snow. This first age was a paradise, but when the gods had set the stage for their mortal children, the spirits lost their place as the inhabitants of the world. Yet they were not really gone. Shunned to the lands behind the mirror, the spirits maintained their connection with that which gives them life, and they served a new role as the intermediaries between the gods and the physical world. Shamans existed long before clerics and wizards usurped their role as the wise leaders of the people, the first to try and make sense of a strange world and the earliest people to delve into the powers of the unknown. Their magic is unsophisticated, and looked down upon as the province of the uncivilized, a primitive tool inferior to arcane formulae and divine prayer.