Within the depth-psychology corpus, shamanic ritual occupies a pivotal position at the intersection of religious phenomenology, analytical psychology, and the anthropology of healing. Eliade’s foundational work establishes the structural grammar of shamanic practice — ecstatic séance, soul retrieval, initiatory dismemberment, cosmic ascent and descent — as universal yet culturally inflected forms. His comparative method reveals shamanic ritual not as primitive superstition but as a rigorously ordered technology of altered consciousness, community healing, and cosmological navigation. Campbell extends this reading, locating the shamanistic crisis within a field of elementary ideas that prefigure all mystical traditions. The tension between Eliade’s phenomenological universalism and the Jungian interpretive frame is most productively elaborated by Sun and Kim, whose empirical study demonstrates that archetype symbols operative in shamanic ritual produce measurable stages of altered states of consciousness, including ego dissolution, thereby grounding Jung’s collective unconscious in observable ritual mechanics. McNiff applies this synthesis therapeutically, recasting the shaman as an archetypal figure whose techniques — soul retrieval, rhythm, the ingestion of illness — serve as generative metaphors for creative arts therapy. The central scholarly dispute concerns whether shamanic ritual accesses genuinely transpersonal realities or enacts intrapsychic processes; both positions find serious advocates across the corpus.