The shaman is the mythmaker, and the source of his faith is his own experience of the Divine in Nature… the shaman… the individual whose “testament is Nature itself, whose hymns are the music of the rivers and the winds.” I would like to believe that such people exist like I once believed in Santa Claus.

— Alberto Villoldo, Dance of the Four Winds, 97

Santa Claus is said by some to have an origin in shamanism (John Matthews, The Winter Solstice).