The word shaman comes from the language of the Tungus reindeer herders of the Lake Baikal region of Russia. From the Encyclopaedia Britannica it seems its derivation is from the Tunguso-Manchurian word saman, formed from the verb sa- meaning 'to know' as in the French word savoir and the Spanish saber. The words witch and wizard come from the indo-European root meaning 'to see or 'to know' and are found in the French voir or the latin videre meaning to see or the German wissen meaning to know. Anthropologists researching healing practises the world over have applied the term shaman to indigenous tribal healers and medicine people. The meaning is sometimes quoted as 'to heat up, to burn, to work with heat and fire' and sometimes as 'Wise One' or 'One Who Knows', 'one who sees'. This brings us to the most important characteristic of shamans. They are masters of energy and of the fire which moves through the human body, called by such names as kundalini in the east, or mana in Hawaiian. They know that there is an energy, normally invisible, which connects all that exists, and they live with the knowledge of this energy and how to use it. They are masters of altered states of consciousness in which the normal rules of Newtonian three dimensional existence are broken, and in which travel to other worlds, pre-cognition, distant seeing are all possible.