Ok. I'm a little bit obsessive and pedantic. I apologize in advance.
I get how divine magic works for classes that tap into the power of a deity (cleric, inquisitor, oracle, warpriest, paladin?). Makes sense to me.
I can get how nature magic (druid, hunter, ranger) works. Basically the same as deity, but substituting a biome/planet/plane/whatever.
But what is a Shaman's "spirit magic"? What are spirits? How do spirits give you divine magic?
There's not really a definition of spirit anywhere I can find. It's used to refer to everything from incorporeal entities (particularly outsiders and undead), summoned creatures, and native outsiders.
Halp
I think that it's like with witch patrons, the identity of a spirit is ultimately up to the GM's discretion. I usually consider them to be some kind of powerful native outsiders.
For example, goddess Besmara is said to be a powerful water spirit who destroyed and consumed other spirits before she obtained divinity (spirits of wood, gold and battle are mentioned, Wormwood Mutiny, p. 69).
If that was the case then you'd essentially still be worshiping a deity, since the difference between gods, demi-gods, and quasi-deities is none as far as granting spells is concerned. But you don't have to worship anything according to this class. What would the difference be between a spirit and a normal divine entity?
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I think the idea is to make them ambiguous on purpose, so that they can fit in with the setting and the GM's plans. You could literally declare your familiar your means of communication with a philosophical concept, and get divine magic from your belief in that.
I seem to have a perverse wish to play as an animist shaman, who can literally declare status conditions like exhaustion, fear, and even blindness to be "bad spirits" and convince them to leave by making Diplomacy checks. Especially if another player wants to be an alchemist, and agrees to get loudly annoyed at how my shaman is wasting magic to cure problems in a way that shouldn't work unless you're wasting magic to do it.
Or you could take it as a literal mix of oracle/witchcraft, where they're the result of a divine accident who uses it to explore an abstract concept.
Hm. Ok. So I actually perused the >>Ask *James Jacobs* ALL your Questions Here!<< thread, and found two pertinent posts.
Hey James!
Question: there are several classes in pathfinder now that can interact with 'spirits'. There's specifically the Shaman, and then there are several archetypes of other classes such as the Spirit Guide Oracle and Spirit Summoner. However, the spirits themselves are not very well defined.
1. In Pathfinder, what exactly is a spirit? The existance of the Kami and the Spirit Summoner suggest that spirits are some type of exotic outsiders, but the fey are also implied to be 'spirits' at times.
2. Are there any bestiary monsters that are 'spirits' aside from the Kami? Perhaps the fey?1) Occult Adventures attempts to define this, but basically... "spirit" is a "supernatural force linked to a soul or life that is not undead."
2) Fey are not spirits. "Spirit" is a word like "monster" that doesn't have only one meaning, though.
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Also, I'd love some insight on the situation with a shaman's spirits versus their worship of a deity. As a divine class, is it expected that a shaman does not pay homage to a deity? Would this anger the spirits they serve? Or could a shaman's respect or reverence of a deity be what grants them access to their spirits? What exactly are the 'spirits' as shaman know them?
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Shamans can ABSOLUTELY worship a single deity, and it's not uncommon for them to do so... but unlike clerics and warpriests, they don't have to focus their worship on a single deity. They can worship a group, or a philosophy, or whatever. What spirits are are what they are—bodiless manifestations of energy that lie somewhere between life and undeath—they are neither, but bear features of both. Think of them as ghosts of things that were never born, or of things that never were going to be alive anyway (like rivers or the wind), I guess?
So that's actually fairly helpful. So to me it seems like a spirit could be defined as a bit of potentiality (since we know the soul cycle is not 100% efficient given how fey are made, this could be viewed as analogous to that creation process) that's not enough (whether due to quantity or some currently unknown quality) to form a full soul, but still has the essence of a "thing" (be it a creature such as a mammoth, concept such as battle, object such as stone, or whatever). This makes sense, as there's no quintessence for it to bond with like in the Outer Spheres, so again, this would be the Inner Sphere's analog. It's just not really sentient so much as it is representative. More of a force than an entity. I can understand that.