Siberian and Mongolian traditions

The traditions that gave the world the word — then had their practitioners shot and their drums burned, and are being rebuilt by people who remember.

What it is

The religious traditions of the peoples of Siberia, the Russian Far East and Mongolia — Evenki, Buryat, Sakha (Yakut), Tuvan, Nanai, Chukchi, Khakas, Altai, Mongol and many others.

They are not one tradition, and the differences between them are substantial. What can be said in general is limited, and most of what follows varies by people:

A specialist mediates between the community and the unseen. The role is generally not chosen — it arrives, frequently through a period of severe illness or disturbance that resolves only when the calling is accepted, a pattern ethnographers have called the shamanic illness.

The drum is central, described in many of these traditions not as an instrument but as a mount — a horse or a reindeer that carries the practitioner.

The world is layered, commonly into upper, middle and lower, and the specialist can move between them.

Spirit helpers are acquired, negotiated with, and can be lost.

Where it came from

These are old traditions with a poorly documented deep history and a very well documented recent one.

The word šamán is Evenki, and reached Europe through Russian accounts from the seventeenth century — travellers, exiles and later ethnographers, whose reports supplied the raw material for the European construction described under what shamanism is.

In Mongolia and Buryatia the traditions have been entangled with Tibetan Buddhism for centuries, in relationships ranging from suppression to accommodation to genuine fusion, and clean separation is not always possible or meaningful.

And then the twentieth century.

Soviet policy treated these practices as backwardness and as competition. Practitioners were harassed, arrested, exiled and killed. Drums and ritual objects were confiscated and destroyed. Practice was driven underground for generations, and in some communities the transmission chain was broken outright.

In Mongolia the purges of the late 1930s under Choibalsan destroyed hundreds of monasteries and killed tens of thousands, including Buddhist lamas and shamanic practitioners together.

The revival since 1990 has been substantial. Post-Soviet Buryatia, Tuva and Sakha, and democratic Mongolia, have seen open practice, registered organisations, public ceremonies and a generation of new practitioners — some trained by elders who had continued quietly, some reconstructing from ethnographic record, and some doing both.

How it is practised

This article does not describe ceremony. What can be said publicly and is widely reported: practice involves the drum, specific ritual dress often incorporating iron pendants and other elements accumulated over a practitioner's life, offerings, and the tending of sites — ovoo, cairns at passes and high places, at which travellers stop and make offerings.

Ongon — physical vessels housing spirits — are kept and maintained.

Practitioners perform healing, divination, weather work, and the accompaniment of the dead.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the traditions are genuinely living, and that this is a recent achievement rather than a continuity. What exists now exists because people held on through a period in which holding on was dangerous.

We can say the reconstruction question is real and is discussed within these communities. Where transmission was broken, some contemporary practice has been rebuilt partly from Soviet-era ethnography — that is, from records made by the same state that was destroying the practice. That is an uncomfortable inheritance and practitioners are aware of it. Whether reconstructed practice is continuous with what preceded it is argued about locally, which is where it should be argued about.

We can say shamanic tourism is a live problem. Tuva, Buryatia and Mongolia now receive visitors seeking ceremony, and a market has developed to meet them. Some of it involves practitioners with real standing; some involves people with none. Communities are divided about whether the income and visibility are worth what comes with them — the same argument occurring wherever this happens.

We can say the Western "shamanism" of the workshop circuit has essentially nothing to do with these peoples, despite using their word.

We cannot describe what practitioners experience, and the ethnographic literature that claims to should be read knowing who wrote it and under what conditions.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading