Chapter Eleven—
Shamanic Heartland:
Central and Northern Eurasia

Australia and parts of tribal southeast Asia are one region where shamanistic practices have survived down to the present; Arctic and sub-Arctic Eurasia from Lapland eastward through Siberia (and Alaska to Greenland), along with much of Central Asia, is another. Between these widely separated areas exist traces, in the China of Taoist-inspired folk religions, the highlands of Kachin Burma and Indian Nagaland, and above all (quite literally) the mountainous tableland of Tibet, of what may once have been a far more widely disseminated shamanism of prehistoric times.

The Antiquity of the Shaman: Tibet and Hints of Prehistory

Beliefs derived from the largely shamanistic Bon (or Bön) religion of Tibet prior to the introduction of Tantric Buddhism in the seventh century A.D. and its development into Lamaism pervade folk religion even now, to the extent that "the so-called Buddhist population is practically Shamanist" (David-Neel, 9). Here too we find the tripartite cosmos, and a legendary time when the king, at least, could ascend to heaven until the cord linking it to earth broke (Tucci, 167, 225). A detachable "double" may leave the body involuntarily to wander abroad in dreams, and the delog or 'das log^[1] ("one who has returned from the beyond") can

[1] Some Tibetan terms are given in roughly phonetic form, some in the wildly unphonetic Tibetan orthography.

travel in trance to far-off places. These include various paradises, purgatories, and the bardo, where the dead await reincarnation, as related in the Bar do thosgrol or "Tibetan Book of the Dead," a Lamaist book of counsel probably influenced by Bon shamanism (Evans-Wentz, 75). The Buddhist lama who whispers this sacred text into the dead man's ear is himself, like the tribal shaman, a psychopompos or soul-guide (Tucci, 194) who accompanies the dead person on his difficult path during the fortynine days of the intermediate state between death and rebirth.

Tales of 'das log returning from the beyond, which closely recall shamanistic journeys of the soul, thus reinforce Lamaist teachings (Tucci, 198–99). Grave sickness and hallucinations usually precede the trance in which the 'das log, believing himself dead, visits the other world, sometimes rising into the air on a horse which suddenly appears and takes him away under the guidance of invisible beings. Other Tibetan practices, whatever their source, reflect the shamanistic belief that the human soul may journey to far-off homes of the spirits in quest of superhuman powers. Gomchen ascetics can "kill men at a distance and fly through the air" (David-Neel, 42), and the rigorously trained lung-gom-pa run long distances barely touching the ground, even wearing chains to prevent them from floating in the air (210). The legend of Shambhala tells of a Pure Land, at once on earth and in the mind, tirelessly sought by those on the road to Nirvana in quest of a liberation that will eventually transform both travelers and the world (Bernbaum, 103). That Shambhala may be reached by magical flight on horseback recalls Central Asian rituals in which shamans similarly ascend to the heavens (165).

In the folk religion evidently descended from the pre-Buddhist Bon (David-Neel, 36–37), a male or female medium, dancing to drum and bell, trembles convulsively as a possessing spirit of the dead frenziedly communicates its wishes. In contrast, shamans of yore splendidly regaled themselves for bold flights on a clay deer or a drum, leaving no doubt, Tucci writes (241), of "similarities between the old Tibetan religion and shamanism; the ride through the air, the magical use of the drum, the calling back of the souls of the dead or dying." And even now, after thirteen centuries of Buddhism, the Bon sorcerer is in essence a shaman. As observed by David-Neel (38–39) among the "practically Shamanist" Tibetans of Sikkim, the sorcerer's "double" travels in trance to the dwelling of a demon holding a captive soul, then obscurely describes his fight to restore the soul to its owner.

With the gradual spread of Lamaist Buddhism northward to Mongolia and Siberia, not only those who adopted (and adapted) the new religion but others who presumably retained ancestral shamanistic practices were deeply influenced by it. Indeed, some scholars—notably Shirokogoroff—attribute not only the Tungus (Evenk) shaman's costume,

mirror, and drum but the word "shaman"^[2] and Siberian shamanism itself to Buddhist influences from Tibet and Central Asia. Given the wide diffusion of a clearly ancient shamanic complex from Lapland eastward to Greenland (hence far beyond Buddhist influences), this conclusion is untenable; but the undoubted impact of Lamaism on Mongolian and Tungus shamanism suggests a complex and reciprocal relation between them. For the Lamaist Buddhism that spread to the north had already been profoundly influenced, as we have seen, by ancient Tibetan Bon shamanism. Indeed, David-Neel (243) heard a learned lama maintain that bold Tibetan mystical theories of a "Short Path" to Buddhahood by direct ascent in this life are "faint echoes of teachings that existed from time immemorial in Central and Northern Asia."

In most of northern Eurasia and much of Central Asia shamanism has been practiced either as a component of tribal religion or in conjunction with Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism into recent times. These peoples of tundra, taiga, and steppe, whether Lapp or Finno-Ugrian to the west, Turco-Tatar, Mongolian, or Tungus-Manchu in Altaic-speaking Siberia and Central Asia, or the "paleo-Siberian" tribes (Chukchee, Kamchadal, Koryak) and others such as the Ainu in the Far East, have for centuries or millennia lived as nomadic hunters, fishers, or herders of reindeer or cattle; their shamanism, in contrast to the fixed rites of agricultural peoples, is a central expression of this mobile existence.

The profusion of splendid animals (and a few human figures in animal garb) painted deep in nearly impenetrable caves by reindeer hunters of Ice Age France and Spain tantalizingly suggests the existence of a paleolithic shamanism. Even evidence from Greek and Chinese writers thousands of years later remains too scanty, however, to allow more than speculative reconstruction of the religious practices of such ancient Central Asian nomads as the Scythians and Huns.^[3] The most intriguing ac-

[2] Mironov and Shirokogoroff in 1924 endorsed the derivation of Tungus shaman (which entered Russian in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) from Sanskrit sramana^[*] (via Pali samana^[*] ), a Hindu or Buddhist ascetic. Mironov, after Levi, thought the Sanskrit-Pali term passed into China (becoming sha-men ) through Indo-European Kuchean or Tokharian speakers of northwest India before the Turkish conquest of the eleventh century. Shirokogoroff uses this derivation to support his theory (127) that shamanism is "a relatively recent phenomenon" in Siberia, beginning with Lamaism. Elsewhere (1935b, 42) he suggests that it is only about two or three centuries old among some Tungus. Eliade (1964, 498), though accepting Buddhist stimulus, argues that Tungus, and generally Asian, shamanism "is not a creation of Buddhism ." Others, such as Diószegi and Hultkrantz, derive shaman from an Altaic root such as Tungus-Manchu sa^[*] or sa, "to know" (Hultkrantz 1973, 26). As far back as 1917 Laufer summarized arguments for a native Tungusic derivation bearing witness, he thought (371), to "the great antiquity of the shamanistic form of religion."

[3] Maenchen-Helfen (269) thinks it certain that the Huns had shamans, but the evidence he cites is the component kam (Turkic for "shaman") in the names of high-ranking Huns. He also notes that in Chinese writings kan (ancient kam ) is equated with Chinese wu, usually translated "sorcerer" or "shaman." References to Hun wu in such Chinese annals as the Han Shu (History of the Former Han ) generally emphasize their magical powers, however, and give little indication of specifically shamanistic attributes.

count is Herodotus's of the Scythians, a migratory Indo-Iranian or possibly Altaic people whose territory once stretched from near the Black Sea to the borders of China, penetrating westward into the Balkans and Prussia and southward, for a brief time, into Palestine and almost to Egypt. Some of their soothsayers, Herodotus remarks (IV.67), belong to "the class of effeminate persons called 'Enarees'," who suffer from what he elsewhere (I.105) calls the "female disease." After a burial (IV.73–75), the Scythians cleanse themselves in a vapor bath formed by stretching woolen cloth over a framework of sticks, and "inside this little tent they put a dish with red-hot stones in it. Then they take some hemp seed, creep into the tent, and throw the seed on to the hot stones. At once it begins to smoke . . . The Scythians enjoy it so much that they howl with pleasure."

Few though these details are, the androgynous prophets, purification by steam bath, intoxication by cannabis, and subsequent howling strongly suggest affinities with Central Asian, Siberian, and American shamanisms observed over two thousand years later. Transvestite shamans are found, Meuli notes (2:826), in much of Siberia and North America, especially among the "Paleo-Siberians" and Asiatic Eskimo; sweat baths such as Herodotus described are widely used by Native Americans for ritual purification, notably before vision quests; and narcotics ranging from tobacco to Siberian fly-agaric mushrooms and South American yagé induce visions throughout much of the Eurasian-American shamanic complex. And since shamans often act as "psychopomps," conducting souls of the recently dead to the underworld, Meuli plausibly conjectures (2:821–22) "that the Scythian too in his sweat-hut was striving for the same object, that his 'howling' was a singing-over of the dead man's soul—that the Scythian," in short, far from howling with pleasure in his primitive sauna, "was shamanizing."

Ancient Central Asian shamanism may have profoundly influenced religious practice in Greece, as Dodds (ch. 5) and Meuli believed, and conceivably in Persia, India, and China as well. Such heady speculations aside, we have clear accounts of shamanistic sessions from European travelers to the courts of Genghis Khan's successors in Turkestan, Mongolia, and China. "The oracle (cham) intending to invoke the spirits begins his sorcery and frenziedly beats the ground with a drum," wrote the Franciscan monk Ruysbroeck, King Louis IX of France's envoy to Mon-

golia in 1253–55. "At last he begins to get wild and lets himself be bound. Then the evil spirit comes in the dark, he gives it meat to eat, and it utters the oracular answer." Such an account, Siikala writes, "proves that the séance has in the main remained almost unchanged" for at least seven hundred years.^[4]

Subsequent accounts of Central Asian and Siberian shamans express intense fascination with their incomprehensible frenzies. Thus Richard Johnson (354–56) vividly describes the "devilish rites" of the northern Siberian Samoyeds whom he visited in 1556:

first the Priest doeth beginne to playe upon a thing like to a great sieve, with a skinne on the one ende like a drumme . . . Then hee singeth as wee use heere in England to hallow, whope, or showte at houndes, and the rest of the company answere him with this Owtis, Igha, Igha, Igha, and then the Priest replieth againe with his voyces. And they answere him with the selfe same wordes so manie times, that in the ende he becommeth as it were madde, and falling downe as hee were dead . . . I asked them why hee lay so, and they answered mee, Now doeth our God tell him what wee shall doe, and whither wee shall goe.

In the remainder of his performance the "priest" thrust a heated sword "through his bodie, as I thought, in at his navill and out at his fundament," and was decapitated (behind a curtain) by a drawn cord, his head falling into a kettle of boiling water. "And I went to him that served the Priest, and asked him what their God saide to him when he lay as dead. Hee answered 'that his owne people doeth not know: neither is it for them to know: for they must doe as he commanded.'"

With expansion of the Russian empire into Turkestan and Siberia, detailed accounts of shamanistic performances proliferated; and though some observers regard shamans as mere charlatans, others openly admit the powerful impact of their wild behavior on imperfectly civilized modern man. "Every time that here or elsewhere I have seen shamans operate they have left on me a dark impression which was long in fading," yon Wrangel writes (Oesterreich, 295) of his experiences in Siberia during the 1820s. "The wild glance, blood-shot eyes, raucous voice which seemed to come forth with extreme effort from a chest racked by spasmodic movements, the unnatural convulsive distortion of the face and body, the bristling hair, and even the hollow sound of the magic drum—all this gives to the scene a horrible and mysterious character which has gripped me strangely every time . . ."

Extensive observations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

[4] Siikala, 77, citing Charpentier, Vilhelms av Ruysbroeck resa genom Asien 1253–1255 (Stockholm, 1919), 258–59. Siikala (77–87) summarizes accounts of shamanism since the thirteenth century.

and ethnographical studies by Shirokogoroff, Bogoras, Jochelson, Sternberg, Anisimov, and others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, when shamanism was in evident decline, are central to the mass of materials in Russian, German, English, French, Finnish, Swedish, and Hungarian on which such twentieth-century scholars as Harva, Eliade, Paulson, and Hultkrantz have drawn for their studies of North Eurasian shamanism. From these voluminous writings one fact that emerges (allowing us to deal with Eurasian shamanism as a whole rather than tribe by tribe) is the extraordinary extent to which, despite countless variations, not only has shamanism remained "almost unchanged" in many respects from the time of Ruysbroeck (if not Herodotus) until its recent decline, but despite "the variety of races and the enormous distances that separate them," as Mikhailovskii (158) long ago observed, many of its practices are "repeated with marvellous regularity." Insofar as the shamanism of the hunters and herders of northern Eurasia (and beyond) has pre-eminently expressed the restlessly mobile, transcendently questing dimension of primitive religion, nothing about it has been more striking than its consistency and persistence in these regions throughout immense expanses of space and time.

The Shamanic Cosmos and the Imperious Call

The cosmology common to many North Eurasian tribal peoples comprises three regions linked together by a central axis mundi, whether pillar or tree, mountain or river (Eliade 1964, 259); though not unique to shamanistic cultures, it is fundamental to their view of the world, high-lighting the transitional place in the cosmos of man in general and the shaman in particular. Similar tripartite divisions are found in Tibet and as far away as Sulawesi, and some North Eurasian tribes, like the Chukchee, distinguish five, seven, or nine vertical worlds (Bogoras, 330). The sacred and profane, divine and human, are not opposed in insuperable dualism but linked by the axis that provides, for those between, the perpetual opportunity of passage between them.

In some cases the tripartite cosmos corresponds to a threefold soul; in every case a mobile soul is believed to depart temporarily from the body during dreams and illness and permanently at death (Harva 1927, 472–74). Because of this peripatetic capacity, those who inhabit the middle world can voyage to the heavens or the world of the dead: a latent potentiality continually impeded, however, by the limits of the everyday human condition.

Thus the Koryak near the Bering Sea believe that in the mythological age of Big Raven, "men could ascend to heaven, and get down to the underground world, with great ease. Now only shamans are capable of

doing it" (Jochelson 1908, 121). As Eliade remarks (1964, 259), the shaman alone "knows the mystery of the break-through in plane" and can communicate to those who have half forgotten it this transcendent potentiality of everyone who inhabits our liminal world.

Although shamans may perform priestly functions, Mikhailovskii observes (91), their chief importance derives from duties which distinguish them sharply from priests. Moreover, nowhere (apart from shamans who continued to practice after a tribe's conversion to Lamaism, Islam, or Christianity) do we find a sharp dichotomy, as in many cultures where spirit mediumship is practiced, between the shaman and a more prestigious guardian of tribal ritual. The shaman, unlike most mediums, is the supreme and often the sole intermediary between his people and the spirit world. On the other hand, although many shamans practice magic (often against shamans of other clans), they characteristically seek communion with spirits instead of attempting to coerce it through mechanical formulas; the shaman's performance, unlike the magician's, is in theory a venture in the unknown.

Shamanic ecstasy is no mere technique, like magic or ritual, then, but a transcendent ("ek-static") quest to restore the harmony shattered for the individual by illness or death, and for the people by loss of primordial unity with kindred spirits in the heavens and fellow creatures on earth. The widespread conception of a soul inherent in natural objects was closely connected, among the Altaic and other peoples, with belief in an inspiriting power identified as the owner or master of phenomena ranging from forest or sea to species of plants and animals. It was in general this owner, not individual members of a species, that ceremonies sought to propitiate after the killing of a kindred animal, notably, among Boreal hunting peoples, the bear (Hallowell 1926, 154). In the Finnish bear feast called "the wedding," Bishop Rothovius observed in 1640 (Harva 1927, 97–98), "when they capture a bear, they must hold a feast in the dark, drinking the health of the bear from its skull, acting and growling like the bear, procuring in this way further success"; similar rites are common throughout the Eurasian-American complex.

The shaman can mediate between men and spirits (of animals or others) because he has been empowered by his own guardian spirit in the shape of an animal or ancestral shaman, the two being not clearly distinct. This tutelary spirit or genius (often assisted by various helping spirits in bird or animal form) is no doubt, as Harva suggests (1927, 284), in essence the shaman's own mobile soul, a universally latent power to which the shaman intermittently gives rein, at the risk of madness, while others regard it as dangerous and strive to hold it in check. The secret language of many shamans, moreover, is frequently thought to be an animal language, and the shaman's costume may be adorned with bird

and animal features. Such costumes, Harva believes (1927, 519), originally represented the shaman's soul-animal, to which he remains inseparably joined long after the cleavage between human and animal has taken place for others.

Through the metamorphic capacity of the mobile soul, shamans are thought to be able, among the Koryak and elsewhere, to transform themselves into other shapes (Jochelson 1908, 117), above all into the animal forms they assume upon donning their costumes. Such transformations are a common motif of myths throughout the world; the shaman, even in a time when bodily transformation, like bodily flight, is no longer possible, perpetuates the versatility of the mobile soul shared by all animate creatures in the mythic past. "Each time a shaman succeeds in sharing in the animal mode of being," Eliade writes (1964, 94), "he in a manner re-establishes the situation that existed in illo tempore, in mythical times, when the divorce between man and animal had not yet occurred": the lost paradise of the dawn of time. To re-establish this condition cannot be simply to recapture a timeless past, however, for it is the capacity for inherently uncertain change that the restless shaman repeatedly embodies in his endless quest to actualize a unity with all creation that is now forever potential and thus forever future.

The vocation of shaman in most of North and Central Eurasia, like that of spirit mediums in much of the world, is not voluntarily chosen but "ineluctably and fatally determined" (Paulson 1964, 135). Predisposition to the call may be hereditary, but the "gift" is normally "accepted as a heavy burden, which man takes up as the inevitable, submitting to it with a weary heart as of one doomed. It is not the shaman who elects the protecting spirit, but the protecting spirit who elects the shaman" (Sternberg, 473). This call, again like the spirit medium's, is characteristically communicated by onslaught of illness, whose often bizarre symptoms led some observers to consider shamanism a pathological condition: epilepsy, neurosis, or "Arctic hysteria" resulting from long nights, malnutrition, and cold. Among the Yakut, a person destined to shamanism, Mikhailovskii writes (85–87), suddenly "gabbles, falls into unconsciousness, runs about the woods, lives on the bark of trees, throws himself into fire and water, lays hold of weapons and injures himself, so that he has to be watched by his family; by these signs they know that he will be a shaman." A future Buryat shaman, marked by solitary thoughtfulness, Mikhailovskii continues, "begins to have fits of ecstasy, dreams and swoons become more frequent; he sees spirits, leads a restless life, wanders about from village to village and tries to kam, " that is, to be the shaman he is becoming.

In these and other instances the transformation into a shaman is more protracted than the spirit medium's call, which may be as sudden as that

of the Ashanti who rushes wildly into the bush and emerges hours or days later as a medium-priest, even if weeks of disorientation and months or years of instruction follow. The shaman, too, receives training from other shamans, but it is typically by spirits themselves—above all his guardian spirit—that he claims to be instructed during his long preparation. His relationship with a guardian spirit of the opposite sex is frequently (like that of some mediums) a sexual one. Thus a shaman of the Gold tribe told Sternberg (476–77) of a spirit who approached him, on his sick bed, in the shape of a beautiful woman, saying: "I love you, I have no husband now, you will be my husband and I shall be a wife unto you." Threatening to kill him if he resisted, she has come to him ever since from her solitary mountain hut, sometimes as an old woman, sometimes as a wolf or winged tiger, "and I sleep with her as with my own wife, but we have no children."

In this story, as in many from Siberia, the spirit takes the initiative in instructing the resisting novice, who appears as passive as a typical medium. Sometimes, however, the shaman's vocation, though initially involuntary, takes on the shape, as he gradually identifies with the transcendent spirit within, of an initiation or quest for realization of hitherto unsuspected powers. In the vivid account of the Tavgi Samoyed shaman Sereptie Djaruoskin reported by Popov (137–43), the novice must find out everything for himself; hence the quest is especially prominent.

After Djaruoskin felled the shaman's tree of which he had dreamed the previous night, "a man sprang out of its roots with a loud shout," commanding the terrified woodsman to come down through the root. Like Alice following her theriomorphic guardian spirit in the ecstasy of Victorian dream, Djaruoskin noticed a hole in the earth. "My companion asked: 'What hole is this? If your destiny is to make a drum of this tree, find it out!'" Recognizing the hole through which a shaman gained his voice, he descended and saw a river with two streams flowing in opposite directions. "'Well, find out this one too!' said my companion." And so with every strange sight, Djaruoskin must divine its meaning and his destiny as a shaman. To the repeated injunction "Find it out!" he repeatedly gives the correct answer, which he had not known before. "You will be a great shaman indeed, you find out everything," the spirit says, clapping his hands,". . . since you have seen all these things": Djaruoskin's own wish is of no account. Finally (like Virgil crowning Dante lord of himself atop Mount Purgatory), "'Now that we have arrived here, I will leave you alone,' said my companion. . . . 'Shamanizing, you will find your way by yourself.'" Hereafter the reluctantly questing shaman will guide others on a path which he himself must continually discover, since it leads forever beyond him.

The Chukchee compare the preparatory period of a shaman's call,

Bogoras writes (421), "to a long, severe illness; and the acquirement of inspiration, to a recovery." The call may be reluctantly shouldered at first, but during his long initiation by a guardian spirit the shaman increasingly acquires the spirit's powers (which are those of his own mobile soul) and thereby control of the forces assaulting him. Seized by spirits, Krader says of the Buryat shaman (115), "he uses the power thus derived to seize the spirits . . . to his own ends." His hard-won ability to make use of his own affliction is thus the first and most crucial sign of the mastery of spirits that defines him as a shaman and enables him to minister to the afflictions of others. Therefore the shaman "is not only a sick man," Eliade rightly insists (1964, 27), but "a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself." By courageously enduring affliction and transforming it into spiritual grace, he becomes, to quote Lewis again (188–89), "the master of anomaly and chaos. . . . In rising to the challenge of the powers which rule his life and by valiantly overcoming them in this crucial initiatory rite which reimposes order on chaos and despair, man reasserts his mastery of the universe and affirms his control of destiny and fate."

Far more than most mediums, whose personalities are unchanged by periodic possession, the shaman's extraordinary experience sets him apart from his world. "I think it was mine," Djaruoskin says of a tent seen in his vision (Popov, 142), strange though it seemed: "I went in, not as a man but as a skeleton." This sense of no longer fully belonging to a society which he alone sees sub specie aeternitatis leaves the shaman a conspicuous outsider even after recovery from his initial "disease" has made him a socially honored (if widely feared) magician and healer. Despite the reverence, even posthumous worship, sometimes accorded him, the Siberian shaman often seems unhappy in a personal life "wholly isolated" and deprived of constant communication with human beings (Shirokogoroff 1935b, 89–91). His startling nonconformity is perhaps a counterweight (like the antics of the peripheral Pueblo clown) to the intense collective pressures of tribal societies: he is a "safety valve" (Shirokogoroff 1923, 247)not only for psychic maladies but for latent individualistic impulses of his tribespeople, which could never be realized by more than a few without shattering their unity. The Buryat are divided, Krader writes (132), between the aberrant shaman and the social conformity of others; the shaman thus embodies "transcendence by the individual of the social norm." As such, he remains perpetually estranged from the society whose need for vicarious transcendence he fulfills: a figure inherently in between.

One example of this transcendence of the socially given is the adoption by some Siberian shamans, especially in the Far East (as also among the Iban of Borneo and many American tribes), of the dress and man-

ners of the opposite sex: a potent expression of the shaman's self-transformative powers. By this ultimate metamorphosis he (or less frequently she)^[5] subverts the conventions even of shamanic society and endures the isolation of having restored, in a divided world, the longlost unity not only of human and animal, heaven and earth, but of the primal androgyne in which male and female, too, are one.

Ecstatic Ascent and Descent: In Quest of a Soul

The shaman's communication with spirits can be conceived, as we have noted, in two ways: either his soul journeys in ecstasy to the world beyond, or spirits enter and inspire him (Harva 1938, 540). These are by no means exclusive, since the guardian spirit may enter his body before departing as his alter ego: in this case possession or inspiration is preliminary to ecstasy. To the extent that the second way predominates, however, shamans may seem "entirely passive," like those of the Ainu (Ohnuki-Tierney, 113), and thus indistinguishable from mediums. Far more distinctive of North Eurasian shamanism is trance, ranging from cataleptic stupor to ecstatic frenzy, in which the shaman's own soul (often identified with his guardian spirit) in the company of his helpers, or these alone at his command, set forth to the spirit world in active quest of knowledge or to retrieve a soul whose loss has endangered another's life. In addition to hypnotic singing and beating of drums, Eurasian shamans, to induce visionary trance, frequently make use of stimulants and narcotics, including the indigenous fly-agaric mushroom, eaten dry or drunk in a potion and recirculated by drinking the urine. This hallucinogen, Bogoras writes (205–07) of the Chukchee, makes a man "unconscious of his surroundings, . . . walking or tumbling about on the ground, sometimes raving, and breaking whatever happens to come into his hands" while "the agaric spirits take him through various worlds and show him strange sights and peoples."

Despite the effects of this and other stimulants, the shaman is not typically considered (like the medium) a vehicle swept away by overwhelming powers but is distinguished precisely by retaining a crucial margin of self-control which allows him, at the height of seemingly de-

[5] On transvestite Siberian shamans, see Krader, 112, on the Buryat; Sternberg, 493, on the Gold; Jochelson 1926, 194, on the Yukaghir and Yakut; and Bogoras, 450–53, on the Chukchee. In much of northern Eurasia and Central Asia shamans have in recent historical times been mainly male. Female shamans are also found, though in general, Harva observes (1927, 499), "these can in no way be compared with the male in power and importance." As a rule, only on the outer fringes of the Eurasian shamanic complex (from the Tajiks and Uzbeks of Central Asia to Korea and the Ainu of northern Japan), in mainly agricultural cultures, have female shamans predominated both in number and in prestige.

mented ecstasy, to orient his visionary experience toward a purposeful goal. Anyone can assimilate spirits, Shirokogoroff writes (1935b, 50), but only shamans "can subordinate them to themselves, doing with them as they please." The shaman can be guided by a guardian spirit that is both within and beyond him only inasmuch as he does not surrender wholly to it; its very guidance is thus the proof of his mastery.

By this guidance, the shaman's trance becomes a fully purposeful quest. In initiatory rites of Central Asia, Siberia, and (as Eliade emphasizes^[6] ) much of the world, his journey often takes the form of ascent to the sky. The elaborate ceremonies performed by the Turkic Altai for their celestial deity Bai-Yulgen, for example, as described by Radloff (Mikhailovskii, 74–78), include ritual ascent by the kam of a birch tree in which steps have been carved. Walking several times round the tree placed in his yurt, he beats his tambourine while his body quivers and he mutters unintelligible words. In ecstasy he climbs the tree, one step for each heaven, thumping his tambourine and shouting. "The more powerful the kam is, the higher he mounts in the celestial regions; there are some, but few, who can soar to the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and even higher. . . . After his conversation with Yulgen, the ecstasy of the shaman reaches its highest point, and he falls down completely exhausted."

In most instances, however, the shaman's soul travels to the heavens while his body remains below. Often he ascends by his magical drum, painted with shamanistic animals or birds and sometimes depicting the sky above and the underworld beneath. The Tofa shaman Kokuev modestly told Diószegi (1968b, 311–12) that he flew only about four meters from the ground, "because I was a small shaman." Yet even at this far-from-celestial height he journeyed astride his drum to sacred lakes and mountains to learn from their spirit masters whatever he wanted to know.

Such ascents, in body or spirit, were among the principal means by which Eurasian shamans could gain and renew the visionary knowledge indispensable to their people's well-being. In their central task, however, diagnosis and treatment of disease, and in some others like safe conduct of the souls of the dead, their goal was usually not the upper but the lower world, to which shamans alone of the living could penetrate and hope to return. Entry to these subterranean realms (as to the heavens

[6] See esp. 1964, ch. 4. Eliade's discussion is dominated by the hypothesis (1961, 154) "that ecstasy as ascension preceded ecstasy as descensus ad inferos " (descent to the under-world), on the grounds that dreams of ascent are "universally attested" (are not dreams of falling?) and that flight is "universally known" in archaic myths (but so is enclosure in caves). To stress the temporal or theoretical priority of one over the other is to forget what Heraclitus (and T. S. Eliot and Eliade himself) well knew, that "the way up and the way down are one and the same."

also) might be by a hole in the middle of each vertically ordered plane through which the world-axis passes from the North Star to the center of the earth. Among the Altaic peoples, Harva writes (1938, 347–48), everything in the lower world "seems to be other," its day corresponding to our night and its night to our day.

The songs and ceremonies of shamans who have returned from this realm vividly describe its geography and its perilous roads over raging rivers or streams of blood. The Reindeer Gold shaman's itinerary crosses high mountains and primeval swamps until reaching the village of the dead, where smoke rises "and reindeer feed as among the living Reindeer-Tungus" (Harva 1938, 485–87). Many northern Siberian peoples believe the realm of the dead lies to the north, at the mouths of rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean or beyond the death-sea, and many in both North and Central Asia tell of an evil prince (Erlik-Khan for the Altai) who rules over the dead and carries off souls to his realm.

Nor is this mirror world a place of eternal stasis: it may be a beginning as much as an end of life, and thus a source of perpetual regeneration. Some peoples believe souls of the dead may be reborn in children of the same family. The Yenisei Ostiaks, or Kets, "believe that the soul can take up its dwelling, or live again in some animal, especially in bears, and also vice versa, " in a cycle of continual renewal (Harva 1938, 481). Yukaghir shamans often go to the land of shadows to request a soul for living childless relatives, or to seize one by force and put it in a woman's womb—though such a soul will soon escape from the body and return to the world below (Jochelson 1926, 160). Because of this dual nature of the underworld, some shamans not only escort souls of the dead to their future homes but bring back to the world of the living souls of the unborn. The other world of Siberian cosmology is thus no eternally changeless realm but partakes in a dynamic interchange of living, dead, and unborn, an interchange—pertaining to the future as much as the past—in which the shaman, both psychopomp and midwife, plays the indispensable role of mediating between the two worlds.

The most common reason for a shaman's descent to the underworld was not to escort souls of the dead, however, or replenish the living, but to retrieve the soul of a sick person feared to be in danger of death, or to gain advice from the dead on how to expel disease. This hazardous quest, in which shamans might risk their own lives, occasioned their most elaborate performances as well as dramatic accompanying narratives and retrospective sagas commemorating their heroic achievement.

Many in the centuries since Richard Johnson have described ceremonies for recovering a sick person's soul. Thus the old Yukaghir Samsonov re-enacted for Jochelson (1926, 196–99) the curing rite of his clan. After beating a drum and conjuring up spirits of animals and birds, the

shaman lay motionless while his soul descended through his drum to the world below; he then described his journey. Having crossed a river and entered the tent of his ancestors, he rescued the sick man's soul by force and stuffed it up his ear to prevent it from escaping. Finally, after two virgins revived him by rubbing his legs, the shaman, beating his drum and jumping, returned the soul to the patient.

The shaman frequently enacts his quest (commonly in a darkened tent) for his patient and others. Among the Tungus or Evenk, performances were especially stormy, Jochelson noted (1926, 199–200) after watching Samsonov's son-in-law "call forth his spirits with such wild onomatopoetic screams, whistling, grinding of teeth and terrible facial contortions, that the Yukaghir would be terrified." A generation later, Anisimov (1963b, 100–101) witnessed an Evenk curing session which he describes in detail. Swaying slowly to the drum, by a glimmering fire, the shaman invoked spirit helpers through song, vividly describing their responses. In the silence after the drumming ceased, "the voices of the spirits could be clearly heard: the snorting of beasts, bird-calls, the whirring of wings." Then to thunderous drumming and agitated song the shaman's animal double (khargi ) and attendant spirits descended to the lower world by the world-tree and learned from an ancestor the cause of the clansman's illness. If the shamanic ancestor failed to provide the needed information, the shaman sent his khargi to the supreme heavenly deity, the ultimate source of knowledge to which only he of the living, by virtue of his ecstatic vocation, had access.

So vividly is the khargi's journey evoked, with "comic and dramatic dialogues, wild screams, snorts, noises, and the like," Anisimov recalls (101–03), "that it startled and amazed even this far from superstitious onlooker." At the height of his ecstasy, the shaman threw his drum to his assistant, seized the thongs connected to the tent pole, and danced a pantomime illustrating how the khargi rushed on his dangerous journey at the shaman's command. While the hypnotized audience "fell into a state of mystical hallucination, feeling themselves active participants in the shaman's performance," he leaped into the air with the help of the tent thongs, imitating the flight of his spirits, "reached the highest pitch of ecstasy, and fell foaming at the mouth on the rug." Gradually revived by his assistant, he began to dance a pantomime symbolizing the khargi's return to the middle world. Then, rhythmically swaying on the thongs, he told in recitative of the khargi's deeds in the other world, reported the ancestral spirits' advice on fighting the disease spirit, put the drum aside, and paused; the first part of the performance had ended.

After resting, the shaman again seized the thongs and began to whirl around the tent pole in a furious dance, attempting to expel the spirit of the disease (Anisimov, 103–05). When all else failed, a contentious dia-

logue ensued, in which the shaman persuaded the disease-spirit to pass into a sacrificial reindeer; his helpers then showered the spirit with jibes and threats. Once more the shaman seized the thongs and threw himself into a frantic dance, accompanied by wild screams and snorts and flying coals and ashes. As the ecstasy of shaman and onlookers reached its highest pitch, the captured disease-spirit was defecated into the abyss by one of the shaman's spirit birds. The shaman and his spirits then returned to the middle world, barricading all passages from the world below. After sacrificing the reindeer and dancing through various heavens up to the supreme god into whose safekeeping he gave an image of the patient's soul, the shaman, in a strenuous dance of ecstasy, celebrated his triumph and that of his people over the forces afflicting them—the always-provisional triumph of life over death which must continually be sought anew because it can never be final.

For both shaman and audience such a performance is no mere theatrical representation but an undertaking demanding supreme effort and entailing possible failure or even death from loss of the shaman's soul. Deep trance, in which the soul is thought to leave the inanimate body for the other world, resembles a coma; Shirokogoroff (1935b, 76–77) found that the pulse of a Tungus shamaness rapidly dropped in half, while her body turned cold and showed no vital signs. "The shaman knows that his soul is going forth, he knows too that on its way back to his body it can be robbed or detained, he knows that a life without soul is impossible, and if he has convinced himself that it has really not returned, nothing further remains for him but to suspend the action of his heart, and to die." Knowing well that transcendence of the here and now is no trifling matter, shamans try to avoid going on such dangerous journeys more than once a year.

Shamanic Narration: Heroes of the Spirit

More than most priests or mediums, the shaman is frequently venerated by those whose aspirations (however worldly) he strives to fulfill through quests to other worlds above and below. His dramatic account of his adventures, in story, song, or recitative, was no doubt "a primordial form of poetry" descending from ancient times, and very possibly also, as Meuli suggests (849), a "germinal form" for myth, folktale, and poetry in general. In the shaman's wild songs, vividly describing the strange sights and adventures, trials and dangers experienced on his difficult journeys in the spirit world (Harva 1927,523), with their perilous battles against demonic foes, is one possible kernel of full-blown epic and dramatic poetry (see Kirby) celebrating the spiritual quest of the conquering hero.

No language of North or Central Eurasian shamanistic peoples was written until recently, but a large body of oral poetry from these regions has been recorded in which the shamanic quest is central. Unlike much early oral literature of Europe, Nora Chadwick suggests (1936, 291)—though like Homer's Nekyia (Odysseus's visit to the underworld) and some poems of the Elder Edda—oral sagas of the Turkic peoples or "Tatars" of Central Asia, as collected by Radloff in the late nineteenth century, relate, insofar as the distinction can be made, "not to the actual, but to the spiritual experiences of their heroes," and the search motif "plays perhaps a larger part than any other single theme in these poems," whose hero himself usually performs shamanistic feats (325).

The hero's career in these oral epics typically takes him over rivers and seas on a "hero horse" by whose aid, in Radloff's summation (Chadwick 1936, 292),^[7] "he climbs the mountain ridges which tower to Heaven, and finally he mounts to the very sea of the gods; . . . dives down into the depths of the nether world and there does battle with fearful giants and swan women." The hero or heroine of the poems communicates with spirits through music, the heroine often transforming herself, like some shamans, into a bird, the hero riding away, like others, on his magical horse. Visits to worlds above and below are common themes (302). Several poems describe heroic underworld journeys like that of the maiden Kubai Ko who visits Erlik, king of the dead, to seek her brother's head, returns with it to earth, and with the water of life restores him to health (306). Visits to the heavens are also frequent, especially by women, on horseback or as birds, with the purpose of saving souls. The hero or heroine of these Turkic epics is engaged, for the people's good, in a perilous quest open to all in those far-off times, but in these latter (and lesser) days restricted to the shaman alone.

Apart from narrations of their spiritual travels, made by shamans themselves and recorded by others during performances, accounts like these from Central Asia of journeys to other worlds are seldom found in the cultures of aboriginal Siberia. The impact of shamanism is evident, however, in the oral epics of such widely separated peoples as the Finns to the west and the Ainu and Manchus to the east.^[8] Prominent

[7] Chadwick draws primarily on Wilhelm Radloff (V. V. Radlov), Proben der Volkslitteratur der Türkischen Stämme und der Dsungarischen Steppe, published in 10 volumes between 1866 and 1907; this citation is from 5:vii.

[8] Shamanistic elements, including flights through the air and attempted ascent of the sky, also pervade the Tibetan/Mongolian epic of Gesar of Ling. "There is good reason to believe that the most ancient traditions relating to Gesar appeared among the Bonpös," David-Neel writes (David-Neel and Yongden, 19), ". . . and that subsequently a Buddhist gloss was given to these traditions" in an epic "impregnated with shamanism." In extant versions, however, this purportedly shamanistic substratum has been overgrown by lush accretions of Tibetan magic and Buddhist marvels.

among the fabulous adventures of the Finnish hero Väinämöinen handed down in the oral tales collected by Lönnrot as the Kalevala are descents to the dead in Poems 16 and 17 (96–112). In order to fetch the charms needed to complete the boat constructed by his magic singing, Väinämönen visits the Abode of the Dead where "Death's stumpy daughter," washing laundry in Death's dark river, warns him that "many have come here, not many returned," and lulls him to sleep. Escaping the river of Death by transforming himself into an otter and a snake, Väinämöinen warns against voluntarily going to Death's Domain and tells of the evil wages paid to wrongdoers there. He next seeks the needed charms from the long dead Antero Vipunen, who lies outstretched with trees growing from him, and when this earthy corpse swallows him, builds a smithy in his entrails and forces Vipunen to reveal the charms. Väinämöinen then emerges from Vipunen's mouth and completes the wondrous boat of his travels.

Despite motifs common to widely disparate peoples, much in these and other adventures of the Kalevala suggests that its strange heroes, "smiths, singers, and magicians," may in essence, as Meuli suggests (2: 693–95), be shamans. Their chief weapon is song, such as the "eternal sage" and master harpist Väinämöinen learns from the dead Vipunen through his shamanistic initiation in the bowels of the earth; and when he finally sets out in a copper boat "toward the upper reaches of the world, to the lower reaches of the heavens" at the end of Lönnrot's compilation (337), he leaves his harp behind as "the eternal source of joyous music for the people, the great songs for his children." In short, Meuli concludes, the adventure with Vipunen and other exploits of Väinämöinen "are shamans' journeys" like those known among the Siberian Samoyed tribes distantly related to the Finns.

Some five thousand miles to the east, on Japan's northernmost main island, Hokkaido, the Ainu epic tradition "is one of the richest and most interesting bodies of archaic oral folklore in existence" (Philippi, 21). Recorded mainly in the early twentieth century, when the language was fast beginning to vanish, these remarkable songs have unmistakable shamanistic affinities. Human, animal, and divine mingle inseparably in poems narrated, like shamans' accounts, in the first person singular, whether by a human being, a semi-divine culture hero, or a god or goddess associated with an animal species such as the bear.

Although the epic reciter, usually a woman (like almost all Ainu shamans), "does not go into a trance, the gods borrow the reciter's lips in the same way as those of a shaman" (Philippi, 3). Indeed, some female reciters double as shamans, and the heroines of epic literature are normally depicted as such (45), suggesting that age-old north Asiatic shamanism "is an all-pervasive influence in Ainu life" (27). In the poems,

shamanistic feats are performed by divinities themselves (the active agents during shamans' trances) or by animals incarnating divinity. Thus the Owl God sends Dipper Boy to request the Gods of Game and Fish to replenish the food from whose lack human beings—until they learn to treat the slain properly—are dying (111–14). In another song a shebear obeys the Fire Goddess's commands to cure a chieftain's daughter by licking her wounds and blowing on them, like a shaman (129–31; cf. Kitagawa, 119–21).

Clearly shamanistic though these poems are, they remain peripheral to our concerns, since the Ainu shaman's personal self is thought to be passively displaced by the god possessing her rather than journeying forth in ecstatic quest of transcendent knowledge. (The Hokkaido Ainu were not nomads but salmon fishers who in some ways more resembled sedentary agriculturalists than the restless hunters and herders of North Asia.) Turning to the Tale of the Nisan^[*]Shamaness —a Manchu folk epic dating, in origin, to perhaps the seventeenth century and surviving in three written redactions discovered in the early twentieth—we find a full-blown rendition, in prose interspersed with verse incantations, of the ecstatic otherworld quest most fully attested among the kindred Tungus who gave the shaman his international name.

Here there can be no doubt of shamanistic influence, since the heroine is a shamaness rescuing a soul from the land of the dead. In the longest version, a son, Sergudai Fiyanggo, is born to a wealthy village official, Baldu Bayan, and his wife in their fiftieth year, after the loss of their previous son in a hunting accident at age fifteen. When Sergudai reaches fifteen he asks to go hunting, for "none of us escapes the fate that comes bringing life and death to us all" (40). Fever suddenly fells him, and he dies. At the funeral, an old hunchback tells the stricken father a skilled shaman can bring the boy back to life: "Go quickly and seek her!" Having said this (50), he walked leisurely away, "sat on a five-colored cloud and was lifted upwards"; Baldu Bayan joyously recognizes that a god has instructed him.

A young woman hanging out clothes directs him to the other bank, where he learns that she herself was the shaman he sought. Having thus deceived him, she yields to his tearful pleas and begins her divination by throwing objects in the water and beating a tambourine while "the spirit permeated her body" (52). In rhythmic mutterings she reveals that Sergudai died when Ilmun Han, Lord of the Dead, sent an evil spirit to seize him, and divines that Baldu Bayan owns a dog born on the same day as his son. But as to bringing the boy back to life: "How will I, a small and weak shaman, be able to accomplish this? . . . What do I know?" (55).

Offered half of Baldu Bayan's property, she consents to try, and is borne to his house as quickly as if she were flying; there her old assistant,

Nari Fiyanggo, joins her. After she dons her shaman's garments, bells, and cap, "her tall, slender body waved like a trembling willow" as "the spirit entered, permeating her fully. Suddenly, gritting her teeth, she began to mumble" (57–58), calling for rooster, dog, lumps of bean paste, and bundles of paper: "I am going to pursue a soul into a dark place. . . . Truly try hard to revive me when I come back" (59). Her assistant begins to mutter, using the drumstick to conduct the spirits, as the shaman starts on her perilous quest.

Leading the rooster and dog, she sets out to seek Ilmun Han. A lame one-eyed man ferries her over a river, informing her that Monggoldai Nakcu, kinsman of the Lord of the Dead, had passed the same way with Sergudai's soul. Crossing the Red River on her drum like a whirlwind, she tells the gatekeepers, "I am going to seek Monggoldai Nakcu in the realm of the dead" (63–64). At the third pass of the underworld she shakes her skirt bells and calls on Monggoldai Nakcu to restore, for a fee, one who did not reach the full length of his life; but he scornfully refuses, saying that Ilmun Han has "made Sergudai his son and is raising him lovingly! Could it be possible to give him back to you?" (65).

The shamaness angrily says she is "finished" (66) if she fails to retrieve him. She bids her bird and animal spirits fly into Ilmun Han's city and bring the boy to her; they rise up like fog, and a great bird carries Sergudai away. Ilmun Han angrily sends Monggoldai Nakcu in pursuit, and after bargaining with the shamaness he promises, in return for rooster and dog, to add ninety years to the boy's life: "Until his hair turns white, his teeth turn yellow, his waist becomes bent, his eyes grow dim, and his feet begin to lag, let him urinate standing up and defecate squatting down" (70).

As she leads Sergudai back, a resentful spirit angrily asks why she has not revived "your dear warm husband who was married to you from youth" (71), and threatens boiling oil if she refuses. She quickly rids herself of him—"Without a husband, I shall live happily" (74)—and continues on her way, "now walking merrily as the breeze, now running quickly as a whirlwind" (75). She sees an ugly old woman, Omosi-mama, distributor of souls, "manufacturing small children" and placing them in bags (77); when the shamaness was born, Omosi-mama recalls, "I placed a shaman's cap on your head, tied bells on your skirt, put a tambourine in your hand, and causing you to act as a shaman, I playfully brought you to life." Omosi-mama shows her punishments of the underworld to instruct her in consequences of good and evil while a bodhisattva, by a bridge of souls, assigns future incarnations, from Buddhas to worms. The shamaness bows and promises to report these things to the living.

After she returns to the home of Baldu Bayan, her assistant revives

her, and she fans the soul into Serguddai's body, which awakens as from a long sleep. She then lives respectably, "making a break with all strange, dissolute matters" (88–89). When her mother-in-law accuses her of killing her husband a second time by refusing to resurrect him, the Emperor, in sparing her life, decrees that her shaman's cap and bells, tambourines and implements, be bound with steel rope in a leather box and thrown into the village well. "Let us," the epic's redactor piously concludes, "overcome and abstain from evil" (90).

Profoundly influenced though this tale clearly is by popular Mahayana Buddhism in important details—its descriptions of hellish punishments, its moralistic ending, and above all its need to declare shamanism a thing of the past—its account of a shaman's underworld journey is surely an authentic reflection of the far older Tungus-Manchu culture of pre-Buddhist times. In this vivid Manchu folk epic, as in those of Turks and Finns (and more marginally of the Ainu), an unmistakably shamanic figure engages in the central undertaking of shamans everywhere, the quest in other worlds for means of restoring human life in this one.

For this world, the here and now of immediate human experience, is not autonomous but can only attain fulfillment through interaction with what lies beyond it—with the transcendent yet potentially immanent worlds of the spirit. In the traditional cultures of these vast regions the shaman alone can bring about communication between them, thereby breaching the closure of a world in which man would otherwise be less than human. In mythical times, to be sure, there were others, as the quests of the Turkic and Finnish epic heroes attest, no less spiritually adventurous than shamans themselves, but since those far-off days when men could speak the language of animals, change shape, and ascend to the heavens at will, the shaman alone, in the solitude of his (or her) demanding vocation and the hazards of spiritual journeys on others' behalf, has made of life, in Shirokogoroff's words (1935b, 96), "a kind of hero's existence," continuing at whatever personal cost the indispensable quest for ecstatic transcendence through communication with the beyond on which the life and wellbeing of others depend no less than before. It is doubtful that any imperial edict will be able to silence this telltale drumming forever or dispense for long with the visionary services of some wise one (or fool) speaking with the indefeasible authority bestowed by cap and bells.