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.