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.