Siberian & Arctic Shamanism

In 1692 the Amsterdam burgomaster and scholar Nicolaes Witsen published a great book on the peoples of northern and eastern Asia, Noord en Oost Tartarye. Among its pictures is a woodcut, much reproduced since, of a figure among the Tungus (Evenki) of Siberia: a man in a fringed fur costume, with an antlered headdress, beating a frame drum. The caption calls him a "Priest of the Devil". It is one of the first European images of a shaman. The word itself came from the same people. About forty years earlier the dissident Russian archpriest Avvakum, exiled to the lands of the reindeer-herding Evenki, had met these practitioners and written about them. Through Russian travellers and scholars the Evenki word šaman entered the languages of Europe. This chapter is filed in the prehistory era for a reason that is itself the subject of the chapter. For more than a century scholars have argued that what Witsen's woodcut shows, a person who enters trance to travel among spirits on behalf of a community, is the oldest form of religion, reaching back into the Paleolithic. Some take it further, to the first religion of humanity. The evidence for that claim is thinner, and more interesting, than its popularity suggests. What follows is the documented religion of the northern peoples of Siberia and the Arctic, then the argument over whether it can be read back into the deep past.

The word and the people

The English word shaman comes through Russian from the Evenki šaman. The Evenki are a Tungusic-speaking people of the Siberian taiga, and Russian and Western writers long called them "Tungus". Where the Evenki word itself comes from is uncertain:

• It may come from a native root meaning "to know".
• It may be a borrowing, through Central Asian languages, from the Sanskrit śramaṇa, "ascetic", a term used for Buddhist monks.

Both derivations have defenders.

Other Siberian peoples had their own words for such figures: the Sakha (Yakut) oyun, the Mongolic böö, the Sami noaidi, the Inuit angakkuq. Scholars have long distinguished within Siberia a Tungus vein of shamanic practice and a Turkic vein, among peoples such as the Sakha and the Tuvans, with many local forms besides.

What Siberian shamans did

The ethnographic record. Most of what we know comes from observers of the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries: Russian officials and missionaries, political exiles turned ethnographers, and later Soviet and Western anthropologists. The most detailed single study of the Evenki is Sergei Shirokogoroff's Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (1935). Waldemar Bogoras and Waldemar Jochelson, exiled revolutionaries, produced classic studies of the Chukchi, Koryak and Yukaghir around 1900.

The core practices. Across the region the record describes shamans as specialists who, by drumming, singing and dancing into an altered state, were believed to:

• Travel to other worlds. They journeyed to the upper and lower worlds to recover lost souls, escort the dead and negotiate with spirits for game or health.
• Take in spirits. They were believed to take helping spirits into themselves or to command them.
• Divine and heal. They divined and treated illness.

A shaman was often said to have been chosen by the spirits, not by people, and the call was frequently described as a crisis: illness, madness, or dreams of being dismembered and remade.

The cosmos. Many Siberian peoples pictured a layered world:

• an upper world of sky beings;
• the middle world of people;
• a lower world of the dead;
• linked by a world tree or a river, which the shaman could travel along.

Scholars caution that the neat three-level model owes something to the scholars who systematized it. It was not uniform across the region.

The drum and the costume. The drum was the shaman's vehicle: described as a mount, often a reindeer or horse, on which the shaman rode between worlds, or as a boat. The costume of Tungus and Sakha shamans was heavy with iron pendants, bells and figures of spirit animals and birds, with fringes representing feathers or bones. Donning it transformed the wearer. Reindeer were central in the symbolism of the taiga and tundra peoples: as mounts for the spirit journey, as sacrifices, and in the antlers of headdresses.

Gender. Among the Chukchi, Bogoras recorded "transformed" shamans, men who took on women's dress, work and sometimes marriage to men at the direction of spirits (and more rarely women who took on male roles). Bogoras and other early writers speculated that female shamans had come before male ones. That was a speculation, not a finding, and it remains unproven.

The fly agaric. Among the Koryak, Chukchi, Yukaghir and Kamchadal of the far north-east, observers reported the use of the fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria) as an intoxicant, by shamans and by others. They also reported the drinking of the urine of someone who had eaten it, which passes on its effects. This is well attested for those peoples. It does not support a general claim that Siberian shamanism was mushroom-driven: most shamans elsewhere used drumming, song and dance, not drugs. The American banker and ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson built on this record his 1968 theory that the Vedic god-drink Soma was the fly agaric. That theory is contested; critics point, for example, to the Rig Veda's descriptions of pressing and filtering, which make little sense for a raw mushroom.

Across the Arctic: the Sami and the Inuit

The Sami. At the European end of the circumpolar world, the Sami of northern Scandinavia had their noaidi and their painted frame drums, used for divination and for the noaidi's trance journeys. The drums' skins were painted with the Sami cosmos: gods, people, animals, the sun. Christian authorities treated them as instruments of witchcraft:

• In 1609 Christian IV of Denmark-Norway made Sami drum use punishable by death.
• In the early eighteenth century the missionary Thomas von Westen confiscated more than a hundred drums. Many were sent to Copenhagen, where numbers were destroyed in the great fire of 1728.
• Individual Sami were tried for their drums; the Arjeplog blasphemy trial of 1687 is one documented case.

The surviving drums have become objects of repatriation:

• In 2022 Denmark transferred ownership of a Sami drum from its National Museum to the Sami museum at Karasjok, Norway.
• The drum called Freavnantjahke gievrie was surrendered some three hundred years ago by the South Sami Bendix Andersen under pressure from von Westen, sent to Copenhagen and later to the ducal collection at Meiningen in Germany. It was returned in 2023 to Saemien Sijte, the South Sami museum at Snåsa, Norway.

The Inuit. Across the North American Arctic, the Inuit angakkuq mediated with the powers that controlled the animals, above all the Sea Woman (known in some regions as Sedna, elsewhere by other names), who kept the sea mammals in her home beneath the sea. When hunters broke taboos she withheld the animals, and the angakkuq journeyed to her to comb her hair and win their release. On the Fifth Thule Expedition (1921–24) the Greenlandic-Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen recorded the testimony of the Iglulik angakkuq Aua and his family, among the fullest accounts of Inuit religion before Christianity displaced it. Aua told of his relative Uvavnuk, a woman who became a shaman after a ball of fire entered her, and whose song "The Great Earth" is still recited.

Persecution and revival

Christian and Soviet persecution. Christian missions under the tsars, and later Soviet anti-religious campaigns, suppressed shamanism. Soviet policy treated shamans as class enemies and exploiters. In the 1930s many were imprisoned or killed, and their drums and costumes confiscated or destroyed. In Tuva estimates range from a few hundred to thousands. Some practised in secret, using cloth instead of noisy drums. What survived often passed through a broken generation.

Revival. After 1991, revival came quickly:

• In Tuva the ethnographer and poet Mongush Kenin-Lopsan, who had recorded shamanic lore under Soviet rule, founded the Dungur ("Drum") society of shamans in Kyzyl.
• Shamanic organizations appeared in Buryatia, Sakha and elsewhere, sometimes linked to national revival and sometimes to tourism.
• Western "neo-shamanism", above all the anthropologist Michael Harner's "core shamanism" (The Way of the Shaman, 1980), took techniques out of their cultural setting and taught them in weekend workshops (Chapter 35).

Shamanism has also become political:

• In 2019 a Sakha man, Alexander Gabyshev, who called himself a warrior-shaman, set out to walk from Yakutsk to Moscow to drive out what he called the evil spirit in the Kremlin.
• He was arrested and in 2021 ordered into compulsory psychiatric treatment.
• The human rights group Memorial declared him a political prisoner.
• In 2025 he was transferred to a facility in Yakutsk.

Shamanism and the deep past

The argument that shamanism is the oldest religion rests on four kinds of evidence.

1. Ethnographic distribution. Similar practices appear across northern Eurasia and the Americas, among peoples whose ancestors spread from Siberia. The genome of the Mal'ta boy, a child buried near Lake Baikal some 24,000 years ago, published in 2013, showed that a substantial share of Native American ancestry, estimated at 14–38%, traces to a population related to his. Similar religious practices on both sides of the Bering Strait may therefore share a very old source. But similarity may also come from similar ways of life, from later contact, or from scholars' habit of describing different things in the same terms.

2. Paleolithic art. At Mal'ta itself were found hundreds of carved objects in mammoth ivory, including female figurines and long-necked birds, probably geese or swans. Elsewhere, cave art includes part-human, part-animal figures that some scholars interpret as shamans in trance (Chapter 41; compare the San, Chapter 66). These readings are interpretations. They are persuasive to some specialists and rejected by others.

3. Burials.

• Hilazon Tachtit (Israel). About 12,000 years ago a small, elderly, disabled woman was buried in a Natufian cave with fifty tortoise shells, parts of a wild boar, an eagle, a leopard and other animals, and a human foot. The excavators interpreted her as a shaman, one of the earliest known.
• Bad Dürrenberg (Germany). About 9,000 years ago a woman was buried with an infant, an antler headdress and animal-tooth ornaments. She too is widely described as a shaman.
• Lake Baikal. Cemeteries such as Shamanka II, of the Early Neolithic Kitoi culture (about 7,500–6,700 years ago), show elaborate treatment of the dead. Their name is a modern place-name, not evidence of shamans.

Each burial shows special status and ritual. Whether that status was "shamanic" in the Siberian sense is an inference.

4. The Eliade thesis. In Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951) the historian of religions Mircea Eliade defined shamanism by the ecstatic journey to other worlds, found it worldwide and argued for a common, archaic source. The book made "shaman" a universal category. Later anthropologists criticized it:

• for building a single type out of scattered sources;
• for neglecting the social and political roles of real shamans;
• for spreading a romantic image.

Alice Beck Kehoe, among others, argued that the word should be kept for the Siberian peoples who used it. Others defend it as a useful comparative term, if used with care.

The believer's lens

For many Siberian and Arctic peoples today, shamanism is not a theory about prehistory but the religion of their grandparents, suppressed and now being recovered. Spirits of place, ancestors and animals are real, and the shaman's journey is a real journey. For Tuvan, Sakha or Buryat practitioners, the revival is a restoration of what was taken. For Sami communities, a returned drum is not a museum object but a living thing coming home. For Western neo-shamans, shamanic techniques are a universal human inheritance open to anyone. That claim is itself disputed by many Indigenous people, who object to the borrowing of their practices. These are religious and cultural positions; they are not what the historical evidence can settle.

The skeptical lens

The historian notes, first, that "shamanism" as a category was assembled by outsiders: missionaries who saw devil-worship, Enlightenment writers who saw fraud, psychiatrists who diagnosed "Arctic hysteria" (a supposed syndrome whose existence later studies question), and Romantic and later New Age writers who saw primordial wisdom. Each projected something onto the evidence.

Second, the practices themselves were changing throughout the recorded period, under the pressures of Russian conquest, the fur trade, Christian and Buddhist missions and Soviet rule. The "traditional" shamanism of the ethnographies is a snapshot of religions in flux, not a fossil.

Third, the leap from Siberian ethnography to Paleolithic religion bridges tens of thousands of years with analogy. It may be right in some respects, but it cannot be tested directly. No text survives from before writing, and burials and images do not tell us what their makers believed.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• The drum as map and vehicle. Siberian drums were decorated with figures, and Sami drums were painted with the Sami cosmos, divided into two to five levels or zones of gods, people and animals. A small pointer of brass or horn (vuorbi) moved across the drumskin as it was struck, and the figure on which it came to rest was read for divination. Some scholars have compared the drum figures with star maps. The drum was thus at once a map of the world, a divining device and, in Siberian belief, the mount or boat of the shaman's journey.
• The costume as skeleton and bird. Iron pendants on Tungus and Sakha costumes depicted bones, spirit helpers and birds. Scholars have read them as making the shaman a skeletal or bird-like being able to fly between worlds. The antlered crown made the wearer part reindeer or stag. The costume encoded the shaman's own story of death, dismemberment and rebirth.
• The world tree. The tree linking the worlds, or a river flowing through them, recurs in Tungus and other Siberian cosmologies as the path of the shaman's journey.
• Birds. Birds recur as the soul, as the shaman's helper and as the form of the journey: on costumes, in songs, perhaps in the ivory birds of Mal'ta 20,000 years ago. The last link is speculation.
• The Sea Woman's hair. In Inuit tradition the Sea Woman cannot comb her own hair, tangled with the people's transgressions, because her fingers were cut off. Her severed fingers became the seals, whales and walruses. The angakkuq's act of combing her hair is a precise ritual image: it restores order to the moral world, and the animals return.

Connections

This chapter sits with the Paleolithic (Chapter 41) and Neolithic (Chapter 42) chapters as a test of how far we can read religion into the deep past. It sits with the San (Chapter 66) and Aboriginal Australian (Chapter 61) chapters as another living tradition that scholars have drawn on to interpret ancient art. Its steppe relatives appear with the Scythians (Chapter 78) and the Mongols' Tengri and shamans (Chapter 81). Korean mudang shamanism (Chapter 71) and Native North American traditions (Chapter 62) are its cousins across East Asia and the Bering Strait. The Sami drum trials belong with the European witch trials (Chapter 32). Neo-shamanism belongs with the new religious movements (Chapter 35).

Walk this chapter’s room in the Museum (beta) →

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch75.html · a comparative library of the sacred.