Siberian Shamanism

Siberian shamanism is not one tradition but the distinct living religious complexes of Siberia's peoples, the Buryat and the Sakha and the Tuvan and the Evenki, and the entry leads with that plurality because the details differ: the Sakha's layered Turkic cosmology of three worlds with nine levels each, benevolent and malevolent deity clans, the fire spirit as door into the other worlds, and the sky god at the top; the Buryat's ninety-nine sky deities and thirteen western master spirits, the stone cairns as offering places, the clan offering rites; the Tuvan synthesis in which shamanism is one of Tuva's officially recognized religions and its place-guardians and family protectors have been absorbed into Buddhist practice. The English word shaman is theirs, derived from the Tungusic saman, which makes this the tradition whose name the whole world borrowed.

The classic Siberian gate is the calling: the shamanic sickness in which the spirits torture the chosen person, tearing them apart and remaking them, the sickness persisting until the person promises to heal others, documented in the ethnography's case studies from a surgeon to a village priestess whose crisis came at thirty. Hereditary transmission coexists with calling, apprenticeship proceeds through staged ranks, the Buryat associations conduct initiations through nine levels of seniority as recorded in the nineteenth-century ethnography, and the drum is the vehicle, the costume with its iron pendants the regalia, the trance and possession the working state, the healing including the sucking-cures, the offerings made at the cairns with fire and libation sunwise around the pyre.

The twentieth century is the tradition's hardest history. Soviet policy treated shamans as enemies of the people: Tuva's 1931 census recorded seven hundred and twenty-five shamans, antireligious policy from 1929 stripped the clergy of rights, by 1937 only five monasteries and sixty-seven lamas remained, and shamans and lamas alike were harassed, dispossessed, and in the 1920s and 1930s sometimes executed, a suppression the Buryat record documents in the same terms. The post-Soviet revival is the tradition's present: the Buryat associations founded in the 1990s and 2000s reconstruct practice from scholarship and apprenticeships with Mongolian Buryat shamans, Tuva's state-funded shaman centers in Kyzyl serve a country where roughly half the population self-identifies as shamanist and half as Buddhist, and the Sakha republic made its summer festival an official holiday, with its spirit-house center teaching the white spirit teaching in the capital.

The census numbers are the hard floor: nearly half a million Yakuts, four hundred and sixty thousand Buryats, nearly three hundred thousand Tuvans in the 2021 Russian census, about two hundred registered shamans in Tuva of whom only a few are considered real ones by the traditionalists, and practitioner counts elsewhere unknowable. The tradition's contested edge is the critique its own practitioners make: Tuvan scholars explicitly distinguish traditional shamanism, spirit-chosen and hereditary and place-bound, from the post-Harner neoshamanism open to anyone, and Buryat practitioners call the big urban associations' work theatre, the same authenticity contest the library's core-shamanism entry documents from the other side. Access is gated by calling, heredity, and apprenticeship in the living communities, open in the revival context where outsiders have been initiated, controversially, and commercial shaman tours are part of the contemporary economy that practitioners distinguish themselves from. The library's neighbors are written accordingly: shamanic journeying and core shamanism as the modern syntheses, the Indigenous traditions as the sources they are not.