Historians of religion sometimes have a tendency to talk as if ‘shamanism’ were something concrete, thereby forgetting that it only exists as an abstraction and a concept in the brains of its students.
Håkan Rydving, ‘Shamanistic and postshamanistic terminologies in Saami (Lappish)’. (1987: 186f)
Even the most sceptical of modern scholars acknowledge that some kind of reality lay behind the sagas’ descriptions of seiðr, and that this can be approached effectively through ethnographic analogy (e.g Foote & Wilson 1980: xxiv).
The notion that some form of cultural affinity or cohesion existed between the peoples of the circumpolar region is a development of the early twentieth century (I have been chiefly reliant on Hultkrantz’s exceptionally lucid 1965 study for this early phase of research). Until the early 1900s there were certainly many working on this idea within limited geographical frameworks – across the Bering Strait for example, or within specific tracts of Siberia – but on a global scale the disparate strands of thinking within ethnology and what was then called anthropogeography were first drawn together by Byhan in his 1909 study of Die Polarvölker. He counted amongst this group the Sámi, Samoyeds, Ostyak, Eskimo (Inuit) and all the Siberian peoples north of Lake Baikal. He made a deliberate point of excluding the northern tribes of Native Americans, and this may have been a reflection of the early white American reluctance to acknowledge the region as a ‘culture area’ (as seen in Bacon’s work from 1946, though this position was not universally adopted – see Naroll 1950 for an outspoken alternative). From the late 1960s onwards, the ‘circumpolar’ concept was extended through the Canadian arctic and the northernmost parts of the United States to encircle the globe. All the peoples living within this area are conventionally included among the ‘circumpolar cultures’.
Scandinavia occupies a unique position in relation to the circumpolar region, as its main cultures span both the sub-arctic zone and the sphere of Germanic culture focused upon in earlier chapters. Although a more detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this book, we may also note in this context a different kind of overlap in south Scandinavia between Germanic and Celtic cultural ideas (Görman 1990). While the case for this can be over-stated, at some level it seems plausible to suggest that in this way the culture of the Norse found itself at the meeting point of three separate traditions: it lay at the northern periphery of the Germanic world, with southerly tangential contacts with the Celtic sphere, and – via the Sámi – in a major frontier zone with the circumpolar cultures that form the subject of this chapter.
This region is sometimes divided into the arctic or polar zone, with no warm season at all, and the sub-arctic with more than six months of temperatures below 5°C. The latter includes the taiga forests of central Siberia, northern Russia and Scandinavia, Iceland (which was once wooded), the Canadian interior and southern Alaska. Everywhere north of this area, including all of Greenland and northern Siberia, falls within the tundra of the arctic proper.
The differences in arctic and sub-arctic vegetation type and climate are important, as they bring with them the flora and fauna native to these environments, and hence determine the preconditions for human subsistence in these areas. Early attempts at matching this to archaeologically or ethnographically recorded settlement patterns included Ohlmarks’ thesis from 1939, mentioned earlier, which proposed an ecological model (see his maps 1–3), and Gjessing’s concept of the ‘circumpolar Stone Age’ (1944). Crucially, the study of connections between the peoples of the far north, which of course began long before the circumpolar concept was formulated, had from the beginning been rooted in a perception of their spiritual life: the complex of shamanism.
The French ethnologist Michel Perrin (1992:9) has called shamanism, l’un des grands systèmes imaginés par l’homme pour expliquer, soulager ou prévenir l’infortune. Et le rêve, lié à la maladie et à la mort, lui est étroitement associé. Shamanism appears here as an explanatory framework for reality, in which human aspirations and the need for protection are formulated in dreams and transcend the borders of death. How did this notion come to such prominence, how was it formed, and how can it be articulated?
When a dissident priest called Avvakum arrived in the lands of the nomadic, reindeer-herding Evenki in the early 1650s, having been exiled to central Siberia by the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, no outsider had ever heard of a šaman, let alone written the word down or explored the cosmological understandings that underpinned its meaning. By the time of his execution for heresy in 1682, the descriptions of his sojourn among the Evenki that Avvakum had published ten years earlier had already laid the foundations for what anthropologists would later term the study of shamanism.
Although Avvakum’s memoirs from 1672 included the first printed mention of the word šaman, the first account of a Siberian shamanic performance actually predates this by almost a century. In the mid-1500s an Englishman called Richard Johnson had travelled along the coast of northwestern Siberia, where he visited a people that can probably be identified as the Nenets (Hutton 2001: 30). On New Year’s Day 1557 he was an observer of what he described as “devilish rites”, and left a long and very detailed note of what he saw. This first appeared in 1598–1600 in the expanded, second edition of a volume collected by a much more famous man, the explorer Richard Hakluyt, but is today surprisingly little known. Johnson’s account is unfortunately too substantial to quote in its entirety here (see Johnson 1598–1600; a modern English version of the relevant passage is given by Hutton 2001: 30ff), but we can simply observe that almost all the elements that anthropologists would later ascribe to the shamanic complex are present, recorded by an uncomprehending Elizabethan adventurer in the language of his time.
Over the following two hundred and fifty years, as Siberia was traversed by missionaries, political exiles (often highly educated intellectuals), Tsarist agents and European travellers, more and more stories were recorded of the intriguing beliefs and practices to be found among the tribal peoples there: from the Nenets, Mansi, Khanty, Ngansan and Enets of the Uralic group around the Yamal peninsula, the Ob and Yenisei river basins and the north Siberian coast; the Turkic-speaking Dolgan and Yakut (or Sakha) on the lower Lena; the Tungusic-Mandchurian peoples of central Siberia, including the Even and the Evenki themselves; and the Yukaghir, Chukchi, Koryak and Itelmen of eastern Siberia and the Pacific coast, amongst many others.
The tales told by these early voyagers were startling, and aroused intense interest from St. Petersburg to London. Particularly influential were the accounts deriving from Joseph Billings’ maritime expedition that explored northern Russia and America in 1785–94 by command of Catherine the Great. Popular versions of the mission’s ethnographic reports were soon in circulation, and eagerly consumed in the courts and drawing rooms of Europe.
A fragmentary picture emerged of an ‘ensouled world’ in which everything was alive, and filled with spirits – animals, natural features, even what to Western eyes were inanimate objects. To such beings could be linked almost every aspect of material life: sickness and health, the provision of food and shelter, success in hunting, the fortunes of sex, and the well-being of the community. The maintenance of good relationships with these spirits was thus of crucial importance, and the most striking of the travellers’ stories concerned the special individuals who took charge of this. These people were seen to attain what we would now call altered states of consciousness, in order to send out their souls to communicate with these beings, to enlist their aid or bind them to their will, sometimes even to engage them in combat. The operative sphere of these people, whom the Evenki called šaman, was revealed as a world of mediation, of negotiation between the realm of human beings and the adjacent, occasionally coincident, planes of existence in which dwelt the gods, the spirits of nature, and the souls of the dead. The complex variety of equipment used in these ceremonies was also described: the strange headgear, hats crowned with antlers and fantastic arrangements of wood or leather; jackets hung with jingling amulets, adorned with fur, feathers and even the whole bodies of animals; the garments covered with bronze figures, bells and hundreds of long straps; the masks and veils; the effigies and figurines; and above all, the drums (Figs 5.1–5.5).
Some of this data was published and widely discussed in scholarly circles, and during the eighteenth century the Evenk concept of the šaman was taken up in Russian as a useful collective for the similar figures that were encountered from one tribe to another across the region (a process charted in Flaherty 1992: 21–66). The indigenous Siberians had no written language, and so the phonetic constructions used to record these concepts resulted in the term šaman or sama:n. This was soon normalised via Russian to the western European languages, creating the more conventional ‘shaman’. We may note that the Evenki pronounced the word with the accent on the second syllable, ‘sha-márn’, but the alternative forms of ‘shár-man’ or ‘sháyman’ are now more common. The term has also been taken up as a verb, in an attempt to render a similar indigenous use of the appropriate regional terms – thus in the secondary literature one can often read of a shaman ‘shamanising’. As we have seen in chapter 2, the same is true of seiðr in Old Norse.
The term šaman seems to have literally meant ‘one who is excited, moved or raised’, but also has connotations of hard work, tiredness as a result of exertion, and other aspects of ritual effort. Among the Tungus-speaking peoples there were other variants, such as hamman and samman, but in general each of the Siberian peoples had their own terms for the equivalent in their respective cultures. Among the Yakut the male specialist of this kind was called the oïun; for the Mongols he was the buge, a word also used by the Buryat together with bö; in the Altai and among the Tartars he was called kam or gam; for the Kirgis he was a baksa or basky; among the Samoyeds these people were called tadibey (Czaplicka 1914: 198). Interestingly this diversity of terms for male sorcerers was not found among their female counterparts, who right across this cultural spectrum were called by a variant of the same word: utagan, udagan, udaghan, ubakhan, utygan, utiugun, iduan, duana (ibid).
Fig. 5.1 A shaman costume from the Evenk people of eastern Siberia, from whom the term šaman derives; note the mask and staffs (after Gilberg 1993: 13).
Fig. 5.2 A female Evenk shaman, photographed in 1931 (after Gilberg 1993: 22; photo E. J. Lindgren).
Fig. 5.3 An Altai shaman (after Nioradze 1925: 88f).
At first, there were few that associated these individuals, and the role that they played within their communities, with ‘religion’ in the sense of an organised system of worship. The notion of shamanism as a collective pattern of belief arose first when the Christian missions began to seriously target the Siberian peoples for conversion, and thus sought to identify a pagan faith towards the overthrow of which they could concentrate their efforts (see Thomas & Humphrey 1994, and Znamenski 1999, for useful studies of church/ state perceptions of indigenous belief).
Fig. 5.4 The antiquity of Siberian shamanism 1: prehistoric rock-art images showing shamans with fringed jackets and drums, with close parallels to ethnographically-recorded examples from later centuries. 1. Oglakhty, Middle Yenisei River; 2. Middle Yenisei River; 3. Mokhsogolokh-Khaja, Middle Lena River (after Devlet 2001: 47; based on Okladnikov and Zaporozhskaja 1972, Kyzlasov and Leontiev 1980, Miklashevich 1998). See also Janik 2007.
In his book Shamans: Siberian spirituality and the Western imagination (2001, building on a shorter volume from 1993), Ronald Hutton has published a compact but nuanced analysis of this ‘creation’ of shamanism. Rather than offering new definitions or histories for the concept, Hutton instead provides a contextualised discussion of why shamanism has been interpreted in different ways at different times. The earlier parts of his study, summarising the politics of ethnography in Tsarist and Soviet Siberia, should be read by anyone interested in the shamanic complex. We shall return to this theme below.
This question as to the exact nature of shamanism has been central to shamanic studies from the very beginning. Already in 1853, the Finnish scholar Castrén challenged the idea that shamanism could be described as a religion rather than as a pattern of behaviour, and this debate continued throughout the late 1800s when the first major Russian works on the subject appeared. By the beginning of the twentieth century, this social, psychological and (arguably) religious phenomenon was already the subject of an established body of literature (see, for example, Shashkov 1864; Potanin 1881–83; Agapitov & Khangalov 1883; Radloff 1884; Pripuzov 1885; Mikhailovski 1895; Shimkevich 1896; Sieroszewski 1896, 1902; this period of early research is summarised in Hultkrantz 1998).
Fig. 5.5 The antiquity of Siberian shamanism 2: the dress of a female shaman from Ust’-Uda, reconstructed from a Bronze Age burial (after Okladnikov 1955).
Similar practices had earlier been described from other parts of the northern hemisphere, as for example in Schefferus’ influential book Lapponia (1673) that we have seen in chapter 4. However, it was not until the early 1900s that the beliefs of other circumpolar arctic and sub-arctic cultures began to be specifically – though tentatively – described in terms of shamanism. This development was largely due to the Jesup North Pacific Expedition and the publication of its findings.
This remarkable venture was launched from the American Museum in New York in 1897, with the objective of analysing early contacts between Siberia and Alaska, and in the hope of illuminating the possible Asian origins of the Native American peoples. For the first two years several American researchers conducted fieldwork in Alaska and in the Canadian Northwest, providing the primary ethnographies for the study of these peoples, to which we shall return below. At the same time a German team worked on Sakhalin and in the Amur region in 1898–99, while a third team of Russian scientists explored north-eastern Siberia from 1899 to 1903. The resulting work was published over the next two decades in a series of massive volumes which still form some of the most fundamental sources for the Siberian peoples (see Freed et al. 1988 and Krupnik & Fitzhugh 2001 for a full account of the expedition’s origins and composition).
The eastern Siberian work was led by Vladimir Bogoraz and his friend and colleague Vladimir Jochelson (their forenames appear in the literature as ‘Waldemar’, and Bogoraz as ‘Bogoras’, after the American spelling of their publications). In their youth both had been exiled to these regions for anti-Tsarist revolutionary activities. There they had developed an affinity for the Siberian natives that resulted in their choice of ethnography for a career, and years later they were hired by the Americans to conduct fieldwork focused on the Chukchi, Koryak, Yukaghir and Yakut (Sakha) peoples. The fieldwork was difficult and dangerous – Bogoraz nearly died – and both men were accompanied by their wives. While their husbands undertook field journeys to talk to Siberian informants, the women were responsible for amassing most of the astonishing material collections that can still be seen in New York today (for example, the Bogorazes brought back 5000 artefacts, documented 450 tales and texts, made 95 wax cylinder recordings, collected 75 skulls and made 33 plaster face casts, and made physical anthropological studies of 860 individuals – all in a space of 18 months). After the expedition, both ethnographers continued with their political engagements and were persecuted by the Tsarist regime; Bogoraz had actually been briefly arrested on his return to St. Petersburg in 1904. However, after the revolution their destinies were very different. Bogoraz (1865–1936), whose descriptions of the Chukchi are noticeably less sympathetic to them than Jochelson’s are of the other peoples, published widely and rose to become director of the Institute of the Peoples of the North. Here he established the first Soviet policies for the Siberians, that attempted to replace their traditional culture with a ‘modern’ lifestyle. Jochelson (1855–1937) also prospered, leading further expeditions to Kamchatka and becoming a director of the Museum for Anthropology and Ethnography, but in 1922 he became disenchanted with the revolution and left Russia for the United States where he lived until his death 15 years later (see Krader’s biographies from 1968).
The English-language publications from the Jesup Expedition, such as the reports by Bogoraz (1904–9) and Jochelson (1908, 1926), greatly eased the link to Siberia in Western research. In 1914 came another milestone, when the Polish scholar Marie Antoinette Czaplicka published her monumental survey of Aboriginal Siberia that remains a standard work even today. Here she traced a chronological evolution from what she called ‘family shamanism’, in which the rituals were organised communally and within the household as need arose, to the later ‘professional’ system familiar from the early European ethnographic accounts (ibid: 167).
In 1935 this was followed by Shirokogorov’s classic Psychomental complex of the Tungus. Through the early twentieth century the notion of shamanism spread slowly in North America, being applied to the ‘medicine-men’ of First Nations peoples, but even here the definitions common in Siberia were being adapted to local circumstances (e.g. Dixon 1908).
Although shamanism was widely adopted as a psychological and psychiatric concept in the years between the world wars, as Hultkrantz has noted, “it is difficult to find surveys of [non-Russian] shamanism before 1950” (1998: 61). There were, however, many foreigners working on the Siberian material. Finnish researchers were particularly active (e.g. Holmberg [Harva] 1987 [1915], 1927, 1938; Granö 1919–21; Donner 1922; Lehtisalo 1924, 1937; other significant Western works include Stadling 1912 and Nioradze 1925), while post-Revolutionary Russian research continued within the strict ideological frameworks of Marxist interpretations (see Hultkrantz 1998: 65ff and Balzer 1990). Until the fall of the Soviet Union, or at least the late 1980s, the division between Western and Eastern studies of shamanism was almost total.
Soviet writers such as Zelenin (1936, 1937, 1952) and Anisimov (1963) sought to explain shamanism in terms of a particular concentration of power and shifting control of production, with an additional emphasis on medical interpretations often based on notions of mental illness. The explanation of shamanism as due to a kind of ‘arctic hysteria’ induced by cold and deprivation was adopted with enthusiasm in Soviet Russia, where it became fundamental in the policies of suppressing this perceived threat of independent thought and spiritual allegiance.
The concept of arctic hysteria has long antecedents, and is found in some of the earliest writings on Siberia (e.g. Gmelin 1751–52: vol. III pp. 105, 379ff; Krasheninnikov 1764; Pallas 1771–74: 17f; Steller 1774: 279). Among the Jesup volumes it was particularly emphasised by Jochelson, and to a lesser extent by Bogoraz. The erotic overtones of this condition were stressed by several authors (e.g. Czaplicka 1914: 310f), and numerous detailed accounts of what anthropologists would now call spirit possession were collected not only from Siberia but also among the Inuit in Greenland and the peoples of arctic North America. Discussions of this phenomenon were relatively free from racist overtones in the early twentieth century, but by 1939 when Ohlmarks published his work on shamanism, the notion of arctic hysteria had come to stand for the perceived primitivism of the ‘lower races’ that underpinned so much of the pseudo-science of the time. Under the Soviet regime, the shaman as a kind of ultimate arctic hysteric joined the idea of the shaman as mentally-unbalanced psychopath as the preferred conclusion of ‘scientific’ reports.
Ethnocentric explanations were also given prominence, while other Russian scholars sought refuge in collecting raw data which did not need to be forced into an ideologically-inspired interpretative straitjacket (the research from this period is summarised in Popov’s bibliography from 1932, listing some 650 Russian works on shamanism; a German-language version appeared in 1990). The scholars who maintained a most strictly empirical line, and thus avoided the regime’s appropriation of their work, are now bearers of the tradition of Russian research in the post-Soviet era (e.g. Vajnstein and Basilov – see Hultkrantz, 1998: 66, for an assessment of these writers’ significance).
Long into the twentieth century the twin poles of discussion revolved around the definition of shamanism as either a ‘primitive religion’ or part of one – the crucial point being whether it was a self-contained system or a component in a larger pattern of belief. Terminologies were as inconsistent then as now, with a plethora of vaguely articulated concepts such as ‘religio-magic’ and ‘preanimism’ (e.g. Czaplicka 1914: 166, 168). However, even in some of the earliest studies it was clear that shamanism was also perceived as a view of reality over and above the specifics of its rituals. As Banzarov put it in 1891 writing about the Mongolian shamanism known as the ‘Black Faith’, it could be defined as “a certain primitive way of observing the outer world – Nature – and the inner world – the soul” (1891: 4f, translated from the Russian). This debate continues today.
As Håkan Rydving has noted, “historians of religion sometimes have a tendency to talk as if ‘shamanism’ were something concrete, thereby forgetting that it only exists as an abstraction and a concept in the brains of its students” (1987: 186f). The research history of shamanism in Western anthropology, comparative theology and related disciplines has been charted many times, and this is not the place for yet another introductory essay on the ‘meaning’ of this phenomenon. However, we can make a broad survey of the literature and the main trends that have evolved (Hultkrantz 1998 provides an excellent overview).
If there is one single text that has come to dominate perceptions of these belief systems in Western research, it is undoubtedly Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: archaic techniques of ecstasy, first published in French in 1951 and continuously in print ever since. Almost all subsequent work has been drawn into the orbit of Eliade’s book, and despite its shortcomings it is still the mostly widely-used work of reference for those working in disciplines outside the specific study of religion. This is significant, because in practice very few comparative theologists or anthropologists rely on this work any longer, partly because of the narrow field on which it focuses, and partly because it has quite simply been superceded by a great many other publications.
One problem with Eliade’s approach to shamanism is his emphasis on ecstasy and trance as primary requisites for a shamanic definition. In some measure this is still generally accepted, but at the same time there are also many variants of these traditions, even in Siberia, where the shamanic communion is constructed through rituals rather than directly altered states of consciousness; some of these are examined below. This focus on ecstasy, deriving we must remember from a work written in the 1950s, is also the primary reason why the modern, popular definitions of shamanism are so broad, extending far beyond what many anthropologists would accept.
Another result of Eliade’s work has been the common association of shamanism almost exclusively with healing, despite the very clear evidence of specialised practices for aggressive ends, and also the prominence of sexual elements in the rituals. Not least, such traits are so common among the arctic and sub-arctic peoples that it is these, rather than the healing functions, which might actually be said to be typical of shamanism in the circumpolar region. We shall examine a number of case studies below.
There are also political complications with the book, and in modern terms it must be regarded as a highly compromised text. Although partly a work of its time, Eliade’s survey of shamanic cultures perpetuates a very clearly primitivist, almost racist view of traditional peoples. They are consistently depicted as being at the ‘lower’ end of the scale in terms of ‘civilisation’, and their generally nomadic subsistence strategies are seen to be technologically (and therefore intrinsically) inferior to the settled, agrarian cultures.
In 1965 Åke Hultkrantz first began to develop his concept of religio-ecology, the notion of at least partial environmental determinism in the formation of the arctic belief systems. In this he followed Ohlmarks, but added that the ecological model was dynamic, “changing with climatic fluctuations and historical developments” (1965: 286 and references therein). He was to pursue this line in various parts of the world for the rest of his career (e.g. 1978), and it has since become a dominant model in shamanic studies (e.g. Pentikäinen 1996a).
In the 1960s, shamanism also began to be incorporated into synthetic studies of religion (e.g. Lessa & Vogt 1965; Wallace 1966), with important surveys continuing into the early seventies (Edsman 1967; Motzki 1971; Furst 1974). Even by this time, Eliade’s influence was waning among historians of religions, and in a crucial paper from 1973 Åke Hultkrantz proposed a new, generalising definition of shamanism that is still frequently employed today:
we may define the shaman as a social functionary who, with the help of guardian spirits, attains ecstasy in order to create a rapport with the supernatural world on behalf of his [sic] group members
Hultkrantz 1973: 34
The key element of this is the focus on spirits, and on the social role of the shaman, rather than the techniques used to maintain such communication – though Hultkrantz retains the focus on ecstatic experience. Hultkrantz expanded on this work with his comprehensive studies of Native American religion (summarised in 1979b), and continued to enlarge upon his perception of the shamanic complex into the nineties (e.g. 1993, 1998).
In 1978 a major contribution to shamanic studies was made by Anna-Leena Siikala, with her thesis on The rite technique of the Siberian shaman. This book was in some ways a kind of successor to that of Shirokogorov, in that it focused on the details of the shamanic séance, but her analysis of the neuropsychology of trance states was both new and revelatory. Consisting of a massive compendium of séance descriptions with an analysis of the different kinds of altered states of consciousness that resulted, this work set a pattern of combined neurological and cultural studies of shamanism that is still followed today.
The same emphasis that Hultkrantz placed on spirits as the primary motors of shamanism is also found in the influential work of Ioan Lewis (e.g. 1981), who argued that the behaviour of shamans must always be seen in the socio-political context of their surrounding communities. A similar view can be perceived in another suite of work produced in the early 1980s, with Caroline Humphrey’s outstanding and nuanced studies of what had happened to shamanic cultures in Siberia under Soviet rule. Her ground-breaking ethnographic investigations brought new insights into the components of these belief systems (e.g. 1980, 1983). In particular, Humphrey’s research focused attention on the shaman as one of a plurality of ritual specialists, and examined the transformations that took place in the shamanic belief system when placed under great social pressure (this is continued in her later work, for example her 1996 monograph on the Daur Mongols, written with Urgunge Onon).
In 1989 Lewis published his major monograph on shamanism and spirit possession, collecting his early work and pushing Eliade’s definitions of ecstatic religion into new territory. Lewis’ book was one of the first mainstream academic works to extend the shamanic definition to a global scale and over vast spans of time – a subject to which we will return below. Atkinson’s paper ‘Shamanisms today’ from 1992 also made an important contribution, in emphasising again the different regional traditions and perceptions that make up varying forms of these belief systems. Even within this broad understanding, Atkinson argues, the meaning of shamanism is entirely a matter of consensus, discussion and continuing redefinition. This extends to terminology, and we can speak equally of ‘shamanhood’ or ‘shamanship’, rather than shamanism (cf. Ripinsky-Naxon 1993).
In the 1990s Juha Pentikäinen, who has also contributed much valuable work on the Sámi, re-oriented the shamanic debate again. Much of this material takes an explicitly cognitive line very similar to the perspectives outlined in chapter 1 above, where Pentikäinen proposes yet another definition of shamanism as ‘a grammar of mind and body’. In this holistic approach, he emphasises the notion of shamanism as narrative performance, in which the shaman employs a deep knowledge of folklore and traditional learning within a diverse range of social roles. The key element is seen here to be the pact of responsibility entered into by the shaman with her or his community, and with the world of the spirits. This whole complex is encapsulated in the shaman’s function as a human repository of the knowledge required for the community to survive – culturally and spiritually as well as literally (1996a, the introduction to which provides a particularly effective survey; 1998; Pentikäinen et al. 1998).
Another dimension of this totality of experience was accentuated by Ricketts (1993: 88f), when he wrote of the shaman as a person who embodies the transcendence of boundaries. In the ability to enter the spirit world, the shaman has overcome the limitations of ordinary human life, and achieved a different state of being.
In all this work as in that of the preceding decades, the relationship of shamanic belief systems to their environmental settings remained of central importance (e.g. Jacobson’s 1993 analysis of a single deity in its ecological context). Alongside this, we can also trace a second strand of enquiry that explores the links between shamanism and another, equally hotly-debated anthropological construct, namely totemism (the classic survey can be found in Lévi-Strauss 1962; see Layton 2000 for a review of this discussion). Though the totemic concept is now rarely employed by anthropologists, the flexible nature of animal-human identities remains a crucial part of any shamanic analysis. The Norse beliefs of this kind have been partly explored in chapter 3 and will be considered further in chapter 6; we shall examine several circumpolar examples below.
Another key theme was the gradual decline of shamanism under various forms of cultural stress, something especially apparent in Siberia under the Soviet regime but occurring to a greater or lesser degree all over the world. The problem of what happened to shamanic societies when the shamanic institution itself began to fade was obvious early on, and had become apparent even by the time of the Jesup expedition. When Jochelson visited the Koryak, for example, he found only two shamans, and it was clear to him that their former power as a professional class was all but gone (1908: 49).
We have already mentioned Caroline Humphrey’s ethnographic work in this vein, but several other scholars have also explored the shamanic aftermath. There have been various terms coined for such a phenomenon, equivalent to the ‘postshamanism’ that Håkan Rydving studied among the Sámi (1987, 1993a). Rane Willerslev (2001: 49), working among the Yukaghirs, writes of a ‘shamanistic approach to life’, in which the roles and functions of the shaman become secularised but maintained within an approximation of the traditional world-view. Sometimes foreign religious elements, such as Christianity, can be imposed upon this, but are more often merely adopted in name and adapted to local requirements (see a range of examples in Pentikäinen 1998).
In an example from the more remote past, Glosecki searches for the same patterns among the pagan Anglo-Saxons, with what he calls the ‘reflexes’ of shamanism. These, he contends, “though fragmentary and widely dispersed, are too pervasive to be explained without reference to a vigorous shamanic tradition current at some point in Germanic prehistory” (Glosecki 1989: 1). For the Viking Age, this phase of shamanic ‘half-life’ is perhaps what was occurring in the early centuries of the High Medieval period, the time of the sagas’ composition.
As the study of northern shamanism has ebbed and flowed in popularity during the last century, three main forms of interpretation have predominated. The Nivkh ethnographer Chuner Taksami, himself an ethnic Siberian and acquainted with several shamans, has perhaps stated it best:
Shamanism is an historical phenomenon within a system of traditional faiths distinctive of nearly all Siberian peoples. Some people consider shamanism as a variety of primitive religion; others tend to think of it as a set of beliefs and customs centred on the shaman’s personality; and others still associate shamanism with witchcraft and magical spells.
Taksami 1998: 14
Retrospective reviews of these changing fashions of interpretation, and more recent responses to them, can be found in the journal Shaman, originally published by the International Society for Shamanistric Research, and since 2015 thriving anew as the International Society for Academic Research on Shamanism. The irregular conferences of these organisations also produced a series of influential collections (e.g. Diószegi & Hóppal 1978; Hóppal 1984, 2007; Hóppal & von Sadovszky 1989; Hóppal & Pentikäinen 1992; Siikala & Hóppal 1992; Hóppal & Howard 1993; Francfort & Hamayon 2001; Pentikäinen 2001; Hóppal & Kosa 2004; Djaltchinova-Malec 2014). Major synthetic studies have been produced by Saladin d’Anglure (1996), Bowie (2000: 190–218) and T. P. Larsson (2000), alongside two useful overviews (Stutley 2003; Dubois 2009), a Reader (Harvey 2003) and a massive encyclopedic work (Walter & Fridman 2004), with the addition of specifically archaeological explorations (Aldhouse-Green & Aldhouse-Green 2005; Price 2011; Gheorghiu et al. 2017).
One major trend however continues to polarise shamanic studies: the question of geographic frames of reference. Even now, echoing the debates of the early twentieth century, some historians of religion strongly resist the use of the term beyond certain regions of central Siberia. In one sense these objections seem baffling, given that the concept of shamanism has always been an external imposition. Quite simply, it does not exist, anywhere, not even in Siberia among the Evenki, who have no overall word for what the šaman does (though like several other Siberian peoples they have a broad vocabulary for the different components of the shamanic complex).
The concept of shamanism progresses through three phases in its transition from the religion of indigenous peoples to its employment by academics, and this trajectory provides the key to its validity as a category of spiritual phenomena. At the first level, which has only separate indigenous terminologies, this kind of belief system quite simply provides a cartography of reality in the cultures concerned. At the second level is the lexical process by which aspects of these indigenous beliefs are transformed into an anthropological concept – from the šaman and other similar figures to the notion of shamanism, as we have seen above. At the third level is the stipulative application of this concept, adapted and interpreted according to circumstance and definition.
Shamanism as an anthropological category is thus entirely invented, and in a sense the word means no more or less than what those who use it decide. However, the same is true for ‘religion’, ‘ritual’, ‘worship’ and all the rest of the terms coined to give meaningful shape to the intangibles of belief. Seen in this way, the use of shamanism as an analytical tool and a comparative vocabulary is no more controversial than any of these other academic categories which have also been the subject of continuous debate for centuries. So long as we understand the implications and frames of reference involved, then shamanism provides us with a useful terminology for describing patterns of ritual behaviour and spiritual beliefs found in strikingly similar form across much of the arctic and sub-arctic regions of the world. The essential question is whether we can truly speak of shamanism beyond the circumpolar sphere.
It is here that we enter a broader framework of interpretation, which moves outward from Siberia and the circumpolar region on a sliding scale of inclusion to embrace shamanistic traits in the ritual practices of South America, Oceania, Africa (particularly controversially), and ultimately the globe. Four scales of geo-cultural reference are found in shamanic studies, representing three different perspectives on these belief systems:
•the Evenki and some of the Tungus-speaking peoples
___________________
•Siberia
•the circumpolar region: Siberia, (sub)arctic North America, Greenland, northern Fenno-Scandia and the White Sea
___________________
•the entire globe
The first level is exclusive, culturally-specific to those peoples who actually employ the word šaman, and has no comparative focus. When the latter is introduced at the second level, a major paradigm shift comes with the acceptance of the shamanic concept as a research tool. The Siberian framework differs from that of the circumpolar region only by degree, as they both incorporate shamanism as an anthropological category within areas of cultural continuity. The next shift comes between the third and fourth levels, because a global platform transforms shamanism from a culturally-situated belief system into a generalising manifestation of human neuro-psychology expressed in localised cultural forms.
There are merits and disadvantages to all these approaches. A focus on the Evenki is unproblematic in one sense, because it deals after all in their own vocabulary of belief and ritual. Even here it is nonetheless important to understand that shamanism is an externally imposed concept. At the global level, a viewpoint of which Piers Vitebsky’s work is probably most representative (1995), comes the risk of diluting the shamanic concept through its adaptation to ever more diverse situations. In many cases this is still rooted in scholarly discussion, but in the broadest and most popular understanding ‘shamanism’ has latterly come to cover virtually any kind of belief in spirits and the existence of other worlds, states of being or planes of consciousness – a definition that of course encompasses the majority of the world’s religions, organised or otherwise, ancient and modern. In this context the term ‘shaman’ has similarly been used to refer to almost any kind of mediator, in any kind of medium, between one perception of the world and another. As a result, those popularly described as shamans have included an astonishing variety of individuals ranging from Jesus to Jim Morrison.
These are not the shamanisms that we shall consider here. Some would argue that this plurality of meaning invalidates the shamanic concept (e.g. Näsström 2002a: 61), and that the application of shamanic terminology actually hinders understanding rather than providing it. In fact, the problems of divergent definition in no way disprove the notion of ‘shamanism’ as a consistent cultural response to sensory products of the human nervous system, nor is this watering-down of the term inevitable. Instead I follow the general direction taken by related academic disciplines, as summarised by Mathias Guenther: “the view held generally by scholars in the anthropology of religion and in comparative religion [is] that shamanism is a religious phenomenon that can be formally delineated and differentiated from other, more complex religions” (1999: 426). The vital point is that emphasised by Michel Perrin (1992), and relates to careful definition as the key to the employment of a shamanic metaphor. In this sense, three attitudes can be discerned among those working with the concept of shamanism:
•those who avoid the term entirely
•those who use it uncritically or in a loose sense
•those who use it in a defined sense
If definition is crucial, then we need to examine some of the components of the shamanic world-view, focusing on material relevant to the discussions of the two preceding chapters. In the following sections we will examine a range of examples, deliberately spread across the circumpolar region to emphasise the comparative links with Scandinavia and the unifying aspects of the arctic cultural sphere.
We can approach this in stages, beginning with cosmology and the tier of worlds, and the axis on which they turn. From this we can move to the spiritual inhabitants of these realms, the idea of animism and the ensouled world.
The World Tree, the ash Yggdrasill, is perhaps the most easily paralleled element of the Norse cosmology, as the idea of a number of layered realms of existence linked by a single axle is found in many northern religions. Åke Hultkrantz has effectively summarised the common aspects of these beliefs:
[T]he world tree, a symbolic representation of the sacred centre of the world, … an axis that measures the three main rooms of the world (and their subdivisions into a great plurality of rooms): heaven, earth and underworld. The tree runs through all these worlds, and is a means of communications between them, used by spirits and shamans. In Siberia shamans may have their own trees which are representatives of the world tree, and which they may climb. Sometimes the tree is marked to indicate seven, nine, or up to thirty levels in the sky. … The tree is often crowned by a bird, usually an eagle (like the Russian imperial double eagle in Siberia, the thunderbird in North America). … The tree of life and tree of knowledge are variations of the world tree idea.
Hultkrantz 1996: 42
We have already seen how the Norse worlds extended both above and below the abode of human beings, the nine roots of the tree, and the eagle at the top of Yggdrasill.
Parallels are often sought for the Norse World Tree in Siberia and the Far East, but in fact they can be found much closer to Scandinavia in the Finno-Ugrian cultures of the Baltic littoral. The Great Oak is a creation symbol found particularly in Estonia, where it appears first as an image of destruction and is subsequently cut down to give new life in the form of objects that spring ready-formed from the tree. The Votes, who lived on the Gulf of Finland around the area of the modern Estonian-Russian border, also believed in the Great Oak, though there it sometimes also appeared as a pine. At the blows of a hero-ancestor’s axe, from the trunk of the tree sprung once more the archetypes of various objects, here linked to the cult of the warrior elite:
| Lõi lasuu, laiva süntü, | He hit once, a boat was born | |
| lõi tõizõõ, tõinõ süntü. | he hit twice, two boats were born: | |
| Ladvas tiemma lavvikkõisia | from the top we made benches | |
| õhsõis sõtisatulõi | from the branches war-saddles | |
| vääriis õhsõis värttäniit. | from crooked branches distaffs. |
Text and translation, Honko et al 1994: 101
A similar creation myth, involving saplings around a tree-stump, is found to the east of the Votes, among the Ingrian peoples on the Russian marches (see Honko et al. 1994: 99–102).
The same tree is recorded in Karelian traditions, where its branches block the light of the sun and moon, and its shadow brings cold that withers the crops. It is felled as in the other myths, but here the fallen trunk forms a bridge between the worlds to a particularly terrifying aspect of the realm of the dead:
| Jo on tammi koatunenne | Now the oak tree had been felled |
| pikki Pohjoisen jovesta | across Pohjoinen’s river |
| sillaksi ikusijahe | a bridge to the timeless place |
| männä miehem matkalaisen | for the traveller to go |
| pimiäh om Pohjolahe | a man to dark Pohjola |
| miesten syöpähä kylähe | to the man-eating village |
| urosten uponnehehe. | the village that drowns heroes. |
Text and translation, Honko et al 1994: 99
In Finland, the leaves of the tree hold the souls of the unborn. A similar version of the tree, in this instance a birch, is found in another Finno-Ugric culture, that of the Mordvin of Hungary. The birch shuts out the light until it is split, the halves of the trunk falling one to the east and one to the west, continuing the metaphor of a bridge to other places (Honko et al. 1994: 97f).
In Eurasian belief the tree is the medium by which the shaman travels from one world to another, climbing its trunk to another plane of existence. Sometimes each world has its own tree, and the realms are linked by a succession of them on top of one another; sometimes each world is a branch from the trunk, or a notch cut into it. In examples with a single tree, the roots become especially important, and it is these that the shaman follows on his or her journeys (the classic work on this is Holmberg [Harva]’s 1923 survey of tree cults; see especially pp. 135–44).
Similar patterns are found in reverse, in relation to the inverted tree. This is also found in Siberia, where it occurs again as a shamanic symbol representing the path of ascent for the shaman’s soul to the other worlds, and/or a protection for the shaman’s dwelling; the roots are the main paths taken by the travelling spirit (Kagarov 1929; Indian parallels for this are discussed by Coomaraswamy 1938, and Edsman 1944 provides a very broad set of interpretations in primarily Judaeo-Christian and Arabic contexts). In 1999 these arguments were given new lease of chronological life by the unparalleled find of a fully preserved Bronze Age timber circle exposed by shifting sand in the inter-tidal zone at Holme-Next-The-Sea in eastern England. At the centre of the circle an inverted tree had been deliberately driven down into the sand, leaving the roots exposed (Pryor 2001). The discovery of ‘Seahenge’ has been subject to widely varying interpretations, but the parallels with the tree mythology of the circumpolar region are striking and have been a consistent feature of the excavators’ speculations as to the meaning of the monument.
The idea of the World Pillar is another similar concept found in the same region, probably originally separate but later conflated with the tree in many traditions. The pillar was thought to hold up the sky, sometimes combined with an idea of the World Nail which seems to have represented the polar star; if the pillar fell, the world would end (see the range of circumpolar examples in Holmberg 1923: 9–33, 133–46; Tolley also provides an extensive study of Finnish beliefs in the world support, 1995b). Again the pillar or nail is divided into tiers or levels, which are often conceptualised in a series of ascending stages, and – significantly in a Norse context – these are often nine in number. For example, among the Dolgan of northern Siberia east of the Yenisei their shamans ascend through nine levels of worlds, each represented by wooden images used in the rituals accompanying the spirit journeys (Holmberg 1923: 145, Fig. 50). The neighbouring Yakut people conceptualise their sacrifices to the spirits in a similar way, and tether the animal offerings to a linked series of nine poles symbolising the worlds through which they will pass (ibid: 144, Fig. 49).
In some of the Canadian Northwest Coast cultures, the world axis is represented by Cane-Of-The-Sky, a straight reed linking the worlds. It is sometimes symbolised by shamans’ staffs, or even carved directly on totem poles. An outstanding example is the Kwahsuh pole erected around 1870 at Angidah on the Nass River, commemorating a chief of the Nisga’a Wolf lineage (Barbeau 1950a: 229–32; Laforet 1992: 48). The base of the pole is formed by Grizzly Bear, holding figures representing All Children of the Grizzly Bear and the People of the Smokehole, surmounted by the totems of Chief of the Wolves and Split Person. The entire upper half of the pole is a representation of the world axis, faceted like a reed, and bracketed at each end by burial boxes for chiefly ancestors to the pole’s patron (cf. other poles such as ‘Spearing-The-Sky’, Barbeau 1950b: 445).
In other areas the pillar and tree are combined, or made of other materials such as stone or metal. Sometimes the pillar extends into the underworld, or in some cases it is only there, supporting the living worlds above it. In still other cultures it rests on the body of a supernatural being. The pillar is conceptualised as the main pole of a house, carrying the weight of the sky like a roof.
Holmberg’s work on these beliefs has been recently analysed by Åke Hultkrantz in a 1996 essay, with an excellent history of research in this field (ibid: 32ff). Hultkrantz also makes a complete survey of these beliefs in the circumpolar and Eurasian area, comparing the pillar with the tree, and arriving at the following cultural distribution for each category (ibid: 35):
•Europe
○World Tree: Cheremisses, Karelians, Mordvin, Viking-Age Scandinavians, Votes
○World Pillar: Finns
○Both tree and pillar: Estonians, Sámi, Samoyeds
•Asia
○World Tree: Tungus
○World Pillar: Ainu, Altai, Buryats, Dolgans, Mansi, Mongols, Orotchi, Teleuts, Yakuts
○Both tree and pillar: Khanty
•North America
○World Tree: Timucua
○World Pillar: Creek, Great Basin Numic, Haida, Hare, Inuit, Kalispel, Kaska, Nuxalk, Okanagon, Omaha, Sanpoil, Tahltan, Thompson Indians, Tlingit, Tshimshian
○Both tree and pillar: Delaware, Kwakwaka’wakw, Plains tribes
These comparisons are of course at a relatively coarse level, obscuring the regional differences in the mythologies. However, closer inspection reveals an astonishing correspondence between the cosmological beliefs of widely geographically separated areas. We can take a single example of this, in the work of Karl Schlesier on Tsistsista (Cheyenne) religion on the northern American Plains. Produced in collaboration with Tsistsista maheonhetaneo, ‘persons working for the sacred’, this is a very careful piece of research in which Schlesier deliberately highlights the range of ritual specialists and uses the indigenous terms for them. He published a nuanced, carefully considered study of a people’s conceptions of the holy, using ‘shamanism’ when appropriate to describe elements common in circumpolar belief, and discarding it when not. As part of this study he compared Tsistsista spiritual practices with those of the northern Siberian peoples, and noted some 108 directly identical features (Schlesier 1987: 45–9). It must be stressed that these were not vague concepts, such as worshipping the sun, but specifics: the centre of the spirit lodge in which ceremonies are performed has a pole symbolising the World Tree, on which seven divisions are marked; the vault of heaven is conceptualised as a kettle; the crane is a sacred bird of the world above, and so on.
As Hultkrantz emphasises (1996: 43), although the pillar and tree are found in some Middle Eastern cultures, it is almost universal in the far north and would also seem to fit this area better. The idea of the long arctic night turning on the axis of the pole star, in a landscape of endless trees or snow, is a perfect environment from which such a view of the cosmos could have emerged. He also argues for a very ancient tradition for this concept:
The world pillar, we may insist, genuinely represents an archaic, circumpolar world-view. Since circumpolar culture, besides being an adaptation to the Arctic and sub-Arctic environment, typifies a culture of mesolithic-palaeolithic origins it seems probable that the world pillar and associated mythic-ritual complex may be traced back to this time and age.
Hultkrantz 1996: 43
We shall return below to the idea of shamanism as the ‘primal religion’, but for now we can merely note the unquestionable circumpolar context of the Norse cosmology, and remember all the links that we have seen between the world of Yggdrasill and the sorcerous practices of Óðinn. From the form of these worlds, we can move on to their inhabitants and examine the spirit population of the circumpolar region.
For most of the Siberian peoples, as well as those of the Canadian and Greenlandic arctic, their physical environment was filled by uncountable spirits of different kinds – some hostile, some benevolent, other monstrous beyond description (a useful overview is presented by the papers in Yamada & Irimoto 1997; for the spirits’ appearance in different cultural contexts see Bogoraz 1904–9: 285–307, who includes Chukchi sketches of some of these beings, and Rasmussen 1929 for similar East Greenland Inuit drawings of trance visions, a number of which are also reproduced in Gilberg 1993 and Vitebsky 1995; Fig. 5.6).
Fig. 5.6 A drawing by Kârale Andreassen, an Inuit from east Greenland, depicting the visions of his father who was a shaman. Here the helping spirit Âjumâq, whose touch brings death, is entering a dwelling. The shamans standing on the sleeping pallets are trying to keep the spirit under control (from the collections of the National Museum of Denmark, København).
These spirits were thought to be present as a form of consciousness residing in all things – whether human, animal, vegetable or mineral. These represent the ‘essence’ of the thing in question, embodying the qualities that make the thing what it is. Thus a bear spirit is big and fierce, while that of a mouse is small and timid, but has other characteristics like being able to go into tiny spaces where a bear spirit could not (cf. Vitebsky 1995: 12ff). Within the shamanic world-view objects too can be conceived of in this way, so the spirit of a knife cuts, the spirit of a pot contains, and so on. These spirits lead their own independent lives with their own needs and emotions, but can also interact with humans in both positive and negative ways. They are a fundamental part of the cosmic harmony, in effect a sort of sentient ecology, and form an integral part of the structure which the shamans must engage with on their journeys between the worlds. This combined network of supernatural forces forms a kind of sacred geography, in which the habitus of the community embodies spatial perceptions with spiritual meaning (see Jordan 2001a for an example of this among the Khanty).
In a completely literal sense this spirit world, and the fluidity of form within it, was omnipresent throughout the circumpolar area, and manifested constantly in material culture. A classic description of this conception of reality was recorded by Bogoraz during his exile in north-eastern Siberia in the late 1800s, when a Chukchi shaman made the following statement:
On the steep bank of a river there exists life. A voice is there, and speaks aloud. I saw the ‘master’ of the voice and spoke with him. He subjected himself to me and sacrificed to me. He came yesterday and answered my questions. The small grey bird with the blue breast sings shaman-songs in the hollow of the bough, calls her spirits, and practices shamanism. The wood-pecker strikes his drum in the tree with his drumming nose. Under the axe the tree trembles and wails as a drum under the baton. All these came at my call.
All that exists lives. The lamp walks around. The walls of the house have voices of their own. Even the chamber-vessel has a separate land and house. The skins sleeping in the bags talk at night. The antlers lying on the tombs arise at night and walk in procession round the mounds, while the deceased get up and visit the living.
Original text (not quoted here) in Bogoraz 1900: 385; translation in Bogoraz 1904–9: 281
The shaman clearly depicts the ensouled world as part of a shamanic whole, with each spirit ‘drumming’ and ‘shamanising’ in harmony with his own rituals. We see the ‘master’ of the spirits, the classic ‘Owner’ or ‘ruler’ figure, and the shaman’s negotiations with him.
The skins and bags referred to by the shaman were thought to turn back into reindeer at night, and had their own ‘ruler’. The trees in the forest, each one personified as one of the ‘people of wood’, talked to each other. Even the shadows in the huts had tribes, and subsisted by hunting the light (Bogoraz 1904–9: 281). This concept of spiritual life extended into every aspect of experience – even the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms was accompanied by the ‘mushroom men’, spirits who would appear and guide the dreamer to new and different places (Bogoraz collected sketches drawn by Chukchi who had eaten the mushrooms, tracing the path along which these spirits had led them; ibid: 282f).
The spirits could also represent other aspects of life, such as sickness. A common idea all across the circumpolar region is the understanding of illness as an attack by a hostile being, which must be fought in order to cure the person afflicted. This could happen in many ways, but a typical example comes again from the Chukchi. When treating a sick person, Chukchi shamans first transformed the illness into some other form, and then transformed themselves into something appropriate with which to fight it or drive it away. Thus a sickness of the stomach might be changed into a bay of the sea, and the shaman would then become rough waves to wash the beach clean. More elaborately still, a swollen limb could be transformed into a mound of snow, whereupon the shaman would change into a sturgeon, flopping about on the snow and cutting it up with his fins, and thereby relieving the pressure of the swelling (Bogoraz 1904–9: 477, 500–5).
The same was true for protection against spirits, such as the evil ke’let whom the Chukchi believed hunted humans for food. A shaman would create spirit-bears or monsters to guard a hut, or transform the building itself into iron, sharp enough to cut an intruder. Alternatively the ke’let’s intended victim could be hidden safely away inside an animal (a reindeer’s ear or anus were favourite spots). Sometimes entire spirit landscapes were created – so a line drawn in the snow would be seen by the ke’let as an impenetrable mountain range (ibid: 475f, 498ff).
Other, related types of spirit concepts are also found among the Yukaghir in the idea of ‘personhood’, an acknowledgement that human and animal souls have a degree of interchangeability, to the extent that such anthropomorphic terminology is almost irrelevant (Willerslev 2001: 44f; this is expanded upon in Willerslev 2007). Human relationships with animals, and in particular whether they regard them as ‘persons’ or not, are flexible and governed by circumstance and context, and the link between personhood and the body is highly complex:
[A]lthough we might talk about an anthropomorphic essence of a spiritual type (the three souls and the capacity for rational consciousness) common to humans and non-humans alike, actual manifestations of these essential qualities are species dependent. For instance … foxes (“caxa’le”) are said to be sly, deceitful creatures, who take great pleasure in causing other species suffering, and keep dirty households. In contrast, moose (“pie’je”) are generally friendly and tidy, although slightly dull. Our notion of personhood, however, has to be expanded to include physiological aspects as well as mental ones. Each species has its own kind of body (“’cul”) and odour (“yo’rula”), both of which are integral aspects of their status as persons. Movement and smell are part of the Yukaghirs’ notion of personhood, and are important for deciding what species they are dealing with. … Animals, while being capable of taking the bodily shape of humans, are said to often retain some of their former physical qualities, which identify them as beings of a special class, who act in a human way, but still do so differently from mankind. Hence, Fox-woman keeps her strong smell, and Bear-man keeps his jog-trot way of moving.
Willerslev 2001: 45
The same kinds of patterns were also found in other circumpolar areas, such as the Canadian Northwest Coast. As with the Norse and Sámi soul beliefs, here there were important links between the spirit world, the ancestors, and the very nature of human beings themselves. Within the shamanic world-view particular to the region, a person traced their identity through their family line to the continuous chain of ancestors stretching back into the past, and especially to those ancestors’ successive negotiated relationships with supernatural beings. Usually appearing in animal form, it is these entities that appear as the ‘totems’ displayed in all the visual media of material culture available to the Northwest Coast peoples, and above all on the totem poles standing in front of every dwelling. The various tribes had different categorisation systems for their clans, but broadly similar in their relationship to the spirit world: the Haida had two clan groups, Ravens and Eagles; the Tsimshian had four phratries, Eagle, Frog/Raven, Wolf and Killer-Whale; the Gitxsan substituted the Fireweed phratry for the Killer Whale, and so on along the coast (Laforet 1992: 13).
The tiers of totem beings on the poles thus represent the collective spiritual assets of the family, expressed through all their ancestors’ supernatural alliances. These associations in turn linked to the domains over which these spirits ruled, the familiar concept of ‘Owners’. The poles therefore served an additional role as manifest claims to resource-rich territory, articulated through myths of ancestral achievement.
These stories were also enacted in ritual dramas, not the least of which were the famous potlatch ceremonies which continue today. The focus at all these occasions was on the notion of ‘witnessed histories’, known as adawk, ensuring that the everyone in the community was aware of their own nature, and of how to behave in their dealings with both the ancestral and supernatural worlds (Laforet 1992: 6, 10–13). The potlatch gifts were simultaneously payment for the act of witnessing, and a potential obligation to later testify to what the witness had seen and heard. It is important to emphasis that aggression and conflict were crucial elements in the potlatch, in the sense that even (or especially) enemy tribes were invited to feast. This symbolism of fighting was maintained throughout the proceedings, and even when a marriage was celebrated it was expressed in terms of warfare and rivalry (Rosman & Rubel 1971: 206).
It is in this context that the well-known masking traditions of the Northwest Coast operated. Some of the masks represent the culture-heroes and famous beings common to all the coastal and riverine tribes – the Trickster beings Raven (on the north coast), Mink and Blue Jay (central and southern coasts), and other entities such as Thunder, Moon, Wild Man, Echo, the How Hows, and the Thunderbird. Masks were also used to dramatise the individual supernatural relationships of the clan ancestors. Each tribe had slightly different masking traditions, and a few did not use masks at all, but all were united in this general understanding of their world (the literature on Northwest Coast masks is vast, but see Wardwell 1996: 108–63 for an overview, and Wyatt 1994, 1999, 2012 for modern legacies).
That these masking traditions, and the ancestral stories to which they allude, may be of very great antiquity indeed is attested to by remarkable Tsimshian finds from Metlakatla near Prince Rupert and Kitkatla. In the late nineteenth century two stone masks of unknown date were collected there, each representing a human face, one blind and one sighted (Duff 1975: 160–7; Ruddell 1995: 44). The latter mask fits perfectly inside the former, suggesting that they were probably worn together and shown sequentially, in a similar fashion to the transformation masks of more recent centuries. The image of a blind human becoming sighted brings to mind the myth of how Raven stole the Light from Sky Chief, scattering its fragments to become the sun, moon and stars, and thereby bringing illumination to the world (Reid & Bringhurst 1988). The earliest known Raven images date to c.1000 BC, again from the Prince Rupert area, suggesting that his role as the Trickster culture-hero of the Northwest Coast is one of the oldest-known shamanic traditions in the world.
Among the Tlingit and Tsimshian, the small spirit-helpers of the shamans could be represented by appropriately miniaturised masks (several examples are known, such as the Tlingit ones collected around 1900: CMC VII-A-30/31). Everyday items could also be carved with shamanic motifs, linking to the activities of the shaman but used by ordinary people (Wardwell 1996 presents a range of examples; see also MacDonald 1996: ch. 3 for Haida shamanic artefacts). Tsimshian fish-hooks, for example, were sometimes decorated with the image of a spirit that would help to bait the fish, chosen with the help of the fishing-shamans (Kirby et al. 1995).
When the full repertoire of Northwest Coast material culture is considered, we therefore see a totality of representation combining all the elements that were central to defining personal identity: the clan, helping spirits, shamanic power, ancestors, supernatural beings friendly to the family, and economic claims for land use.
Joining all these, again at the heart of a shamanic view of reality, was the soul itself. On the Northwest Coast the notion of communal souls was widespread, not just between human beings but also shared with animals (especially fish, the main source of protein and the key to subsistence in the region). All ‘animals’ – the totems represented on the poles and emblems of clan identity – were thought to live in their own separate worlds, with access points from this world in the sea, the air, the rivers and the other major habitats of the rocky coast of Northwest Canada. In their own realms these beings appeared as humans, and only took on their animal forms when visiting our plane of existence. Many of the myths of the Northwest Coast concern journeys by human shamans or heroes to these respective worlds, meeting the ‘animals’ in their own villages. The latter usually resembled those of the humans themselves, with the same kinds of houses, boats and material culture, all set in a similar landscape. When the ‘animals’ were hunted in the human world, the task of the shamans was to ensure the respectful return of their souls to their own worlds, where they would be reborn. The familiar cycle of shamanic rituals and negotiations designed to ensure the continued maintenance of the community can be recognised from all the cultures discussed here.
The ultimate symbol of this world-view, and one which can be found in many situations on the coast, was the cedar-wood box. A great many of these carved and decorated chests survive from the last few centuries, and the tradition of making them continues today (see Wardwell 1996: 300– 7; MacDonald 1996: 118–27). They were used for many purposes, including the storage of food, ceremonial regalia, and not least shamanic tools (see below). They were also used as containers for human burials, essentially a kind of coffin. At the ultimate level there are stories among the Tsimshian and Haida of the entire universe conceived as a Box of Souls in which all the spirits of ‘animals’ and ‘people’ are contained.
We must bear this in mind with a background of the Norse soul beliefs – the fylgjur, hamingur and so on – and their relationship to patterns of sorcery. To these we may add the verðir and gandir, the spirits attracted by the varðlok(k) ur, and other, more potent beings such as the dísir and landvættir. From these inhabitants of the shamanic world, we can move on to those who communicated with them, the shamans themselves.