Shamanism

Laughing at the Spirits in North Siberia: Is Animism Being Taken too Seriously?

Rane Willerslev

However, while it may at first appear to require no further comment, I want to question the empirical grounds on which anthropologists claim that the indigenous peoples take their own animist beliefs seriously. We may ask whether the new animist studies are overstating the seriousness of the indigenous peoples’ own attitudes toward their spirited worlds. It is exactly here that we begin to glimpse the problem that motivates my writing this article. I am no longer convinced that seriousness as such lies at the heart of animism. Quite the contrary, it seems to me that underlying animistic cosmologies is a force of laughter, an ironic distance, a making fun of the spirits which suggests that indigenous animism is not to be taken very seriously at all. I think that we are facing a fundamental yet quite neglected problem here, and I will begin to explore it by drawing attention to a somewhat puzzling episode from my own fieldwork among the Yukaghirs, who are a small group of indigenous hunters living in northeastern Siberia.

I was out hunting together with two Yukaghirs, an elderly and a younger hunter, and they had succeeded in killing a brown bear. While the elderly hunter was poking out its eyes with his knife and croaking like a raven as custom prescribes, the younger one, who was standing a few meters away, shouted to the bear: “Grandfather, don’t be fooled, it is a man, Vasili Afanasivich, who killed you and is now blinding you!” At first the elderly hunter doing the butchering stood stock-still as if he were in shock, but then he looked at his younger partner and they both began laughing ecstatically as if the whole ritual were a big joke. Then the elderly hunter said to the younger one, “Stop fooling around and go make a platform for the grandfather’s bones.” However, he sounded by no means disturbed. Quite the opposite, in fact: he was still laughing while giving the order. The only really disturbed person was me, who saw the episode as posing a serious threat to my entire research agenda, which was to take animism seriously. The hunter’s joke suggested that underlying the Yukaghir animistic cosmology was a force of laughter, of ironic distance, of making fun of the spirits. How could I take the spirits seriously as an anthropologist when the Yukaghirs themselves did not?

I experienced several incidents of this kind which, I must now admit, I left out of my books on Yukaghir animism, as they posed a real danger to my theoretical agenda of taking indigenous animism seriously. One time, for example, an old hunting leader was making an offering to his helping-spirit, which is customary before an upcoming hunt. However, while throwing tobacco, tea, and vodka into the fire, he shouted, “Give me prey, you bitch!” Everyone present doubled up with laugher. Similarly, a group of hunters once took a small plastic doll, bought in the local village shop, and started feeding it fat and blood. While bowing their heads before the doll, which to everyone’s mind was obviously a false idol with no spiritual dispositions whatsoever, they exclaimed sarcastically, “Khoziain [Russian “spirit-master”] needs feeding.” Direct questioning about such apparent breaches of etiquette often proved fruitless. One hunter simply replied, “We are just having fun,” while another came up with a slightly more elaborate answer, “We make jokes about Khoziain because we are his friends. Without laughter, there will be no luck. Laughing is compulsory to the game of hunting.”

The Cave and the Sky

Gyrus

However, while the ‘descent’ aspect of the tiered cosmos maps comfortably onto the painted caves, the ‘ascent’ aspect — supported by ethnographic reports or not — doesn’t seem to fit. Lewis-Williams only really mentions shamanic flight in the context of the more recent rock art traditions he uses for comparison (those in southern Africa and in North America). A diagram showing ‘the way in which Upper Palaeolithic people used caves’ is given, with a two-ended arrow labelled ‘spirit world underground’ and ‘spirit world above’, in the sky over the scene of ‘daily life’ – but no real comment is given on the limited evidence for the importance of this heavenly realm.6 Again it seems that while the Palaeolithic caves may demonstrate a consciousness that is moving beyond the primacy of terrestrial concerns with immediate ecological relationships, towards a verticality that expresses spiritual transition, there is still precious little evidence to implicate the sky in the Cro-Magnon cosmos.

The cave, though, has many aspects. From the perspective of daylight at ground level, its character is obvious: dark, subterranean, enclosed. Once penetrated, however, its contortions confound our habitual categories, and the darkness reveals its own complexities — its own lights and spaces. Perhaps the sky is absent in the specific images in these painted caves, in the overt representations. But perhaps it is intimately present, right there in the metamorphic space of the cave — could the cave itself be a form of the sky?

The idea that the sky is a tent, dome, vault, sphere, or some other grand structure arcing over our heads is widespread in traditional cultures. Such projections of human-scale constructions onto the cosmos obviously help make the vastness more habitable and familiar. And while simplistic ideas pitting the ‘artificial’ nature of agricultural and city-based societies against the more ‘natural’ life of the hunter-gatherer might lead one to locate these projections relatively late in human history, it must be remembered that evidence for constructed habitations reaches surprisingly far back.

See also this note from Gordon White's Star.Ships regarding Nuit:

At first glance, the gender reversal of the pairing – having a female sky and male earth – appears to be an outlier in the motif; ‘earth mothers’ and ‘sky fathers’ are seemingly more common. Dr Witzel accounts for the variation below:

The reversed position may be further elucidated by a comparison with Vedic myth. In daytime, the sky arches over the earth, like Father Heaven, stemmed up by Indra from the prostrate Mother Earth. But at night, the situation is reversed: Earth and the primordial hill or rock, on which she rests, have turned upside down and overarch the now prostrate Heaven as the ‘stone sky’ of Iranian, Hawai’ian and Pueblo myth.

Such an interpretation would explain not only the extremely common depiction of Nuit inside coffins but also the numerous instances of Tefnut, a Mother Earth analogue, painted on the inside of sarcophagi. The deceased is in the Underworld/ stars, thus the earth is now his or her sky. Tefnut, in addition to her consort, Shu, are the conjoined couple ‘the next level up’ from Geb and Nuit, suggesting a ‘passing back up through the worlds’ for the deceased. Recall also that the ritual timings of the Pyramid Texts and royal mummification rituals rely on asterisms such as Orion and Sirius to rise above the horizon, to ‘emerge’ from the Underworld/ sky, from their Mother, Nuit. The Dead are under the earth and also in the stars.

Stone age carvings from Laussel show the same sexual arrangement, with a woman atop and arching over a bearded, prostrate man. From Laussel we also have the more famous sculpture of the ‘goddess’ holding the moon. It appears that the Mother of Osiris, like her son, was supremely old by the time she made it to Egypt. If she was not always too old for even the very idea of temples, they would have been elsewhere, and have long since turned to dust or been lost to the waves.

In Egypt’s Old Kingdom we thus see the most perfect expression of a supremely ancient idea. The spirits – and by extension, humanity – come from, return to and are the stars.

Shamanism in Northern and Southern Eurasia their distinct methods of change of consciousness

Michael Witzel

...The interaction of music, singers and dancers also produces ‘heat’: the dancers transmit heat (‘boiling’) to each other, and the women’s singing and music, too, activates it; from it, the shaman healers may draw energy. San shamans know of the difficult mastering of their internal heat (n/um) which moves upward from the base of the spine. They use that power for healing. It is controlled by medicine inside their body. The older experienced medicine men control n/um, and call the ‘traveling’ adept back into his body. This description immediately reminds one of the descriptions of some forms of Indian yoga, where the...power is awakened at the bottom of the spine (guhya) and likewise moves upwards, in several stages via a number of centers (cakra)...

Python shrine found in Botswana

More on this shrine and its relation to the San ->

World’s oldest ritual discovered. Worshipped the python 70,000 years ago

Yngve Vogt

While large cave and wall paintings are numerous throughout the Tsodilo Hills, there are only two small paintings in this cave: an elephant and a giraffe. These images were rendered, surprisingly, exactly where water runs down the wall.

Sheila Coulson thinks that an explanation for this might come from San mythology.

In one San story, the python falls into a body of water and cannot get out by itself. The python is pulled from the water by a giraffe. The elephant, with its long trunk, is often used as a metaphor for the python.

“In the cave, we find only the San people’s three most important animals: the python, the elephant, and the giraffe. That is unusual. This would appear to be a very special place. They did not burn the spearheads by chance. They brought them from hundreds of kilometers away and intentionally burned them. So many pieces of the puzzle fit together here. It has to represent a ritual.” concludes Sheila Coulson.

Laughing at the Spirits in North Siberia: Is Animism Being Taken too Seriously?

Rane Willerslev

Interesting, though I can't help but wonder whether the mention of the ' small plastic doll, bought in the local village shop' is a clue. These people are obviously well aware of the outside world and of modern science and technology. As such, their own take on traditional beliefs may be very different from more distant past generations who lived much more within their own universe. For example in the West we have such things as the Monty Python film, "The Life of Brian", which though much enjoyed by some, caused shock in others. Both that film and the plastic doll represent a changing of times. It is difficult to comprehend the former significance of western belief, we cannot readily place ourselves in the shoes of our forebears any more than these Siberian Yukaghirs can.

Even in the 19th century, it was difficult to grasp traditional tribal beliefs, intermingled and displaced as they were with the ever-spreading ideas and alternative traditions from the so-called civilised parts of the world. It can only be more difficult as time passes.

17,000-Year-Old Kangaroo Painting Is Oldest-Known Australian Rock Art

Livia Gershon

“It’s important that Indigenous knowledge and stories are not lost and continue to be shared for generations to come,” Cissy Gore-Birch, chair of the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, says in the statement. “The dating of this oldest known painting in an Australian rock shelter holds a great deal of significance for Aboriginal people and Australians and is an important part of Australia's history.”

Sven Ouzman, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia who was part of the research, says that the art’s style hints at connections between Indigenous Australians and other ancient people.

“This iconic kangaroo image is visually similar to rock paintings from islands in Southeast Asia dated to more than 40,000 years ago, suggesting a cultural link—and hinting at still older rock art in Australia,” he says in the statement.

Ancient humans arrived in Australia in one or more migrations from Southeast Asia, starting at least 55,000 years ago, per the Australian Museum.

The researchers plan to continue their work by using wasps nests to date additional pieces of art, creating a more definitive timeline of the evolution of the different styles.

John Lockley is one of the first white men, in recent history, to become a fully initiated sangoma in the Xhosa lineage of South Africa. He is author of Leopard Warrior: A Journey into the African Teachings of Ancestry, Instinct, and Dreams. John was born, into a divided Apartheid South Africa, with the mark of the sangoma on his face – a band of white birth skin around the eyes. He was serving in the South African army as a medic (during the war with Angola in the 1980s) when he had a strong, prophetic dream calling him to train as a Xhosa sangoma. He suffered from the thwasa, a severe period of ill-health that is inherent in all ancient shamanic cultures, which can only be cured through apprenticeship to a shamanic teacher. Because of the restrictions of Apartheid (which ended in 1994) it would take John seven years to find a Xhosa teacher. He returned to post-apartheid South Africa and completed a 10 year apprenticeship with a medicine woman from the Xhosa Tribe. His website is johnlockley.com.

John shares how he became a sangoma – a traditional priest and healer in the Xhosa tribe – the same tribe as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. The name he was given, Ucingolwendamba, means messenger or connector between people and cultures. A shaman is a spirit doctor of humanity who can help heal the split ­– or apartheid – between the heart and the mind, and between man and nature. He begins with a chanting meditation that calls in the great ones and ancestors to help us realize our humanity (Ubuntu) in this world and the next. He shares how to connect to your inner nature so you may connect to nature outside of yourself. He encourages everyone to develop qualities of kindness, compassion, and patience.