The word shaman comes from Siberia. It reached English through Russian šamán, which took it from a Tungusic language — probably the speech of the Evenki, reindeer herders and hunters of the taiga, or possibly Manchu. A woman shaman is sometimes called a shamanka, though that is only the Russian feminine ending added to the word.
How Europe heard of it
The word first turns up in Russian in the memoirs of Avvakum, the Old Believer priest exiled to Siberia in the 1650s. It came to Western Europe with the Dutch statesman Nicolaes Witsen, whose Noord en Oost Tartarye (Amsterdam, 1692) described his travels among the Tungusic and Samoyedic peoples, and to English readers in 1698, in the translated journal of Adam Brand, a merchant who had gone with a Russian embassy to China. To these travellers the shaman was a curiosity, a "priest of the devil"; later Russian ethnographers, many of them exiles themselves, recorded the practice with far more care.
What a Siberian shaman did
Across the many peoples of Siberia — Evenki, Buryat, Yakut, Nenets, Khanty and others — the practices differ, but certain things recur:
- The calling. A future shaman was often seized by an illness or crisis that only ended when they accepted the spirits' call: the "initiatory illness" of the wounded healer.
- The drum. A large frame drum, often called the shaman's horse or boat, carried them on the journey. Its beat drew them into trance.
- The costume. A coat hung with iron pendants, bells, ribbons and images of helping spirits, and a headdress — itself a map of the shaman's powers.
- The séance. Before the community, the shaman drummed, sang and danced into trance, travelled in spirit to the upper or lower worlds, and returned to tell what they had learned: why someone was ill, where the game had gone, what the dead wanted.
- Helping spirits. Animal and ancestral spirits who guided and protected the journey.
The Tungusic peoples tell the Tale of the Nisan Shaman, a woman who journeys to the land of the dead to bring back a rich man's son — the shaman's journey told as a story.
Eliade's "archaic ecstasy"
In 1951 the historian of religions Mircea Eliade published Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. He gathered reports from Siberia, the Americas, Australia and beyond and argued that the shaman — the specialist in the ecstatic journey of the soul — was a universal, primordial figure, the root of religion itself. The book made "shamanism" a household word.
Many scholars now think Eliade went too far. Alice Kehoe and others argue that lifting the word out of Siberia and applying it everywhere creates an invented world religion, flattening very different practices of many peoples into one and making them look "primitive". It is safest to say Evenki shaman or Sámi noaidi where you can, and to use "shamanism" knowing it is a scholars' category.
Exercise
Read about one Siberian people's shamans in a good encyclopaedia or museum collection — the Evenki, Buryat or Sakha. Write a page on what their shaman did, in their own terms, without using the word "shaman" at all. Then try a first short drum journey of five minutes, only listening, and note in your journal what the steady beat did to your attention.