SHAMANISM & THE DRUM · LESSON 7 OF 12 · 14 MIN
The Three Worlds and the World Tree
The cosmos the shaman travels — upper, middle and lower worlds joined by a tree, a pole or a mountain — in Siberia, the Altai, the North, the Maya lands and on the Sámi drum, and Eliade's axis mundi.
Ask a Siberian, an Altaic or an Arctic shaman where the journey goes and the answer is a picture: a world above, a world below, our own in between, and something that joins them — a tree, a pole, a mountain, a river. The historian of religions Mircea Eliade called that joining thing the axis mundi, the axis of the world, and made it the centre of his theory of shamanism. The picture is older and more varied than his theory, and it is the map the drum journey still uses.