At the beginning of the 20th century, a new social system and the underlying Marxist-Leninist ideology reigned in the territory of "one-sixth of the land." Including - on the lands of small peoples, from time immemorial practicing shamanic rituals. The Soviet government, without wasting time on disputes, announced that the time of the gods was over, how did the shamans live in the country of developed socialism?
Shamanism is an unusually ancient phenomenon. It originated during the Paleolithic period and spread throughout all parts of the world. It is still practiced in northern Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and, of course, Siberia.
Walkers between worlds
Strictly speaking, shamanism is not quite a religion - rather, it is a form of cosmotheism. The essence of shamanism is the spiritualization of all that exists, be it the wind, river or stone. The world is divided into three parts: above are the demiurge spirits, below are the spirits of evil, people, animals and numerous spirits of nature live in the middle world; shamanists call them aiyy, burkhans, sevens, eezi. Each mountain or grove has its own master spirit. In most cases, the owners are benevolent to the person, but they can easily get angry, bringing down troubles on the offender.
The shaman's task is to get in touch with the angry spirit and try to restore balance. For this, a rite of ritual is performed. Boo, oyun or kam (as the shaman is called by the Buryats, Yakuts or Altai), through singing, dancing, and sometimes narcotic infusions, he introduced himself into a trance in order to summon helper spirits, make a trip to other worlds, negotiate with hostile spirits, return stolen souls, heal diseases. Having a huge influence on the life of the community, the shaman did not inherit his status and did not use it for enrichment, because he could not ask for payment, and his gift was literally a gift from above.
Kams of the Land of Soviets
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When the changes that came to Russia reached the small peoples practicing shamanism, shamans automatically fell into the category of enemies of socialism. The Soviet state created a new religion based on atheism, and the new religion is always trying to eradicate the old one. By all formal signs, shamans were enemies, and they began to fight with them.
Representatives of the ancient cult were equated with bays and kulaks and started the process of "shaming". They were deprived of voting rights, forced to public denials, tambourines were burned, the intractable were exiled, imprisoned and even shot. The newspapers were full of articles about shamans who were decisively breaking with the past.
It is curious that often the "shamming" turned a completely different side. There is evidence of how they could not take the tambourine away from the shaman, because he suddenly began to “walk with a shaker,” or how the kam imprisoned first came out of the locked cell and then summoned a live bear from the wall.
In post-war times, attitudes towards shamanism and shamans have softened significantly. The state has gained enough stability to admit their existence. The sorcerer with a tambourine ceased to be a class enemy, although the Soviet government did not transfer him to the category of "friendly".
Gradually, shamans integrated into the life of Soviet society, they worked in collective farms, administrations or forestry districts, did not talk about their abilities, spreading information exclusively along the chain of clients. The ceremonies were practiced in secret, sometimes they went to kamlats in the taiga, away from prying eyes. The very structure of the ceremony has changed, turning from a public event of great importance into a secret session of witchcraft. The punishments remained, although they became softer. Now shamans were threatened with being brought to the police, fines or short terms. The shamanic paraphernalia, which could no longer be used openly, began to disappear.
Shamanism was firmly recorded in the category of superstition, obscurantism, harmful remnants, no one wanted to understand and study it seriously, even if the rituals really cured a disease or solved someone's problem. Party functionaries formally condemned the shamans, and unofficially turned to them for help. Often, the clientele of the kams was police or court officials.
Alive and dead
Conflicts with the authorities took place not only because of the rituals of rituals or sacrifices. In shamanism there are many areas associated with death and do not tolerate any invasion. To begin with, for a shamanist, the line between the living and the dead is completely surmountable. The message that the deceased Sysoy or Badma came to advise him to do something or not to do something does not surprise or shock anyone. And if the advice was given by a dead shaman, then only a fool will not follow them.
A whole system of rituals is associated with shamanic funerals. This happens in different ways for different peoples. Some of them bury the shaman in the ground in a special way, others are cremated, and the ashes are placed in the trunk of a living birch, and still others arrange an air grave (arangas). This type of burial is the most ancient. The tops of four trees standing next to each other are cut down, a platform is arranged at a height of two meters, on which a coffin from a larch trunk is placed. Tribesmen watch over the arangas, and once every 100 years they transfer the remains to a new "grave".
Shamanists consider the places of such burials to be sacred and try to avoid them, so as not to cause trouble. The Soviet government, promoting atheism, could not and did not want to indulge in harmful fairy tales. Epidemiological authorities liquidated the arangas as a probable source of infections, routes were laid through the holy places, and dacha villages were laid out in shaman groves.
The shamans resisted. Chilling stories tell how six students from Yakutia, having urinated by the arangas, died in a tent of a heart attack that very night. Three shabashniks who defiled the shaman's grave were conditionally convicted, but all died a few years later under dire circumstances. The helicopter pilot, who saw the ghosts, refused to fly over the grave of another shamaness. His shiftman said that he did not care about the old woman, and there was an accident on the first flight. A whole series of equipment failures, diseases and even deaths accompanied the construction of several airfields and gas pipeline branches, designed near shaman graves. This ended either with the transfer of sites, or with visits to local shamans with a request to conduct a ceremony and appease the intractable dead. All these events could be attributed to a coincidence of circumstances,but the concentration of chances is too high.
A heavy gift
We talked a lot about life and death, but did not touch on the issue of birth, and in fact it was perhaps the most difficult for Soviet shamans. The term "shamanic disease" precisely defines the process of kama initiation. A person begins to see strange dreams, he is haunted by hallucinations, he speaks with the spirit of a shaman, whose incarnation he is preparing to become. He is overcome with depression. He feels hot and cold. The "patient" suffers from pain in the joints, vomiting. Uncontrollable bizarre behavior can be compared to drug withdrawal or a manifestation of schizophrenia. Resisting the call is fraught with trouble and even death. In addition, the dead shaman “takes the ransom” by “eating” the blood relatives of the initiator. The Soviet Komsomol member did not need such joy, to put it mildly. Those who believed in magic went to the sages to deceive the spirit of their ancestor and evade the burden of the shamanic gift,those who did not believe went mad or died.
In the late 1980s, the attitude towards shamans underwent a final liberalization. Today shamanism has organically merged into the meltdown of religions and philosophies. On Olkhon Island, a universally recognized center of occult teachings, shamans from Russia and the neighboring countries carry out rituals without any hindrance, getting along well with Orthodox, Buddhists, Muslims and even communist atheists.
Eduard SHAUROV