The life of a pagan shaman was hard - for their "ability" to communicate with spirits and travel to the worlds of the gods and the dead, they paid off during their lifetime - as a hermit, broken family ties. Only another “stronger” shaman could heal a sick shaman, and no one even approached the dying shaman. Representatives of the Siberian and northern peoples firmly believed that a sorcerer could convey his "gift" by touch, hug or kiss, and they feared this gift like a curse. But even after death, the remains of a shaman rarely found quick rest in the cold taiga land - the northern peoples treated the corpses of shamans differently, but very rarely left them alone.
Buried three times
Ethnographer A. V. Bondarenko writes about the custom of the Yakuts to reburial a shaman three times - to raise his bones from the grave, add sacred objects that have collapsed from time to time and sacrifice horses ("The practice of post-inhumation disturbance of graves in the cultures of early and developed Bronze of Western Siberia").
Another shaman was invited to perform the ritual, who, obviously, during the next funeral tried to "enter into communion" with the deceased. The Yakuts believed that a shaman, unlike other people, never completely dies. His "never-dying" spirit is near the grave and continues to chant - this is also related to the belief that no one can offend a descendant of a shamanic clan near his grave with impunity - the deceased will surely intercede for the descendant and take revenge.
If the Yakuts forgot to perform the reburial ritual, they said that the shaman himself began to “remind” of it - perhaps, his relatives dreamed about it.
At the same time, the Yakuts believed that the soul of a shaman could become a yuer - an evil and invisible spirit (however, this could happen to an ordinary person). In this case, the name of the "strongest" shaman they knew was, and he made a special wooden figurine and enclosed the angry spirit of the deceased in it.
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Killed one more time
Siberian Tatars believed that shamans have two souls - a soul-shadow and a soul-bird, and obviously, they also believed that shamans just don't die, because they were afraid that a deceased shaman might come to the living and harm them, as if "drinking" their soul. In order to prevent this from happening, it was necessary to divide the shaman's corpse into parts, and it was impossible to touch it with your hands. So the shaman was "killed" again - opening his grave and with stakes or sticks or an iron crowbar crushed the body into pieces.
Such cases are known among the Yakuts.
Hung in the trees
Evenks buried shamans in trees, hanging them or leaving them in storage sheds, while in the tundra they buried them in hollowed-out logs, leaving them on the ground and covering them with moss. It was believed that the spirit of the shaman leaves for the land of the dead not immediately, but only when the body decays.
The Yakut scientist Galina Nikolaevna Varavina described a two-hundred-year-old burial of a shamaness on a tributary of the Khatanga River, which she witnessed. The body of a shamaness, wrapped in rovduga (women's clothing), rested in a wooden block with its head to the north on a platform of two pillars. At my feet on the ground lay a perforated copper cauldron, and the coffin - items of women's handicraft. It is noteworthy that the Evenki men put objects of shaman worship in the coffin, including a tambourine.
Destroyed even in the grave
The ancient peoples of the Urals considered the shaman to be a kind of superman. He was buried at a distance from the others, but excavations of such burials often showed that the deceased was treated cruelly - almost completely destroyed his skull, chest, and limbs.
This was perceived as a terrible punishment by the peoples inhabiting Mongolia and the territory adjacent to it - Buryatia, Tuva, Altai. It was believed that in order for the soul of the shaman to go to the land of the dead, his body - and especially the upper part: head, shoulders, chest, must remain intact and be intact. Ethnographer S. V. Dmitriev points out that the dismemberment of the shaman's body into parts and even its burning made the completion of the burial ceremony impossible. Consequently, the shaman, according to the beliefs of his people, could not finally die in this world and could not be reborn in the world of the dead.
They did it out of revenge or for the sake of insulting the graves of a foreign nation, now it is impossible to find out, since such burials of shamans of the ancient peoples of the Urals (Pokrovskaya culture) date back to the 1st millennium BC.
Pulled into amulets
Many representatives of the northern peoples treated the bodies of shamans as things from which one could benefit for the family and for the clan.
The researcher of shamanism V. Ye. Vasiliev in his work "Yukaghir Saitans" says that in ancient times the Yukaghirs took the corpses of shamans apart with special iron hooks, removing meat from the bones, which was then dried in the sun. And the shamans did it too; during the ceremony, they put on special masks and gloves and depicted ravens, which, as it were, ate the body of the deceased, killing him again.
The shaman's bones were handed out for amulets, and the jerky was divided between family or clan members, each part was taken to a special dwelling - urasa (a type of summer hut, the most ancient dwelling of the northern peoples), where it was left, often combined with the corpse of a sacrificial dog.
This was not intended to offend the shaman, because the dog was a domesticated version of the wolf, and the ancient Yukaghirs revered the wolf as a totem animal.
It was believed that the spirits of ancestors, for whom such a treat was a sacrifice, dine with the body of a shaman - tullehi kerekh.
Made the shaitans
But that's not all - the Yukaghir shaman's skull was pinned down and made a wooden idol, which was dressed in pre-made clothes, and the naked skull was covered with a ritual mask.
The Yukaghirs kept this “deity” in their dwellings and constantly “fed” them, burning various foods on the fire, obviously believing that in this way the soul of the shaman would be fed and protect the house.
An interesting detail - after the death of the shaman, he could not be called either by name or by profession.
It is known that both Yakuts and Evenks made the same idol from shamanic bones, but they did not have such a taboo, and they openly called the idol saitan (shaitan). At the same time, for both those and others, this spirit did not patronize the whole family, like the Yukaghirs, but served one person and was dangerous even for members of his family.
Petersburg archaeologist Elga Borisovna Vadetskaya in the article "Imitation of the dead to prolong their life" mentions that the Nivkhs quite recently made mummies from the bodies of dead shamans
Maya Novik