For centuries Siberian shamanism was known in Europe almost solely through the eyes of outsiders: exiles, merchants, missionaries, scientists in the service of the tsar. Their accounts are valuable sources, but they must be read with the knowledge that they also reflect the ideas, prejudices and curiosities of those who wrote them. Retracing this history means understanding how the European image of the shaman was born.
An archpriest in exile
One of the earliest Russian descriptions of a shaman is found in the autobiography of Archpriest Avvakum, a leading figure of the Old Believers, exiled to Siberia in the mid-17th century. Avvakum tells of witnessing a session by a Tungus shaman, consulted by the commander of the expedition he was travelling with to learn the outcome of a military venture.
His description is full of hostility: for him the shaman is a servant of demons. But it is also vivid and precise in its details, and it shows that even then Russian authorities, in certain circumstances, turned to the services of local shamans.
Witsen's engraving
In 1692 the Dutch merchant and statesman Nicolaes Witsen, mayor of Amsterdam, published a monumental work on Siberia and northern Asia, Noord en Oost Tartarye. Among its illustrations is one of the most famous images in the history of shamanism: a Tungus shaman depicted with deer antlers on his head, a drum in his hand and clawed feet, with a caption calling him a «priest of the devil».
The engraving, which probably reworked second-hand descriptions, mixes observation and fantasy. It nevertheless spread widely and helped fix in the European imagination the idea of the shaman as a diabolical and savage figure.
The great expeditions of the 18th century
In the 18th century the Russian Empire promoted a series of scientific expeditions to Siberia, often entrusted to German scholars. Among the protagonists:
| Scholar | Context |
|---|---|
| Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt | journey through Siberia in the early decades of the century, commissioned by Peter the Great |
| Johann Georg Gmelin | naturalist of the Second Kamchatka Expedition (1730s-1740s) |
| Georg Wilhelm Steller | naturalist of the same expedition, active in Kamchatka |
| Peter Simon Pallas | great journeys in 1768-1774 |
These scholars gathered observations on languages, customs, plants and animals, and also on shamans. Their outlook was that of the Enlightenment: often curious and attentive to detail, but convinced that the sessions were deceptions practised on naive peoples. Gmelin, for example, recounts attending sessions and regarding them, essentially, as conjuring shows.
An empress's comedy
The Enlightenment verdict on shamans even reached the court. In 1786 Empress Catherine II wrote a comedy entitled The Siberian Shaman, in which an impostor posing as a shaman dupes the polite society of St Petersburg. The play was aimed mainly at the esoteric fashions of the capital at the time, but it used the figure of the shaman as a symbol of charlatanry.
From judgement to study
In the 19th century the outlook gradually changed. Linguists and ethnographers such as Wilhelm Radloff, who long studied the Turkic peoples of the Altai, began to transcribe texts, songs and invocations in the original languages, trying to understand the inner logic of the sessions. Many Russian political exiles, deported to Siberia, became fine ethnographers, and some of them took part in great international expeditions at the end of the century.
Thus the shaman passed, slowly, from the role of «priest of the devil» or charlatan to that of an object of scientific study, and then to a figure of interest for the history of religions.
What these sources teach us
Reading the European travellers requires a double effort. On the one hand, their descriptions preserve information that would otherwise be lost: costumes, gestures, names, places. On the other, every text carries its author's point of view, whether religious, scientific or political. Studio Esoterico Cornelio invites readers to approach them in this way: as precious and yet partial witnesses to an encounter between worlds.
In short
- In the 17th century Archpriest Avvakum described a session by a Tungus shaman.
- In 1692 Nicolaes Witsen published the famous image of the «priest of the devil».
- The 18th-century expeditions, with Gmelin, Steller and Pallas, observed shamans with an Enlightenment eye.
- In 1786 Catherine II wrote the comedy The Siberian Shaman.
- In the 19th century scholars such as Radloff began transcribing shamanic texts in the original languages.
