A Costume Built to Carry Weight, and to Make Noise

Among Siberian and Tungusic shamanic traditions, a practicing shaman's ceremonial regalia typically combines a coat or cloak of hide or cloth hung with metal pendants, small plates, bells or mirrors, and an iron or antler headpiece often described in the ethnographic literature as a crown. The costume is heavy by design; the metal fittings add substantial weight and produce sound as the shaman moves, and both the weight and the sound are treated in the traditions themselves as functional to the shaman's work rather than incidental to it, marking the wearer's passage into an altered ritual state and, in many accounts, representing or invoking specific spirit helpers attached to particular pendants or plates.

Eliade's comparative study of shamanism describes such costumes as being, in the traditions that use them, understood almost as a body in their own right, a second skin the shaman puts on to become capable of the journey the rite requires, distinct from ordinary ritual dress that marks status without transforming the wearer's ritual capacity. Not every element of a given costume carries an agreed meaning even within one tradition, and shamans themselves have sometimes offered differing explanations for particular pendants to different outside questioners, a variability that later scholarship treats as genuine rather than as an inconsistency to be resolved.