Siberian

This heading covers the traditions of a number of distinct peoples across northern Asia, the Evenki, Buryat, Yakut and others among them, and they are not one religion. What they share is a structure that outsiders have found easy to recognise and hard to describe accurately.

A high god of the sky stands at the top and is not the focus of practice. Below him the world is populated by masters and owners: of a river, a mountain, a forest, a species of animal, a household. These are the powers a person actually deals with, because they control the things a person needs, and dealing with them is a matter of respect, offering and restraint rather than devotion.

The cosmos is layered, upper, middle and lower, and the layers are connected. Movement between them is the specialist's work, and the office of that specialist is entered by a call that is not sought and often not wanted, followed by training under someone who already holds it.

The ancestors are part of the working order, and among several of these peoples a deceased practitioner becomes a spirit that later practitioners work with.

These are living traditions, held by Indigenous minority peoples, severely suppressed during the Soviet period and substantially revived since. The atlas lists them as restricted and does not reproduce what practitioners hold.

The English word shaman entered European languages from Siberia, through Russian, from Tungusic, and its subsequent career is a case study in what happens when a specific office becomes a general category.

The early record is made by outsiders travelling under Russian imperial authority: exiles, explorers, missionaries and administrators, several of whom produced detailed accounts of peoples they had been sent to among. That material is valuable and it was gathered under conditions of colonisation.

By the later nineteenth century the term had been detached from the region entirely and applied to ritual specialists worldwide, and by the twentieth it was the basis of a general theory of religion, most influentially in a comparative study that presented an archaic technique found everywhere. The effect was to make a Siberian office into a universal type, and then to read the universal type back onto the Siberians.

The Soviet period then removed the possibility of correcting this from the field. Practitioners were persecuted, practice was driven underground, and research operated under constraint.

Since the 1990s the traditions have revived publicly, and Indigenous scholars from these peoples now write about them. What has also arrived is an international market in shamanic experience, which has an interest in the universalised version rather than the local one.

The atlas keeps the peoples distinct where it can and does not elaborate what is held.