Toli

The toli does three things at once, and the ethnographic accounts rarely separate them. It is armour: hung across the chest and back of a costume, a disc turns aside what would otherwise strike the wearer, and a practitioner expecting difficulty puts on more of them. It is a seat: a spirit called to attend can settle on the disc, so the toli is a place as much as an object. And it is a surface: polished bronze holds an image, and the literature records practitioners looking into a toli for what is out of sight, whether that is a lost animal, an absent person or the cause of an illness.

The discs vary considerably. Some are plain and lightly domed with a boss at the centre. Others carry cast designs, animals, whorls or Chinese characters that the wearer may or may not read. They are pierced or looped for a cord and hung singly or in numbers, and a fully equipped costume can carry a substantial weight of metal.

Because bronze rings, the toli also contributes sound. A practitioner in motion is audible before being visible, and the mirrors, the pendants on the coat and the drum together produce a continuous metallic noise that the accounts treat as part of the work rather than as a side effect of the equipment.

A large proportion of the toli in museum collections were not made for the use they ended up serving. They are Chinese bronze mirrors, manufactured for domestic and funerary use over a very long period, traded north and east in quantity, and then drilled, looped and fitted to costumes by Buryat, Evenki, Daur and Manchu practitioners. Some are centuries older than the coats they hang on. Alongside them sit local castings that copy the imported form, and plain discs with no ornament at all.

That reuse is worth stating plainly, because the popular picture of Siberian practice is of something sealed off and archaic. It was not. These are trade goods, absorbed from a neighbouring empire and given a new job, and the same is true of the beads, coins, bells and iron fittings that appear alongside them. A costume assembled over a working life is a record of what its owner could obtain.

It also complicates dating. A disc can be dated by its manufacture, which tells you when the bronze was cast in China, and that says nothing about when it was fitted to a coat in the Baikal region or in Manchuria. Collections catalogued on the mirror's date alone will read older than the practice they document, and that has caused confusion in the literature more than once.