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By Cooper Baltis and Tyler Mayo

Our contemporary world is a collage of dominator Gucci hand bags, home-woven willow baskets, crumbling trees, and sprouting skyscrapers. It hands us a shot of absinthe mixed with holy water and asks us if we want to go to graduate school or a strip club. This globalized existence gives us individualized cubicles and corporate farms, chemical injected water and distilled knowledge.

Yet, while appearing to be conflicting opposites, all of these elements exist together in our world, in our lives. Which begs the question: What is the significance of their relation? It is this space of relation between what look like separate objects where shamanism exists.

Shamanism is a form of spirituality that predates all the major world religions. It emphasizes non-physical worlds and their inhabitants, human relation to nature, and the power of healing.

Shamanism has no formal organization and holds no core doctrine; in fact, it was only recently that people started to notice that ancient, localized forms of healing, spirit invocation, and communication with non-physical realms had overlapping themes.

The word “shaman,” used to identify these spiritual individuals in parts of Siberia, was adopted to refer to this worldwide phenomenon. While the different forms of shamanism share many aspects, they are also filled with cultural variations that make each form unique. Examining two specific forms of shamanism from their technical to metaphysical aspects reveals what these traditions share, as well as how each tradition is molded to its culture. During my time in Mongolia, I have been exposed to Buryat shamanism, whose shamans, known as “бөө” wear elaborate costumes and channel animal, nature (trees, rivers, etc), and ancestor spirits.

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Two years ago, I lived in Nepal where I became involved in their form of shamanism, the “jhankri” tradition, specifically amongst the Tamang people. Nepali shamans also have a costume, though they use it mostly for larger ceremonies, and also work with animal, natural, and ancestor spirits – they often channel a forest spirit known as the “ban jhankri” (“forest shaman”). They often work with Tibetan Buddhist and Hindu deities as well, where as Buryat shamans do not seem to work with such entities as prevalently.

When Buryat shamans put on their costume (complete with bells, beads, metal plates, and a feathered headdress with leather strips covering their eyes) and begin drumming to call in their spirit, they move and shake until the spirit enters the body, and their composure changes. The shaman’s “translator,” a person who works with the shaman to translate the spirits’ old form of the Mongolian language, provides them with vodka, tobacco, snuff, and other items, which they physically imbibe. The spirits voice is often much different from that of the shaman: Deep, hoarse, and crackly.

Positioned on their seat of cushions, they call forward people to heal, rubbing the patients head and back, and using a ritual club wrapped in katak with small metal figures of tools hanging off it to ‘brush off’ unwanted energy and ‘loosen’ stuck energy. Sometimes the spirit will energize vodka by blowing on it and offer it to the patient, or share a smoke with them.

When the work is done, the spirit takes their drum and beater in hand, and drums again to leave the body of the shaman, who returns.

The Buryat shaman does not remember anything, as all of him, save his body, has been absent. The Nepali shaman does not always call their spirit through for healings; instead, they access their energy using “mantra” (sacred phrases) and direct it using ritual implements.

However, for more involved healings they too dress in their costume and drum themselves into trance. They wear beads in the same way the Buryat shamans do, slung around their neck and side, to create an “X” across their chest like a bandolier. They also have a sling of bells worn in the same way, which differ from the Buryat shaman’s bells, which are attached to their clothes, headdress, and drum beater.

As for the Nepali shaman’s headdress, it also has feathers (usually peacock feathers), but does not have the fringes that cover the eyes. Their drum is a circle with two sides and a handle that also serves as a “phurba” (ritual dagger); Buryat shaman drums are single sided, and can be octagon, polygon, or triangle, and whereas the Buryat shaman has different drums for different spirits, Nepali shamans use the same drum.

Read more here at Psyche Wizard