The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  The shamans of Siberia were rarely at the centre of social or religious life, in that they were not usually the political leaders of groups or the people who performed the regular rites in honour of deities. Nor was shamanism a single social institution, as practitioners might serve only their own family, or its neighbours or relatives as well, or a clan or a tribe, or take on any clients. Their most widespread and common function consisted of healing, by driving out or propitiating the spirits believed to cause disease; and indeed treatment of the sick is a major function of service magic worldwide. Next in order of importance in the Siberian shaman’s work came divination, another major aspect of magic globally; and in Siberia it could take the form of clairvoyance, to trace lost or stolen property, or prophecy, to advise people on how best to prepare for activities such as hunting, fishing or migration. In addition to these two big roles, there were others which were only important in some regions, such as conducting the souls of the recently deceased to the land of the dead; or repairing the psychic defences of the community and launching magical counter-strikes against its enemies; or negotiating with the spirits or deities believed to control the local supply of game animals; or conducting special rites of sacrifice.

  To effect any of these tasks, shamans generally worked with spirits, as part of a world view which divided the uncanny universe into entities that were naturally hostile to humans and those which were either benevolent or could be forced to serve human needs. Such work took place within the context of local cosmologies which tended to possess three beliefs in common: that even apparently inanimate objects were inhabited by spirit forms; that the cosmos was divided into different levels or stacks of worlds, between which travel was possible (in spirit rather than physical form); and that living beings possessed more than one soul, or animating force. All over Siberia shamans were believed to depend for much of their work on the superhuman powers of their spirit helpers, who were usually regarded as taking the form of animals. This was probably for a practical reason: that it endowed the servitor spirits with mobile forms that enabled them to traverse different environments and deal with different challenges at the greatest speed. The nature of the animals concerned was a highly individual and personal matter which varied from shaman to shaman, and most made their own combinations of different species, choosing or being granted them from a very wide possible range. Some peoples believed that each shaman was assisted by one or two spirits in particular, which functioned as their spiritual doubles. The ability to call on these entities at will generally left a Siberian shaman with no need to transform into an animal in person, or to send out their own soul in such a form; though the matter could be confused by the central Siberian belief in animal spirit-doubles, with whom a shaman’s own spirit might fuse, mentioned above. There seems to be no trace, however, throughout Siberia, of a shaman changing his or her own body into that of an animal in the physical world, as Roman witches (for example) were thought to do. That is why an assumption of humans’ ability to turn themselves into animals as a sign of shamanism appears to be incorrect. The relationship between shaman and spirit helpers varied greatly across Siberia, covering broad spectra of fear and affection, and of voluntary association and coercion. Some shamans were very clearly in absolute control of their invisible assistants, while others were with equal clarity serving the wishes of theirs.

  The apprenticeship of a Siberian shaman was generally divided into three phases. The first consisted of the discovery of a vocation for shamanism. This often ran in families, but the hereditary principle was qualified heavily by the fact that in theory the spirits concerned had to consent to the transfer to a new owner, and they often chose individuals with no shaman forebears, especially if those who did have such forebears did not seem as talented. In some regions they were thought to come to a new shaman unbidden on the death of the old one, and their arrival was marked in the person concerned by a physical or mental illness. Once the connection with the spirits was made, the apprentice shaman had to be trained, both by a veteran one, and by the spirits themselves in a series of often terrifying visions and dreams. The final phase of maturation consisted of acceptance as a qualified practitioner by existing shamans and by clients. All three of these stages of development varied greatly in form across Siberia and no one model can be regarded as normative; and even less generalization can be made about the relationships between shamans and the human communities they served, or indeed between different shamans.

  Universally, Siberian shamans performed with some ritual costume or equipment, which distinguished them on sight from others of their community. Across most of the region they put on a special form of dress, and in the central areas this was usually ornate, consisting of a heavily decorated gown and elaborate headpiece. In most peripheral areas, however, ceremonial costume was vestigial or absent though shamanism just as important. The employment of special implements or objects was more general, and of these by far the most widespread was the drum, the beat of which usually played a major part in the performance. None the less, stringed instruments replaced it in some places and among southern areas a staff was the main shamanic accessory, and occasionally a rattle. The key characteristic of shamans for European observers, their rite technique, was naturally also varied in character, though it was usually dramatic and demanded considerable performative skills. It consisted in essence of a summoning of spirits and the direction or persuasion of them to carry out specific tasks, by a process of which the possible component parts were singing, dancing, chanting, playing of music (usually drumming), and recitation. Some of the shamanic rites were for the general benefit of communities, and others to aid individuals. Shamans often used assistants, and the audiences at the performances were almost as frequently expected to contribute to them by chanting, or singing refrains: in this manner the shamanic rite technique was often a group one led by the shaman. Siberian shamans were mostly male, but women made up a large minority in most areas and probably predominated in one (the lower Amur Valley), and they served as shamans throughout Siberia: indeed, the role gave them a unique opportunity to wield public power and influence in its native societies. No two shamans, however, performed in exactly the same way, even in the same community or family. Some induced an atmosphere of gentleness, melancholy and reflection, while others were menacing and maniacal and terrified onlookers. Some apparently sent out their own souls on journeys to accomplish the task needed, while others took their spirits into their own bodies and were possessed by, and became mouthpieces for, them in the classic manner of the spirit-medium, and yet others carried on an external dialogue with the entities on whom they had called, eliciting information from them. Some remained conscious and active throughout the whole performance, while others fell and then lay motionless and seemingly unconscious for the central part of it.

  It may be seen from this that Mircea Eliade’s choice of the personal spirit journey as the definitive feat of the true shaman was mistaken, and his concern to distinguish shamanism from passive spirit mediumship was needless. Shamanism of this sort was found throughout the whole vast region of Siberia, and in neighbouring regions of Central Asia and parts of South Asia. It was also found in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of Alaska and Canada, round to Greenland, the Bering Strait between Asia and North America representing no barrier to communication between the peoples on either side. How far it can be said to extend into other parts of the world, such as East Asia, the Middle East, the rest of the Americas, Africa and Australia, is a matter of protracted controversy among experts, a resolution to which always founders on the lack of accepted definitions of shamanism. Mercifully, it is not a concern here, where the focus is firmly on Europe. What can be emphasized is that whereas a belief in the witch figure, while widespread globally, made up a patchwork in most regions, peoples who feared witches fervently being interspersed with those who did not regard them as a serious problem or did not believe in them at all, the North Asian and North American shamanic province form
s a compact mass covering Siberia and the Canadian Arctic and sub-Arctic. However hazy its boundaries may be south of that core area, due to the definitional problem, within it all the native peoples had shamanism of the classic kind described above.

  The relationship between the two belief systems, in the shaman and the witch, took a strikingly different form on either side of the Bering Strait. Across most of Siberia, as has been noted before, the witch figure was completely absent, as uncanny misfortune was blamed on hostile spirits in the natural world, or some normally benevolent or harmless spirits whom humans had offended, or occasionally on shamans working for enemy clans, who had sent their spirits to inflict damage as an act of invisible warfare. Among some peoples in the north-east of the region, some slight qualifications were found to this rule. The Koryak believed that some individuals had the power to suck life and good luck out of their neighbours, but this was regarded as innate and involuntary, and they were not thought to be possessed by evil spirits. They were therefore avoided rather than persecuted.25 Among the Sakha, a Turkic people who had migrated up into Siberia from the south-west, it was accepted that some shamans could turn bad and secretly attack the persons and property of neighbours. In those cases the culprits could be punished; but they seem to have been treated as delinquents rather than embodiments of evil, and the usual penalty was a fine.26 By contrast, many of the peoples in sub-Arctic and Arctic North America who possessed shamans of the Siberian sort also feared and hunted witches; and there the shamans used their powers to detect and unmask alleged practitioners of witchcraft in the manner of service magicians across the world, including those in Europe. This is true around the north of the New World from the Tlingit of Alaska to the Eskimo of Greenland.27

  One further point needs to be made in this portrait of the ‘classical’ shamanism of Siberia: that it was assembled by selecting certain characteristics from the members of what were often quite complex local assemblages of magico-religious specialists. Thus, for example, a study of the Sakha divided such specialists among them into the oyun, or man who worked with spirits in a trance by means of a public performance, and the udaghan, his female equivalent; the körbüöchhü, or diviner; the otohut, or healer; the iicheen, or ‘wise person’; and the tüülleekh kihi, or dream interpreter.28 Their work clearly overlapped, and it is no longer possible to distinguish them absolutely. To the scholar interested in shamanism, it is the oyun and udaghan who are the figures corresponding to that category, but to the anthropologist interested in the spiritual world of the Sakha, all are important; and across Siberia the individuals identified as shamans often engaged in other kinds of magic as well, such as the use of symbolic natural substances, and incantations. In making comparisons between Europe and Siberia, such complexity is an important factor within European societies themselves. The service magicians who featured in early modern Hungarian witch trials included not only the táltos, the spirit-warrior who has been mentioned earlier, but the ‘healing woman’, the ‘woman doctor’, the ‘herb woman’, the ‘learned woman’, the ‘midwife’, the ‘seer’, the ‘bed-maker’, the ‘smearer’ and the ‘wise woman’. Nor does it seem as if many of these terms could be used as alternatives for the same sort of functionary: the ‘learned woman’ and ‘woman doctor’ were of greater status than most of the others, and most could generally be distinguished by their methods.29 Equivalents found in Finnish records between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were led by the tietäjä, who was the most high-grade and usually male, and the noita, who was less respected, less reliably benevolent, and mostly female, but there were also five other kinds of magician of lower status, each with its own name.30

  It is easy to see why scholars concerned with an understanding of how the concepts of magic and witchcraft have operated in particular human groups might feel uneasy about cultural cross-comparisons made by concentrating on particular figures and features without reference to the local contexts in which they are embedded. None the less, without some such exercise such comparisons can hardly be made at all, and they seem to have some validity. In the case of the historical debate with which this chapter commenced, it should be readily apparent now why some of the participants should have seen some similarities between Siberian shamans and specific kinds of folk magician in early modern and modern south-eastern Europe. It should also be apparent, however, why Gustav Henningsen placed more emphasis on the differences, and his view may be borne out further by the means by which some of the positive comparisons were made. For example, the Hungarian táltos was held to have the following features in common with the Siberian shaman: being born with a distinguishing physical feature (such as teeth or an extra bone); an initiatory experience in childhood (a convulsive illness, a mysterious period of disappearance, or a visionary dream); the acquisition of unusual powers (such as vanishing at will, changing shape into an animal, or duelling with enemies in spirit flight); and the use of special equipment (such as a head-dress, drum or sieve). The first of those, however, is rarely found in Siberia, and this is also true of the first two of the three unusual powers mentioned. Missing in Hungary is the distinctive shamanic performance and much reference to work with spirits. Moreover, the features of the táltos listed above as significant do not appear together in descriptions of actual individuals: rather, they have been constructed from different morsels of (mostly modern) folklore to create an ideal type. In the earlier accounts, Siberian features such as the special equipment seem to be rarer or missing.31 For this reason the táltos, benandanti and similar functionaries from south-eastern Europe cannot readily be accepted here as part of a historical Eurasian shamanic province, and the different question of whether they were survivors from an ancient one cannot be resolved. What can be attempted more readily is a solution to the question of whether any figures unambiguously similar to Siberian shamans can be identified in Europe at a period for which records survive, and the logical place to seek these is in areas closest to Siberia itself: in Russia and the Arctic and sub-Arctic north.

  A European Shamanic Province

  One obvious point at which to commence this quest is among northern peoples belonging to the Uralic linguistic and ethnic group, which straddles the Ural Mountains that separate Siberia from Russia and also includes the Magyars as an isolated component. The members of this group who live in western Siberia have practised classic shamanism of the universal Siberian sort, so what of those just on the opposite side of the mountains, in Russia itself: the Mordvins, Cheremises, Chuvashes and Votyaks? Here the information available seems to derive mostly from nineteenth-century folklore collections. The Mordvins had people who specialized in communing with the dead, and old men who put on white robes at festivals to bless food. The Cheremises had diviners who cast beans and gazed into water, and the Chuvashes people who healed with herbs, told fortunes and recited charms to banish diseases. None of these sounds very much like a Siberian shaman, and most are no different from forms of popular magician found across the rest of Europe. The Votyaks, however (a people also known as the Udmurts or Chuds), had a figure called the tuno, who told fortunes, healed diseases and found stolen or lost property, either by prayer or by going into trance. Sometimes the trance state was achieved by dancing with a sword and whip to the music of a psaltery, until he cried out the answers to questions in delirium. The vocation was mostly hereditary, although gifted individuals could take it up without such a qualification, and trainees were instructed at night by spirits. This does sound close enough to Siberian shamanism to suggest that it was an offshoot.32 There is also an isolated medieval reference to a similar practice among the same people under the year 1071 in the Russian Primary Chronicle, which was written in 1377 but drew on an original work from the early twelfth century, which in turn was based on older material. It tells how a man from the major Russian city of Novgorod went among the Votyaks. He paid to have his fortune told by a tribal magician, who called spirits to himself to provide the answers, which came to him while lying i
n a trance inside his dwelling.33

  The great European parallel for Siberian shamanism has, however, been located precisely where, perhaps, it would be logical to look for it, in the Arctic and sub-Arctic where it more or less completes the circumpolar shamanic province which extends across Siberia, North America and Greenland. It has been detected among the Sámi or Lapps, a Uralic hunting, fishing and herding people who occupy northern areas of Finland, Scandinavia and Russia and formerly extended their range far into the central portion of the Scandinavian peninsula and further across the top of Russia. The first record of shamanism among them occurs in the twelfth-century Historia Norwegiae, which described the Sámi as having people who were claimed to divine the future, attract desirable things from a great geographical distance, heal, and find hidden treasure, with the aid of spirits. It included a report from Norse traders of how their Sámi hosts had attributed the sudden apparent death of a woman to the theft of her soul by spirits sent by enemies. A magician then took up residence under a cloth hanging and picked up a drum or tambourine painted with pictures of beasts, shoes and a ship, which represented forms of locomotion for his attendant spirit. He then played this, chanted and danced until he suddenly died himself, allegedly because his spirit-double had been killed in a battle with those of the enemies. Another magician was consulted, and performed the same rite, this time with success, as he survived, and revived the woman.34 In every detail, this could be a description of a Siberian shaman at work, and it is small wonder, if they used the classic, dramatic, shamanic rite technique, that Sámi magicians became famed for their prowess among the medieval Norse. It aided their reputation for arcane powers that whereas the other Scandinavian peoples converted to Christianity around the year 1000, the Sámi remained pagan for more than half a millennium longer. Particular examples in Old Norse literature of magic worked by them testify again to the importance of ecstatic trance to their mode of operation. The thirteenth-century Vatnsdalers’ Saga features a group of three of them being hired by Norse chieftains to trace a missing amulet, and doing so by shutting themselves indoors for three days and nights while their spirits wandered abroad and found it.35 Sámi magic also features as a distinctive, exotic and potent phenomenon in other sagas, though none of these literary sources portrays the Siberian performance rite in connection with it.36 What continued to fascinate other Europeans was its reputed ability to send out the magician’s spirit from its body at will to roam freely about the world. When the German Cornelius Agrippa wrote his major study of ceremonial magic in the early sixteenth century, he discussed this ability with reference to the Greek sages, and commented that in his own day it was still found among many in ‘Norway and Lapland’.37 The expression ‘Lapland witches’ became a commonplace one in early modern English literature for especially potent magicians, being found in Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe and Swift, in addition to lesser writers.38