The Drum and the Lake
In Siberia, around the deepest lake on Earth, the Buryat Mongols have been speaking to spirits for longer than anyone can document. Their shamans — the böö and udgan — enter trance, cross between worlds, negotiate with the dead, heal the living, and maintain the ancient covenant between human beings and the forces that surround them.
This is one of the most well-documented shamanic traditions in the world. Russian ethnographers like Mikhail Khangalov recorded its practices in meticulous detail in the late nineteenth century. Mircea Eliade drew heavily on Buryat materials for his landmark study of shamanism. Western scholars from Caroline Humphrey to Justine Buck Quijada have studied its modern transformations. The documentation is rich because the tradition has been continuously observed — and continuously threatened — for three centuries.
The Soviet state tried to end it. Shamans were arrested, exiled, executed. Their drums were confiscated and burned. Their sacred groves were leveled. For seventy years, the practice went underground — surviving in whispers, in family memories, in healers who called themselves bone-setters instead of shamans. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the drums came back. They are still coming back.
This profile tells the story of a tradition that was nearly killed and chose to live.
I. The People and the Lake
The Buryats (Буряад) are a Mongolic people, the northernmost branch of the great Mongol family, and the largest indigenous group in Siberia. Approximately half a million Buryats live in the Russian Federation, concentrated in the Republic of Buryatia (capital: Ulan-Ude), the Ust-Orda Buryat Okrug west of Lake Baikal, and the Agin-Buryat Okrug to the east. Smaller Buryat communities live in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, China.
Their homeland centers on Lake Baikal (Байгал далай — "Sacred Sea" in Buryat) — the deepest, oldest, and by volume largest freshwater lake on Earth. Twenty-five million years old. Six hundred and thirty-six kilometers long. One thousand six hundred and forty-two meters deep at its lowest point. Containing roughly twenty percent of the world's unfrozen surface freshwater. The lake is not scenery. It is the spiritual axis of the Buryat world.
In Buryat cosmology, Baikal is alive. The lake has a master spirit — Dalai Lama Burkhan or Baikal Baabai (Father Baikal). The major rivers that feed it have their own spirits. The mountains surrounding it are sacred. The island of Olkhon (Ольхон), the largest island in the lake, is the most sacred site in Buryat shamanism — the residence of the chief of the thirteen northern spirits, the place where the first shaman received his power.
The Buryats were traditionally pastoralists — herding cattle, horses, sheep, and goats across the steppe and forest-steppe around the lake. Their way of life was transhumant: seasonal movement between pastures, the felt tent (ger or yurt) as the portable center of domestic and spiritual life, the horse as the measure of wealth and freedom. Shamanism grew from this landscape — a religion of open sky and running water, of mountains that watch and trees that listen, of spirits that dwell in every significant feature of the land.
The division that matters most for understanding Buryat shamanism is geographical. The Buryats west of Lake Baikal — the Cisbaikal or Irkutsk Buryats — maintained shamanism more strongly and longer, resisting both Buddhist and Christian missions with greater success. The Buryats east of the lake — the Transbaikal or Zabaikal Buryats — adopted Tibetan Buddhism (Gelugpa school) beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, creating a dual religious landscape where Buddhism and shamanism coexisted, overlapped, and competed. This east-west divide is the fundamental structure of Buryat religious life. It has never fully resolved.
II. The Three Worlds
Buryat shamanic cosmology divides reality into three layers, connected by the Turge — the World Tree, the cosmic axis that the shaman climbs during trance.
The Upper World (Дээдэ замби) is the realm of the Tenger (тэнгэр) — the celestial spirits, the sky-dwellers. In Buryat tradition, there are ninety-nine Tenger, organized into two groups: the fifty-five Western Tenger (generally benevolent, associated with light and warmth) and the forty-four Eastern Tenger (more ambivalent, capable of sending disease and misfortune). This division echoes throughout Buryat ritual life — the western and eastern sides of the yurt, the western and eastern directions in prayer.
Among the Western Tenger, the most important group is the thirteen northern noyod (lords) — powerful spirits associated with Olkhon Island and the northern shores of Baikal. Their chief is Khan Khoto Baabai, sometimes identified with the historical figure of Genghis Khan's father, or with an older sky-spirit layer predating Mongol imperial theology. The thirteen northern lords are the most actively worshipped spirits in contemporary Buryat shamanism. Their names, attributes, and associated rituals vary by clan and region — one of the defining features of the tradition is its local diversity.
The Middle World (Дунда замби) is the human realm, shared with a vast population of nature spirits. Every mountain of consequence has an ejen (эжэн, "master" or "owner"). Every river, spring, forest, and notable rock has its spirit presence. The gazryn ezen (master of a place) must be acknowledged, propitiated, and respected by anyone who enters its territory. The rituals of everyday shamanic life — the libation poured before drinking, the offering left at a mountain pass, the prayer spoken before crossing a river — are transactions with these spirits of place.
The Lower World (Доодо замби) is the realm of the dead, ruled by Erlig Khan (Эрлик хаан), the lord of the underworld. Erlig Khan is a fearsome figure but not purely evil — he is a judge, a keeper of order among the dead, a necessary power. The shaman who descends to the lower world does so to retrieve lost souls, negotiate with the dead, or learn secrets that only the dead possess.
The World Tree connects all three. The shaman ascends or descends along its trunk during trance. In some ritual traditions, a physical birch tree is erected as a ritual post (serge, сэргэ) — the earthly anchor of the cosmic axis. The birch is sacred in Buryat tradition: the shamanic drum is made from birch wood, the ritual staff is birch, the tree itself is the road between worlds.
III. The Shaman
The Buryat word for a male shaman is böö (бөө). The word for a female shaman is udgan (удган). Both terms are among the oldest attested shamanistic vocabulary in the Mongolic languages, and some scholars believe the word "shaman" itself — which entered European languages via the Tungusic (Evenki) word šaman — reflects a pan-Siberian institution of which the Buryat böö is one of the best-documented examples.
A person does not choose to become a shaman. The spirits choose. The hereditary calling is called utkha (утха) — the shamanic lineage or "root." The utkha traces back through ancestors who were shamans, and the calling descends through the blood, sometimes skipping generations, sometimes appearing in unexpected branches of the family. The most powerful shamans have deep utkha — nine or thirteen generations of shamanic ancestors.
The calling manifests as shamanic illness. A young person — often in adolescence or early adulthood — begins to experience episodes of strange behavior, visions, seizures, withdrawal, emotional storms, or physical illness that does not respond to ordinary treatment. In the Buryat understanding, the spirits are pressing the individual to accept the calling. Resistance makes the illness worse. The only cure is initiation — accepting the spirits, receiving the drum, and beginning to practice.
The ethnographer Mikhail Khangalov, himself a Buryat, documented these calling experiences in detail in the 1890s and 1900s. His accounts describe individuals who shook, sang involuntarily, ran into the forest, climbed trees, and spoke in languages they did not know. Western psychiatry would call this psychosis. The Buryat tradition calls it the spirits arriving. The distinction matters: in the Buryat framework, the "illness" is not a disorder to be cured but a transition to be completed. The shaman who emerges from the crisis is not a patient who recovered but a practitioner who accepted what was always theirs.
Initiation involves a series of rituals of increasing power, traditionally described as consecrations or "shanarization" (from the verb shanarga — to consecrate). The first consecration grants the right to practice basic rituals. Subsequent consecrations — traditionally up to nine levels — grant access to progressively more powerful spirits and more dangerous rituals. Each level requires more extensive equipment, more complex ceremonies, and greater spiritual authority.
The drum (хэсэ, khese) is the shaman's central instrument — the vehicle for trance, the horse that carries the shaman between worlds. Buryat drums are traditionally made from a circular birch frame covered with horse or deer hide, with a vertical handle on the inside carved or shaped to represent the human form — the spirit that inhabits the drum. The drumstick is covered in fur. The rhythm of the drum induces the altered state in which the shaman journeys.
The shamanic costume is another dimension of power. A fully equipped Buryat shaman wears a coat or cape adorned with metal mirrors (intended to deflect hostile spirits), iron pendants and chains (representing spirit-helpers), ribbons (representing the paths between worlds), bells, and animal parts. The costume is not clothing. It is armor, map, and summoning device combined.
Female shamans — udgan — have been central to the tradition throughout its documented history. In some Buryat clans, the udgan was more powerful and more feared than the böö. Khangalov and other ethnographers noted that female shamans were often associated with the Eastern Tenger and with the darker, more dangerous aspects of shamanic practice. The gender dynamics of Buryat shamanism do not map neatly onto Western feminist or patriarchal categories. Both men and women could be called, and both held genuine spiritual authority.
IV. The Practice
Buryat shamanic practice is centered on maintaining the relationships between humans, spirits, and ancestors. It is not a contemplative tradition — it is transactional, communal, and practical.
The most important public ritual is the tailgan (тайлган) — a communal ceremony of sacrifice and offering, traditionally performed at sacred outdoor sites: mountaintops, sacred groves, the shores of springs or rivers, or near ovoo cairns. The tailgan is a clan or community event, not a private one. A shaman presides. Animals — traditionally sheep, horses, or cattle — are sacrificed. The meat is cooked and shared. Libations of milk, tea, and vodka are offered to the spirits. Prayers are spoken to the Tenger, the local spirits, and the ancestors.
The tailgan is the heartbeat of Buryat shamanic community. It binds the living to the dead, the human to the spirit world, the individual to the clan. When the Soviet state banned the tailgan, it was not merely banning a ritual — it was severing the ligament that connected the Buryat people to their land, their ancestors, and their cosmic order. When the tailgan returned in the 1990s, thousands attended.
The kamlanie (камлание, from the Evenki kamlat' — to shamanize) is the private or small-group ritual: the shamanic séance. The shaman puts on the costume, takes up the drum, and begins to drum. The rhythm accelerates. The shaman enters trance — the eyes roll, the voice changes, the body moves in ways that may be violent or graceful or both. In trance, the shaman's soul leaves the body and travels: to the Upper World to petition the Tenger, to the Lower World to retrieve a lost soul, to the dwelling of a particular spirit to negotiate healing. The shaman speaks with the spirits' voices, conveys their demands, and returns with instructions: make this offering, visit this spring, honor this ancestor, stop doing this thing that offended the spirits.
Healing is the most common purpose of shamanic practice. A person falls ill. Ordinary medicine fails. The family consults a shaman, who diagnoses the spiritual cause — an offended ancestor, a nature spirit disturbed by careless behavior, a soul partly stolen by a malevolent force — and prescribes the remedy. The remedy is always relational: restore the broken relationship with the offended spirit. The illness is a symptom; the cause is social, in the broadest sense that "social" includes the dead and the spirits.
Fire rituals occupy a central place. The hearth fire — the fire at the center of the yurt — is sacred. It has its own spirit, often conceived as a grandmother figure. Libations are poured into the fire before meals. The fire must never be polluted — no garbage, no sharp objects pointed at it, no stepping over it. Fire purification (jumping over a fire, passing between two fires) is used for cleansing after contact with death or spiritual contamination. The relationship with fire connects Buryat shamanism to the broader Mongolic and Central Asian fire-cult that Dorje documented in the Tengrism profile: the libation, the respect, the understanding that fire mediates between worlds.
Arshaan (аршаан) — sacred healing springs — are pilgrimage sites scattered across Buryatia. The word comes from the Sanskrit rasāyana (elixir) via Tibetan and Mongolian, a linguistic trace of the Buddhist layer that overlaid the older shamanic relationship with water. Buryats visit arshaan for healing, drinking the mineral waters, bathing in the springs, and leaving offerings. Each arshaan has its own spirit, its own protocol, its own ailments that it addresses. The arshaan tradition survived the Soviet period almost intact — mineral spring visits could be reframed as "health tourism" and thus escaped the ideological ban on religion.
The ovoo (обоо) — the stone cairn — functions in Buryat practice exactly as in the broader Mongolic tradition: a marker of sacred space, a place of offering, a point of contact between the human and spirit worlds. Travelers add a stone when passing. Vodka is sprinkled. Prayers are spoken. The ovoo marks the spots where the world is thin.
V. The Ancestors
Ancestor worship is the bedrock beneath all Buryat shamanic practice. The spirits who matter most are not abstract deities but known dead — grandparents, great-grandparents, clan founders, and above all, former shamans whose power continues to operate after death.
The ongon (онгон) is the physical representation of an ancestral spirit — a figure made of felt, wood, leather, or metal, kept in the home or in a special container, and periodically "fed" with offerings of fat, milk, or vodka. The ongon is not a statue of a spirit. It is a house for a spirit — a dwelling that the ancestor occupies when invoked. Some ongon are personal (representing a specific ancestor), others are communal (representing a clan's founding shaman or protector spirit).
The dead do not leave. They become part of the spiritual landscape. A deceased shaman of great power becomes a zaarin (заарин) — a spirit so strong that it can possess living mediums, speak through them, demand offerings, and intervene in the affairs of the living. The zaarin are not ghosts in the Western sense — lost, lingering, pathetic. They are authorities. They have opinions. They make demands. The boundary between the living shaman and the dead shaman is thin: the living shaman channels the dead, the dead shaman inhabits the living. The drum is the bridge.
Buryat society is organized into clans (обог, obog), and each clan has its own shamanic lineage, its own sacred sites, its own ongon, and its own relationship with specific Tenger. The clan dimension is critical: Buryat shamanism is not a universal religion with a single theology. It is a family of local practices, each rooted in specific kinship networks, specific landscapes, and specific dead. What a Buryat shaman in the Tunka Valley knows and practices may differ significantly from what a shaman in the Barguzin Valley does — and both are authentic, because authenticity in this tradition is genealogical, not doctrinal.
VI. Buddhism and the Dual Path
Tibetan Buddhism arrived among the Buryats in waves. The first contacts came through Mongolia in the seventeenth century, as the Gelugpa school spread northward from Tibet through the Mongol khanates. By the eighteenth century, Buddhism had established a significant presence among the Transbaikal Buryats, with the construction of the first datsan (monastery) — Tsongolsky Datsan — in 1741. The Russian Empire, after initial suspicion, found Buddhism easier to administer than shamanism (it had institutions, hierarchies, texts — things a state can recognize and regulate) and formally recognized Buddhism as an official religion of the Buryat people in 1741.
The relationship between Buddhism and shamanism among the Buryats is not a simple story of replacement. It is a story of layering, synthesis, competition, and coexistence that continues to the present day.
In the east, many Buryat families developed a dual practice: consulting lamas for some needs (funerals, calendar divination, monastery-based ceremonies, philosophical questions) and shamans for others (healing, spirit-related illness, clan rituals, land-spirit propitiation). This was not hypocrisy or confusion. It was a practical recognition that different specialists address different domains. The lama knows the Buddhist scriptures. The shaman knows the local spirits. Both are needed.
Buddhist authorities, however, were often hostile to shamanism. The Gelugpa establishment viewed shamanic practice as superstition at best and demonic at worst. Some lamas actively campaigned against shamans, and the institutional weight of the datsans gradually pushed shamanic practice to the margins of Transbaikal society — not eliminating it, but rendering it unofficial, private, slightly shameful. Among the western Buryats, where Buddhism had less institutional purchase, shamanism remained dominant well into the twentieth century.
The synthesis produced distinctive hybrid forms. Some Buryat Buddhist practices incorporate elements that have no parallel in Tibetan Buddhism but closely resemble shamanic ritual: spirit propitiation, fumigation ceremonies, local spirit-deity worship. Some shamans incorporated Buddhist imagery — Buddhas and bodhisattvas — into their spirit pantheons. The boundary between "Buddhist" and "shamanic" practice in Buryat religious life is a scholarly convenience, not a lived reality. Many Buryats would be puzzled by the question "Are you Buddhist or shamanist?" — they are Buryat, and being Buryat involves both.
This duality is structurally similar to the Bon-Buddhist coexistence in Tibet: two traditions sharing the same cultural space, each claiming priority, each borrowing from the other, neither fully absorbing or replacing the other. Rinchen's Bon profile describes pilgrims circling Mount Kailash in opposite directions. In Buryatia, the dual practice is less a question of direction than of depth: Buddhism occupies the public, institutional, philosophical surface; shamanism occupies the private, familial, spirit-facing depth. Both are real. Both are necessary.
VII. The Destruction
The Russian colonial period restricted shamanism but did not try to destroy it. The Soviet period did.
The anti-religious campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s targeted both Buddhism and shamanism in Buryatia, but the shamans were more vulnerable. The datsans were institutions — they could be closed, their property confiscated, their monks registered and monitored. Shamanism had no institutions, no buildings, no membership rolls. Its practitioners were scattered across the countryside, embedded in clan networks, operating through personal calling rather than institutional appointment. This made shamanism harder to surveil but also harder to defend. A shaman had no organization to protect them, no foreign co-religionists to appeal to, no diplomatic weight.
The campaigns were systematic. Shamans were classified as class enemies — parasites who exploited the superstition of the masses. They were arrested under charges of fraud, counterrevolutionary activity, or "anti-Soviet agitation." Many were sent to labor camps. Some were executed. The numbers are difficult to verify — Soviet record-keeping on shamanic persecution was less thorough than its record-keeping on Buddhist persecution, in part because the state never fully catalogued what it was destroying.
The drums were the primary target. Soviet authorities understood that the drum was the shaman's essential tool — without it, the shaman could not practice, could not enter trance, could not journey. Drums were confiscated and publicly burned. The burning of the drums was a deliberate act of spiritual violence: in Buryat understanding, the drum is alive, it has a spirit, it is the shaman's horse. Burning the drum is killing the horse. Some shamans reportedly died within days of their drums' destruction — whether from grief, from the spiritual consequences of the severed connection, or from physical violence by the authorities, the accounts do not always distinguish.
Sacred groves were cut down. Ovoo cairns were dismantled. Ongon figures were confiscated and destroyed or sent to ethnographic museums (where some survive, stripped of their spiritual context, displayed behind glass as "artifacts of primitive belief"). The tailgan — the communal ceremony — was banned. The entire apparatus of shamanic practice was targeted for elimination.
And yet it survived.
It survived in families. Grandmothers who remembered the rituals and performed them quietly, at home, without costumes or drums. Mothers who taught their children which springs were sacred and what words to say when passing an ovoo — but phrased it as custom, not religion. Healers who practiced bone-setting, herbal medicine, and folk remedies, using the knowledge they had received through shamanic training without calling it shamanism.
It survived in memory. Clan genealogies that recorded which ancestors were shamans, kept orally or in hidden notebooks. The utkha — the shamanic lineage — continued to be tracked even when no one dared to act on it. The calling did not stop coming just because the drums were burned. People continued to experience shamanic illness — the visions, the crises, the involuntary behaviors — but without initiation available, they suffered without resolution.
It survived because some shamans simply refused to stop. They practiced in secret, in remote areas, for trusted clients. They used substitutes for the confiscated equipment — hand-clapping instead of drumming, a stick instead of a drumstick, a coat instead of the ceremonial garment. The Soviet state could burn the drum, but it could not burn the calling.
VIII. The Revival
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened the door. The door had been slightly ajar since Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reforms of the late 1980s, which relaxed anti-religious restrictions. But 1991 was the decisive break: the ideological framework that had criminalized shamanism was gone. The crime no longer existed. The drums could be made again.
The revival was rapid and messy. Multiple organizations formed. The Tengeri (Religious Organization of Shamans of Buryatia) was among the first, followed by several competing groups. The organizational landscape was complicated by personal rivalries, disputes over legitimacy, and the fundamental problem that shamanism had never been organized — it had always been a decentralized, clan-based, genealogically transmitted practice. Trying to organize it into a "religion" with institutional structure was itself a kind of distortion, driven by the requirements of Russian religious registration law rather than by the tradition's own logic.
Nadia Stepanova (Надежда Ананьевна Степанова, born 1943) became the most visible face of the Buryat shamanic revival. An udgan (female shaman) from the Ekhirit clan, she came from a deep utkha — nine generations of shamanic ancestors. She had experienced the shamanic calling in the Soviet period but could not be fully initiated until the restrictions lifted. In the 1990s, she began performing publicly, appearing in documentaries, traveling to international conferences, and giving interviews. Her international visibility brought attention to Buryat shamanism but also raised the question — familiar in every tradition profiled in this archive — of whether visibility transforms or distorts the thing it reveals.
Sarangerel Odigan (born Julie Ann Stewart, 1963–2006) was a Buryat-American writer and shaman whose books Riding Windhorses (2000) and Chosen by the Spirits (2001) became the primary English-language introductions to Buryat shamanism. Sarangerel — her shamanic name — was initiated in Buryatia and worked to bridge the tradition into English while maintaining its integrity. Her early death was mourned on both sides of the Pacific. Her books remain in print and continue to be the entry point for most English-speaking readers.
The tailgan returned. Public communal ceremonies resumed at sacred sites around Lake Baikal and across Buryatia. Thousands attend. Animals are sacrificed. Libations are poured. The Tenger are addressed. For communities that had been separated from their ancestral rituals for seventy years, the experience of attending a tailgan for the first time was often overwhelming — people wept, not from sadness but from the recognition that something they had been told was dead was alive.
New shamans were recognized and initiated. Some came from families with known utkha — the calling had been documented in the family but could not be answered during the Soviet period. Others claimed new callings. The question of who is a real shaman became the revival's sharpest internal tension: hereditary shamans with deep utkha versus newcomers with powerful experiences but no genealogical credentials. The tradition had always used utkha as its primary criterion of legitimacy, but the Soviet period broke many lineages. Entire clans lost their shamanic genealogies. Some individuals experienced unmistakable shamanic illness but could not trace their utkha because the records were destroyed.
New drums were made. Drum-makers emerged — some taught by surviving elders, some trained through visions and intuition, some studying ethnographic descriptions and museum collections to reconstruct what had been lost. The drum came back, not as a museum piece but as a working tool. The sound of the drum over the Siberian steppe, absent for seventy years, returned.
IX. Shadows
No honest profile of Buryat shamanism can avoid the tensions that run through the revival.
The authenticity question is the sharpest. Seventy years of suppression broke lineages, destroyed knowledge, and killed the people who carried it. How much of the "revived" shamanism is genuine transmission from pre-Soviet practice, and how much is reconstruction — built from ethnographic texts, from fragments of memory, from the imaginations of people who want it to be real? The answer is: both. Some elements survived intact (the arshaan traditions, the ovoo practices, family-level rituals). Some elements were reconstructed from Khangalov's ethnographic descriptions and from museum collections. Some elements are new — invented in response to contemporary needs and retroactively attributed to tradition. This is not unique to Buryat shamanism. Every religious revival faces the same question. The grandmother who never stopped is transmission. The young person who reads Sarangerel's book and feels the calling is — what? The tradition itself provides no clear answer.
Commercialization has followed the revival. "Shamanic tours" around Lake Baikal are marketed to domestic and international tourists. Ceremonies are performed for paying audiences. Some shamans charge substantial fees for healing sessions, divination, and ritual services. This is not inherently illegitimate — shamans have always been compensated for their work, traditionally in livestock, food, or labor — but the scale and style of commercial shamanism in contemporary Buryatia would be unrecognizable to Khangalov's informants. The line between a shaman serving their community and a shaman serving tourists is not always clear, and crossing it is not always avoidable in a market economy.
The Buddhist tension has sharpened since the revival. The Buryat Buddhist establishment — the datsans and their lamas — experienced their own post-Soviet revival. The Ivolginsky Datsan outside Ulan-Ude, which had survived the Soviet period as the sole functioning Buddhist monastery in Russia (a showcase for foreign visitors), became the center of a renewed Buddhist institutional presence. Some Buddhist authorities view the shamanic revival with open hostility, seeing it as a return to superstition that undermines the progress Buddhism represents. Some shamans return the sentiment, framing Buddhism as a foreign imposition that suppressed the Buryats' authentic spiritual heritage. The old dual practice — consulting both lama and shaman — continues for many Buryats, but the institutional leaders on both sides are less comfortable with the arrangement than the people they serve.
Nationalism is woven through the revival. Buryat shamanism's resurgence is inseparable from the broader post-Soviet Buryat cultural renaissance — the reassertion of indigenous identity against Russian cultural dominance, the revival of the Buryat language, the reclamation of ancestral land rights. For many Buryats, shamanism is not just a spiritual practice but a marker of ethnic identity: to be Buryat is to have this relationship with the land, the spirits, and the ancestors. This is powerful and genuine. It becomes dangerous when it slides into ethnic exclusivism — the idea that only Buryats can practice Buryat shamanism, that the spirits belong to the Buryat blood, that outsiders are inherently excluded. The tradition itself is ambiguous on this point: it is genealogically transmitted (the utkha), which implies ethnic specificity, but the spirits are spirits of place, not of blood — they belong to the land, and anyone who lives on the land is in relationship with them.
The gender question has emerged in new forms. Historically, both men and women were shamans, and the udgan (female shaman) held genuine authority. In the contemporary revival, some observers note a shift toward male institutional dominance — the organizations are led by men, the most publicized practitioners skew male, and the udgan tradition has been slower to re-emerge. This may reflect Soviet-era disruptions (female shamans were persecuted as severely as male shamans but had fewer resources for survival), or broader patriarchal pressures in post-Soviet Russian society, or both. The tradition's own history argues against this narrowing.
X. The Living Shore
What keeps Buryat shamanism alive today is what has always kept it alive: the relationship between people, land, and spirits.
A family in the Tunka Valley consults a shaman because their child is ill and the doctors cannot find a cause. The shaman drums, enters trance, speaks with a voice that is not her own, and says: your grandfather is angry because you moved the ovoo stones from his grave. The family makes an offering. The child recovers. Whether the mechanism is spiritual, psychological, or something that our categories cannot capture, the practice works in the sense that it produces meaningful action — the family re-engages with its ancestral obligations, the community fabric is repaired, the relationship with the dead is restored.
A young man in Ulan-Ude experiences visions, tremors, episodes of involuntary singing. His family recognizes the signs. They take him to a shaman who confirms: the utkha is in him, his great-grandmother was an udgan, the spirits are calling. He is initiated. He begins to practice. He makes a new drum. The calling has crossed the seventy-year silence and arrived.
At Olkhon Island, on a cliff above the lake, the summer tailgan draws hundreds. Sheep are sacrificed. Vodka is sprinkled toward the sky. The shaman addresses the thirteen northern lords in a voice that carries over the water. The tourists with cameras stand at a respectful distance. The Buryats who came from the city — lawyers, teachers, engineers, people whose parents never told them about any of this — stand closer, and some of them are weeping.
The arshaan springs still flow. The ovoo cairns still accumulate stones. The fire in the center of the ger still receives its libation before the family eats.
Scholarly attention has intensified. Anya Bernstein's Religious Bodies Politic (2013) examines the political dimensions of the shamanic and Buddhist revivals in Buryatia. Justine Buck Quijada's Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets (2019) traces the transformations of both traditions through the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Katherine Metzo's ethnographic work on Buryat environmentalism has documented the intersection of shamanic practice and ecological activism — the defense of Baikal as both a spiritual and environmental imperative. The documentation continues because the tradition continues.
The tradition faces real threats. Urbanization is drawing young Buryats away from the countryside where shamanic practice is most embedded. The Russian language is displacing Buryat, and with it the vocabulary of shamanic practice — the names of the spirits, the formulas of the prayers, the songs that accompany the drum. Climate change is affecting Lake Baikal — water levels, temperatures, the ecosystem — and a tradition whose cosmology centers on the lake cannot be indifferent to its fate. The political situation in Putin's Russia, with its tightening restrictions on minority religions and indigenous rights, casts a shadow over all non-Orthodox religious practice.
And yet the drum is being made again. The hide is stretched. The birch frame is bent. The handle is carved. The shaman holds it for the first time, strikes it, and the sound crosses the steppe the way it crossed it a thousand years ago. The spirits hear it. They have been waiting.
The lake is still deep. The sky is still blue. The calling still comes.
Colophon
This profile draws on the ethnographic work of Mikhail Khangalov (Буряатское шаманство, collected works published posthumously), the scholarship of Caroline Humphrey (Shamans and Elders, 1996), Anya Bernstein (Religious Bodies Politic, 2013), Justine Buck Quijada (Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets, 2019), and the published writings of Sarangerel Odigan (Riding Windhorses, 2000; Chosen by the Spirits, 2001). The broader framework of Siberian shamanism draws on Mircea Eliade (Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951/1964) and Vilmos Diószegi's comparative studies. Any errors of fact or emphasis are the author's.
Buryat shamanism is the tradition that survived by having nothing the state could confiscate except the calling itself — and the calling cannot be confiscated.
Profiled for the Good Work Library by Tenzin of the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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