The Way of the Baksy
On the steppe that stretches from the Caspian Sea to the Altai Mountains — the largest grassland on Earth — the Kazakh people have been speaking to spirits for as long as anyone can remember. Their healers are the baksy, the spirit-callers who play the kobyz fiddle until the strings cry like a human voice, until the spirits answer, until the sick are healed or the lost are found or the dead are given rest.
This is not a religion with scripture, clergy, or catechism. It is an ecology of practice — ancestor veneration, spirit negotiation, sacred landscape, healing trance — woven so deeply into Kazakh culture that it survived the arrival of Islam, the Russian conquest, and seventy years of Soviet persecution. The Kazakhs became Muslim, but the baksy kept playing. The Soviets closed the mosques and burned the drums, but grandmothers still cut the cord at a baby's first steps and whispered the old words. The tradition survived because it lived in the gesture, not in the institution.
This profile tells the story of a spiritual tradition that has no name for itself — because to the Kazakhs, it was never a separate thing. It was simply how you lived on the steppe.
I. The Steppe and Its People
The Kazakhs (Қазақ, Qazaq) are a Turkic people whose homeland spans the immense Central Asian steppe — from the Caspian Depression in the west to the Altai and Tian Shan ranges in the east, from the Siberian forest-steppe in the north to the deserts of Kyzylkum and Betpak-Dala in the south. Modern Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country on Earth by area and the largest landlocked country, home to approximately nineteen million people, of whom roughly seventy percent are ethnic Kazakhs. Significant Kazakh communities also live in western China (Xinjiang), Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan.
The Kazakhs emerged as a distinct people in the fifteenth century, when the sultans Janibek and Kerey broke from the Uzbek Khanate of Abu'l-Khayr around 1465 and led their followers onto the open steppe. The word "Qazaq" itself likely means "free wanderer" or "those who broke away" — a name earned by the act of leaving, by choosing freedom over settled authority. The identity was forged in movement, and the steppe was both home and religion.
Traditional Kazakh society was organized into three jüz (жүз, "hordes" or confederations): the Uly Jüz (Great Horde) in the south and southeast, the Orta Jüz (Middle Horde) in the central and eastern steppe, and the Kishi Jüz (Little Horde) in the west. Within each jüz, identity descended through ru (ру, clan lineages), and every Kazakh was expected to know their lineage seven generations back — the jeti ata (жеті ата, "seven ancestors"). This genealogical consciousness is not merely social. It is spiritual. The ancestors are not gone. They are aruaq (аруақ) — spirits who watch, protect, judge, and intervene. To forget your seven ancestors is not just a social failure. It is a spiritual severance.
The steppe itself shaped the religion. Kazakh nomadic pastoralism — herding horses, sheep, goats, cattle, and camels across seasonal pastures — required an intimate relationship with landscape, weather, water, and animal behavior. The yurt (kiiz üy, кiiz үй) was the portable cosmos: its domed ceiling was the sky, its central opening (shanyrak, шаңырақ) was the eye of heaven, its interior divided into sacred and profane zones. When a family erected their yurt, they were building a model of the universe. When they struck it and moved, the universe moved with them.
II. Tengri and the Spirit World
The cosmological foundation of Kazakh shamanism is Tengriism (Тәңірлік) — the worship of Tengri (Тәңірі), the Eternal Blue Sky. Tengri is not a god in the personal, anthropomorphic sense familiar from Abrahamic traditions. Tengri is the sky itself experienced as divine presence — the vast, blue, encompassing, unknowable totality above. The Kazakh phrase Тәңірі жарылқасын ("May Tengri bless") remains in everyday use, even among devout Muslims.
Alongside Tengri, the pre-Islamic Kazakh spirit world included:
Umay (Ұмай) — the female principle, protector of women, children, and the hearth. Umay was associated with fertility, birth, and the continuation of the clan. In Turkic cosmology broadly, Umay is sometimes understood as the feminine complement to Tengri's masculine sky — earth to his heaven, womb to his vastness. Traces of Umay veneration persist in Kazakh birth rituals and in the name itself, still given to girls.
Jer-Su (Жер-Су, "Earth-Water") — the collective spirit of the land and its waters. Not a single deity but a category of spiritual presence: every significant mountain, river, spring, and lake has its own iye (ие, "master" or "owner spirit"). The traveler who crosses a mountain pass leaves a stone on the oba (obo, cairn) and ties a cloth strip to a nearby tree. The herder who waters animals at a spring speaks a brief acknowledgment. These are not formalities. They are negotiations with the spirits who own the land.
Aruaq (аруақ) — the ancestor spirits. This is the beating heart of Kazakh spiritual practice. The dead do not depart. They become aruaq — invisible presences who dwell near their burial sites, who visit their descendants in dreams, who can bless or curse, protect or withdraw protection. The most powerful aruaq are the spirits of holy people, warriors, and clan founders. Their graves become mazar (мазар) — pilgrimage sites where the living come to pray, to ask for healing, to make vows, and to sleep overnight hoping for a vision.
The albasti (албасты) — a female demonic spirit associated with childbirth, postpartum illness, and infant mortality. The albasti attacks new mothers and newborns. Protective rituals against the albasti — iron objects placed near the cradle, fire kept burning through the night, specific prayers spoken by elder women — are among the most tenacious survivals of pre-Islamic practice.
The jinn (жын) — after Islamization, the older spirit categories were partially mapped onto Islamic jinn cosmology. The baksy's healing work was often understood as dealing with jinn possession — a framework that allowed shamanic practice to continue under Islamic vocabulary. The spirits changed their names but not their behavior.
III. The Baksy
The baksy (бақсы) is the Kazakh shaman — healer, spirit-medium, exorcist, and psychopomp. The word is ancient Turkic, cognate with the Turkish baksı and related to the Chinese 博士 (bóshì, "learned master"), reflecting old Central Asian networks of esoteric knowledge. In Kazakh tradition, the baksy is distinguished from the mullah, the fortune-teller (palshi), and the herbalist (tamyr) — though in practice these roles could overlap, especially after Islamization blurred the boundaries.
The baksy's power comes from spirits. Specifically, from a personal kómekcí (көмекші) or pirím (пірім) — a helper spirit or spirit-guide who grants the baksy the ability to see, to travel between worlds, and to negotiate with hostile spirits on behalf of the patient. The relationship between the baksy and the helper spirit is intimate, lifelong, and non-negotiable. The spirit chooses the baksy, not the reverse.
The calling of the baksy follows a pattern recognizable across Siberian and Central Asian shamanism: initiatory illness. A young person — often in adolescence or early adulthood — begins to suffer strange, undiagnosable symptoms: seizures, visions, fits of weeping or laughter, withdrawal from social life, episodes of trance-like behavior. The Kazakh term is qasirga (қасырға, "storm") — the spirits are storming the person, demanding acceptance. If the person refuses the calling, the illness worsens. If they accept and undergo training under an established baksy, the illness transforms into controlled power.
The Soviet ethnographer Vladimir Basilov, who conducted fieldwork in Central Asia in the 1960s through the 1980s, documented baksy initiations in detail. He noted that the Kazakh baksy tradition was already deeply syncretic by the time he encountered it — the baksy invoked Islamic saints alongside pre-Islamic spirits, recited Quranic verses alongside shamanic chants, and understood their power as coming ultimately from Allah through the mediation of spirits. This was not confusion or corruption. It was a working system, internally consistent, that had been evolving for centuries.
The gender dynamics of Kazakh shamanism are notable. While the most famous baksy in the historical and ethnographic record are male, women played central roles as healers, midwives, and ritualists. The emshi (емші, "healer") was often a woman who combined herbalism, prayer, bone-setting, and spirit-work. After the Soviet period, when the male baksy lineages were more thoroughly disrupted by persecution, it was often women — grandmothers, aunts, village elders — who preserved the healing practices in domestic settings. The baksy tradition survived in kitchens and birthing rooms as much as in any formal lineage.
IV. The Kobyz and the Song
The kobyz (қобыз) is the soul of Kazakh shamanism rendered as a musical instrument. A short-necked, bowl-shaped, two-stringed fiddle, traditionally carved from a single piece of wood and strung with horsehair, played with a horsehair bow. Its sound is extraordinary — a throaty, resonant, overtone-rich voice that seems to come from somewhere deeper than the instrument. When a baksy plays the kobyz in a healing ceremony, the instrument does not accompany the ritual. It IS the ritual. The vibration opens the door between worlds.
The kobyz is one of the oldest bowed string instruments in the world. Its origins predate the Kazakh ethnogenesis by centuries, reaching back into the deep Turkic past. The instrument was sacred — not secular entertainment. It was the baksy's tool, and its sound was understood as spirit-speech. The kobyz was never separated from its ritual function until the Soviet era, when it was "secularized" and incorporated into Kazakh folk orchestras, stripped of its shamanic context and repackaged as national cultural heritage.
In ceremony, the baksy would begin playing the kobyz in a darkened room. The patient lay on the floor. The baksy sang — not songs with fixed lyrics, but improvised spirit-invocations, calling the helper spirits by name, describing the illness, negotiating with the hostile spirit responsible for the affliction. The kobyz's sound would shift and modulate as the baksy entered trance. The audience — family members, neighbors — sat in darkness and witnessed the negotiation. The healing, when it came, was understood as the result of a successful transaction: the hostile spirit was persuaded, bribed, tricked, or commanded to release the patient.
Alongside the kobyz, the Kazakh musical tradition includes the dombra (домбыра) — the long-necked, two-stringed plucked lute that is the national instrument of Kazakhstan. The dombra is the secular cousin of the kobyz: the instrument of the aqyn (ақын, the poet-improviser) and the jyrau (жырау, the epic singer), not of the baksy. But the boundary was porous. Great jyrau were sometimes attributed shamanic powers, and their epic performances — recounting the deeds of heroes like Koblandy Batyr, Er Tóstik, and Alpamys — carried a charge of spiritual authority that was more than entertainment.
The küy (күй) — the instrumental composition for dombra or kobyz — is the Kazakh art form that most directly preserves the shamanic sensibility. A küy is not just music. It is a story told entirely through melody, rhythm, and texture, without words. Each küy has a narrative — a legend, a historical event, an emotion — that the listener is expected to feel through the sound. The most famous küy are attributed to legendary musicians whose art had spiritual power: Korkut Ata, Ketbuga, Asan Qaigy. When a Kazakh hears a küy and weeps, they are experiencing something closer to shamanic practice than to concert attendance.
V. Korkut Ata — The First Shaman
Korkut Ata (Қорқыт ата) is the mythological founder of the baksy tradition and the inventor of the kobyz. His legend is shared across the Turkic world — known as Dede Korkut to the Turks, Gorkut to the Turkmen — but the Kazakhs claim him most intimately, placing his grave on the banks of the Syr Darya river in what is now the Kyzylorda region of southern Kazakhstan.
The legend: Korkut Ata was granted foreknowledge of his own death. Horrified, he fled — east, west, north, south — but everywhere he went, he saw people digging graves. The earth itself was preparing for him. In despair, he spread his cloak on the waters of the Syr Darya, sat upon it, and began to play the kobyz. As long as he played, death could not take him. The music held death at bay. He played for days, for years, for ages — but eventually, even the greatest musician must sleep. A snake bit him while he slept, and he died. But the kobyz lived. The music continued. Every baksy who plays the kobyz is playing Korkut Ata's instrument, continuing his defiance of death.
The legend is far more than a folk tale. It is a cosmological statement: the baksy's power is the power of music over death. The kobyz is not an instrument — it is a weapon against mortality. The trance state induced by the kobyz is a temporary victory over the same death that Korkut Ata fled. Healing is the practical application of that victory: the baksy enters the realm of spirits and death and brings the patient back.
A monumental complex was erected at Korkut Ata's traditional grave site near the town of Qarmaqshy in the 1980s, designed by the architect Bek Ibrayev. The complex includes stylized kobyz forms rising from the steppe — a Soviet-era gesture toward cultural heritage that inadvertently preserved a shamanic sacred site. Since Kazakhstan's independence in 1991, the site has become a genuine pilgrimage destination. UNESCO added the "Heritage of Korkut Ata" — encompassing the epic, the music, the instrument, and the associated traditions across multiple Turkic nations — to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2018.
VI. The Sacred Landscape
The Kazakh steppe is not a blank canvas. It is a text written in sacred sites.
Mazar (мазар) — the graves of holy people, saints, warriors, and clan founders. Mazar veneration is the most widespread and visible expression of Kazakh spiritual practice. Thousands of mazars dot the steppe, from modest clay-brick domes to grand mausoleums. The most important mazars attract pilgrims from across the country. Visitors circle the mazar, pray, tie cloth strips to nearby trees or poles, leave offerings, and sometimes sleep overnight in or near the tomb, hoping for a healing dream — a practice called tüs köru (түс көру, "dream-seeing").
The most famous mazar in Kazakhstan is the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi in the city of Turkistan — a massive fourteenth-century structure commissioned by Timur (Tamerlane) over the grave of the twelfth-century Sufi poet and mystic. Yasawi is the pivot figure between Islam and the steppe: a Sufi master who spoke Turkic, composed mystical poetry in the language of the nomads, and whose tradition (the Yasawiyya order) carried Islam into Central Asia on terms the steppe could accept. His mazar is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the spiritual heart of Kazakh Islam — but the practices performed there (pilgrimage, dream-seeking, cloth-tying, circumambulation) are older than Islam.
Oba (оба) — cairns of piled stones, found at mountain passes, hilltops, river crossings, and other liminal points in the landscape. Travelers add stones and tie cloth strips (shüberék, шүберек) to mark their passage and honor the local spirits. The oba is the steppe equivalent of the Mongolian ovoo and the Tibetan la-tse — a marker of spiritual presence in the land.
Aúlie (әулие) — a holy place, a saint, or the state of holiness itself. An aúlie site might be a spring with healing waters, a rock formation with an unusual shape, a tree of great age, or a cave where a saint once meditated. The concept blends Islamic sainthood with the older Turkic reverence for land-spirits. A place can be aúlie because a Muslim saint prayed there, or because the land itself has always been powerful. The distinction rarely matters in practice.
Shanyrak (шаңырақ) — the circular crown of the yurt, the opening through which smoke rises and sky enters. The shanyrak is the most sacred object in Kazakh domestic life. It represents the family, the clan, the continuity of the hearth. An old shanyrak — blackened by years of smoke — is inherited, never discarded. It appears on the flag of the Republic of Kazakhstan, at the center of the national emblem. Its symbolism is layered: the eye of heaven, the cosmic axis, the meeting point of earth and sky, the home that moves but never breaks.
VII. The Arrival of Islam
Islam reached the Kazakh steppe in waves, over centuries, and never fully displaced what it found.
The first wave came with the Arab conquest of Transoxiana in the seventh and eighth centuries, which brought Islam to the settled oasis cities of southern Central Asia — Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent — but barely touched the nomads of the open steppe. The second wave, far more consequential, came through Sufism — specifically through the Yasawiyya order founded by Khoja Ahmed Yasawi (d. 1166) and the Naqshbandiyya order that followed. Yasawi's genius was to speak in Turkic, to use poetic forms the nomads understood, and to present Islam not as a repudiation of the steppe way of life but as its deepening. His hikmat (wisdom poems) address God in the language of longing, in meters and metaphors that resonated with Turkic poetic tradition.
By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Kazakh khans were nominally Muslim. Islam provided a unifying identity, a legal framework (sharia adapted to nomadic realities), and a connection to the wider Islamic world. But the relationship was always negotiated, never total. The Kazakhs adopted Islam's God, its prophets, its calendar of fasts and feasts, its burial rites, and its vocabulary of holiness. They did not adopt its scriptural literalism, its urban legalism, or its rejection of pre-Islamic spiritual practice.
The result was a distinctive Kazakh Islam — sometimes called "folk Islam" or "popular Islam" by scholars, though these terms can be condescending. It is better described as syncretic Islam: a living system in which Quranic prayer and baksy healing, mazar pilgrimage and mosque attendance, ancestor veneration and Islamic monotheism coexist without contradiction. The baksy invokes Allah and the spirits in the same ceremony. The grandmother who performs the tusau kesu (cord-cutting for a baby's first steps) whispers a prayer that blends Quranic phrases with older Turkic blessings. The pilgrim at Yasawi's mazar performs tawaf (circumambulation) as at the Kaaba and ties cloth strips as at an oba.
Reformist Islam has periodically challenged this synthesis. In the nineteenth century, Tatar missionaries and Jadidist reformers promoted a more scripturally orthodox Islam among the Kazakhs. The great Kazakh poet Abay Kunanbayev (1845–1904) criticized what he saw as superstition among his people, though his critique was more ethical than theological. In the contemporary period, Salafi and Wahhabi influences (often funded by Gulf states) have promoted a purified Islam that rejects mazar veneration, baksy practice, and ancestor worship as shirk (polytheism). The Kazakh government, anxious about both extremism and its own cultural heritage, has positioned itself as defender of "traditional Kazakh Islam" — the syncretic model — against foreign puritanism.
The tension is unresolved. It may be permanent. The steppe Islam that has sustained Kazakh spiritual life for five centuries is under pressure from both secular modernity and scriptural fundamentalism. The baksy tradition sits at the exact point of maximum tension — too Islamic for the purists of Tengriist revival, too shamanic for the purists of Islamic reform, and too alive to ignore.
VIII. The Russian Encounter and the Soviet Winter
The Russian Empire reached the Kazakh steppe in the eighteenth century. The Junior Jüz (Little Horde) accepted Russian protection in 1731. By the mid-nineteenth century, all three jüz had been absorbed, and the Kazakhs found themselves subjects of a Christian empire that viewed their religion — whether Islam or shamanism — as backward.
Russian colonization brought settlers, forts, land seizures, and the gradual restriction of nomadic movement. The spiritual consequences were indirect but devastating: as pasture was taken and movement curtailed, the relationship between the Kazakhs and their sacred landscape was disrupted. Mazars were plowed under. Migration routes that followed seasonal spiritual geography were broken. The portable universe of the yurt began to give way to the fixed settlement.
Russian ethnographers, however, also documented what they found. Chokan Valikhanov (Шоқан Уәлиханов, 1835–1865), a Kazakh aristocrat educated in Russian military schools, conducted the first serious ethnographic study of Kazakh shamanism, describing baksy ceremonies, belief systems, and sacred sites with the dual perspective of an insider and a trained observer. His notes on the baksy's trance states, the role of the kobyz, and the relationship between shamanism and Islam remain foundational sources.
The Soviet period (1920–1991) was catastrophic. The forced collectivization of the early 1930s — the Asharshy (Asharshylyk, the Great Famine) — killed between one and a half and two million Kazakhs, roughly forty percent of the ethnic Kazakh population. Entire clans were annihilated. Genealogical knowledge was severed. The seven-ancestor chain was broken for millions of families.
Soviet atheism targeted both Islam and shamanism. Mosques were closed. Mullahs were arrested, exiled, or executed. But the baksy were hit even harder, because shamanic practice was classified not just as religion (which could theoretically be tolerated as a "private matter") but as fraud — a criminal category. A baksy who performed a healing ceremony could be prosecuted for deception. The kobyz was confiscated and "secularized" — placed in folk orchestras and museums, stripped of its ritual context. Mazar pilgrimage was discouraged and sometimes physically prevented. The word "baksy" itself became associated with charlatanism in official Soviet Kazakh discourse.
And yet the tradition survived. It survived in women's domestic rituals: the cradle rites (besik toi), the first-steps ceremony (tusau kesu), the postpartum protections against the albasti, the dream interpretations, the food offerings left at ancestral graves during holidays. It survived in the persistence of mazar pilgrimage — people came to the graves even when the authorities disapproved. It survived in the kobyz, which could not be fully secularized because its sound carried memories that the concert hall could not contain. It survived in the genealogical consciousness — the jeti ata, the seven ancestors — which was suppressed but never extinguished, passed down in whispered family histories.
It survived because it had no institution to destroy.
IX. The Revival
Kazakhstan declared independence on December 16, 1991. The Soviet Union dissolved. And in the spiritual vacuum that followed — seventy years of enforced atheism suddenly lifted — everything came back at once.
The Islamic revival was the most visible: mosques were rebuilt, Quranic education expanded, the Hajj became accessible, and Kazakhstan positioned itself as a Muslim-majority country on the world stage. The government promoted a moderate, state-supervised Islam through the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Kazakhstan (DUMK), balancing religious freedom against the fear of extremism.
The Tengristic revival was more ideological: intellectuals, nationalists, and cultural figures promoted Tengriism as the authentic, pre-Islamic spiritual identity of the Kazakh people. Tengriism was framed as an indigenous philosophy — ecological, egalitarian, sky-centered — in contrast to the "foreign" religions of Islam and Christianity. The Tengristic movement produced books, organizations, and ceremonies, but remained largely urban and intellectual, more popular among the educated elite than among rural Kazakhs who had never stopped venerating their ancestors.
The shamanic revival was quieter but arguably deeper. In the 1990s and 2000s, people who had experienced the baksy calling — the initiatory illness, the visions, the spirit-storms — began to practice openly for the first time in decades. Some connected with surviving elderly baksy who had practiced secretly through the Soviet period. Others reconstructed from fragments: family memories, ethnographic literature, parallel traditions in Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia.
The scholar Raushan Sultanova, working in the post-Soviet period, documented the emergence of a new generation of Kazakh healers who combined baksy techniques with Islamic prayer, herbalism, and modern psychology. She noted that the boundary between baksy, emshi (healer), and palshi (fortune-teller) was more fluid than ever — practitioners drew from multiple traditions simultaneously, crafting individualized healing practices that reflected the syncretic reality of Kazakh spiritual life.
Mazar pilgrimage exploded after independence. Sites that had been neglected or officially discouraged became major destinations. The Kazakh government, recognizing both the cultural significance and the tourist potential, began restoring and promoting major mazars — while also trying to regulate practices it considered "superstitious." The tension is familiar: the state wants the heritage without the spirituality, the prestige without the practice.
The kobyz was reclaimed. Musicians like Raushan Orazbayeva pushed the instrument back toward its ritual roots, performing compositions that evoked the baksy's trance music rather than the sanitized folk arrangements of the Soviet era. The kobyz became a symbol of Kazakh cultural identity — featured on postage stamps, in national celebrations, in UNESCO nominations. But beneath the cultural nationalism, the older power stirs: the sound of the kobyz still does something to people that the dombra does not. It reaches deeper.
X. Practice Today
Contemporary Kazakh shamanic practice is not a unified tradition with clear boundaries. It is a spectrum of spiritual activities that shade into each other and into both Islam and secular Kazakh culture.
At one end of the spectrum: the practicing baksy. These are healers who understand themselves as called by spirits, who perform diagnosis and treatment through trance, prayer, and ritual. They may use the kobyz or not. They almost always invoke both Islamic and pre-Islamic frameworks. They see patients for conditions that range from the clearly psychological (depression, anxiety, substance abuse) to the clearly physical (chronic pain, infertility) to the distinctly spiritual (bad luck, family curses, jinn possession). Their fees are variable — some charge, some accept whatever is given, some refuse payment. Their reputation depends on results. A baksy who heals is respected. A baksy who fails is abandoned. There is no tenure in shamanism.
In the middle of the spectrum: lifecycle rituals with shamanic elements, performed by families and communities as cultural practice rather than as explicit shamanism. The besik toi (cradle ceremony): when a newborn is placed in the traditional wooden cradle for the first time, accompanied by blessings, protective prayers, and specific rituals to guard against the albasti and evil eye. The tusau kesu (cord-cutting): when a toddler takes their first steps, an elder ties the child's legs loosely with a multicolored cord, then cuts it — symbolically freeing the child to walk their own path. Prayers are spoken. The cord is kept. The ceremony is universal among Kazakhs, practiced by families who would never visit a baksy and who consider themselves straightforwardly Muslim.
At the other end of the spectrum: mazar pilgrimage, practiced by millions of Kazakhs across the entire range of religiosity. The practice is simple: visit the grave of a holy person, pray, make a vow, ask for healing or guidance, tie a cloth strip, leave an offering, sleep nearby if possible. The pilgrimage absorbs whatever theology the pilgrim brings: an Islamic pilgrim prays to Allah through the intercession of the saint; a more traditionally-minded pilgrim addresses the aruaq directly; a secular pilgrim simply feels the power of the place and responds to it. The mazar does not ask what you believe. It asks only that you come.
The Nauryz celebration (Наурыз, the Turkic spring equinox, March 21–23) has become the focal point of public Kazakh spiritual identity. Originally a Zoroastrian-influenced new year festival, suppressed under the Soviets, restored as a national holiday after independence — Nauryz is now the largest annual celebration in Kazakhstan, marked by feasting, games, traditional dress, music, and rituals of renewal. It carries pre-Islamic, Islamic, and secular nationalist meanings simultaneously, and nobody sees a problem with this.
XI. The Scholars and the Sources
Kazakh shamanism is less thoroughly documented than the shamanic traditions of Siberia (Buryat, Tuvan, Yakut) or of neighboring Kyrgyzstan, but the literature is growing.
Chokan Valikhanov (1835–1865), the pioneering Kazakh scholar-ethnographer, produced the earliest serious descriptions of baksy practice, writing in Russian from within the tradition. His collected works, published posthumously, remain essential.
Vladimir Basilov (1937–1998), the leading Soviet-era ethnographer of Central Asian shamanism, conducted extensive fieldwork among Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen shamans. His monograph Shamanism in Central Asia (Shamanstvo u narodov Srednei Azii i Kazakhstana, 1992) is the most comprehensive scholarly account of the baksy tradition, documenting the initiatory illness, the spirit-helpers, the healing ceremonies, and the relationship between shamanism and Islam.
Raushan Sultanova has studied the post-Soviet revival of shamanic healing in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, documenting the emergence of new practitioners and the transformation of shamanic practice in a contemporary urban context.
Saule Kaskabasov and other scholars at the Kazakh Academy of Sciences have worked on the mythology, epic traditions, and ritual practices of the Kazakhs, often publishing in Kazakh and Russian.
Michael Rouland, Gulnara Aitpaeva, and other international scholars have contributed to the study of sacred sites, mazar pilgrimage, and the politics of heritage in post-Soviet Kazakhstan.
The UNESCO intangible heritage nominations — for the Korkut Ata heritage (2018), Nauryz (2016), and the art of the dombra küy (2014) — include extensive documentation of the spiritual dimensions of Kazakh culture, providing accessible English-language summaries of traditions that are otherwise documented primarily in Kazakh and Russian.
XII. The Eternal Song
What makes Kazakh shamanism distinctive is not any single belief or practice — ancestor veneration, spirit possession, sacred landscape, healing trance, and musical ritual are found across Central and Inner Asia. What is distinctive is the totality of the integration. Kazakh shamanism has no boundary. It is not a religion separate from Islam, not a folk practice separate from culture, not a healing system separate from music, not a cosmology separate from the landscape. It is all of these things at once, woven so tightly that pulling any thread unravels the whole cloth.
This is why it survived. You cannot destroy what has no institution, no clergy, no scripture, no building. The Soviets could close a mosque. They could not close a grandmother's kitchen. They could arrest a baksy. They could not arrest the sound of the kobyz playing in someone's memory. They could plow under a mazar. They could not plow under the knowledge that great-grandmother is buried there and her spirit watches.
The danger now is not persecution but separation — the Tengristic revival separating shamanism from Islam, the Islamic reform separating Islam from shamanism, the cultural heritage industry separating the kobyz from the baksy, the nation-state separating all of it from the living practice and packaging it as tourism. Each act of separation clarifies something, and each act of separation kills something. The living tradition does not survive as a museum exhibit, a UNESCO file, or a nationalist talking point. It survives as a grandmother cutting the cord at a baby's first steps, as a pilgrim sleeping at a mazar, as a baksy playing the kobyz in a darkened room and listening for the spirits to answer.
Korkut Ata played the kobyz to hold off death. The steppe is still playing. The question is whether anyone is still listening.
Colophon
This profile was written by Rinchen (རིན་ཆེན་) of the Living Traditions Research lineage, New Tianmu Anglican Church, March 2026. Sources consulted: Vladimir Basilov, Shamanstvo u narodov Srednei Azii i Kazakhstana (1992); Chokan Valikhanov, collected works; Gulnara Aitpaeva and Aibek Samakov, eds., Sacred Sites of the Southern Kyrgyzstan (as comparative reference); Raushan Sultanova on post-Soviet healing practitioners; UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage nomination files for Korkut Ata (2018), Nauryz (2016), and Dombra Küy (2014); Michael Rouland on Central Asian sacred sites; general ethnographic literature on Kazakh Islam, Turkic Tengriism, and Central Asian shamanism.
The kobyz is still playing.
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