The Voice and the Land

At the geographic center of Asia, in a mountain-ringed republic where the Yenisei River is born, the shamans still drum.

Tuva — Tyva in the local language — sits at the southern edge of Siberia, bordered by Mongolia to the south and the Russian Federation to the north. It is one of the most remote inhabited regions on earth. The capital, Kyzyl, has a monument marking the geographic center of the Asian continent. The landscape is steppe and taiga, salt lakes and sacred mountains, and every feature of it — every spring, every pass, every outcrop — has a spirit-master. The Tuvans call these spirits cher eezi, masters of the place. The relationship between the human community and the spirit-masters of the land is the foundation on which everything else rests: the shamans, the rituals, the songs, the survival.

Tuvan shamanism nearly died. The Soviet state confiscated the drums, arrested the shamans, burned the sacred objects, and declared the spirit-masters a superstition. What it could not confiscate was the voice. Khöömei — throat singing, the art of producing multiple simultaneous pitches from a single human throat — survived because the Soviets classified it as folk music, not religion. But the voice carries the land. When a Tuvan singer produces the low drone of kargyraa and the high whistle of sygyt over it, they are not performing. They are becoming the wind over the steppe, the water over the stones, the breath of the spirit-masters themselves. The voice is the land, compressed into a human body.

This profile tells the story of a tradition that was nearly erased and has come back — messy, contested, commercialized, and alive. Not as it was. Nothing returns as it was. But the drums are new, the singers are young, and the spirit-masters have not left the mountains.

I. The People and the Land

The Tuvans (Тывалар, Tyvalar) are a Turkic-speaking people numbering roughly 300,000, the vast majority living in the Tyva Republic (Тыва Республика), a federal subject of the Russian Federation. Their language, Tuvan, belongs to the Siberian branch of the Turkic language family, closely related to Altai and Khakas but mutually unintelligible with either.

The land itself is the first text. Tuva occupies a basin ringed by mountains — the Sayan range to the north, the Tannu-Ola to the south, the Altai to the west. Within this ring, every biome of Central Asia compresses into a single republic: alpine tundra, taiga forest, river valley, open steppe, semi-desert. The Yenisei, one of the longest rivers on earth, begins here as the confluence of the Bii-Khem and the Kaa-Khem at Kyzyl. The geographic diversity matters because Tuvan shamanism is landscape religion — every terrain has its own spirits, its own protocols, its own songs.

The Tuvans were traditionally pastoral nomads: herders of yak, horse, sheep, goat, camel, and reindeer — in the northwestern Todzhu district, a small Tuvan subgroup, the Tozhu, practices reindeer herding alongside the related Dukha people. The annual cycle followed the pastures: winter camps in protected valleys, summer camps on open steppe. This seasonal rhythm structured the ritual calendar. When to make offerings, when to move, when to ask the spirit-masters for permission — all of it was tuned to the land.

Modern Tuva is changed but not unrecognizable. Kyzyl is a small city of around 120,000. Many Tuvans live in apartment blocks and work government jobs. But the yurt camps still dot the summer steppe, the herds still move, and the spirit-masters are still addressed. Urbanization has not killed the practice — it has relocated some of it to shamanic clinics on city streets where the drums that once sounded on the mountain passes now sound behind plate glass.

II. The Spirit-Masters

The cosmological foundation of Tuvan shamanism is not a theology in the Western sense — no systematic doctrine, no founding prophet, no codified scripture. It is a relationship with place.

Every natural feature of the Tuvan landscape has a cher eezi (чер ээзи) — a master or owner of the place. The mountain has its eezi. The river has its eezi. The spring, the pass, the lake, the individual tree — each has its master. These are not metaphors. They are beings with preferences, moods, and the capacity to help or harm. A herder who crosses a mountain pass without making an offering at the ova (овaa, the stone cairn at the pass) risks angering the eezi. A hunter who kills without giving back risks the animals withdrawing from the territory. The relationship is reciprocal: humans use the land, and in return they honor its masters.

The most powerful spirit-masters are those of the great mountains. Khaiyrakan (Хайыракан, literally "Sacred Bear") is a mountain near Kyzyl that carries immense spiritual significance — when the Dalai Lama visited Tuva in 1992, he consecrated Khaiyrakan as a sacred site, linking Tibetan Buddhist blessing with the indigenous recognition that had never lapsed. The spirit-masters of springs — arzhaan (аржаан, healing waters) — are especially important for health. Pilgrimage to arzhaan springs, bathing in them, drinking from them, making offerings, is one of the most persistent practices in Tuvan religious life, continuous through the Soviet period because it could be disguised as recreation.

Above the spirit-masters of specific places sits a broader cosmology. The sky (Tengri, Дээр) is the highest power — the Eternal Blue Sky, the same concept found across the Turkic and Mongolic world. The earth is the mother ground. Between sky and earth, the middle world is dense with spirits: albys (demons), aza (malevolent spirits), diir (ancestral spirits that can help or harm), and the tos (тос, ancestral spirit-effigies kept in the yurt). The tos are small leather or cloth figures hung near the hearth, representing clan ancestors and protective spirits. They are fed with milk and fat. They are spoken to. They are the family's dead, still present, still hungry, still caring.

The cosmology layers into three worlds — upper (sky, celestial beings), middle (humans, animals, spirit-masters), and lower (underworld, the dead, powerful chthonic forces) — connected by a world tree or sacred mountain that the shaman ascends or descends in trance. But this three-world system is more a scholarly framework than a dogma. In practice, Tuvan shamanic cosmology is ecological: the spirits are where the land is. The mountain eezi does not live "in the upper world" — it lives in the mountain. The spring eezi does not live "in the middle world" — it lives in the spring. The mapping of spirits onto landscape is prior to and more important than any cosmological abstraction.

III. The Shaman

The Tuvan word for shaman is xam (хам) — a term with deep roots in the Turkic world. A female shaman is udagan (удаган), a title found across Turkic and Mongolic peoples. The shaman is the specialist — the one who can communicate with the spirit-masters, travel between worlds in trance, diagnose illness caused by spiritual imbalance, and negotiate with the dead.

The calling comes in one of two ways: hereditary or spontaneous. The hereditary calling follows a bloodline — a family with shamanic ancestors is more likely to produce a new shaman. But the spontaneous calling, coming as shamanic illness (spirit-possession or unexplained affliction), is equally recognized. The person falls ill — often severely, often with symptoms that resist medical treatment — and the illness is diagnosed by another shaman as a call from the spirits. If the person accepts the call and undergoes initiation, the illness resolves. If they refuse, the illness may worsen or kill them. This structural pattern repeats across northern Asia, but the Tuvan language and specific spirit-ecology give it local texture.

Initiation traditionally involved extended training with a master shaman: learning the invocatory songs (algysh), the drum techniques, the spirit geography, the ritual sequences. The initiatory shaman tested the candidate's ability to enter trance, to identify spirits, to navigate the spirit world. The training could take years. In the post-Soviet revival, this master-apprentice transmission was the most damaged link in the chain — the old shamans were dead, and the new shamans often had to reconstruct techniques from books, from fragments of family memory, or from the guidance of spirits themselves.

The drum (düngür, дүңгүр) is the shaman's primary instrument. It is round, single-headed, made from a bent wooden frame covered with hide. The drumstick (orba, орба) is covered in fur. The drum is not an instrument in the Western musical sense — it is a vehicle. The shaman rides the drum the way a horse is ridden: the steady beat carries the shaman into trance and across the boundaries between worlds. Each shaman's drum has its own voice, its own spirits, its own power. The relationship between shaman and drum is intimate, personal, and irreplaceable.

The Soviet confiscation of drums was the most devastating blow to the tradition. Destroying a shaman's drum was not like confiscating a tool — it was like killing a companion. Many shamans hid their drums in trees, buried them in the earth, or concealed them under floorboards. The drums that survived the Soviet period are now treated as sacred objects. The drums being made in the revival carry new power, but the old transmission of drum-making knowledge — which wood, which hide, which rituals of construction — was severely damaged.

The séance (kamlanie, from the Russian камлание) is the shaman's primary ritual act. The shaman drums, entering trance. The spirits arrive. The shaman may speak in the voices of spirits, may shake or tremble, may seem to leave the body. The diagnosis emerges from the trance — which spirit is offended, which ancestor is restless, which offering must be made, which taboo was broken. The treatment follows: purification rituals with juniper smoke (artïsh, арттыш), offerings, prayers, the redistribution of spiritual debt. The séance is not a performance — it is a medical and spiritual intervention. The patient is there because they are sick or troubled. The shaman is there because this is what shamans do.

IV. Khöömei — The Voice and the Land

Khöömei (хөөмей) — Tuvan throat singing — is the art of producing two or more simultaneous pitches from a single human voice: a low fundamental drone and one or more higher harmonic overtones that can be shaped into distinct melodies. It was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2010.

The major styles include: khöömei (the generic term, also a specific mid-range style), sygyt (сыгыт, a high clear whistle over a low drone), kargyraa (каргыраа, a deep rattling bass with overtone harmonics), ezengileer (эзеңгилээр, rhythmic pulsing, named for the stirrup's beat on a horse at trot), and borbangnadyr (борбаңнадыр, a rolling sound like water tumbling over stones). Each style evokes a different landscape texture. Sygyt is wind over the steppe. Kargyraa is a deep river in a gorge. Borbangnadyr is a stream over rocks.

This is not metaphor in the Tuvan understanding. Khöömei originated as sonic participation in the natural world — the wind, the water, the animals, the echo of the mountains. The singer does not represent the landscape. The singer becomes the landscape, lending the human throat to the voice of the spirit-masters. Theodore Levin, the American ethnomusicologist who spent years recording and studying Tuvan musicians, titled his book Where Rivers and Mountains Sing — because in Tuva, they do. The landscape is sonorous. The human voice joins the chorus.

The connection between khöömei and shamanism is real but not direct. Not all throat singers are shamans. Not all shamans are throat singers. But the sonic universe is shared. The shaman's algysh (алгыш, invocatory song) often uses throat-singing techniques, especially kargyraa, to call spirits. The landscape that the throat singer voices is the same landscape that the spirit-masters inhabit. The overlap is not institutional but cosmological: both practices rest on the premise that the land has a voice, and the human role is to listen, to echo, and to participate.

Khöömei survived the Soviet period because the state classified it as folk art, not religion. This is the critical fact. While drums were confiscated and shamans arrested, throat singers were sent to conservatories, recorded by ethnographers, put on stage at cultural festivals, and celebrated as examples of Tuvan national heritage. The Soviets loved folk art — colorful, displayable, useful for propaganda about the diversity and richness of Soviet peoples. They did not understand that the throat singer on the concert stage and the shaman on the mountain pass were drawing from the same well. The folk art label saved the voice. The religious label killed the drum.

The result is that khöömei is the most intact link between pre-Soviet Tuvan cosmology and the present. When the revival came in the 1990s, the throat singers were already there — trained, practiced, carrying a sonic tradition that had never been interrupted. The shamans had to reconstruct. The singers only had to remember what their songs meant.

V. Buddhism and Shamanism — The Double System

Tibetan Buddhism arrived in Tuva in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, primarily in the Gelug school — the tradition of the Dalai Lamas. By the nineteenth century, Tuva had significant monastic infrastructure: temples (khüree), ordained lamas, scriptural traditions, and a formal religious calendar. This was never a replacement of shamanism. It was a layering.

The Tuvan double system — lama for some needs, shaman for others — mirrors the Buryat pattern but with its own texture. In broad terms: the lama handled the cosmic and the textual (astrology, funeral rites following Buddhist protocols, merit-making for future lives, scriptural blessing), while the shaman handled the local and the immediate (healing from spirit-caused illness, negotiating with offended cher eezi, managing the tos in the yurt, addressing livestock problems, divination of local practical questions). A single family might consult both without any sense of contradiction.

The shamans and lamas were not always at peace. Some Buddhist lamas regarded shamanism as a lower practice — useful for the unlettered but superseded by the dharma. Some shamans regarded the lamas as foreigners — carriers of a Tibetan tradition that had no roots in the Tuvan land. But the majority practice was synthetic: Buddhism and shamanism occupied different registers of the same religious life, the way a person might see a doctor for some ailments and a therapist for others. The spirit-masters did not require Buddhist blessing. The dharma did not require shamanic drumming. Each handled what it was built for.

The Soviet destruction hit both equally. Temples were closed, scriptures burned, lamas defrocked. Shamans were arrested, drums confiscated, ceremonies banned. By 1940, institutional Buddhism and institutional shamanism were both functionally dead in Tuva. What survived was what had no institution to destroy — the offerings at mountain passes, the feeding of the tos, the songs that the state thought were just songs.

VI. The Independent Republic

Tuva has a political history unlike any other indigenous region in Siberia. After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, Tuva briefly became a Russian protectorate, then in 1921 declared independence as the Tannu Tuva People's Republic (Тыва Арат Республик) — one of the least-known sovereign states of the twentieth century. It had its own stamps (now prized by philatelists), its own currency, its own government, and nominal sovereignty — though in practice it was a Soviet satellite from the beginning.

The Tannu Tuva period (1921–1944) is significant for understanding the shamanic destruction. Unlike the Buryats and other Siberian peoples, who experienced Soviet anti-religious campaigns as subjects of the Russian SFSR, Tuvans experienced them as citizens of a formally independent republic mimicking Soviet policy. The anti-shamanic campaigns began in the late 1920s and intensified in the 1930s, following the Mongolian model: lamas and shamans were both classified as class enemies, their property confiscated, their persons subject to imprisonment or worse. The campaigns were carried out by Tuvan officials under Soviet pressure — a detail that adds complexity to the memory of destruction, because the destroyers were, at least nominally, Tuvans themselves.

In 1944, the Tuvan People's Republic was absorbed into the Soviet Union, becoming the Tuva Autonomous Oblast and later the Tuva ASSR. The incorporation was presented as voluntary — a joyful joining of the great Soviet family — but it meant the end of even nominal sovereignty and the deepening of cultural Russification. The shamans, already driven underground, went deeper.

The political history matters because it shaped the revival. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Tuva's reassertion of identity was immediate — the republic renamed itself the Tyva Republic and sought greater autonomy. The shamanic revival was entangled with this political awakening. To be Tuvan was to reclaim the practices the Soviets had suppressed. The drum was not just a spiritual tool — it was a national symbol.

VII. The Destruction

The anti-shamanic campaigns in Tuva followed the Soviet template but were devastatingly effective.

In the 1930s, shamans were systematically targeted. Their drums were confiscated — often publicly burned to demonstrate the triumph of scientific materialism over superstition. Their ritual regalia — headdresses with feathers and ribbons, coats hung with metal objects, mirrors, bells — were seized and sent to ethnographic museums or destroyed. The shamans themselves were arrested, sent to labor camps, or killed. No reliable count exists for how many Tuvan shamans died in the purges. The oral tradition says: most of them.

The destruction was thorough because shamanism had no institutional buffer. Buddhism had monasteries — physical structures that could be closed, but which at least concentrated the tradition in identifiable places. Shamanism was dispersed. Each clan had its shaman. Each valley had its practitioner. To destroy shamanism, the state had to reach into every community, every yurt, every family. And it did.

What it could not reach was the level below the shaman: the herder who made offerings at the ova, the grandmother who fed the tos by the hearth, the hunter who asked permission of the mountain eezi before ascending. These practices continued because they had no specialist to arrest. They were as natural as closing the door against the cold. The spirit-masters were not worshipped in temples. They were greeted at mountain passes. The state could not post guards at every mountain pass.

The damage was concentrated in transmission. The old shamans died. The techniques of trance, the songs of invocation, the spirit-geography — these were oral traditions passed from master to apprentice, and when the masters died without training apprentices, the chain broke. What Kenin-Lopsan would later spend his life collecting was the scattered debris of this broken chain: fragments remembered by elderly people who had witnessed shamanic ceremonies as children, songs preserved by throat singers who did not fully understand their ritual context, techniques reconstructed from the memories of families who had hidden a shaman among their ancestors.

VIII. Kenin-Lopsan Mongush — The Living Treasure

If Tuvan shamanism survived the twentieth century, one person deserves more credit than any other: Kenin-Lopsan Mongush (Кенин-Лопсан Монгуш, 1925–2015). Ethnographer, poet, novelist, shaman, and the last person alive who had witnessed pre-Soviet shamanic practice as a living system — he became the tradition's memory.

Kenin-Lopsan was born in 1925 in the Tuvan countryside, within the Tannu Tuva People's Republic. He grew up hearing shamanic songs and witnessing ceremonies before the purges reached full intensity. He studied at Leningrad State University, earning a doctorate in philology. His academic career gave him access to archives, libraries, and the permission to do fieldwork under the guise of folklore collection — the same camouflage that saved Lithuanian paganism, that saved Mansi bear songs, that saved what the state's categories could not destroy.

Over decades, Kenin-Lopsan collected thousands of shamanic texts: invocations, healing songs, divination formulas, spirit-addresses, ritual descriptions, testimony from elderly witnesses. He published them in Tuvan and Russian, with some translated into English and German. His works — including Shamanic Songs and Myths of Tuva, Tuvan Shamanic Folklore, and The Call of the 17 Shamans — became the primary source material for the study and revival of Tuvan shamanism.

In 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Kenin-Lopsan co-founded the Dungur (Дүңгүр, "Drum") shamanic society in Kyzyl — the first openly shamanic organization in post-Soviet Tuva. He served as its president and spiritual authority. The Republic of Tuva proclaimed him a "Living Treasure of Shamanism," and the broader international community recognized him — the official acknowledgment of what Tuvans already knew: this one man carried in his memory and his notebooks what the Soviet state had tried to erase.

Kenin-Lopsan's position was paradoxical: he was both an academic trained in the materialist Soviet system and a practicing shaman who entered trance and communicated with spirits. He did not see a contradiction. He said that scholarship and shamanism were two ways of knowing the same thing. The spirits did not mind being studied. The notebooks did not mind being sacred.

He died in 2015, aged ninety. By then, the revival he had catalyzed was twenty-three years old, and the organizations he had founded had multiplied and divided and competed and grown. The tradition he saved is not the tradition that existed before the purges. He knew that. He also knew that the alternative was nothing.

IX. The Revival

The shamanic revival in Tuva began in the early 1990s and was immediate, dramatic, and chaotic.

Three major shamanic organizations emerged in Kyzyl:

Dungur ("Drum"), co-founded by Kenin-Lopsan in 1992, was the first and most academically grounded. Its shamans were often trained by Kenin-Lopsan himself or by elders he identified as having preserved genuine shamanic knowledge. Dungur positioned itself as the guardian of authentic tradition.

Tos Deer (Тос Дээр, "Nine Spirits"), founded around the same period, drew more heavily on hereditary claims — shamans who had shamanic ancestors and who described their own callings in terms of spontaneous illness and spirit-possession. Tos Deer was more populist, less academic, and attracted practitioners who might not have met Kenin-Lopsan's scholarly standards but who described genuine callings.

Adyg Eeren (Адыг Ээрен, "Bear Spirit"), founded in the early 2000s, was the newest and most innovative, willing to incorporate techniques from other shamanic traditions and to engage with the international community. Its founder, Ai-Churek Oyun, was a powerful female shaman who gained international recognition.

The organizations operated as shamanic clinics — physical locations in Kyzyl where clients could come for divination, healing, purification, and spiritual counsel. A client would arrive, describe their problem, and be seen by a shaman — sometimes individually, sometimes in a group ceremony. The shamans drummed, entered trance, diagnosed, treated. The setting was urban and practical: a room in a building, not a mountaintop. But the practice was recognizably shamanic.

The Dalai Lama's visit to Tuva in 1992 was a watershed. He came at the invitation of the Buddhist community but also met with shamans and explicitly validated the shamanic tradition as a legitimate spiritual path — not competing with Buddhism but complementary. His blessing carried immense weight. The most respected religious figure in the Buddhist world had said that shamanism was real. For Tuvans navigating the confusing post-Soviet spiritual landscape, this was permission.

The revival was not without problems from the start. The seventy-year gap meant that the chain of transmission was broken in most lineages. Some revivalist shamans had genuine hereditary callings and fragments of family tradition. Others had read Kenin-Lopsan's books and reconstructed technique from text. Others had trained with Mongol or Buryat shamans and imported non-Tuvan elements. The question of authenticity — who is a real shaman, who is performing, who is self-deceived — became the central tension of the revival and has never been resolved.

X. The Practice Today

In contemporary Tuva, shamanic practice exists at multiple levels, from the deeply traditional to the frankly commercial.

The seasonal rituals continue. Spring and autumn offerings to the spirit-masters of the land — at ova cairns, at sacred springs, at mountain passes — are communal events that involve entire families and sometimes entire communities. These are the most traditional layer, the one least dependent on specialist shamans, the one most directly descended from the pre-Soviet practice that herders maintained through the suppression.

The shamanic clinics in Kyzyl are the most visible institution. Several organizations operate permanent locations where clients consult shamans for health problems, family troubles, business difficulties, and spiritual disturbance. A typical consultation involves divination (often by throwing stones or reading smoke patterns, or through direct trance-diagnosis), followed by treatment — purification with artïsh (juniper) smoke, drumming, prayer, and specific instructions: offerings to make, places to visit, behaviors to change.

Arzhaan pilgrimage — visiting sacred healing springs — is one of the most popular practices. Tuva has hundreds of arzhaan, and pilgrimages to them spike in summer. The practice is both medical and spiritual: the waters are genuinely mineral-rich and have real therapeutic properties for certain conditions, and the visit is simultaneously an act of devotion to the spring's eezi. This dual character is why the practice survived the Soviet period and why it is the most broadly participated-in element of Tuvan shamanism today.

Khöömei remains central to cultural identity. The annual Üstüü-Khüree festival draws musicians, shamans, and visitors from across the world. Throat singing is taught in schools. Young Tuvans learn khöömei as a matter of cultural pride. The international fame of groups like Huun-Huur-Tu has brought global attention to Tuvan culture and, through it, to the shamanic substrate that the singing carries.

Fire rituals may be the most emotionally significant. The hearth fire is addressed as a living being. Shagaa (Шагаа) — the Tuvan New Year, celebrated at the lunar new year — involves the kindling of a new fire, offerings, and communal prayers. The fire is the center of the home, the connection between the family and its ancestors, the one element of the shamanic cosmos that urbanization cannot fully displace. Even in apartment blocks, Tuvans may keep a small fire or candle in the ritual position.

XI. Shadows

The Tuvan shamanic revival has been celebrated internationally as a triumph of indigenous resilience. It is also a tradition carrying contradictions that honest profiling cannot avoid.

The authenticity question is the sharpest. After seventy years of suppression, with the master-apprentice chains broken and the old shamans dead, how much of the revived practice is genuinely traditional and how much is reinvention? The answer is both, and the proportions are unknowable. Kenin-Lopsan collected what he could. The elderly witnesses remembered what they remembered. The new shamans reconstructed from fragments, from their own trance experiences, and from comparison with related traditions. The result is a tradition that is continuous in cosmology and intention but reconstructed in practice and technique. Whether this constitutes survival or reinvention is a question that Tuvans answer differently depending on who you ask.

Commercialization is the most visible concern. Shamanic tourism — Westerners coming to Tuva for "authentic shamanic experiences" — has become an economic reality. Some shamans offer ceremonies for foreign visitors at prices reflecting Western markets. The international neo-shamanic community has discovered Tuva and consumes eagerly what it finds. The risk is that the practice adapts to foreign expectations: more dramatic, more exotic, more "spiritual" in the vague sense, and less rooted in the specific land-and-spirit ecology that makes Tuvan shamanism Tuvan.

Competition between organizations has sometimes turned bitter. The major societies in Kyzyl have disagreed about standards, legitimacy, and leadership. Personal rivalries between prominent shamans have occasionally been public. The absence of any traditional centralized authority to adjudicate these disputes means the conflicts tend to simmer without resolution.

Nationalism is a double-edged presence. The shamanic revival is entangled with Tuvan national identity — to be Tuvan is to have shamans, to throat-sing, to honor the spirit-masters. This can be a genuine source of cultural strength. It can also become exclusionary: some nationalists use shamanism to draw boundaries against Russian cultural influence, and the line between cultural pride and ethnic chauvinism is not always clear.

The gender question is quieter but real. In the traditional system, female shamans (udagan) were recognized and respected — in some accounts, regarded as more powerful than male shamans. The revival has been more mixed. Some prominent women achieved significant authority. But the organizations have also reflected broader post-Soviet gender dynamics, and the space for female spiritual authority is not automatically secure.

Environmental change threatens the ecological foundation of the practice. Mining interests, climate change affecting pasture cycles, and urbanization all alter the landscape that the spirit-masters inhabit. If the mountain's stream dries up, what happens to the spring's eezi? If the herder moves to the city, who makes offerings at the ova? The tradition is landscape religion. When the landscape changes, the religion must adapt — and adaptation is not the same as continuity.

XII. The Voice That Cannot Be Confiscated

Four Central Asian profiles now sit in this archive: Bon, Tengrism, Buryat Shamanism, Tuvan Shamanism. Each survived the death of its institutions through something too intimate to destroy.

Bon survived in caves — the terma, hidden texts buried by practitioners who trusted that someone would dig them up centuries later. Tengrism survived in stones — the ovoo, a pile of rocks with no door to close, no priest to arrest, no text to burn. Buryat shamanism survived in blood — the utkha, the hereditary calling that descends through the body and cannot be confiscated because it lives in the lineage, not the institution. Lithuanian paganism survived in song — the daina, the folk song so woven into daily life that you could not remove it without removing Lithuania.

Tuvan shamanism survived in the voice. Khöömei — the throat singing that the Soviets classified as folk art because they could not hear the cosmology in the harmonics. The voice that carries the wind and the water and the breath of the spirit-masters, compressed into a human throat, unconfiscatable because it has no physical form. You can burn a drum. You can arrest a shaman. You can close a temple. You cannot close a throat.

The voice is not the whole tradition. The drums are being made again. The clinics are drumming again. The ova are being fed again. The arzhaan springs are being visited again. The tradition that exists today is not the tradition that existed before the purges — it is poorer in some ways, reconstructed in others, commercially entangled in yet others. But the spirit-masters have not left the mountains. The springs still flow. The voice still carries the land.

At the geographic center of Asia, in a mountain-ringed republic where the Yenisei is born, the shamans still drum and the singers still sing. Not as they once did. Not as anyone planned. But the cher eezi are still addressed, the drums have new hides, and the overtones of sygyt still whistle across the steppe like wind that remembers where it came from.

Colophon

Tuvan shamanism has been documented by Kenin-Lopsan Mongush (Shamanic Songs and Myths of Tuva, 1997; Tuvan Shamanic Folklore, 1998; The Call of the 17 Shamans, 2002), Sevyan Vainshtein (Nomads of South Siberia, 1980), Theodore Levin (Where Rivers and Mountains Sing, 2006), Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (Shamans, Spirituality, and Cultural Revitalization, 2011), and Kira Van Deusen (Singing Story, Healing Drum, 2004). The tradition is alive and contested. Everything in this profile is a snapshot.

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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