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Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Georgetown University

Sustainable Faith?
Reconfiguring Shamanic Healing in Siberia

Introduction: Sustainable Faith?

Nostalgia is rife in Siberia for the pre-Soviet days when powerful shamans, in control of a panoply of spirits traveling across multiple layers of the universe, could cure patients during deeply dramatic and transforming community-wide seances. Poignant stories abound of lost knowledge: the shaman who died knowing where a special plant that could have cured his cancer was located, "just at the edge of the village airport", and just beyond the edge of our current medical practices and perceptions. Another depicts the shaman who died several days before a repentant Soviet doctor returned to probe the healer's renowned, yet earlier rejected, understanding of an illness known in the ethnographic literature by the infelicitous term of "Arctic hysteria" [menerik in Sakha and Russian]. Such stories are told and retold with sorrow by the Sakha (Yakut) of the Russian Far East, from whom I have been learning since the early 1980s, and they can be understood on multiple levels. On menerik and shamanic seances, our understanding has been particularly enhanced by the work of ethnomusicologist Eduard Alekseyev¹ .

For many elders and some youth, accounts of menerik, oiuun (male shaman) and udagan (female shaman), sustain faith as well as place that faith in temporal and special perspective. Sakha in numerous conversations yearn for the reincarnation of named hero-shamans of previous generations, who could recognize a medicinal plant from its life-force vibrations, knew as well when to harvest it at its peak, how to prepare it, and, as important, how to ask permission from local spirits for its removal by giving a token offering in return. Yet discourses of disaster are deceiving, for a strong and, I argue here, effective revitalization of shamanic healing has become a crucial part of larger processes of cultural recovery. The past post-Soviet decade has led to considerable personal and social transformation for many Sakha, as well as other Siberians. While acknowledging the seriousness of Soviet repression of shamans, analysts should also consider that mourning a previous generation's lost esoteric knowledge and spirituality may be a pattern that goes back at least through the nineteenth century, when shamans were hounded and denigrated by Russian Orthodox missionaries² .

As a new generation of healers has turned to elders and spirits for guidance, some exciting (for healers, patients and ethnographers alike) accounts of 'miracle cures' have begun to supplant the litanies of loss. This chapter features three sets of healers of two generations. Each set is imbued with human and/or spiritual kinship. All are well-known in the Sakha Republic, with varying degrees of controversy, rumor and confidence swirling around them. In each case, I know or have worked with only the younger generation, since the generation of legendary hero-shamans has passed in the biological sense, though not spiritually. Through examination of generational differences, shamanic approaches to spiritual healing processes and transformation are also analyzed, using specific descriptions and epistemologies of cures in their cultural contexts (Crandon 1987). A key and often explicitly stated task of the healer is to stimulate a patient's own potential to self-cure, using an integrated body/mind approach, activating the "Heart-Soul-Mind" that the Sakha term kut-siur, and combining that with a "radical empathy" that is the hallmark of intuitive healers in many parts of the world, as well as a featured theme in this book. I follow Thomas Csordas's (2003: 241) suggestion that in studying spiritual healing anthropologists should understand embodied, emotional experience as "the starting point for analyzing human participation in a cultural world."³

The first set of healers profiled here is the family of Konstantin Ivanovich Chirkov, who is also reverently called the 'Elder of Abei region' and 'Konstantin oiuun [shaman].' He is renowned for 'miracle cures,' and for his empathy and tact under extreme conditions of Soviet repression. His daughter, Alexandra Chirkova, at his urging became a Moscow-trained surgeon and the head doctor of her northern region. After age fifty, she returned to the shamanic healing traditions of her father, incorporating spirituality into her therapies selectively and creatively, depending on the patient. A second family of healers is that of Foma Petrovich Chashkin, whose two sons have increasingly openly been seeing patients in their rural Tatta region, after years of hiding their inherited shamanic gifts and the spirit-torture that constitutes Siberian shamanic initiation. The third set is linked by apprenticeship and spiritual communication, since the famed shaman Niikon (Nikon Alekseevich Vasilev, of the Viliuisk region) is said to have passed on his legendary abilities to a young shaman named Fedot Petrovich Ivanov. The chapter reveals an interplay among Sakha principles of shamanic healing gifts that are inherited genetically, like musical talent, yet activated spiritually and cultivated with training. Data on healers, their supplicants and their communities derive from periodic fieldwork in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) beginning in 1986, and continuing many summers in the post-Soviet period.

Konstantin and Alexandra: Adapting 'the healing gift' to fit the times

Alexandra Konstantinovna Chirkova shared with me in 2000 a curing event that she considered best illustrated her father's colossal talent as simultaneously a "white shaman" and "psychotherapeutic master." She later featured the story, related by the son of the patient, in a memoir honoring her father (2002: 211-213). I begin with her voice, told with the authority of a licensed surgeon who later decided cutting into people's heads was unbearable:

"One Spring a Sakha hunter who was a friend of father's went blind, probably from the glare of the sun on snow. Possibly the nerve endings in the brain that guide vision were affected, or it was a kind of spasm. In any case, nearly a year passed and he requested Konstantin's help. Konstantin prepared him psychologically by asking the family to please find an Arctic white owl, within the next three days. Konstantin promised to return with his cloak, drum and assistants for a seance, if only the owl could be found. 'How can we?' fretted the hunter's family, for he was inactive and his son was too young. 'Do your best,' said Konstantin, 'even if it is not alive, we will manage. 'Soon after, the hunter's wife found that a frozen owl somehow had landed on their sled. They worried that the owl was dead, but when Konstantin arrived with his entourage and drank tea with the family, he said 'it will be fine. 'They prepared the room for the seance, placing the owl near the hearth. The old hunter sat near the fire as Konstantin began drumming, dancing, and calling his helper spirits. One moment, he was drumming close to the hunter's ear, and took his drumstick, whoosh, and made a whistling sound nearby..."

The account of the hunter's son, a witness, continues:

"About midway through the seance, Konstantin took up the owl and put it on his knees, stroking it and saying incantations. I sat near him and with amazement watched his every move. I saw that the frozen owl had come to life, was scratching, and had taken flight. 'Bai, what happened with that bird, look where its flying,' exclaimed Konstantin. The owl, flapping its wings, was flying around the cabin, and then flew up the chimney. Konstantin continued long in his singing [in Sakha, kuturuu]. His assistants took two frozen boards from the yard and hit him in the kidneys. They took an axe and beat him... as they held it, the shaman licked it, ran his hands over its blade. It was horrible.... The shaman licked hot strips of wood from the fire and licked my father's eyes, [then...] bound [them] with a dark cloth. [Konstantin] told him to open his eyes by slowly and carefully un-bandaging himself only on the third day....'You will at least see your feet...'And on the third day, my father made it to the open door and took off the bandage. Opening his eyes, he cried several times 'I can see,' and he wept for joy."

Alexandra explains that the Arctic white owl is sacred, not to be killed. Thus the hunter was primed to be thrilled that his family avoided having to kill the bird: its appearance was a blessed sign. Its revival and flight during the seance created conditions for a still more intense epiphany for the hunter, who so wanted to see, and for his extended family, who all rejoiced at the sharp-eyed owl's recovery. They were in a state of spiritual astonishment, possibly group trance and certainly group solidarity, caused by the drama of drumming, the rhythm of dancing, poetic mantra-like incantations evoking nature, as well as the palpable presence of spirit helpers. All this was compounded by the adrenaline (and endorphin?) stirring excitement of shamanic exploits, aided by Konstantin's helpers [called kuturuk-sut]⁴ . The seance lasted well into the night and was perceived by attendees as a miracle, the epitome of a "benevolent spirit shaman's" [aiyy oiuun] negotiation with the spirit world. Alexandra wonders if the bird was really an owl, and if the group was not under mass 'hypnosis.' She notes that opthamologists recommend waiting three days after an eye injury to remove bandages and that Konstantin's licking probably had medicinal, purifying value precisely because he licked a hot stick first. Yet she too has had her own spiritual epiphany, after moments of self-doubt, 'shamanic illness,' and yearning to be guided from realms of the dead by her father, who was born in 1879 and died in 1974.

In childhood, Alexandra had notorious symptoms of shamanic illness, called in the Sakha language eteeni and "the Sakha sickness" [Sakha yld'ybyt]. A form of "spirit torture," it often results in painful feelings of being "sick all over," of being torn apart and remade from the inside out by snakes and other animal-like spirits. The goal of this 'initiation' is to feel a variety of pains that one's future patients are likely to feel, to gain enough empathy to become a true intuitive healer, tapping into the spiritual potency of oneself and one's patients in a synergistic way. To recover, a potential healer must promise to cure others, in a literally and figuratively enlightening bargain with spirits who become one's helpers⁵ . Alexandra explained to me: "I was young when I first felt the strength. I had visions, forebodings. But I was also headstrong and emotional... Father tried to tell me this was not how to be. I had a dream that I was thrown into a pit with snakes. I heard a voice that said 'She will see it through. She will win.'"

Alexandra, confirming that various stages of transformation are typical of Sakha shamans, describes a later episode in her memoir (2002:100-106):

"In 1985, something happened with me that is beyond explanation. It began with a headache and unstoppable vomiting. For three days, I was not able to get up from bed, and then I revived. The whole time I wanted fish... My body was covered with red hives. I had a terrible skin itch, as if worms were crawling all over my body... A woman came to me and said that I was not curing myself correctly, that what I had was well-known... She brought three kinds of herbs and said to burn them in the evening and purify myself with smoke. Also, that I should eat fish... After feeling better, I decided to take the smell of smoke from my body. But again the headaches began, and I realized what I had to do. I had to put on my father's [shamanic] dress [bequeathed to her ten days short of 3 years after Konstantin's death, as he had directed]... I put on the cloak and immediately felt a lightening. I even looked at myself in the mirror. I felt a tranquilizing of the soul, and with a great yawn I lost my footing, and fell into a deep dream...."

After taking sick leave, Alexandra continued to use her father's cloak to cure herself, as she gradually realized that what was happening was "the ritual of tearing apart." She explains this as "a ritual of suffering through which one is taught." Among the teachers were animal spirit guides, including a bear. Significantly, one of Konstantin's most famed forms was as a bear, the animal also associated with his "mother spirit," or iee kyl in Sakha. Her suffering was far from over. During this period, she would sing ancient Sakha songs with abandon in her sleep. And after three years, a still greater trauma occurred, the one that led her away from being "the kind of doctor who cuts and sews," as her father used to say. After performing a brain surgery, she reeled from the operating room, vomited, was unconscious for three days. She landed in several hospitals, including in the republic capital, Yakutsk. Marks appeared on her face that some said resembled a cross on one side, and a drum on the other. She envisioned the bed she was to have, and was later taken there, near patients who subsequently were amazed when she began understanding their illnesses without their having told her their complaints. She hid her dizziness, blurred vision and mental state, in great fear that her colleagues would put her in one of the notorious Russian psychiatric clinics, and that she would be inappropriately drugged. Gradually, she realized: "I had acquired a new gift, the ability to see through a person into their illness." She saved one woman from a kidney stone operation by willing the stones into sand. Another, who was to have a leg amputated, was saved when Alexandra "by thought, with intense gaze, cured her. Soon she stood, felt warmth, and itching in the leg." As she cured others, she improved herself, and was finally released, still wobbly, with the diagnosis "sickness uncertain."

Back home, donning Konstantin's cloak, Alexandra finally felt relief and calm that led to her spiritual transference from a surgeon to a healer, guided by the spirit of her father, who sometimes sent messages through an elderly mediator fondly named "Aunt Shura." Konstantin had delivered Shura in a difficult birth, had accurately predicted her future family life, and later began sending her elaborate dreams as a way to contact Alexandra. Alexandra herself had saved Shura from going blind in 1991, by Shura's own account to me. When I first met Alexandra in 1992, she was head doctor of her region, with a large plant-filled room within the Belaia Gora hospital for those patients who wished to be cured in seances that included Sakha chants, incense purification, and mutually reinforcing group prayers. Their enthusiastic testimonies made me realize Alexandra's eteenii had fulfilled a powerful promise, though she still wore her white doctor's gown and inspired confidence in more 'modern' ways as well. Within ten years, Alexandra resigned as head doctor, and began receiving selected patients in her home, including those she helped occasionally by donning Konstantin's cloak and drumming by a fire, in a special healing hut in her back yard. Alexandra is well loved for dealing with emergencies, with the traumas of hunting accidents, as well as for curing nervous system disorders and alcoholism. Nikolai, a patient with cancer, and several others, say they have seen a man standing behind her while she chants, as she evokes the beauty of the Northern mountains⁶ .

The Chashkins: From exploits to tractors

In the central Sakha region called Tatta, renowned for producing many artists and writers, the family of Foma Petrovich Chashkin felt the same heat of Soviet repression that Konstantin's did. Foma and Konstantin together spent time in jail in the 1930s for their illegal practice of 'charlatan medicine,' since in those days Soviet anti-religious authorities considered the words 'shaman' and 'deceiver' to be synonymous. Foma first came to my attention not for his reputation for healing, though it was great, but for his exploits with Soviet police. In one account, Foma invited the policeman who had come to arrest him to eat a cooked fish with him, but it wiggled on the plate and the poor man fled. In another, Foma was arrested, but he kept showing himself in the surrounding fields and woods, as if he were everywhere at once. They let him go because they could not be sure where he was. In a third, he was being taken to be shot, but a policeman put the gun to his own temple instead. Finally, they let Foma go home, where he married a girl he had cured of a skin disease.

Chaashka oiuun, as he is nicknamed in Tatta, became known especially for curing alcoholics in secret, after the performance of community-oriented Sakha drumming seances attracted too much attention and became too dangerous. One time, recalled a friend of his, Chaashka visited another friend, who was drunk. The drunk evicted them angrily, so Chaashka made himself invisible. Later, at a time chosen for maximum startle effect, he "scared the guy straight out of his drunkenness," and, implied the speaker, his addiction. In another case, two men showed up on Chaashka's doorstep asking to be cured of their vodka habit. But they were not entirely sure that they wanted to quit, so they decided to test Chaashka by hiding a couple of bottles along the way. 'If you really want to be cured,' he told them, 'then you must get rid of those two bottles that you hid along the way here. 'Impressed, they decided that he could see everything, and that they may as well agree to be cured. Chaashka's usual method was to get people to guarantee with a ritual oath a particular amount of time that they would quit drinking. "If they violated this, they could be in big trouble," said one of Chaashka's elderly followers."Sometimes people came back to him asking that the 'spell' be lifted, so that they could go to someone's wedding and drink for just a short period, say, three days. But if they didn't get the ritual and tried this on their own, they had terrible repercussions –sickness, dizziness, and even death." Swearing and fear of spiritual enforcement enables emergence from addiction in these cases⁷ .

Two of Chaashka's sons have continued the family healing traditions, one more publically than the other. I traveled to meet a modest, somewhat jolly, middle-aged Mikhail Fomich Chashkin in his home village in 2003. Large and brawny, he has not given up his regular job as a tractor-driver on an impoverished nearby farm that is part of a former Soviet collective, although he also regularly receives patients from the capital, a full 8 hours bumpy drive away. A local patient explained that Mikhail "has a strong tie to the land, and this is where he derives his strength, the human-natural connection that creates the context for the information he uses to heal. This includes deep knowledge of plants, of all their medicinal possibilities. But he doesn't pretend to cure everything."

Mikhail began our discussion with his ancestry. "Doimpo was my ancestor, one of the great shamans of this area. We all probably got our healing abilities from him." In answer to my question about using the heavily charged word oiuun for the more recent generations, he replied: "Yes, it is in our line to be oiuun. Foma certainly can be called an oiuun. He died at age 78, treated like an ordinary person, and was buried that way, not as the oiuun of the past were [in special tree platforms in sacred groves]... There is a place named for Doimpo, and a sacred tree kerekh mas associated with him. I sometimes go to Foma's grave for inspiration. He died quietly in his sleep. He knew when he was going..."

Both Foma and Mikhail are perceived as oiuun by their patients, because they went through the painful process of eteeni to become healers. While Foma probably had some inklings of "shamanic torture" in his childhood, the most striking bout in this process was not until the age many Sakha claim is a key turning point in the revelation of creative and spiritual talent: "When Foma was about 40, he became very sick and was tortured by spirits. He had eteeni for about 7 years. For 3-4 of those years, he could hardly walk. He sang at night... I was born when he was around 50, so I do not remember his eteeni. He cured it the way Sakha shamans do – he drank milk as if it were his life's blood, used milk to purify his system." Rather than stressing a pact with spirits, Mikhail chose to emphasize Foma's "rechanneling of his talents." "Since he could not use a drum... he used other instruments, for example horn tubes for bloodletting." With some sorrow, Mikhail said: "he didn't pass his healing implements to me, he didn't think his children should suffer [by becoming healers]."

Foma channeled his talent toward "great herbal knowledge and psychological understanding.... He used everything that was in his head, his brain. I myself can figure out who is coming and why. He did this too. It is possible when you are calm and connected. I think that telepathy was more needed then than now. Now we have the telephone." Unlike many rural Sakha, Foma did not keep cows or horses, but rather was a forest-oriented hunter. This helped him avoid too much contact with Soviet authorities in the village, and, more importantly, gave him the spiritual connectedness he needed to open himself to appropriate cures for individual patients. Many of his patients were women with menerik, perceived to have psychological problems collectively (mis-) labeled "Arctic hysteria." Quite possibly, such women were themselves frustrated healers, unable to cure themselves by becoming openly respected udagan, the Sakha term for female shamans. Instead, their "nervous" bouts of dancing with wildly loosened hair, talking in tongues, and singing were perceived by their families and communities as frightening reminders of a "primitive past"⁸ . Mikhail continued: "In those days, there were quite a few menerik. Foma helped them, calmed them, and let blood out of them, from their temples. He also cured depression, back pain, osteochondrosis, stomach ulcers, and fertility problems."

Mikhail's practice has been imbued with the faith that he can eventually learn to cure precisely 41 illnesses. He got this from his own version of eteeni, which he freely admits began with suffering from alcoholism. "It was really through dissipation and disorientation. I was very out of it when I drank, and through this, I suffered eteeni without at first understanding what it was. I too went through this struggle for about 7 years. Papa died before he could help me in this [healing] life. He was an oiuun and accepted that fate for himself. But now I see him in my dreams. This is how he has helped me." When I asked if he had any urge to take up drumming and perform seances, he hooted with laughter: "How am I going to jump around like that? The most important thing is the results, the cures that you help people achieve, when people believe in you. You can use herbs and the words of a blessing [algys] the same way as the drum. The energy of the curing is in the herbs, in all of nature itself." Mikhail's spirituality is inspirational and ad hoc, in that his intuition [in Sakha tagkha] guides him to the right diagnoses, herbs and prayer-chants to use. "The words just come to me, they come from nature, a kind of prayer. I can see a person and figure out their illness. But I only have strength for 5-6 people a day." In the Sakha language, the word for nature, aiylgkha, stems from the root aiyy, meaning benevolent spirit. Mikhail recognizes this, yet hesitated to discuss its implication as his prayer source.

Mikhail differentiates Sakha and Russian patients, noting that sometimes Russians are more receptive than Sakha, with "softer internal structures," that is, more adaptable and less prone to chronic ailments. By 2007, Mikhail had helped to cure a colleague, Sakha ethnomusicologist Galina Alexeeva, of a life-threatening illness in a dramatic reaffirmation of his healing gifts, as described by Eduard Alekseyev.

With Sakha patients, Mikhail is particularly attuned to their three souls, thought by most Sakha to be an integral part of their being. The first, and primary soul is the "mother soul," or iee kut. It is important not to scare it, but rather to let its life force refresh itself. "Most curing, however," says Mikhail, "takes place with the salgyn kut [the breath soul]. Nearly everyone has their breath soul spoiled to some degree." This is because of human exposure to the destruction of nature, to human-made ecological imbalances. If a mother or breath soul wanders or is stolen, the task of the great shamans of old, including Foma and Konstantin, was to recover and control it. But Mikhail confessed he cannot do this, nor can he send his own soul in search of another's, as shamans are supposed to do. The third soul is the "earth soul," or buor kut, most identified with a person's shadow, and possibly, in some interpretations, with a person's "aura." All three make up the full harmony of an integrated, healthy person, enabling a balanced kut-siur [Heart-Mind-Soul] and a pure liver⁹ .

On leaving, I noticed patients were waiting. Mikhail apologized for not being able to personally show the local sacred tree where his father had once gone to make spirit offerings and derive inspiration. Mikhail admitted he had not been there for a long time, and felt more comfortable at Foma's grave, rather than Doimpo's tree. To my surprise, he encouraged a pilgrimage, probably because he was charmed by the woman I was with, the well-known Sakha sociologist, parliamentarian and author Uliana Vinokurova. We searched for the tree in a nearby forest, where a stand of larch meets one of birch. But sadly, the most likely sacred tree [kerek mas] we could find was a prone larch, an enormous, once-living being lying on the forest floor, abandoned. Uliana, having been ready to make a prayerful offering, stared forlornly at it, and, it developed later, expected me to photograph it as a symbol of cultural and spiritual decay¹⁰ . We pondered the twenty-first century ironies of a milk-drinking, tractor-driving healer whose salgyn-kut does not fly.

Niikon and Fedot: Transcending the generations

In the Viliuisk and neighboring Suntar regions, a phenomenal number of shamans were renowned for their healing, spirituality, and ability to counteract or at least hide from Soviet repression. In one almost unbelievable case, the head of a "village Council" managed to cover up his continuing shamanic practice because he was protected by his loving community while perceived by the outside world as a good Communist. Probably the greatest of all the Viliuisk shamans was Niikon, for whom a local curing center is now named. One legend about Niikon is that he was shot in the 1930s, having fled into the forest with a 'rebellious' group of Evenk trying to avoid Soviet collectivization. When the activists who had shot him came to his body, they found only a dead dog, instead of Niikon¹¹ . Though hounded, humiliated and forced to relinquish his drum and cloak, Niikon, believed to have lived 104 years (1880-1984), managed by the end of his lifetime to gain special official dispensation for aspects of his curing practice. In one account, Foma Chashkin himself referred a patient with several ailments to Niikon in 1971:

"Niikon was an open, warm and hospitable elder, who loved to chat and tell stories. He looked at me and said just what Foma had: 'Come next summer when the birches are budding.' I came at the right time and found Niikon had moved to his summer camp. With other patients, he took us to a birch grove and had us gather large branches of young birches into a pile. He then instructed us to make a pit for a fire, and when there were only coals left, he lined the pit with them and put birch branches in a bed on top, covering the pit. He had us one by one lie on the branches naked. Then he asked what part of the body felt hot, and added more branches there. During this, he held our hands, taking our pulse, to check our heart. When he finished with one, he'd take another, adding coals and branches as needed. After this healing, I became well and for twenty years have had no illnesses."¹²

This frustratingly spare yet glowing testimony is typical of many recalled by Niikon's admirers. Niikon used prayer-chants (algys) during such purification sessions, made spirit offerings, and rarely discussed his own relationship with helper-spirits, hard-won through shamanic initiation. In the darkest moments of his secret practice, he was constrained from taking the life histories of patients, some of whom he barely knew. He occasionally told newcomers that he did not want to know their names, yet his loving empathy came through, especially as he lay his hot gentle hands on their heads, softly blew across their fontanel and prayed for them. He modestly received all supplicants, taking from them only the gifts that they could afford to give. Thus his practice in retrospect is surrounded with the mystery of successful healing using a relatively narrow range of traditional therapies, herbs, bloodletting, sucking, prayers, purification and counseling. His 'healing gifts' were said by local Sakha and a few big-shot Russian patients be 'from nature' and inherited within his shamanic line. But to whom could he pass this precious yet dangerous gift? One of the many tragedies of the Soviet repression of shamans is that they only with great difficulty found appropriate youth to bequeath their secret knowledge and practice.

Niikon, however, had several apprentices in his lifetime, including one promising young man who landed in jail for alleged murder after working with Niikon for seven years. Late in his life, Niikon learned of another extraordinary young man named Fedot, who was still in school in a neighboring village. By Fedot's own testimony, "Niikon called me to him when I was 16. I felt the pull and resisted. I was ill [with eteeni]. I was confused. And I was different from the other kids and did not want to be. My mother was very upset. But Niikon found me. He sent me signals through dreams and sent me a letter asking me to come live with him, to train with him." Fedot's mother, sitting nearby, confirmed that she had been vigorously against his leaving school and going to study with Niikon in 1981. But she could not stop him, and she became the only one who knew where he had gone: it was kept secret from the rest of the family. Fedot continued: "Niikon taught me a lot. He taught me how to find healing herbs, and how to mix them in appropriate doses. He gave me my drum and instructed me in how to gather important components of my cloak [through spirit communication]. I worked with him for about a year. [As he became infirm...] he passed me on to his friend, another shaman..."¹³

Since Niikon's death, Fedot has periodically visited his grave, known to special followers as a pilgrimage site. At the grave, Fedot occasionally has felt comfortable enough to spend the night, shyly saying in answer to a direct question, "Yes, I go to Niikon's grave... I cannot go into details, but you can say we met each other there." One aspect of Fedot's burgeoning reputation with intelligentsia in the capital is that he spends time each year at Niikon's grave, something few have the courage to do.

Fedot outlined more specifically some of the Sakha therapies that Niikon had taught him, while making clear that he was still learning, was at a relatively early stage of his healing abilities. One of the most common, which has striking correlation to the healing practices of some Native Americans, is bokhsuruii, sucking illness from the body¹⁴ . Another is a ritualized massage, ilbiyii, literally 'casting out illness,' that includes lengthy incantations. More serious illnesses require sullerdeehii, a kind of telepathic operation without cutting the body, and d'albyii, removing and escorting ill-willed spirits (abaahy) from a patient, through a seance. For this, a shaman needs a darkened room with a hearth or an isolated spot in the forest where a fire can be lit. Prayers (algys) are said to the fire spirit (iot ichchi), with offerings of white horse hair, Sakha pancakes and butter, as is typical of many Sakha rituals. Then, early in the seance while drumming and singing, Fedot evokes his helper spirits, a raven and a black dog. "I use the same song always to start. I cry like a raven, to evoke Raven, and then call to Dog, like a dog.... I do not consider my spirits abaahy – they are ichchi. They are helpers, not evil spirits. I try to cure people, to be kind, not to hurt people. How effective I am partly depends on what kind of illness is being discussed."

One of the reasons I had found Fedot, whose village is remote, and been received warmly in the early 1990s, was that I was accompanied by a Sakha friend, Ivan Alekseev, who is a linguist from the region, and a virtuoso player of the jaw harp [khomus, also called mouth organ and Jew's harp]. A deeply resonating instrument, the sculptural forged metal khomus is famed in the republic for creating calming, sometimes healing, effects, and has had an enormous revival of popularity in the last twenty years. Fedot too plays the khomus, and welcomed Ivan with joy. Yet he was not ready to treat either of us for the specific complaints that we arrived with, for he had just performed a risky seance with his own brother the day before and admitted he was feeling unwell himself. He nonetheless managed through some sort of telepathy [called "clear-seeing," keurbeuchur] to discern what our needs and hopes were as potential patients, before we explicitly mentioned them¹⁵ . He also warned us that he could not simply sing and drum "for show," without immediately evoking his helper spirits. My respect for his effectiveness has increased over the years, as he has successfully treated a mutual friend, the singer-song-writer Anastassiia Varlaamova, for chronic diabetes.

A less successful case was mentioned by Fedot himself, who admitted that he could not use 'clear-seeing' or a non-intrusive operation to cure patients from afar, although he had tried. One desperate family had brought him the clothing of a loved one dying of cancer: "It was too late, but I think I made the pain of the illness easier to bear." Interestingly, I first heard of Fedot because of a sensational story buzzed in the capital about a Russian woman doctor who he had indeed cured of cancer. This woman, knowing well the pitfalls of Soviet operations, secretly had gone to Fedot around 1990, after Japanese scanning technology revealed she had a tumor. Fedot worked with her during numerous seances in the forest near his home over the course of a month. When she returned to her hospital, her doctor-colleagues were furious that she had delayed her operation. But they were completely confounded when they found no tumor and learned where she had been.

Conclusions: Spiritual transformation as a social and personal process

Stories such as that of the Russian woman doctor cured of cancer by a remote rural Sakha shaman are just what a social doctor of a wounded post-Soviet society might have ordered. I have never been able to track the Russian doctor to confirm her recovery. But the account is at minimum a wide-spread affirmation of faith in traditional healing, in the revitalization of shamanic traditions, and in the spiritual transference of shamanic power to a new generation. Fedot in the post-Soviet period represents this and more, for his satisfied patient list has been growing, and in 2003, on a trip to Viliuisk, I heard from several of his followers that he had managed to put out a forest fire with a seance, by evoking Niikon's help to create a storm. This is precisely the kind of story told about the great hero-shamans of the past, who used their abilities not only for healing but for community protection.

Over a decade of post-Soviet life has produced many changes in indigenous Siberian attitudes toward their healing legacies. Once associated with discredited "deceiver-shamans" in the Soviet period, Siberian spirituality has become more openly revered in the post-Soviet period by many Sakha and some Russians. However, zigzags of community support for shamanic cures have resulted in both openings and closings of some "traditional healing centers." In the capital Yakutsk, a Center of Traditional Medicine has recently changed its name to the Center for Prophylactic and Sports Medicine, in keeping with a Russian Federation-wide law that curtails the practice of 'folk healing' without licenses. The boom in post-Soviet healers of the early 1990s has given way to fewer practitioners a decade later, as patients learn for themselves who are effective healers with 'shamanic gifts' and who are commercial 'charlatans' trading on new credibility for religion. A "Center for Folk Healing," founded by the shaman-historian Vladimir Kondakov, using Sakha therapies as well as Chinese medicine such as acupuncture, has had considerable success attracting healers and patients. Except for Kondakov himself, however, few of the healers are considered by either urban or rural Sakha to be full-fledged oiuun or udagan. For this, consultants say, one needs a shamanic lineage, spirit torture-inspiration through eteeni, and a many-staged apprenticeship to a knowledgeable elder. While the proportions of these elements may vary individually, all three are desirable to create the personal synergism needed for curing through experience-rooted empathy [ahynyy]. A wise, effective healer like Niikon literally and symbolically stripped his patients naked to cleanse them of their fears and their community-defined 'sins,' to make them feel whole again, welcome, humble and respectful in an imperfect world. Various kinds of empathy, intuition and their resonance may be at work. Mikhail Chashkin and Alexandra Chirkova also carry on this tradition.

Sakha terminology concerning spiritual healing is revealing. A shaman (and a few others) is said to be "a person with an open body" [ahaghas etteekh kihi], bravely open heart-soul-minded to all experience. Perceptive healers have "eyes on the spine" [kokhauger kharakhiakh], akin to the concept of a "third eye." All are adept at intuition-based diagnosis, and at stimulating the life-forces of kut-siur through mutually reinforcing prayers-and-blessings [algys]. But to reduce the healing process, and its transforming effects, to the power of prayer and purification misses the integration of many kinds of spirit-uality in shamanic practice, derived from inner strength as well as from the outside natural energies of the surrounding environment and the cosmos of a multilayered universe filled with named animate and active beings.

Tensions between individual and community-oriented curing play out differently in diverse cases, especially given that many Siberian communities, as elsewhere, are highly multiethnic. The more cultural boundaries are blurred, the harder it becomes to identify fixed etiologies and philosophies of curing that can be linked to particular ethnic groups or specific language-based chants and mantras (Langford 2003)¹⁶ . The healing processes through spiritual transformation that are illustrated here show several kinds of healing working at many social levels. First, the model of 'healing the healer' through personal revelation is the 'classic' shamanic pattern of spirit negotiation through suffering and its transcendence. Called 'spirit initiation' in the ethnographic literature, it results in a 'radical empathy' that brings results. Second, the ability of a healer to communicate and enact compassion through elaborate ritual is shown in the cure of the blind hunter. The full power of a suspenseful, dramatic drumming seance, planned and executed with elaborate effort appealing to 'higher' spirit authorities, including the manipulation of the perfect symbol of a dead owl brought to sharp-eyed life, illustrates a cure enabled through the synergy of personal and community psychological persuasion, and perhaps more. The reality of spirits comes to life in the healing. Third, as Soviet repression curtailed such exuberance, the bare bones of traditional healing sustained faith: herbal knowledge tied to ecological care, massage, bone-setting, and counseling linked to close understanding of individual complaints. Especially for elderly supplicants, these worked best when combined with spiritual endorsement and accounts of shamans transcending persecution. With a new generation of healers, a fourth and exciting level has been added in the re-emergence of spiritual healing into more open community practice. A few special healer-shamans are combining the poetic, inspirational and creative chanting of previous generations into adapted rituals, guided by their dreams, by their intuitions, and by their acclaimed consultations with deceased yet spiritually alive hero-shamans. Far from being bound by specific chant formulae, healers are free to explore individual and community problems in interrelation with each other.

To return to themes of the introduction, people in Russia have too often seen 'folk healing' in terms of extremes: either disastrous or miraculous, 'black' or 'white,' and some projected these images onto their shamans. As a new generation of healers and their supplicants become comfortable with the creativity and energy of cultural (re)vitalization, they are also (re)kindling a vibrant and pliant understanding of healing itself. To adapt Lewis Hyde's (1998: 293-300) perspectives on cultural creativity, some gifted shamans can cross boundaries and become the creative tricksters of cultural revitalization. Thomas Csordas (2002: 5) warns that "healing is much more like planting a seed or nudging a rolling ball to slightly change its trajectory so that it ends up in a different place, than it is like lightening striking or mountains moving." Combining these insights, we can see that the 'nudge' of renewed faith in benevolent and active healers and ancestral spirits may be making possible the effectiveness of newly revitalized shamanic therapies. Occasionally, when a few living shamans themselves evoke the sacred mountains, rivers, nine heavens, and lightening of a culturally-constructed Sakha cosmos in their prayer-chants, an incremental cure may occur so speedily as to seem miraculous.

Notes

¹ I am deeply thankful to Eduard Alekseyev, to whom I dedicate this article for his 70th birthday. See his article on menerik, "Penie pri kul'turno-spetsifichnykh psikhicheskikh rasstroistvakh u narodov sibirskogo Severa" on the website www.sakhaopenworld.org/alekseyev/work4.html, earlier published for a Festschrift of Elena Novik. The Sakha Open World site honoring Eduard Yefimovich also provides wonderful samples of menerik and shamanic seance singing.

I also thank my Sakha language teacher, Klara Belkin, with whom I began studying in 1983, and many Sakha friends and colleagues, especially Zinaida and the late Vladimir Ivanov for sharing their home, Albina Diachkova and Anatoly Gogolev for hosting me in 2003, Alexandra Konstantinovna Chirkova for working with me periodically since 1992, Uliana Vinokurova for long-term partnership, including in Tatta ulus in 2003, Ivan Alekseev and Anatoly Gogolev for guiding me in the Viliuisk region in 1991 and 2002 respectively. I am indebted to Georgetown University, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Yakutsk University, the Academy of Sciences Institute of Languages, Literature and History in Yakutsk (AN IIaLI, now the Humanities Institute), the Sakha Republic Ministry of Culture, and to the Kennan Institute of the Smithsonian's Wilson Center for fieldwork and/or research support. Fieldwork relevant to this paper was begun in 1986 and 1987, continuing periodically from 1991-2007.

² For historical background, see Alekseev (1984); Balzer (1999); Il'iakov (1995); Znamensky (1999). On shamans and definitions, see Balzer (1997); Narby and Huxley (2001); Siikala and Hoppal (1992); Schenk and Ratsch (1999). While controversial for its generalizations and lack of directly experienced field data, see also the classic Eliade (2004 [1951]).

³ For more on my eclectic approaches to shamanic healing and anthropology theory, see Balzer (1996).

⁴ On group seance dynamics, see Ksenofontov (1992 [1928]); Jacobsen (1999); Kendall (2001). On seances as group therapy and possibly stimulating endorphins, see Balzer (1987; 1991).

⁵ See especially Basilov (1997), who stresses the shamanic call as being "chosen by the spirits." Compare Brown and Cousins (2001); Hultkranz (1992); Mehl-Madrona (1997). Gender-sensitive aspects of shamanic healing are relevant. In Sakha, a male shaman is an oiuun [with a Turkic root], while a woman is called udagan [with a Mongolic root]. Neither is considered by definition stronger than the other, but during the Soviet period more high-profile men were arrested, causing a feminization of folk curing, as healers went underground (Balzer 1999). On the significance of women shamans through history, see Tedlock (2005). See also Perrone et al (1989); Koss-Chioino (1992).

⁶ A patient who had never seen a picture of Konstantin recognized his photograph, an identification that may have involved "power of suggestion." Another of Konstantin's children, Maria, has also become a healer in her home region of Belaia Gora. Alexandra has moved to the capital, where she works in one of several 'traditional' healing centers, without using the cloak or drum. She briefly treated the former Sakha Republic president, M.Y. Nikolaev, before he left the presidency.

⁷ This approach is also practiced by a healer-shaman I have visited twice, Vitaly Nikiforov. It brings out some of the more negative, fear-inducing aspects of dealing with spirits, who can be vengeful if not appeased and respected. However, a Sakha barrier to the misuse of spirit power is the widespread belief that evoking ill-intentioned spirits or cursing can rebound against one's close family members. Compare Whitehead and Wright (2004).

⁸ On menerik, see the Russian doctor S.I. Mitskevich (1929). For a social interpretation of similar phenomena, see I. M. Lewis (1971). Compare ethnomusicologist E.Y. Alekseyev (2005 ms.).

⁹ The body-purifying liver is considered as important, if not more so, than the heart in Sakha conceptions. For more on concepts of the three souls and of health, see Kulakovsky (1979); Kolodesnikov (2000); Kondakov (1992; 1999).

¹⁰ Off numerous dirt roads of the republic are sacred groves with large, imposing trees, often larch, festooned with ribbons and other offerings. I was first taken to one in 1986, in secret, and have been to many since with Sakha friends honoring their local spirits.

¹¹ This account is from the ethnographer S. I. Nikolaev (Somogotto), told to me in July, 1991.

¹² This appeared in a collection honoring Niikon (Boeskorov 2001). I am grateful to Zina Ivanova for insights into its meaning and for help with its translation.

¹³ I hope to work more with Fedot, and am grateful to Ivan Alekseev and Anastasiia Varlaamova for helping me to connect with him.

¹⁴ See also Kondakov (1999). The stunning 1984 documentary film "Time of Dreams," directed by E.Alekseyev and E.Novik and shot by A.Slapinsh, includes a segment on Niikon.

¹⁵ Shamans rarely heal family members, since they are considered too close with too much at stake. Although Fedot rejected performing a seance with me and/or Ivan, I have been a patient with several other Sakha healers, including one who "saw" an abnormality through my body (X-ray vision?) that I had only just learned about with Western technology. My own skepticism has been tested to the point of considerable realignment and spiritual confusion, as I absorb information about instances of relatively rapid spiritual healing, shamanic telepathy, uncanny coincidences, predictive dreams and 'clear-seeing' into future events and into patient's bodies.

¹⁶ See also Csordas (2000; 2002) and Davies (2004) on Navaho healing in new culturally mixed contexts.

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