Extracts from M. A. Czaplicka, My Siberian Year, Mills & Boon,
My comments
are between [ ].
CHAPTER X
A SHAMAN’S CURSE [p. 211-224]
To a casual observer it might seem that the persecutions of an earlier
day and the present attitude of calculated contempt and disparagement on the part
of the official Russian missionaries have greatly weakened the hold of the
shamans (medicine men) and the cults they represent on the minds of the native
tribes of the lower
Among the Limpiisk Tungus of to-day the principal function of the shaman
which has survived the efforts of the missionaries is that of healing. Besides
this, a great deal of importance is still attached to shamanist ceremonies for
securing luck in fishing and hunting. The injunctions of the shaman who is
treating a patient or carrying out a ceremony for ensuring a good haul of fish
are unquestioningly obeyed. But when he shamanises at some social gathering,
displaying his powers by way of affording entertainment to the company, he
cannot be so sure of a respectful compliance with his wishes; the more daring
spirits will on such occasions sometimes venture to question his supernatural
authority, and even to “chaff” the wielder of the mystic drumstick.
Social events which
bring together a fair number of people are not very frequent among these
scattered northern nomads. A few score may gather for the yearly fair of the
Chapogir on the banks of the
This is the name they give to a trial of wits or a deliberately provoked
quarrel, in which the shaman is incited to put forth his supernatural powers
against the merely human mentality of a layman. Or the struggle may be between
two shamans - a test of shamanistic power. A typical case is that of a contest
between a Samoyed and a Yakut shaman, continued for years, in which the scene
of strife was transferred first from the earth to the sky and then to the water
and below it. Although the Samoyed succeeded -in compassing the death of his
rival, this did not put an end to the struggle, which culminated in the defeat
of the Samoyed - a tacit recognition of the superiority of Yakut culture; for
the tale was told by the brother of the defeated champion.
When a layman pits
himself against an adversary who can summon to his aid the resources of the
spiritual world, it is notable that the issue is always decided by the lack of
shamanistic power, no matter how greatly superior the layman may be in
personality and intellect to the adept. A veritable tragedy - of which only the
final catastrophe is still, so far as I know, to be enacted - was unfolded
before our eyes, of a family blasted and disappearing under a wizard's curse,
because its head had rashly offended the “spirits” of the latter. Śdipus
himself was not more relentlessly pursued by the instruments of the offended
gods than was the Tungus herdsman who presumed to slight the familiars of a
powerful shaman. It was difficult to shake off the feeling that this was indeed
the motive of the drama, and to pin oneself to the rational explanation that
the misfortunes of this apparently fate-ridden family were partly a series of
coincidences and partly a matter of psycho-pathology.
[Ready to curse Chunga
if wounded in his pride]
[I guess this is the “only photograph in all the
Limpiisk tundra” that he promised to give to Czaplicka, see infra]
Chunga, or - to use his Russian baptismal name - Nikolai, Hiragir, is a
member of one of the two most influential families or clans among the ten which
form the Limpiisk group of Tungus - a man of unusual refinement and delicacy
for a Tungus, a thorough gentleman. We first met him in the tundra on our
outward journey, in a chum, where our hosts, as in most of the other
places where we had stopped for only an hour or two, forgot their hospitable
duties in their curiosity. His courteous greeting was in welcome contrast to
the jostling eagerness to shake hands with the strangers which made us the
centre of a small mob-large enough, though, to cut us off from the warmth of
the fire in the middle of the chum. It was Chunga who, with a few quiet
words of authority, dispersed the chattering crowd and made room for us in the
place of honour near the fire, opposite to and facing the tent flap; and when
we set about the preparations for a much-needed meal, he informed us “When you
come to my house you will not open your food-box," combining a hospitable
invitation with a rebuke to his own hosts for forgetting their manners.
Chunga has been six times “prince” of the Limpiisk people, thus
completing eighteen years of public service - a prince is elected for a three year
term by the men of the group. His tact and ripe experience are still always at
the service of the prince pro term and the elders, and they are
frequently made use of. He was, until quite lately, the head of a prosperous
family of five sons and five daughters; his quiet tactfulness, dignified
bearing, and wisdom were recognised and appreciated no less by the Russian
officials and traders than by his own tribesmen.
In the spring of last year Chunga went to the fair of the Chapogir. This
is an annual gathering at which furs are exchanged for provisions and stuffs of
Russian manufacture brought to the fair by native traders. The Chapogir are a
tribe of Tungus who live in the taiga (forest) on the southern bank of
the
Now some enterprising Tungus trader had brought a large quantity of
vodka from one of the Russian settlements on the
There was at the fair a well-known Chapogir shaman. Chunga went to his chum,
to make a friendly call and smoke a pipe with him. As has been hinted,
Chunga was very drunk. After the usual exchange of greetings and news, they
unluckily fell on the topic of the relative merits of Limpiisk and Chapogir
shamans. Chunga, though at no time a devout shamanist, was in duty bound to
uphold the claims of Limpiisk magic to be of superior potency. The Chapogir, he
said, are “wild” people, and they cannot be supposed to have really powerful
shamans. Portentously the shaman warned him to take back his words.
“Pooh!” said Chunga, “you know well enough who I am. A word from me to
the pristav (local Russian administrator) or the pope, and you know what
will become of your coat and drum.”
The use of the ceremonial coat and drum of the shaman are banned by
Russian law, though Chunga knew very well that this law is now practically a
dead letter.
The shaman rose, a baleful gleam in his little bloodshot eyes. Solemnly
he took up his drum. As the swift jingling clatter rose and swelled to a booming
thunder, the listeners within and without the tent ceased their noisy
bargaining and chatter, and stood horror-struck. No one was ill, there could be
only one other reason for day time shamanising - it was a “curse”! Chunga,
sobered by terror, crouched motionless in the middle of the tent, paralysed by
the sudden consciousness of what he had done. Only his eyes seemed alive; they
followed with a dull intentness the leaping, swaying, figure of the shaman,
whenever the latter came within his vision as he danced around the squatting
figure of the blasphemer.
Louder
and louder waxed the chant of the shaman. He called upon Etigr, the
bringer of storms, of disease and death, to come to the drum, where rattled and
shook in a jingling ecstasy his effigy, a twisted iron serpent. He called upon Iinyan,
who bears the shaman on his wings to the world of spirits, to enter
into the madly agitated man-faced eagle of iron that clashed and clattered
against the serpent. He summoned into the drum the whole array of spirits whose
symbols, in the form of jangling bits of metal, tore the shaken air around the
head of the cowering victim. He conjured Iinyan to bear him far away
from earth, where no blaspheming Limpiisk scorner could reach him to do hire, harm,
while Etigr wreaked his will upon the offender. Then, in the manner of
the shamans of the north, humbling himself before the black spirits, his chanting
sank and ceased in a long drawn wail -
“Not
me, not me, but you, O mighty spirits, Chunga has offended. Not for myself I
call for vengeance, but for you. Let Chunga kill me if he will, but let him not
escape the vengeance due. For it is you he has outraged, O Iinyan, O Etigr ! in
the insult he has put upon your servant! Chunga Hiragir shall live alone among
his reindeer - lone as this pointing forefinger - without child or workman to
bear him aid.”
He ceased and flung himself
down upon the ground, his eyes closed, his face twitching, his whole frame
quivering, his foam-flecked lips working spasmodically. The drum fell with a
clatter beside him, the drumstick described a circle in the air, as he jerked
it from him, and lay at Chunga's feet, dread token of the futility of any
lingering hope of avoiding the curse. He stared at it dully. The bystanders
looked at him half curiously, half in awe. They saw a man, aged, bent, broken,
it seemed, with the weight of the curse already fallen upon his hunched-up
shoulders.
The story of the
cursing was told me by an old man, of the Yalogir clan, who took Chunga home
from the fair. I had remarked to him on the air of despondent apathy which
seemed to weigh upon the occupants of Chunga's winter hut while we were his
guests. It was a doomed family, he said, and proceeded to explain.
The working of the curse had begun before I met Chunga. Some weeks had
passed since his ill-omened visit to the fair, and though his mind was still
sick with the expectation of a blow he knew would fall, nothing tangible had
taken place. Then news came from the south that the Chapogir shaman was dead.
But this did not lighten Chunga's burden of fear; he knew that a curse does not
die with the man who uttered it. Within a few hours his eldest son, a fine
young man of thirty, was taken ill. It was the height of the short summer when
Tungus families disperse for hunting and fishing. But Chunga would not allow
any of his children to leave the lake where their tents had been pitched for
the winter. Whatever was to come upon his children he preferred to see the blow
fall with his own eyes. He entrusted the care of the herd, which involved
frequent absences from home, to the husband of his eldest daughter.
He tried one after another all
the medicines he had got at various times from the Russian traders on the
river. The young man grew worse and worse. His memory failed; he seemed to live
in a world apart - a world of the shaman's
making - from which
he kept calling to his father as across an ever-widening gulf; calling him by name
: “Chunga Hiragir ! Chunga Hiragir ! Chunga shall be left alone in the midst of
his herd - alone like this pointing forefinger.” How did the boy know? He had
never repeated to a living soul the words that echoed night and day in his own
heart. Now, at any rate, his wife and children would know the fate that lurked
in the cloud that had hung over his household ever since he returned from the taiga.
Chunga crossed the lake and the mountain beyond it, found his
son-in-law, took charge of the herd himself, sent him to find somewhere,
anywhere, a Limpiisk shaman. The man was taken suddenly and violently ill in
the third
chum
he
reached on his wanderings. They buried him there. The same day died Chunga's
eldest son. His father reached home in time to hear his last words: “Lone as a
finger."
This was in the summer. When I arrived that winter at the balagan (winter
hut) on the lake, Chunga had one son left, a boy of fifteen. Of daughters one
had died, another was very ill - without hope of recovery, as they believed - a
third was a prey to melancholia. It was a matter of wonder to every one that
the youngest daughter had a suitor who was still fearless enough to be wishing
to marry her. True, his mother was a shamaness and might be able to avert the
curse from himself and his wife. The eldest daughter, now a widow, had charge
of the herd; but she would have soon to go, in accordance with Tungus customary
law, to her late husband's family. Chunga could not hire any one to work for him;
nobody cared to live in a household which was so obviously shadowed by the
influence of the black spirits. The same fixed idea was an invariable symptom
in the illness of each of the children: they kept saying to their father, “You
will be left alone, like this finger - pointing with a solitary forefinger among
your reindeer and your wealth.”
The Tungus said
that the dead shaman had entered into the victims. Chunga's wife offered me a sakui (hooded winter
overcoat) which had belonged to one of her dead sons. When I pointed out to her
that the youngest boy would soon be able to wear it -
“No," she
said, “he will never wear a man's sakui.”
Everybody else, too, took his fate for granted, though he seemed then in
perfect health : “Poor boy !” they always said, when he was spoken of – “Poor
boy ! . . . ”
It was impossible to rid oneself of the feeling that this unfortunate
family was hopelessly entangled in a web of fate. Something was always
happening to confirm the impression. The youngest daughter and her melancholic
sister formed part of our convoy when we continued our outward journey. The
sledge of the latter was in the lead; her sister was driving our baggage
sledges just in front of me. It was quite dark - at this time of the year there
is little or no daylight - and we were passing through a belt of open forest.
Suddenly my driver pulled up his deer with a jerk, as the baggage teams swerved
across our paths, and the bucks stood with shaking limbs and snorts of terror.
What was the matter? Oh, nothing, said my driver; the deer had shied at a wolf
among the trees. As this was an ordinary incident of our journeys, the
explanation seemed satisfactory enough. But the two sisters stood talking in
low tones near my sledge. The younger girl was trying to convince her sister,
and apparently herself as well, that it was a wolf. But the other knew better
“No, I saw the Chapogir quite plain, between those two trees over there
to the left. My reindeer shied, and I looked round and saw him. It was not dark
where he was. He will not leave me now.”
When we returned in the spring to Monastic-Turukhansk to await the
steamer that should take us south, Chunga arrived in the little river
settlement a few days later. Travelling was still possible in the tundra,
though the snow was deep and soft, and there was open water here and there in
the morning after his arrival. His gait was a trifle unsteady, his eyes were
bleared, but his manner had lost none of its courtesy as he explained his
errand. He needed fifty roubles. Could I let him have it? He was going home the
same day. He would send the money in by his son-in-law before the first boat
arrived. There was no cringing, no elaboration of shamefaced excuses; he was
obviously quite assured that I would as a matter of course be his friend in
need, just as he would have been mine in a similar case. He thanked me simply
as I counted out the notes to him. His son-in-law should also bring me the
photograph he had promised me, taken by a Russian geologist-probably the only
photograph in all the Limpiisk tundra.
The days passed. The snows
were melting rapidly. Daily the river was expected to “move.” The son of the
shamaness had not come in. The
At breakfast we were startled by a noise like a crash of thunder. We
rushed out to the river bank. The
[Here is the probable
grave (so I guess) of Chunga’s son in law]
But even now it makes me
shudder to think - it is absurd, of course-that perhaps I, too, was drawn into
the meshes of the web spun for Chunga's undoing, and made an unwitting
instrument of the dead shaman's vengeance.
[This book was published in a popular collection
My Siberian Year, and Czaplicka could certainly not shock her readers by stating ideas
too much opposed to the canonical beliefs. Nevertheless, this popularization aspect
enables her to say simply what she thinks without being forced to hide behind
the scholarly mask as in her other book on the Siberians, Aboriginal Siberia.
I would also like to underline the strange attitude
of Chunga who finds a way to borrow money from someone about to depart. Could
it be that his purpose was to entangle her in the mesh of the curse? Anyhow,
she could not find a stable academic position (a shame I share, it does not
explain everything however), her beloved married another one, she became
financially desesperate and ended in self-killing in 1921 – these are the
facts.]