The Wealth Of Shamans

hovsgol province/ulaan baatar—On a sunny afternoon, a man sits on the floor of his teepee (or ortz) in the mountains of northern Mongolia, drinking salty tea with reindeer milk and smoking cigarettes rolled in strips of newspaper. He is Ghosta, fifty-nine, a handsome man with high cheekbones and a broad, rugged face. Yet there is sadness in his eyes.

“My life is hard,” he says, more than once. He might be referring to his life as a nomadic reindeer herder, but no. He is talking about being a shaman.

“I have a responsibility for people in the community,” he says. “People who are struggling with sickness come for help and I cannot refuse.”

Ghosta is one of about 200 members of Mongolia’s Dukha minority who eke out an existence as reindeer herders in the alpine taiga along Mongolia’s border with Siberia. They move with the seasons, subsisting mainly on reindeer cheese and bread.

There are perhaps half a dozen shamans among the herders. They are the priests and healers of an ancient religion, the bridge between this world and that of the spirits. Here in the countryside, they keep the old ways, performing rituals only at night, in strict accordance with the seasons and the phases of the moon. They are wary of outsiders, and Ghosta talks only reluctantly.

He found his calling at the age of twenty-five, he says, at a time when he was “sick and becoming unconscious.” Shamanism is a family tradition, and the spiritual congress often begins when the future shaman confronts a life-threatening illness. Ghosta describes the day when he awoke from a mysterious sleep to find his father performing a ritual. “My father told me to put on his costume. I wore it for a while and took it off.” Soon after, he became a shaman.

“That was during socialism times,” he says. “Everything had to be done secretly.”

Under the Communists who ruled Mongolia for most of the twentieth century, shamanism, like all forms of religious expression, was banned. Despite the controls, life under the Communists was easier for the reindeer herders. Their animals were collectivized—made official state property—and every herder received a monthly stipend.

A democratic revolution in the 1990s returned the herders to the laissez-faire existence of their forebears. When they ran short of cash, they were forced to sell or slaughter many of their animals. The herd has dwindled to some 650 today, down from more than 2,000 a generation ago.

Even by local standards, Ghosta’s tent is stark. The canvas is old. Worn blankets and skins are rolled and stacked around the perimeter. His shaman drum and costume are hidden behind a green cotton curtain, opposite the door. Ghosta has had bad luck in his life: a divorce, the death of a son. He says the trouble began when he helped someone who later refused to make an offering to the spirits. “That was bad for me, as the mediator in between. That’s why my son died.”