In this photo, a shamaness in Kangnung, Korea, dances to invoke a spirit. When the spirit comes to her, she will enter a trance state, which is signaled by repeated leaps into the air. Then, the spirit will speak through her and she will help focus its power to help and to heal her clients.

I’ve talked with people who experienced or witnessed shamanic healings of physical ailments, both by shamans working in their indigenous traditions (Korea, Mongolia, Siberia, Mexico, Brazil), and by shamans in non-indigenous societies drawing their knowledge from the worldwide pool of shamanic knowledge.

In gathering material for my writing, I’ve focused on traditional shamanism in East Asia, because that’s the context of the 10,000 Spirits story. In this part of the world, people think of shamans as the most ancient healers. In 20th century rituals I’ve seen and heard about, the majority were for healing of non-physical problems such as marital conflict, mental illness, financial misfortune, business problems, and so forth. Sometimes a ritual was arranged in combination with medical treatment: many shamans are tolerant and accepting of medical help for their clients and themselves, just as they combined their spiritual work with traditional herbal healing in the past.  

Rupert Isaacson makes an interesting point in his book, Horse Boy: He says we need to distinguish between healing and curing. He brought his autistic 5-year-old boy to several Mongolian shamans. Did they cure the boy of autism? No. He’s still autistic. But did they heal him? By the end of the trip, the boy had made giant steps in his ability to take care of himself, to communicate, and to have friendships, and he continued to improve afterwards. It was a radical change. In many ways, the boy was healed, and has since worked with autistic children to help them improve their lives. (You can find the movie, Horse Boy, online, if you want to know more.)

(Young Shaman in UB)

I’m reading a wonderful book, The Horse Boy by Rupert Isaacson. I should have read it before I went to Mongolia, but I had seen the movie, and so I thought I didn’t really need to read the book. I was wrong! 

The Horse Boy is Isaacson’s memoir about taking his wife and their five year old autistic son to Mongolia, hoping that a horseback trek to visit the powerful shamans there could heal him.

Isaacson has an educated, modern mind, but over the years he has seen shamans at work in many places, especially Africa. Desperation to find help for his son led him to seek them out again.

It’s a common thing, when modern medicine has failed, to try out some kind of “alternative” healing. But for members of indigenous cultures where shamanism permeates all aspects of life, it can be the other way around: first, try the shaman. If that doesn’t work, then go to a “real” doctor. For them, that may be as much of a stretch as it is for the average American or European to employ a shaman.

Isaacson says he’s never met a shaman who rejects modern medicine, and that’s something I’ve noticed, too. Shamanism isn’t really an “ism”—it has no theology or doctrine, but just a world view that includes many spirits or “gods” that influence our lives and respond to human prayer. So shamans tend to be flexible and accepting towards new ideas. Buddha and the boddhisatvas have joined the shaman pantheon in Korea and other Asian countries. Many shamans work alongside modern medicine. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Jesus included in shaman spirit-portraits or altar sculptures, except that Christians represent him as the enemy of shamans.

One of the beautiful things about The Horse Boy is the way shamans embrace the autistic little boy as “one of us.” They recognize in him a sensitivity to emotional or spiritual phenomena that most people don’t notice. Many shamans worldwide go through a period of psychosis or emotional instability which signals their readiness—their need—to become a shaman. The training process cures the psychosis or sickness, or  transforms into an asset that enables the trainee to cross over into the spiritual or spirit world and communicate with the beings there.

Gambat, the shaman we visited with the reindeer herders (pictured right), went through a period of madness in his early fifties. His neighbors told us about it with gentle humor. They said, he was like a crazy man and he kept trying to climb to the top of the teepees in the village. Climbing teepees couldn’t be more appropriate for a budding shaman: when a real shaman enters a trance state, his/her spirit is said to fly up out the smoke hole and up to the land of the spirits.

I’ve heard similar stories of personal crisis about Korean shamans. My heroine in Ten Thousand Spirits doesn’t go through a period of madness, but desperation drives her to cross a threshold into an alternative world where she is required to meet and master the spirits. It’s not unlike what Rupert Isaacson and his wife did when they boarded a plane for Mongolia.

But do shamans really heal? I’ve asked myself that question over and over. More, in the next blog…

(Sheep for felt, goats for cashmere.)

Yesterday I went down to a big Lutheran church in Santa Monica to a talk and slide show about how the various nomadic tribes of Central Asia make felt. I’m not a felt-maker, but it does look like it would be fun to try. Felt happens when sheeps’ wool is heated and then pressed and subjected to friction. The combination of shrinking and kinking makes it form a dense mat. You spread sheep’s wool out on a sheet of stiff fabric, then sprinkle boiling hot water on it, and then you roll it up. You can make felt from camel hair, too, but not from goat hair.

The speaker was Dr. Stephanie Bunn, an anthropologist who has spent many years living in Kyrgyzstan studying how they make textiles. (She’s one of those people who exemplifies the saying, “Do what you love and love what you do!”) She said the first felt was probably made by accident: it’s not unusual among shepherding people to stuff some loose fleece into their boots in the winter for warmth. Put on the boot, tramp around in the snow for a couple of days, and, presto, you’ve made felt!

If you’re making large pieces of felt as the nomads did, you need many hands for beating the fleece (to fluff it up), laying it out, and rolling it up. Then comes the fun part: you have to find a way to create enough friction to integrate the strands of wool. Dr. Bunn showed us pictures of women lined up on their knees, pressing down on their forearms with all their body weight, on a long roll of fleece. In another shot, a group of men were tramping on a roll with heavy boots. There’s a video online at  that shows a Kyrgyz woman teaching a group of tourists to dance on the rolled fleece, as they use to in old days. In any case, you’d need to call your neighbors and relatives to come over for a felt-making party, sort of like quilting bees and barn-raising in colonial America. 

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHEW6orYPK8

Mongolians still use a thick layer of felt for their ger (yurt) walls and roofs. It does a good job of insulating and keeping out the cold. On our trip to Mongolia we saw big rolls of felt for sale in the open markets, and we saw it rolled up and piled in a truck for the seasonal move. But nowadays it’s made in felt factories.

I wonder if people miss getting together for felt-making. Or have the rural people substituted some new event: the day the children arrive in town to live in the school dormitory? Graduation day? Election day? Rural inoculation programs? Sheep-shearing? Still, there’s something special about working on a project together, followed by a potluck meal for all the helpers and their families. 

A video about felt making in Kyrgyzstan, with photos of their beautiful colors and designs:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO2VxDmy4y4

A video about old-fashioned felt-making in Mongolia, from catching the sheep to wrapping the get:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=674RZRDLg6U