Climbing Teepees

(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…