The Witch

tells how a man from the major Russian city of Novgorod went among the Votyaks. He paid to have his fortune told by a tribal magician, who called spirits to himself to provide the answers, which came to him while lying in a trance inside his dwelling.33

By contrast, many of the peoples in sub-Arctic and Arctic North America who possessed shamans of the Siberian sort also feared and hunted witches; and there the shamans used their powers to detect and unmask alleged practitioners of witchcraft in the manner of service magicians across the world, including those in Europe. This is true around the north of the New World from the Tlingit of Alaska to the Eskimo of Greenland.27

What can be emphasized is that whereas a belief in the witch figure, while widespread globally, made up a patchwork in most regions, peoples who feared witches fervently being interspersed with those who did not regard them as a serious problem or did not believe in them at all, the North Asian and North American shamanic province forms a compact mass covering Siberia and the Canadian Arctic and sub-Arctic.

The apprenticeship of a Siberian shaman was generally divided into three phases. The first consisted of the discovery of a vocation for shamanism. This often ran in families, but the hereditary principle was qualified heavily by the fact that in theory the spirits concerned had to consent to the transfer to a new owner, and they often chose individuals with no shaman forebears, especially if those who did have such forebears did not seem as talented. In some regions they were thought to come to a new shaman unbidden on the death of the old one, and their arrival was marked in the person concerned by a physical or mental illness. Once the connection with the spirits was made, the apprentice shaman had to be trained, both by a veteran one, and by the spirits themselves in a series of often terrifying visions and dreams. The final phase of maturation consisted of acceptance as a qualified practitioner by existing shamans and by clients.

The apprenticeship of a Siberian shaman was generally divided into three phases. The first consisted of the discovery of a vocation for shamanism. This often ran in families, but the hereditary principle was qualified heavily by the fact that in theory the spirits concerned had to consent to the transfer to a new owner, and they often chose individuals with no shaman forebears, especially if those who did have such forebears did not seem as talented. In some regions they were thought to come to a new shaman unbidden on the death of the old one, and their arrival was marked in the person concerned by a physical or mental illness. Once the connection with the spirits was made, the apprentice shaman had to be trained, both by a veteran one, and by the spirits themselves in a series of often terrifying visions and dreams. The final phase of maturation consisted of acceptance as a qualified practitioner by existing shamans and by clients.

All over Siberia shamans were believed to depend for much of their work on the superhuman powers of their spirit helpers, who were usually regarded as taking the form of animals.

Such work took place within the context of local cosmologies which tended to possess three beliefs in common: that even apparently inanimate objects were inhabited by spirit forms; that the cosmos was divided into different levels or stacks of worlds, between which travel was possible (in spirit rather than physical form); and that living beings possessed more than one soul, or animating force.

What struck (and generally shocked and appalled) Europeans who entered Siberia between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, was the manner in which specialists among its native peoples contacted spirit worlds to safeguard the well-being of their societies: by a dramatic public performance which commonly included the use of music, song, chant or dance, or any combination of those. It was an impressive piece of drama which held the attention, and engaged the senses and imagination, of an audience. In essence, therefore, shamanism was originally defined as a particular ‘rite technique’, and it was something that Europeans found utterly strange, and for which most of them were aware of no real parallel – contemporary or historical – from within their own societies.24

If shamans are defined as experts in communicating with a spirit world on behalf of others, then it must be beyond doubt that they existed in ancient Europe, because every traditional society has had such experts; such a definition cannot in itself, therefore, offer the potential to say anything very interesting about ancient Europeans in particular. The slightly tighter definition, of experts who perform that communication in an altered state of consciousness, is not a lot more helpful, because it seems that most human beings who claim or are claimed to make direct contact with spirits (including deities) seem to do that in such a state, and in European history have done so under the names of sibyls, oracles, seers, prophets, visionaries, saints and mystics.

All human societies until the eighteenth century believed that they had to deal with spirits; what is significant is the range of different ways in which they responded to that belief. A levelling and universalizing language may deprive us of our best chances to explain varying patterns in the historical record, and – as the greatest single aim of a historian – to elicit why particular changes happened in particular places at particular times.