Our Approach · Origins · Siberia

Northern Asia · documented from 1698, practiced today

Siberian Shamanism

The healer's instrument was a rhythm, and the dose was measured in hours.

Siberian shamanism is the healing practice of dozens of separate northern Asian peoples, among them the Evenki, Sakha, Buryat, Tuvan, Nenets and Chukchi. Its defining technique is sustained drumming at a held tempo, played for hours until the state of the healer, the patient and the gathered household changes. The English word shaman came from Evenki through Russian. What that rhythm acts on is a regulated bodily state. The Unified Model of Tone names that state tone.

Siberiaart
forthcoming

Flourished

Oral roots; documented 1698 to the present

Region

Northern Asia, from the Yenisei forests to the Pacific

Source record

Oral tradition, plus Russian and European ethnography

Legacy

The frame drum as treatment, and a word now used worldwide

The documentary record

What the record shows

Almost everything written about Siberian healing before the twentieth century came from outsiders with an empire behind them.

Berthold Laufer traced the word shaman through the Tungusic languages of eastern Siberia in American Anthropologist in 1917, pages 361 to 371, and rejected the older theory of a Sanskrit source. (Laufer, 1917)

The title is native to the taiga. English acquired it because Europeans met the role first in Evenki country.

Olle Sundström counts more than thirty peoples that Russian administration filed as shamanists. Their own terms include tadebya among the Nenets, oyuun and udagan among the Sakha, böö among the Buryat, and saman among the Evenki. (Sundström, 2012)

There is no single Siberian tradition. There are dozens, each with its own word for the role, all older than the category that absorbed them.

Sergei Shirokogoroff lived among Evenki groups and learned to play in their ensembles. He records that a rite opens with soft, almost monotonous drumming at a slow tempo, in 2/2 and 4/4 time. (Shirokogoroff, 1935, p. 325)

The tempo is chosen, held and raised deliberately. The rhythm is the treatment.

The same account records that the drum is dried over an open fire before use, even on dry nights. An undried skin will not hold pitch, and the healer then cannot obtain the effect of the rhythmic influence. (Shirokogoroff, 1935, p. 326)

Sound quality was handled as a clinical variable. A slack drum counted as a failed treatment.

Waldemar Bogoras, quoted by Maria Czaplicka in 1914, records that a Chukchi novice needs considerable time to learn the drum, and that the difficulty lies in endurance rather than in pattern. (Czaplicka, 1914, p. 180)

The apprenticeship targeted duration, which identifies duration as the active ingredient.

Dmitri Klementz reported that the drum was seldom used among the Buryat, whose great ceremonies turned on other objects. (Czaplicka, 1914, p. 222)

Even the defining instrument is not regionwide. Generalizing across Siberian peoples fails at the first check.

The Sakha healer Tiuspiut told Wacław Sieroszewski that he fell ill at twenty, hid the condition for nine years, and recovered only once he began to shamanize. He was sixty and thirty-one years into the work when they met. (Czaplicka, 1914, pp. 175 to 176)

The vocation opens as an illness that nothing else resolves. The first patient is the healer.

Czaplicka records that Russian officials punished Tiuspiut many times and burned his costume and his drum, and that he returned to the work after each incident. (Czaplicka, 1914, p. 189)

Burning drums as policy runs decades ahead of the Soviet state. Officials had already identified the instrument as the thing that worked.

The word shaman, 1698

The word shaman came out of the Evenki language

Shaman is an Evenki word carried into English by Russians. Berthold Laufer settled the question in 1917 in American Anthropologist, tracking the forms across the Tungusic languages and dismissing the theory of a Sanskrit root.

The route was imperial. Laufer records that Russian and Cossack explorers of eastern Siberia heard the term among Tungusic peoples in the second half of the seventeenth century. E. Ysbrants Ides, a Dutchman who crossed Siberia with a Russian embassy from 1692, printed it at Amsterdam in 1698.

One people's name for one role then became a worldwide category. Liudmila Nikanorova, a Sakha scholar, argues that the term was reserved at first for Siberian practitioners, to mark an assumed civilizational difference. She adds that translating Sakha oiuun into shamans contributed later to their imprisonment under Soviet rule.

Six peoples, six languages

Naming the peoples matters, because the practices differ

Siberia holds dozens of separate nations, and the traditions grouped under one English word are not one tradition. Sundström counts more than thirty peoples classified as shamanists by Russian administration, speaking languages from four unrelated families.

The Evenki are reindeer herders and hunters whose lands run from the Yenisei toward the Pacific. The Sakha live along the Lena, the Buryat around Lake Baikal, the Tuvans on the upper Yenisei, the Nenets across the northwestern tundra, and the Chukchi in the far northeast. By the end of the Soviet period the Nenets and the Evenki each numbered between 30,000 and 40,000 people, and Tuvans make up 77 percent of the population of the Tuva Republic.

The differences reach the instrument, since the Buryat rarely used a drum at all. Any sentence beginning with the words Siberian shamans always is a sentence about the category rather than about the people.

Tuvan sound practice extends past the drum. In khoomei, the throat singing of Tuva, a singer produces two pitches at once. Bergevin and colleagues measured four Tuvan singers in 2020 and found the focused overtone concentrated around 1.5 to 2 kHz. Khoomei is a musical art rather than a healing rite, and it shows how finely sound is worked in Tuva.

The drum, dried and tuned

The drum was tuned like an instrument and played for hours

Shirokogoroff records that the frame drum's skin is dried over an open fire even on dry nights. An undried drum will not produce a clear high pitch, and the healer cannot then obtain the effect of the rhythmic influence.

Many healers kept two drums and dried them alternately. The drum could be tuned lower or higher like a kettle drum, and a passage needing a low tone got a drum dried only slightly. Center and rim give different sounds, and a drum with resonators produces a principal tone plus overtones.

Bogoras recorded that the demand on a Chukchi novice is endurance above all. Sieroszewski watched Sakha rites in which the healer beat the drum without interruption, while assistants held him by leather thongs.

A tempo is selected, held and raised across hours, on an instrument tuned to carry it, by a person trained for duration. In Siberian practice the frequency itself is the intervention.

At last I became so seriously ill that I was on the verge of death; but when I started to shamanize I grew better.

Tiuspiut, a Sakha healer · recorded by Wacław Sieroszewski, in Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia, 1914

The calling, and its illness

The vocation announced itself as an illness that would not resolve

Across the Siberian record the work is not chosen. It arrives as sickness, it runs in families, and it resolves when the person accepts it. Tiuspiut fell ill at twenty and hid the condition for nine years. He told Sieroszewski that he improved once he began to shamanize, and sickened again during long gaps in the work.

Mihály Hoppál relates a Tuvan version from the writings of Mongush Kenin-Lopsan, in which a spirit takes the soul of the person called and the result is serious sickness. Recovery and the vocation are one event.

The response was training rather than sedation. Bogoras described a novice's curriculum of singing, dancing, ventriloquism and the drum, run across weeks of near continuous activity.

The outsiders who wrote this down brought a diagnosis with them. Czaplicka gave a section of her 1914 book to what she called Arctic hysteria, and Shirokogoroff titled chapters around psychosis. Those are the observers' categories rather than the peoples' own.

The rite and the room

The rhythm was applied to the whole room, not only to the healer

Shirokogoroff is explicit that the state produced by an Evenki rite is needed by three parties: the healer, the patient and the audience. It is built by a gradual increase of emotion through rhythmic music, rhythmic movement, dancing and the sung text.

In Shirokogoroff's account the household arrives already expecting the sequence, so it is not a neutral crowd. As the drumming builds, the state of the room approaches the healer's own. He reads whether the audience is following. When it is, his own state rises, and that rise passes back to them.

Rites ran through the night. Sieroszewski's Sakha accounts have the healer drumming without pause while assistants restrain him with thongs, in a room where every person present is a participant.

A held rhythm entrains a room of coupled nervous systems, the sick person among them, and the healer steers the whole assembly by reading it and feeding it back.

Rhythmic driving, 1961 to 2021

What measurement has and has not shown about drumming

Andrew Neher proposed the modern version in 1961 and 1962, reporting auditory driving on scalp electrodes and arguing that drum rhythms could account for trance in ceremonies worldwide. The early studies drew criticism because participants moved freely during recording, and Gilbert Rouget's 1985 Music and Trance rejected the physiological determinism outright.

The strongest recent test of that version failed it. Mateusz Konopacki and Guy Madison recorded EEG from 24 listeners under drumming at about four beats per second in 2018. They found no theta driving, and suggestion of trance lowered alpha power rather than raising it.

What does replicate is the effect of expectation and training. Bruno Gingras and colleagues exposed 39 participants to repetitive drumming at about 220 beats per minute for roughly 15 minutes in 2014. Salivary cortisol fell about 0.35 ng/ml overall, with no advantage for drumming over meditation music. The same drumming under shamanic instructions produced heaviness, slowed heart rate and dreamlike experience far more often than under relaxation instructions.

Ezra Huels and colleagues took 18 practitioners and 19 controls through 25 minutes of solo drumming in 2021. Both groups heard one identical recording. Practitioners scored higher on 8 of the 11 altered-state measures used, and showed higher gamma power.

Rhythm alone does not drive a brain into trance on demand, and the samples are small at 39, 24, 18 and 19. An identical rhythm does produce sharply different states depending on who is listening and what they expect. Siberian practice recorded that first.

Repression, 1930s to 1990

The Soviet state banned the rite and took the drums

Leonid Potapov studied Altai shamanism for decades as a Soviet ethnographer. He recorded that rituals were forbidden and that drums and costumes were expropriated, and concluded in 1991 that the practice had ended completely.

Marina Mongush records that the 1931 census counted 725 shamans in Tuva, then a separate republic that did not come under Soviet sovereignty until 1944. Systematic persecution began there in 1936. By 1937 only 5 monasteries and 67 lamas remained.

Nikanorova states plainly that classifying Sakha oiuun as shamans led to their imprisonment under the Soviet regime. Sundström notes that the number arrested, jailed or executed across the whole campaign is still being established from the archives.

The state named the practitioner and the instrument as its targets, which identifies what the authorities thought the practice was made of.

Revival, 1992 to now

The practice is alive, organized, and openly contested

Practice returned in the open as soon as Soviet religious restrictions fell. Mongush Kenin-Lopsan, born in 1925, a Tuvan writer with a Leningrad doctorate in ethnography, founded the first Tuvan shamanic organization at Kyzyl in 1992 and named it Dungur, meaning The Drum. It certifies and registers practitioners.

Mongush reports about 200 shamans practicing in Tuva today, against 725 counted in 1931. A survey cited by Valentina Kharitonova found 3.6 percent of Tuva's population identifying as adherents. A working profession has returned. A mass religion has not.

Buryatia took a different shape. Justine Quijada, Kathryn Graber and Eric Stephen studied the Tengeri organization in Ulan-Ude. Its healing requires clients to learn their family genealogies and revive clan rites, and the work encourages use of the Buryat language. Local critics call the organizational form untraditional.

Sundström finds that elements of the revived practice carry real continuity with what came before, and that the forms and the context have changed all the same. Shamanism is now a self-designation, adopted by practitioners from the vocabulary outsiders once imposed.

The record and its makers

The written record is a colonial record, and it shows

Nikanorova's conclusion is blunt: the study of Siberian shamanism tells us more about colonial scholarship than about the people of the region. Czaplicka compiled her 1914 book at Oxford from Russian ethnography, and Laufer traced a word whose route into English ran through Cossack conquest.

What survives that framing is the physical detail: the drum dried over a fire, the tempo in 2/2 and 4/4, the endurance the apprenticeship demanded, the thirty-one years Tiuspiut gave the work.

The convergence

What Siberian healers documented, and what it is called now

Siberian healers had no instruments and no concept of a nervous system. They had a frame drum, a chosen tempo, and a room of people whose state they intended to change. Unconnected traditions across the world arrived at the same short list of observations, which is evidence that the state itself is real and readable without instruments. The Unified Model of Tone names that state tone and measures it.

A rite opens at a slow, almost monotonous tempo in 2/2 or 4/4, then holds and raises it for hours, on a drum tuned so the beat stays clean.Oscillation, rhythm used as the input rather than as the background.
Shirokogoroff records healer, patient and household entering the state together, with the healer reading the room and rising as it follows him.Coupling, the linkage that makes separate people behave as one system.
The household arrives already expecting the sequence, and the rite states its purpose before the first beat, so nobody hears a neutral sound.Prediction, where expectation shapes what a body does with an input.
The calling and the long apprenticeship select for people whose state moves under the drum, a difference in responsiveness the tradition used constantly and never named as its own variable.Gain, how strongly a system responds to a given input.
The skin is dried over a fire, the pitch tuned high or low, the head struck at center or rim, because a dull drum was held to do no work.Input quality, where the character of an input decides the response.

Common questions

Frequently asked

Where does the word shaman come from?

From the Tungusic languages of eastern Siberia, above all Evenki, where the healer is a saman. Berthold Laufer's 1917 study in American Anthropologist traced the forms across the Tungusic languages and rejected the older theory of a Sanskrit source. Laufer records that Russian and Cossack explorers heard the term in the second half of the seventeenth century, and that the Dutch traveler E. Ysbrants Ides printed it at Amsterdam in 1698. One people's word for one role is now used worldwide.

How was the Siberian shamanic drum prepared and played?

The frame drum was dried over an open fire before use, even on dry nights, because a slack skin loses pitch and the rhythmic effect fails with it. Shirokogoroff recorded in 1935 that many Evenki healers kept two drums and dried them in turn, tuned them high or low like a kettle drum, and struck the center or the rim for different sounds. A rite opened with soft, almost monotonous drumming at a slow tempo in 2/2 and 4/4 time, then built across the night.

Does drumming actually change brain activity?

Not in the simple way Andrew Neher proposed in 1961. Konopacki and Madison recorded EEG from 24 listeners under drumming at about four beats per second in 2018, found no theta driving, and did not reproduce the earlier results. What replicates is the interaction of rhythm with expectation and training. Gingras and colleagues found in 2014 that identical drumming produced different experiences under different instructions. Huels and colleagues found in 2021 that 18 trained practitioners responded far more strongly than 19 controls to one recording.

What happened to Siberian shamans under the Soviet Union?

They were persecuted and their instruments were taken. Leonid Potapov recorded that rituals were forbidden and that drums and costumes were expropriated by the authorities. Marina Mongush documents a 1931 census counting 725 shamans in Tuva, with systematic persecution beginning in 1936. Liudmila Nikanorova shows that classifying Sakha oiuun as shamans contributed to their imprisonment. Olle Sundström notes that the number arrested, jailed or executed across the whole campaign is still being established from the archives.

Is Siberian shamanism still practiced today?

Yes. These are living peoples and, in places, living practice. Mongush Kenin-Lopsan founded the Tuvan organization Dungur, meaning The Drum, at Kyzyl in 1992, and it certifies and registers practitioners from a building the government bought for it. Mongush reports about 200 shamans practicing in Tuva against 725 counted in 1931, while a survey cited by Kharitonova found 3.6 percent of the republic's population identifying as adherents. In Buryatia the Tengeri organization in Ulan-Ude ties healing to clan genealogy and the Buryat language.

Which Siberian peoples had shamans, and were their practices the same?

Sundström counts more than thirty peoples that Russian administration classified as shamanists, speaking languages from four unrelated families. The Evenki, Sakha, Buryat, Tuvan, Nenets and Chukchi are among them, and each had its own word for the role: saman, oyuun and udagan, böö, tadebya. The practices differ materially. Dmitri Klementz reported that the drum was seldom used among the Buryat, whose major ceremonies turned on other objects, so even the defining instrument is not universal across the region.

Why is the early ethnography of Siberia treated with caution?

Because outsiders wrote nearly all of it. Laufer traced a word that reached Europe through Cossack conquest. Czaplicka compiled her 1914 survey at Oxford from Russian sources and framed part of it around a disease category the observers invented. Nikanorova concludes that the study of Siberian shamanism tells us more about colonial scholarship than about the people of the region. The physical details survive that framing: the dried drum, the held tempo, the hours, the trained endurance.

What does the Unified Model of Tone say about Siberian shamanic drumming?

That the drum is a rhythm applied to people until their state changes, and that the state it moves is tone. A tempo is chosen, held for hours, and raised. Shirokogoroff records healer, patient and household entering that state together, which is coupling. The household arrives expecting the sequence, which is prediction. Trained healers move under a rhythm that leaves others where they were, which is gain. The model does not adopt the spirits as a mechanism. It holds that the variable those healers were moving is the one it measures.

Keep reading

Where this connects

Tone is the regulated state a held drum tempo moves, defined and measured.
Oscillation is why a rhythm held for hours works as treatment rather than as atmosphere.
Coupling explains a room of people entering one state with the healer who is drumming.
Prediction is why the same drumming with different instructions produced different experiences.
Gain is why 18 trained practitioners and 19 untrained listeners heard one recording and diverged.
Input quality is why the drum skin was dried over a fire before a single beat was struck.
The Sámi kept a frame drum of their own across the same latitudes, and lost most of them to burning.
Inuit and Yupik healing runs on drum and song across the Bering Strait from Chukchi country.
The Central Asian steppe shares the Turkic and Mongolic words for the role, kam and böö.

Sources

References

Last updated 2026-08-10

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