The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  Fig. 1 ‘Animal-shaman’ dancing. Les Trois Frères cave, Ariège, France.

  The word ‘shaman’ comes from the language of the Evenk, a small Tungus-speaking group of hunters and reindeer herders in Siberia. Its literal meaning is ‘one who knows’ and it was first used, according to Piers Vitebsky, only to describe religious specialists from this region. Other tribes in the arctic north have other words, which haven’t caught on to the same extent.6 Shamans exhibit various forms of behaviour – which we shall come to – but the aspect of shamanism that is of obvious interest to us at this point is its geographical spread. In Vitebsky’s words, ‘There are astonishing similarities, which are not easy to explain, between shamanistic ideas and practices as far apart as the Arctic, Amazonia and Borneo.’7 Although shamanism is found in Borneo, the strongest links are in fact laid out like a giant figure ‘7’, along the northern rim of Eurasia, from the Lapps in arctic Russia to Siberia, and then on down the Americas to the Amazon.

  It is fair to say that more would be known about the phenomenon of shamanism – its nature and distribution about the world – but for twentieth-century history, in particular the Cold War. Several hundred photographs of prehistoric cave art, and ancient sculptures, have been published in the West (in France, for example), but, according to one account, there are 20,000 illustrations published in Russian (Soviet) journals but not readily available elsewhere in accessible journals or books. This has inhibited the growth of our knowledge while at the same time confirming the distribution of shamanism across Eurasia.

  Siberia, even today, is an inhospitable place. An area equal in size to Europe and the United States put together, it contains, in the Kolyma basin, the coldest inhabited location on Earth, where winter temperatures can sink to -70° Centigrade and where, when summer arrives in May, the frozen rivers can shatter ‘with the sound of cannon fire’. Siberia contains the world’s largest forest, covering roughly 2,000 million acres and, of all the inhabitable parts of the globe, it remains the most thinly populated. According to Soviet sources, there are some 120 linguistic groupings in the area though much of the taiga (boreal forest, birch, poplars, conifers) and tundra (shrubs, sedges, mosses, scattered trees) of central and eastern Siberia was roamed by reindeer-hunting and herding tribes who spoke the language known as Tungus. On the Kamchatka Peninsula and its offshore islands – the easternmost tip of Asia – the language spoken was and is Eskimo: Yupik and Unangan.8

  At the time the Russians moved into Siberia, in the late sixteenth century, the Chukchi, a tribe we have already met, were still a Stone Age people, living in tents with bone-tipped arrows and spears and recognising no authority higher than family networks.9 In this area, Christianity was never fully imposed on the people, who continued to offer blood sacrifices (often of dogs) to the saints, usually in secret. In Soviet times, shamanism was officially abolished by decree, aided by collectivisation, which moved Russians into Siberia from other regions of what was then the USSR. Great cruelty was sometimes used to stamp out traditional practices, with shamans allegedly being thrown from helicopters and challenged to ‘show their powers of spirit-flight’. By 1980 the Soviet authorities claimed to have suppressed shamanism completely, though this is doubtful.10

  Shamanism may have begun as the world’s oldest religion, when and where it did, partly because of the psychopathology of the arctic region, and partly because of man’s relationship with the deer. There is some evidence, for example, that early shamans were psychologically out of the ordinary – either epileptics or neurotics, whose abnormal behaviour was regarded by primitive peoples as ‘an altered state of consciousness’. In the arctic region, with its intense cold and long periods of darkness, recognised forms of mental illness, such as meryak or menerik (arctic hysteria), could appear similar to the shaman’s trance.11 It is notable that in some areas of Siberia and the Americas the initiation rites for shamans include a period of sickness. What we understand as abnormal behaviour may not always have been regarded as pathological in ancient times but rather as ‘spirit possession’.

  Reindeer are magnificent animals. They are large; the males have their extraordinary crown of antlers, giving them an easy, and easily identifiable, nobility; they are skittish but not fierce, unlike bears and the big cats; and they are natural herding animals. Because of their configuration, they were and are useful sources not just of meat, but of hides, bone and sinew. This configuration may have provoked the traditional attitude of hunting societies towards game, which has been described as ‘a complex of worship and brutality’.12 Early hunting societies (the ‘reindeer civilisations’ as Fernand Braudel called them) usually had some belief in a ‘Master’ or (less often) ‘Mistress’ of the Animals, a guardian of the animal species which played an important role in the life of the tribe or clan, and represented their collective soul or essence. On this understanding, the Master of the Animals ‘releases’ animals to human hunters, so they can kill certain creatures and obtain food and other necessities, but in return the hunters owe certain obligations – they must make agreed sacrifices and observe particular rules. This is where the shaman comes in.

  One of the defining attributes of a shaman is the phenomenon known as ‘soul flight’. By means, usually, of an ‘altered state of consciousness’ (to use a modern western phrase not necessarily recognised by the shamans themselves), and often a form of trance, the shaman flies – either around the landscape, to locate the animals to be killed, or to the upper world, or the netherworld, or the bottom of the ocean, to locate the Master of the Animals, to negotiate the price to be paid for the creatures.

  But there is more to shamanism than this. Often a link is made between hunting and seduction. The penetration of the animal’s body in hunting is sometimes seen as analogous to sexual union.13 For example, in the Upper Amazon, among the people known as the Desana, the word ‘to hunt’ also means ‘to make love to the animals’. The analogy is elaborated in the careful preparations that are made, meaning that the prey is ‘courted’ and even sexually excited, so that it will be attracted towards the hunter and ‘allow’ itself to be shot. To this end, the hunter must be himself in a state of heightened sexual tension, which is achieved by sexual abstinence immediately before the hunt, and by making himself more appealing to his prey through ritual purity and body decoration of which face paint is an important ingredient. In Siberia, the shaman is often felt to have power over the animals because he has once been an animal himself. In preparatory ritual dances, the rutting and mating of animals is often simulated, with explicit sexual gestures.14

  According to Piers Vitebsky, Siberia and Mongolia are the ‘classic shamanistic areas’. A conference at Harvard in the spring of 2011 heard other recent evidence suggesting that the elk, a species of large deer, migrated across the Bering Land Bridge at more or less the same time as did humans. If this is confirmed, it would underline the idea that shamanism crossed the continental divide at that time too. Soul flight does occur in the Americas but mainly in the arctic and sub-arctic, with North American Eskimos very similar in this regard to Siberian peoples.15 For Eskimo shamans, ‘dismemberment, dramatic flights through the air and journeys to the bottom of the sea are common’. As the distance from the Bering Strait increases, soul journeys become rarer, as does the occurrence of deep trance. Instead, the shaman is initiated into his role through isolation and fasting. Especially in the Great Plains region, trance and journeying are replaced by dreaming and by the ‘vision-quest’. This latter is a procedure in which young men – and less often young women – remove themselves to the wilderness for days at a time, to prove their hardiness but also to seek a vision from the spirits of the natural world. In many tribes this has become a widespread initiation rite all by itself – to teach young people basic survival skills – but shamans develop the visions obtained in this way in more detail.16

  In Central and South American societies, the shaman is the dominant figure in the tribe. Their view of the cosmos is essentially th
e same as it is in Siberia – a layered heaven linked to Earth by a world tree, or pillar, with the shaman having the ability to fly to the upper and lower worlds. The initiation procedures, also, are much the same: an initial sickness, the experience of being dismembered or reduced to a skeleton, and marriage to a ‘spirit-spouse’. Chanting is a particularly distinctive technique of entering trance in South America, and so are two other devices not found elsewhere to anywhere near the same extent – the widespread use of hallucinogens and the close identification of the shaman with the jaguar. These aspects are considered in more detail in later chapters but here we may note that, recently, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson have brought new evidence to bear which confirms the great antiquity of shamanism by showing that shamanic practices were ‘a significant component’ of Palaeolithic rock art.

  In the first place they noted evidence of hallucinogens being used in these confined spaces; at the same time the images themselves, often abstract designs, are, they say, similar to those produced in ‘entoptic’ (trance-like or drug-induced) states. This links in with the well-known account by Peter Furst of fly agaric use among the Koryak, another Siberian tribe. According to Furst, fly agaric, a psychoactive fungus, has been used as a sacred inebriant of the shamanistic religions of the northern Eurasiatic forest belt, especially those of Siberian reindeer hunters and herders, from the Baltic to Kamchatka, where it was known as the ‘mushroom of immortality’.17 Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Koryaks was that they would drink the urine of intoxicated people – intoxicated with fly agaric – and even the urine of reindeer who had eaten the mushroom and became affected. The urine of people and deer who had eaten the mushroom was apparently even more potent than the mushroom itself and in this way the Koryaks could ‘prolong their ecstasy for days’.18

  There is, too, an overlap between the role of the shaman and the myth of the trickster, referred to earlier. Being a shaman often involved trickster-type behaviour. The shaman must change form to ‘fight and outwit’ obstructive spirits, and in myths the earliest shamans employed trickery to capture the sun, to give light to the people, or else stole the secret of fire, or of agriculture, from the jealous gods.

  One final cultural characteristic that crosses the Bering Strait is the fact that shamanism is closely associated with transvestism. In Siberia the costume of the male shaman is invariably decorated with female symbols, while among the Chukchi shamans may dress as women, do women’s work, and use a special language spoken only by women (they are referred to as ‘soft men’). Among North American Indians there is a widespread tradition of transvestism known as berdache. These make especially powerful shamans – the Mohave, for example, rank their shamans, rating females as more powerful than males but berdaches as more powerful than either. The Navajo, Lakota and Cheyenne Indians all believed berdaches could cure insanity and were powerful aids in childbirth.19

  Ronald Hutton concludes that the idea of the shaman is a more diffuse concept than many other scholars believe but all are agreed that, at the most fundamental level, shamanism is based on the hunt – the primary role of the shaman being to ensure success in hunting. After that, his (or her) functions fall into two: to perform feats that benefit the community; and to become ‘expert’ on the workings and experiences of the individual soul, in particular conducting the soul of the sacrificed animal to the deity to whom the offering was made, showing families where their dead relative should be propitiously buried, and then conducting the soul of the dead relative to the world beyond.

  That the Bering Strait is where it is – in the remote far north – was to prove of great importance in the long run. Whether the early peoples who populated the New World came from inner Asia or island South East Asia, they had to pass through Siberia on their way. And whether they practised shamanism to begin with, and whatever other genetic or psychological or mythological characteristics they had, Siberian shamanism was imported wholesale into the New World as its basic ideology. It was to have an influence that, as we shall see, outweighed everything else.

  • 4 •

  INTO A LAND WITHOUT PEOPLE

  BERINGIA: WHERE THE GREAT DIVIDE TOOK PLACE

  The question as to whether America was part of Asia, or a landmass in its own right, was only settled in 1732, nearly a quarter of a millennium after Christopher Columbus had first set foot on Guanahaní, when Ivan Fedorov and Mikhail Grozdev finally discovered Alaska. In 1778 Captain James Cook sailed through the Bering Strait, noting that only a short reach of sea sixty miles wide separated the continents, convincing many that this was the point of entry for the first Americans.

  The man who first put forward the idea that there was once a land bridge between Russia and America was Fray José de Acosta, a Jesuit missionary, in 1590.1 By then he had lived in Mexico and Peru for nearly twenty years and he took it as an article of faith that, since Adam and Eve had begun life in the Old World, man must have migrated to the Americas. Moreover, he thought transoceanic travel unlikely, preferring the idea that ‘the upper reaches’ of North America were joined or ‘approach near’ Russia, with a narrow enough water gap that migration would not be inhibited.

  He noticed too the spread of smaller animals, considering it unlikely that they had swum across even a short stretch of water: overland travel was much more likely. He also suggested that it wasn’t a deliberate migration, rather a ‘gradual expansion . . . without consideration in changing by little and little their lands and habitations. Some people the lands they found, and others seeking for newe, in time they came to inhabit the Indies.’2

  Angelo Heilprin (1853–1907), a geologist, also drew inferences in 1887 from animal distribution, observing that Old and New World animal species were relatively dissimilar at southern latitudes, more similar in mid-latitudes, and ‘nearly identical’ in the north. To him it was clear that, ‘if species diversification was a function of distance from the north, then the species must have dispersed from that direction’.3 Not long afterwards, another geologist, the Canadian George Dawson (1858–1901), noted that the seas separating Alaska from Siberia were shallow and ‘must be considered physiographically as belonging to the continental plateau region as distinct from that of the ocean basins proper’. Dawson added that ‘more than once and perhaps during prolonged periods [there existed] a wide terrestrial plain connecting North America and Asia’. He had no idea of the Ice Ages but accepted that continental uplift had from time to time raised the seabed above the water level.4 In 1892 great excitement was caused when some mammoth bones were discovered on the Pribilof Islands, three hundred miles west of Alaska. ‘Either these giant hairy elephants were awfully good swimmers, or the islands were once high spots in a broad plain, conjunct . . . with the entire Alaskan and Siberian landmasses.’5 W.A. Johnson, another Canadian geologist, added a final gloss. In 1934, he made a link between sea level changes and the Ice Ages, the existence of which had been affirmed only in 1837. ‘During the Wisconsin stage of glaciation [~110,000–11,600 years ago],’ he wrote, ‘the general level of the sea must have been lower owing to the accumulation of ice on the land. The amount of lowering is generally accepted to be at least 180 feet, so that a land bridge existed during the height of the last glaciation.’ This agreed well with the argument that the Swedish botanist Eric Hultén made about the same time, that the area of the Bering Strait had been a refuge for plants and animals during the Ice Age. It was Hultén who named the region Beringia, and argued that it provided the terrestrial route by which ancient humans reached the New World.6

  The evolution of scholarship surrounding the Bering Land Bridge is a fascinating story in its own right. It falls into three aspects – first, the attempts to prove that there really was a land bridge, at various remote times in the past; second, an exploration of what the land bridge was like physically, what its geography comprised, what plants and animals it could support; and third, an inquiry into what sort of people travelled across, and when.

  The Pleistocene e
ra, more popularly known as the Ice Age, began roughly 1.65 million years ago. Most scientists think that it ended some ten thousand years ago, though others argue we are still in it, ‘merely enjoying an interglacial reprieve’.7 During the Pleistocene, warming trends followed cooling ones in great cycles that could last hundreds of thousands of years. The most recent cold cycle began about 28,000 years ago, with temperatures falling relentlessly until roughly 14,000 years ago. Conditions were far harsher than anything known today, especially at the polar regions, and particularly so in the northern hemisphere owing to the direction of the Earth’s rotation, which made ocean currents and the weather they affected worse there than anywhere else, and because there is more (heavy, dry) land in the northern hemisphere than in the southern one, producing irregularities in the Earth’s orbit. All of which meant that more snow fell in winter than melted in summer, building up in layers that melted slightly in the short summers, then re-crystallised. Each year’s snowfall pressed down on the layer of the year before, creating great masses of ice.

  As a result, year by year, the glaciers’ edges spread out, so that they gradually merged, one with another, their dimensions becoming truly awesome. For instance, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the biggest in North America, built up to a height of nearly two miles. It was centred on what is now Hudson Bay, but it eventually smothered all of what would come to be called Canada, 4,000 miles across. To the north it merged with the Greenland Ice Sheet and in the south it eventually extended as far as what is now known as the state of Kentucky.8 To the west, the Laurentide merged with North America’s other great ice sheet, the Cordilleran, which stretched 3,000 miles down the coastal mountains of western North America, from Puget Sound to the Aleutian Archipelago. Northern Europe was blanketed in much the same way, in England as far down as what would become Oxford, while ice covered most of the world’s principal mountain ranges, not to mention Antarctica. One surprising exception was the interior of Alaska, where the arid conditions meant there was little moisture to make ice or snow. It was a phenomenon that would prove all-important.