In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  Two other items of scientific evidence modified the standard explanation of the spread of Black Death. In the first place it had been shown beyond all doubt that the plague bacillus was extraordinarily resilient. For example, the plague organisms were so resistant that they were known to survive in dried human sputum for as long as three months, and under laboratory conditions retained their characteristics in low temperatures for up to ten years. Secondly, the carriers which spread the disease could be animals, but equally they could be infected humans or the fleas themselves. A flea, for example, which sucked the blood of an infected marmot might retain the deadly bacillus in its mouth or gut for at least a month or even longer. Thus fleas infected in October could transmit the disease the following March. The disease could also be passed from human to human, either by air droplets as had happened in Manchuria, the pneumonic version of the disease, or by a parasite which fed on one diseased human victim and then carried the bacillus to the next human whose blood it sucked.

  That being so, the Black Death in its most virulent form was probably carried from Central Asia to Europe by an agency other than rats and mice. The first Western reports of the Black Death actually came in 1347. It broke out among the troops of the Kipchak Khan, ruler of one of the fragments of the disintegrating Mongol empire. His army was besieging the Black Sea port of Kaffa when it was ravaged by the plague. In one of the first recorded instances of biological warfare, the Khan ordered his siege artillery to fling infected corpses over the city walls. The Black Death broke out in the city, and was duly carried back to Europe by Genoese ships trading in the port. In the next six years the dreadful disease roared across Europe in what has been rated the worst calamity experienced by the Western world at that time. The French historian Froissart calculated that a third of the population died. In some regions as many as three out of every four inhabitants succumbed, and Europe’s population did not recover its previous levels until the early 16th century.

  As the Minister pointed out, the Black Death or ‘Marmot Epidemic’ was not restricted to Mongolia but found in a broad belt of country across the steppes of Asia wherever marmots lived. Only in the previous year a death by plague had been reported in Soviet Kazakhstan, 1250 miles closer to Europe, and in 1878 there had been an outbreak of plague on the lower Volga. A generation after Genghis Khan, Rubruck reported that ‘there are plenty of marmots there, which in those parts they call sogur (an example of one of the Turkish, not Mongol, words he picked up) and of which in winter twenty or thirty at a time collect in one hole and sleep for six months: of these they catch a great number.’ He also recorded the fact that whenever a Mongol was very sick, a warning sign was put up over his tent advising that it contained an ill person and that no one should enter. In view of my conversation with Dr Nymadawa, Rubruck’s observation sounded to me very similar to the description of the quarantine precautions practised by modern arats. Certainly there was plague in Central Asia in the Middle Ages. Archaeologists working near Lake Issyk kul to the west of the Altai had found the graves of people who had died of an outbreak of the disease in the early 14th century. The possibilities were obvious. The Black Death’s murderous journey to Europe had been more by land than by sea. Infected humans and their body parasites, more than rats or mice, carried the plague from Central Asia to Europe. If the major and ineradicable reservoir of the Black Death was amongst the marmots of Central Asia, then it was likely that it was the Mongol armies and the merchants who travelled under Mongol protection who brought the most lethal version of the disease to the West. Thus, the legend of Genghis Khan as the warmongering destroyer of civilisation was misleading. His armies may have produced havoc and destruction across two-thirds of the known world, but this was nothing when compared to their really ghastly legacy, and it was a nightmare which they had also suffered themselves. Unwittingly the Mongols and their allies had inflicted the Black Death on Europe.

  15 - Shamaness

  My search to find a living shaman did not end with the fruitless visit to the Sixth Brigade near the Chinese border. Although I thought it very unlikely that genuine shamanism - the belief in, and communication with, the spirits dwelling in earth, sky, rocks, streams, winds and forests - was still practised in Mongolia, I was prepared to track down even the most unpromising rumour, because it seemed to me that if a shaman did exist, he or she must surely be the last survivor of what had been an intriguing element of the world of Genghis Khan. Shamanism had been central to the phenomenon of Mongolia’s imperial expansion. The Mongols liked to claim that it was Tengri, the shamans’ Universal Sky God, who had authorised Genghis Khan to go out and conquer the world, and there is reason to believe that Genghis Khan himself had been a shaman. When he heard about the massacre of his caravan at Otrar, for example, he had withdrawn alone to a mountain for three days, a typical shaman’s retreat, to commune with the gods. As churchmen, Carpini and Rubruck had both commented on the numbers of shamans, ‘soothsayers’ as they liked to call them, though they might equally have been described as spirit lords and spell casters, who clustered about the imperial camp and attended the royal ancestor images. Rubruck, in particular, had watched the camp shamans at work:

  Soothsayers are constantly to be found outside the court of Mangu and other wealthy people (the poor do not have them) - those, that is, who are of the stock of Genghis ... They deliberate where the camp is to be pitched and they unload their own dwellings first of all, the rest of the camp following. On an occasion when it is a feast day or the first of the month, they produce the effigies that I have mentioned and arrange them methodically in a circle in their dwelling. Then the Mo’al [Mongols] arrive, and enter their dwelling, bowing to the effigies and worshipping them. No outsider is allowed to enter the dwelling: once I wanted to go in and was given a very sharp reprimand.

  Thanks to his curiosity Rubruck was the only Westerner to record in any detail the original shaman rites of the Mongols, and his tales amount to a mosaic of the occult and charlatanism. Apparently the chief shaman was also the court astrologer, and he predicted the times of the eclipses of the sun and moon. During the actual eclipses the entire population hid in their tents and made a tremendous din with drums and instruments, presumably to scare off the evil spirits, and once the eclipse was over they emerged and held a great feast of rejoicing. When someone died, the shamans had to conduct purification ceremonies, carrying all the dead persons’s effects and bedding between the two fires to purge them from evil, and they officiated at the major festivals, particularly the great First Mare’s Milk Festival held on the ninth day of May when the white mares from the horse herds were gathered together to be blessed, and thank offerings of the season’s first ayrag were sprinkled in the air. Shamans, Rubruck believed, were able to influence the weather, and they were consulted as healers when someone was sick or dying. He detailed one incident which seemed pure quackery when a Mongol noblewoman fell ill with shooting pains through various parts of her body. The shamans were called in and:

  sitting at a distance ordered one of her maids to put her hand over a painful spot and to remove anything she might find. So she got up and did so, and discovered in her hand a piece of felt or some other material. They thereupon told her to put it on the ground; and on being laid there it began to crawl like some live creature. Next it was put in water and turned into a kind of leech.

  Rubruck feared that the shamans also had direct communication with demons, for he heard tales of how they gathered in a ger at night with those who wanted to consult with the devils. A dish of meat was placed in the middle of the tent, and the chief shaman ‘who issues the summons begins uttering his incantations and holds a tambourine which he bangs heavily on the ground. At length he falls into a frenzy and has himself tied up; and then the demon appears in the darkness and gives him the meat to eat, and he utters oracles’. Rubruck himself could not witness such scenes because if a Christian was in the audience the demon sat on the top of the dwelling and cried out that he could not enter
.

  Even as Doc, Paul and I were putting a prudent distance between ourselves and the plague outbreak among the Orianghai I was still hoping that in such a remote corner of the country it might be possible that shamanism still continued. In Ulaan Baatar I had heard a rumour of an old woman, a shamaness, who lived somewhere in the Altai in Bayan Olgei province. She had been acknowledged as a seer, and had been visited many years ago, some said at least twenty years earlier, by a well-known Mongolian poet who had written about her mystic powers. According to her reputation she knew the ancient rituals, could predict the future, and cured the sick. But whether she was still alive, and if she was where in Bayan Olgei province she lived, no one could tell me. The only course was to keep on asking the local people.

  The first clue had come in the town of Olgei itself, and seemed to be a dead end. This was when we were told that the Sixth Brigade had shamans. But although the information was misleading, it at least took us through Tsengel, a small settlement at the foot of the mountains which had the air of a frontier town in the American West. In Tsengel it was grizzled Kazakhs in fur-lined pink satin hats and long-skirted corduroy coats rather than trappers in buckskins who stalked along the main street, leading their pack-ponies loaded with bags of flour and provisions before they headed back into the mountains. Here Doc again enquired about the rumoured shamaness, and the initial response was discouraging. Yes, there had been a shamaness in the area, but she was very old and as far as anyone knew she had died or withdrawn into the mountains to find a lonely spot to end her days. In either case we would never find her.

  One fact, however, was useful. It turned out that the shamaness was neither Kazakh nor Orianghai, but belonged to the Tuva people. Many ethnographers consider that the Orianghai and the Tuva are one and the same people under different names, but as far as the ordinary Kazakh or Mongol is concerned this is not the case. They regard the 25,000 Orianghai who live in Mongolia and use mostly Mongol words in their speech as being Mongols, while the people they call Tuva are more closely associated with their tribal cousins across the border in the Tuva Associated Socialist Republic of the USSR, who speak their own Turkic language of Tuvinian. As with the Kazakhs, I got the impression that the handful of Tuva artificially isolated within Mongolia had retained their ancient customs more faithfully than their fellow tribesmen in the Soviet Union. In the past the Tuva combined all three ways of life characteristic of Central Asia - herding sheep and cattle on the mountains, growing millet in the valleys of the upper Yenesi river, and in the north raising reindeer which they saddled and rode like horses. What was more encouraging from my point of view was that the Tuva homelands included the Siberian forests, the heartland of Asian shamanism.

  The Tuva of Bayan Olgei, we were warned, were reticent with strangers and kept to themselves. There was, however, one Tuva by the name of Magsa, who had recently retired from a career in the government service, and he might be prepared to help us with our enquiries. Fortunately the Kazakh driver of our jeep, who seemed to know everyone in the region, was acquainted with Magsa and thought that he could take Paul, Doc and myself to his camp, which he shared with a small group of his fellow tribesmen in the valley they called the Valley of Mirages.

  The Tuva deserved their reputation for closeness. Halfway along the valley we stopped at a Tuva felt tent to enquire where we might find Magsa, the retired civil servant. Our reception was chilly. There was no man in sight, and the Tuva woman who was outside the tent doing her wash in a tin bowl curtly waved us to enter her ger. For the next ten minutes she ignored us completely, then came into the ger and dumped a bowl of stale bread in front of us and wordlessly handed out some rancid milk. After that she stumped out of the door and continued doing her work, paying us no further attention. It was only with great tact that Doc managed to coax her into giving directions.

  Magsa’s ger was a couple of miles further on, perched at the upper end of a steep side valley above a line of Kazakh yurts which had been set along the narrow stream bed. The interior was half-Mongol and half-Kazakh. The animal figures on the little wall hangings were Mongol in character and style, but the floor was spread with embroidered Kazakh rugs. On the low table was Kazakh bread and a Kazakh type of boiled and dried curd like lumps of yellow pumice, (Rubruck had not enjoyed chewing on sun-dried blocks of curd. He described them as being ‘as hard as iron slag’) but also a typically Mongol mixture of sugar lumps, biscuits and clotted cream. Magsa himself was distantly polite rather than welcoming, and his attitude was explained when he asked us rather wearily if we wanted the family to put on their national costume for photographs. It seemed that for the past year the Tuva minority in Mongolia had been attracting media attention. Japanese and Mongolian journalists and a television team had recently come to the valley to interview them and had disrupted their lives. Magsa, I suspected, felt that he and his people were being treated as curios and resented the fact.

  To try to overcome this poor start I asked Doc to explain that we had come there only because we were interested in any traditions which survived from the days of Genghis Khan, and that we had been riding through the Hentei and Hangay with the herdsmen as part of our research. This seemed to impress Magsa, and he began to be more cooperative.

  As he talked about the Tuva, I began to sense that Magsa’s people had retained more of the medieval traditions than any other people we had met in Mongolia. When Magsa was a child his Tuva family still regarded the hearth fire as sacred. The fire was one of the most precious elements in their lives and had to be treated with respect. No one was allowed to burn rubbish in its flames, and if that happened by some accident, it was believed that a calamity would befall the house. Magsa cited the Tuvan belief that if old onion skins were thrown on the fire then the owner’s horses would all go blind. Also the Tuva considered it was very bad luck to put a knife near the flames, just as seven centuries earlier Carpini had noted of the Mongols that ‘there are certain traditional things, invented by them or their ancestors, which they say are sins: for example to stick a knife into the fire or even in any way to touch fire with a knife.’

  Once a year Magsa’s family had held a ceremony to relight and bless the central flame in the ger. On that day the brazier was smeared with butter, and its legs decorated with red ribbon. Then incense was placed on the coals, and the brazier was carried outside the ger so that all the cattle could be led through the smoke in order to purify them and cure them of disease, because fire had the magic property of driving away evil. It was precisely the same purification ritual that Carpini described, and he himself had been exposed to similar treatment when he arrived at the pavilion of Batu Khan, Genghis’s grandson. He was obliged to walk between two fires as he approached the imperial pavilion, and when he asked why it was necessary, the palace guards had told him: ‘Go without any fear, for we are making you pass between two fires for no other reason than this, if you are planning to do any evil to our lord, or if you happen to be carrying poison, the fire will remove all that is harmful.’ Carpini’s interpreter had been made to leave his weapons outside the imperial tent, and Tuva etiquette as Magsa described it still had a similar suspicion of visitors. It was good manners, he explained, to dismount some distance from the ger even when arriving in response to an invitation, and to wait until your host came out to greet you. If the visitor was carrying a rifle he should put it down well away from the door, and if he had a knife in his belt he should remove it and let it dangle where it was clearly visible outside his left boot. He then entered the ger from the right side, pushed open the door with his right hand, and was seated on the right-hand side.

  Finally I asked Magsa if he knew any shamans, and he took the question as completely normal. It was as if I had asked him to recommend the name of a good doctor or dentist. He knew of two shamans, he replied, and they were both women. But one had recently moved away with her family and gone to live in another aymag, and since that time he had not heard anything more about her. However, the other shamaness
was still living locally and practising her craft. But she was very old and would not last much longer. Very few people knew her real name. They just called her Samga, ‘The Old Woman’. When she died, the local people would be at a loss because many Kazakhs and Tuva consulted her about their marriage prospects, over financial matters, for their personal problems and above all to ask her to cure their sickness. Then would she be the last of the local Tuva shamans? I asked. Magsa shrugged and seemed unworried. Perhaps, because there were no young shamans as far as he knew. But shamans nearly always came from the same families, and their mystic power passed down through the same bloodline, so maybe another shaman might be born one day, possibly skipping a generation. If that happened, then the shaman power would reveal itself once again.

  The Old Woman had not gone up into the mountains with her family as we had been told in Tsengel. In fact she was probably too frail to make the arduous trek to the high ground, and we would find her on the outskirts of the town in the home she used in winter. Before I left, I asked Magsa why the valley was called the Valley of Mirages. Because at certain times when you look down the valley it appears to be filled with a lake covered with lashing waves, he replied with equal composure.

  We thanked Magsa and went back down the slope, only to be intercepted by a covey of children running out from the Kazakh yurts lower down the hill. Please would we stop for a moment? Their parents had never laid eyes on a Westerner before, and wanted to know what we looked like. A crowd of adult Kazakhs emerged and clustered round the jeep, gazing in. Doc chortled. ‘They are very disappointed. They say you look just like Russians.’

  In Genghis Khan’s time the shamans had wielded great power and commanded considerable prestige. Besides serving as intermediaries between the ordinary Mongol and the ninety-nine great spirits which ruled the firmament, shamans were also prophets and even political advisers. (Shaman-soothsayers were still active at the court of Pi-Yin, the last Chinese emperor, at the beginning of this century, performing rituals and divination). The most ambitious of them, a head shaman by the name Teb-tengri, grew so prominent that Genghis Khan feared him as a rival, and arranged for him to be assassinated. Teb-tengri was tricked into a wrestling match and had his back broken by three muscular thugs. His corpse was then placed in a small ger and the door was wedged shut and guarded. Three nights later, according to The Secret History of the Mongols, the body and spirit of Teb-tengri had fled the ger through the smoke hole in the roof. When the door was opened, it was found that his corpse had vanished, thereby proving that the shaman even when dead had the power to fly through the air and ascend into the blue eternal heaven to consult with the gods.