In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  Given that shamans had such a picturesque history, I began to have second thoughts about whether I really wanted to find Samga. Perhaps she would turn out to be a charlatan and a disappointment, and I was naïve to expect that I would find a real shamaness in modern Mongolia. Perhaps such colourful mystique was best left alone, because I knew that I would have to approach the subject with a degree of scepticism.

  The initial contact with Samga increased my doubts. We tracked her down to a cluster of four rather humble yurts a short distance out of Tsengel. A Tuva man of about 30 years old, neatly dressed in a suit, came to the door of one of the yurts and told us that he was sorry but Samga was indisposed and unable to see us. That morning she had seen some visitors who had come to consult her. Now she was sleeping off the effects. ‘Samga is my grandmother,’ said the man frankly, ‘and she has a very bad hangover. People bring arkhi as a gift for her, and she loves to drink, maybe up to two litres a day. It helps in her work. Normally she needs a full day to recover. It would be better if you came back tomorrow. I will tell my grandmother to expect you, and I will make sure that everything is ready for you.’

  Odd though it seemed, Samga’s alcoholic binge could be explained. Historically shamans employed stimulants or deprivation to induce their trances: They ate hallucinogenic plants, inhaled smoke, exposed themselves to extremes of heat and cold, starved, or took alcohol. Also they repeated chants over and over again, or beat steady rhythms on drums and tambourines to create a self-hypnosis.

  The following morning we returned, still not knowing what to expect beyond the fact that our alleged shamaness was very old and very alcoholic. It was one of those insipid days when, although there was not a single cloud, the blue of the sky seemed washed out and pale, and the horizon of the mountains appeared distant and ill-defined. Nor was there anything remarkable about the little group of gers where she lived. The felt tents were pitched on bare ground about a mile from the edge of town where a low rise gave a view over Tsengel and its river flowing through a grove of tall trees, providing an unusual block of dark green in that otherwise treeless and muted landscape. Behind the smallest ger was a small corral for sheep, but it was empty, and there was no one to be seen except two toddlers and, off to one side, a very ordinary-looking woman in a purple del crouching on the ground over a large soot-blackened cooking bowl, which she was giving a vigorous scrubbing. I glanced at her for a moment, wondering if she was the famous shamaness, but dismissed the idea. She did not look old enough, and was certainly far too normal, busily getting on with the everyday chores. She gave me a cheerful toothless smile in return and straightened up slowly, before hobbling off into a small tatty ger.

  Doc found the grandson, who was now dressed in a very colourful Tuva national costume. It turned out that he was a high-school teacher who taught both Russian and Tuva, and he would be happy to be our interpreter if we wanted to interview his grandmother because she spoke only Tuvinian and did not know either Mongol or Kazakh. His offer of help was a great bonus for us as he was well-educated, and I had been concerned that my questions for Samga would founder in the translation. I had certainly not expected to find how thoroughly normal everything was. There was no sense of awe or mumbo-jumbo. It was simply that Samga was a shamaness, everybody accepted the fact, and we had come to see her.

  Yet I still hesitated. I was uncertain about putting my questions to an old lady who was perhaps being manipulated by her family. Also I feared that my curiosity would be seen as an intrusion, and if I was sceptical it would be taken as an affront. My qualms began to subside as I saw the evident pride and affection the family had for their Old Woman. I had half-anticipated that we would hold an interview in a gloomy tent, suitably mysterious, or huddled privately in a corner. But now Samga’s extended family began to emerge from the gers. There was her careworn daughter, a pair of great-nephews, and a swarm of giggling children. Most of them had taken the trouble to dress up in their traditional costume as if on a national holiday, and they were obviously delighted that we had come. Excitedly they escorted us to the small ger, and we all crammed inside to find that the pot-scrubbing woman was indeed Samga. She was sitting on a bed, hands folded in her lap, and looked at us expectantly while all the children scrambled to find places sitting on the ground in a circle round the edge of the ger. They gazed at us in wonder, and it was very obvious that two pale-skinned foreigners were far more exotic than a great-grandmother who was a witch doctor.

  Samga was ancient enough, though she did not look her full 86 years. She was stooped and her face was deeply lined, and she had a wide mouth with a single tooth in the right upper jaw exactly like a witch’s fang in a cartoon drawing. A row of empty arkhi bottles on the cheap dresser beside her testified to her alcoholism, and there were other signs of someone who drank far too much. Her eyes were rheumy, and her hands shook as she repeatedly took hefty pinches of snuff from a little blue cotton bag. It was clear that when her family talked about getting her ready to meet us, it meant that they had to sober her up and wait for her hangover to subside. She was also very deaf, and her grandson took up his position sitting on the ground beside her, where he could lean against her knee and relay my questions in a loud shout. Conditions could hardly have been less suitable for chicanery, and as Samga talked, regarding me with a quizzical, almost amused expression, I found my misgivings ebbing away.

  To put her at ease I began by asking about her family, and like any normal great-grandmother she was pleased to list them and their accomplishments. She had given birth to fifteen children of her own and adopted a sixteenth. Out of the total, only two had been sons, and seven were still alive. She was very pleased that one of them had been elected a people’s deputy of the Hural, Mongolia’s parliament, and another had been decorated as a Labour Hero. I found it odd, to say the least, to hear a shamaness with her medieval heritage recounting her children’s contribution to modern communism, but then I was in for several more surprises. I asked her how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren she now had. ‘At least sixty or seventy,’ she replied with a definite twinkle in her eye, ‘but I can’t keep track.’

  Turning the subject to her own childhood, I asked her how and when she had first known that she possessed shamanistic powers. It was a key question, because the standard authorities on shamanism state that a shaman’s training was normally done by elder shamans who channelled and developed their pupil’s natural psychic gifts.

  She began by saying that she had been instructed by two great Tuva shamans, and she could give me their names. They were Chengelay and Magnai. These two had taught her, as had her father, Dorj, who was also a shaman but had not played a major part in her training. From Dorj she had inherited the power itself, but it was the other two shamans who had really taught her how to use it. I asked how they had schooled her, but the answer was vague. They had told her the chants and spells and encouraged her, she said. How old had she been when she realised she possessed shaman’s powers, and how had she known? ‘I was thirteen’, she answered, and then suddenly she stood up from the bed and gave three or four double hops, shuffling forward, ungainly in her heavy felt boots. Seeing that I was puzzled, she gave a cackling laugh and explained. ‘It was the energy in my body. I could not stay still as a child. I did not sleep at nights. I had to run. I would be shut up at night in her ger, but I would climb out through the smoke hole, and run and run. I loved to run at night, to climb trees, and to imitate the owls. No one could catch me because I ran so quickly, and sometimes they let loose the dogs to hunt me down. But they could not catch me.’

  A doctor might have said that she was describing a hyperactive childhood, but Samga had - unprompted - offered particulars that authorities on shamanism have long identified as classic elements in shaman behaviour, and which she could not have been expected to know in such detail. The frantic energy and the urge to climb were typical. Shamanistic initiation ceremonies normally culminated with the new shaman climbing up a pole to symbolise the ability t
o climb to meet the sky spirits. Entering and leaving the ger by the smoke hole in the roof was also very characteristic. According to The Secret History of the Mongols, not only had Teb-tengri’s ghost fled this way, but one of Genghis Khan’s ancestors was the magic child of a beam of yellow light which came down through the ger smoke hole and entered the belly of a Mongol woman. Literature was full of tales of shamans who could fly through the air, yet Samga was illiterate and spoke a language that had no script of its own. Possibly she had learned some of the information from conversation with educated Tuva-speaking informants, but that seemed an unlikely source. Her explanation and the way she expressed herself appeared authentic and without guile.

  Samga’s daughter passed the old lady a small tumbler of arkhi, and she took it eagerly and gulped it down. She was beginning to remember more of her childhood and youth. ‘There was another shaman - Kuzhuk - he also taught me. He saw that I had strange abilities and directed them in the right way. But when I started to ‘see’, I did not wish it. There was nothing I could do. I had to fly, and I had to fall from rocks. It was a strange start to life, and very hard.’ Impatiently she held out her hand for another glass of arkhi.

  ‘My father liked me and spoiled me. He had two horses. One was white, the other yellow. How I loved to gallop on those horses. How I loved the speed. No one could stop me once I was on those horses. Then one day an old man came to see my father with two skins of arkhi in his saddle-bags. He asked me if I would be his daughter-in-law. I ran away, but a moustached man came and took me home anyhow. My husband was a very great hunter. He was a caravan guide, and brought red salt from a faraway sea.’

  Here Doc whispered to me that Samga was probably referring to the caravans which brought salt out of China across the Tien Shan mountains. Samga took no notice and continued her monologue, but suddenly Doc looked startled.

  ‘Right in the middle of what she was saying, she changed the subject. She just said to me casually, and in passing, that there is a pair of spectacles at my home, and I don’t know who owns them. Then she went straight back into her stories about her childhood.’

  I knew why Doc was looking startled. Ten days earlier when I had been unpacking our expedition kitbags in his apartment in Ulaan Baatar, I found a pair of spectacles. I handed them to Doc as he always wore glasses. But he gave them back, saying they did not belong to him. Indeed he had thought the glasses must belong to Paul or to me. But they did not, and so the mysterious spectacles had been put on one side. Neither of us had given the matter another thought, though in a country as poor as Mongolia it was very unlikely that someone would not try to recover a pair of lost glasses. It was only a trivial detail, and how Samga had known it was an utter mystery. Of course it proved nothing. It could have been a lucky guess or a trick of the trade. I had deliberately refrained from asking Samga to demonstrate any of her supposed powers, and she herself obviously attached no significance to her remark. She took it for granted that the unclaimed spectacles were there.

  Her ger was very modest and unpretentious. There was no special paraphernalia for a shaman. It was sparsely furnished, and the roof wheel was held up by a single untrimmed branch stuck in the ground. There was nothing unusual or occult about the place. It was a very plain workaday ger, now filled to bursting with wide-eyed Tuva children and Samga’s immediate surviving relatives. The teacher grandson wanted to make quite sure that we appreciated Samga’s talents. ‘She sees into the future’, he said, as if he were describing the quality of her cooking. ‘She foretold Brezhnev’s death more than ten days before it happened, and she knows when she will have a visitor. She tells us in advance. She can also say in which direction certain events are taking place, and what is happening in those faraway regions even when she herself is right here at home.’

  ‘Can you foretell anything about your own family?’ I asked her.

  ‘No’, said Samga. ‘The only thing that I was able to see ahead was the death of my mother, when and how it would happen.’

  The arkhi was having its effect, and she was growing more talkative, wandering from subject to subject.

  ‘I never wanted to have this ability, and now I would like to leave and die. But people won’t let me go. They keep me here. They need me. When anyone is exhausted or weary like a wasted dog, I will fly to them and help them. When my spirit is strong, I can fly through the whole valley and see into everyone, and whether they are worried or in need.’

  ‘Is there any time when your power is at the strongest?’ I asked.

  ‘On the ninth day of each month* or on the New Year.’ (Nine is the Mongol lucky number; seven is unlucky.)

  Her grandson intervened to ask if we wished to see her conduct the shaman’s ceremony before she got too tired. ‘Only if she wants to,’ I answered. ‘If she is too exhausted, it is not necessary. Maybe this is not the right time or a suitable place for her.’

  But Samga impatiently brushed aside my hesitation. She was happy to show us how she worked. ‘Only bright light or electricity interferes with me’, she said. ‘But I am sorry that I no longer have all the right equipment. The shaman’s tambourine drum which I inherited from my father wore out long ago, and I have never replaced it. Also I once had a shaman’s special dress but that too fell to rags, and I am too old to need another. I can work without them. All I have left is my cap and flail.’

  She rose to her feet and her daughter helped her to put on the headdress of a shamaness. It was a cross between a headscarf and a closely fitting cowl, with a long flap down the neck and a row of pearly buttons sewn across the top. Its strange feature was the heavy coarse black fringe which hung across Samga’s forehead like a badly made wig worn back to front. The effect was to turn the rather homely Old Lady into a sinister creature like a witch from a Grimms’ fairy tale.

  But the Tuva children were not the least frightened. As far as they were concerned, here was their great-grandmother behaving as she regularly did. They waited for the seance to begin. Samga began to mumble and chant rhythmically, swaying back and forth. She shuffled a few steps to one corner of the ger, still chanting, and sank down to her knees. She knelt with her body rocking back and forth, and her head turning from side to side. In her hand was a small flail, about a foot long and topped with short strips of white rag. Among the strips, attached to the top of the handle, was a round ball of crystal or glass. As she chanted, Samga flicked the flail back and forth rhythmically. Occasionally she would stop and rest a while, and draw breath before taking up the steady chant again. Abruptly she halted. Her daughter was behind her. Still kneeling, Samga put her hand behind her back, and her daughter placed in it a lighted pipe. Samga put the pipe to her mouth, drew a mouthful of tobacco and blew out the smoke towards the corner of the ger. Then, peremptorily, she thrust the pipe behind her back and it was taken again by her daughter. Painfully and slowly, the Old Lady climbed to her feet, took a small ladle of milk from her daughter, and threw its contents up into the air as an offering. Three more times she repeated the action, praying and making offerings in each corner of the ger. Then she sank back on the bed and for a moment or two began to tremble and shake as if in a trance. Her tremors could have been caused by tiredness or they may have been pretence, I could not be sure.

  Unexpectedly she stood up again and went to the door, stepping outside into the bright sunlight, though she had said that bright light disturbed her concentration. Opposite the door, about 5 yards away, was a glowing brazier. Samga knelt before it, crouching down so her face was almost on her knees, and again took up the crooning chant, still flicking the flail back and forth. Her daughter came forward and sprinkled incense on the coals and then from a kettle filled with mare’s milk poured out libations into a glass and again threw the drops of milk to the spirits of the sky and hearth fire. Rising, Samga hobbled slowly back to the door of the ger and went back inside, followed by her daughter carrying the smoking brazier. Finally Samga made a second circuit of the room, this time stopping in front of each adu
lt, passing the incense under their noses and shaking her flail before their faces. Pulling back the flail she thrust her face into the strips of rag and inhaled with a deep snuffling grunt as it to suck out the air from the flail. Finally she returned to her original position, sank back on the bed, and sat exhausted.

  I had seen enough to convince me that even if Samga was not a fully skilled shamaness, she was no fake. She had entered and left the ger in a manner that was genuine shaman behaviour. Both times when she passed through the door, she had turned around and gone through backwards. Yet when I had first seen her by the ger, cleaning the cooking pot, she had gone indoors normally, facing forwards. When she was in her role as a shamaness, she had reversed the process, just as - to a lesser degree - she had acted in reverse when she insisted on taking the pipe from behind her back instead of accepting it from in front of her. Reversed actions were mark of shamans down through the centuries. Shamans lived partly in our world and partly in the other-world. When they were in the other-world they communed with the spirits, and everything back on the mortal realm became upside-down, inside-out, or back-to-front in a mirror of reality. Some shamans wore their clothing inside out, gloves with the fur inside for example, and the stiff hairy fringe sticking out from Samga’s headdress, I now realised, could be seen as if her hair was growing in the wrong direction.