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Friday, 20 April 2007 |
Walrus Magazine - hovsgol province/ulaan baatar—On a sunny
afternoon, a man sits on the floor of his teepee (or ortz) in the
mountains of northern Mongolia, drinking salty tea with reindeer milk
and smoking cigarettes rolled in strips of newspaper. He is Ghosta,
fifty-nine, a handsome man with high cheekbones and a broad, rugged
face. Yet there is sadness in his eyes.
“My life is hard,” he says, more than once. He might be referring to
his life as a nomadic reindeer herder, but no. He is talking about
being a shaman.
“I have a responsibility for people in the community,” he says. “People
who are struggling with sickness come for help and I cannot refuse.”
Ghosta is one of about 200 members of
Mongolia’s Dukha minority who eke out an existence as reindeer herders
in the alpine taiga along Mongolia’s border with Siberia. They move
with the seasons, subsisting mainly on reindeer cheese and bread.
There are perhaps half a dozen shamans among the herders. They are the
priests and healers of an ancient religion, the bridge between this
world and that of the spirits. Here in the countryside, they keep the
old ways, performing rituals only at night, in strict accordance with
the seasons and the phases of the moon. They are wary of outsiders, and
Ghosta talks only reluctantly.
He found his calling at the age of twenty-five, he says, at a time when
he was “sick and becoming unconscious.” Shamanism is a family
tradition, and the spiritual congress often begins when the future
shaman confronts a life-threatening illness. Ghosta describes the day
when he awoke from a mysterious sleep to find his father performing a
ritual. “My father told me to put on his costume. I wore it for a while
and took it off.” Soon after, he became a shaman.
“That was during socialism times,” he says. “Everything had to be done secretly.”
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