12-11. Trade and Religion Among the Nomads
Speedy as the Altaian is on horseback, on foot he is helpless and unwieldy; and so the dance is unknown to him. All games full of dash and excitement are played on horseback. His hospitality is marvellous; for weeks at a time he treats the new arrival to the best he has, even when it is the despised and hated Shiite Persian. He possesses many sagas and songs — mostly in the minor key, and monotonous as the steppes — which are accompanied on a two-stringed guitar. Tenor and mezzo-soprano predominate, and the gait of the horse and the stride of the camel mark the rhythm.
The surplus of the female house-industry and of the herds is, as a rule, exchanged in barter for weapons and armours, metal and wooden articles, clothing material, brick-tea, and grain. Instead of our gold and silver coinage they have — sit venia verbo — a sheep coinage, in which all valuations are made. Of course they were acquainted with foreign coins from the earliest times, and obtained countless millions of pounds from tribute, plunder, and ransom of prisoners, and they used coins, now and then, in external trading, but among themselves they still barter, and conclude all their business in sheep, cattle, horses, and camels. Rubruquis says of the Mongols in 1853: “We found nothing purchasable for gold and silver, only for fabrics, of which we had none. When our servant shewed them a Hyperpyron (Byzantine gold coin), they rubbed it with their fingers and smelt it to see if it were copper.” They have no handworkers except a few smiths.
The Altaian, and especially the Turko-Tartar barbarian, considered only the advantage of the moment; the unlimited plundering was hostile to any transit trade. But when and so long as a strong hand controlled the universal plundering spirit, a caravan trade between north and south, and especially between east and west was possible, and, with high duties, formed a considerable source of income for the Central-Asiatic despots.
The religious conceptions of a group of primitive people inhabiting such an enormous district were of course never uniform. Today the greatest part of the Altaians is Buddhist, or Islamitic, and only a few Siberian Turkish tribes remain true to the old-Altaian Shamanism.
The characteristic feature of Shamanism is the belief in the close union of the living with their long dead ancestors; thus it is an uninterrupted ancestor worship. This faculty however is possessed only by a few families, those of the Shamans (Mong. shaman, Turk, kam), who pass on their power from father to son, or sometimes daughter — with the visible symbol of the Shaman drum by means of which he can call up the spirits through the power of his ancestors, and compel them to active assistance, and can separate his own soul from his body and send it into the kingdoms of light and of darkness. He prepares the sacrifice, conjures up the spirits, leads prayers of petition and thanksgiving, and in short is doctor, soothsayer, and weather prophet. In consequence he is held in high regard, but is less loved than feared, as his ceremonies are uncanny, and he himself dangerous if evil inclined.
The chosen of his ancestors attains to his Shaman power not by instruction but by sudden inspiration; he falls into a frenzy, utters inarticulate cries, rolls his eyes, turns himself round in a circle as if possessed, until, covered with perspiration, he wallows on the ground in epileptic convulsions; his body becomes insensible to impressions; according to accounts he swallows automatically, and without subsequent injury, red-hot iron, knives, and needles, and brings them up again dry. These passions get stronger and stronger, till the individual seizes the Shaman drum and begins shamaneering. Not before this does his nature compose itself, the power of his ancestors has passed into him, and he must thenceforth "shamaneer." He is moreover dressed in a fantastic garb hung with rattling iron trinkets.
The Shaman drum is a wooden hoop with a skin, painted with gay figures, stretched over both sides, and all kinds of clattering bells and little sticks of iron upon it. In shamaneering the drum is vigorously struck with one drum-stick, and the ancestors thus invoked interrogated about the cause of the evil which is to be banished, and the sacrifice which is to be made to the divinity in order to avert it. The beast of sacrifice is then slaughtered and eaten, the skin together with all the bones is set aside as the sacrificial offering. Then follows the conjuration-in-chief, with the most frantic hocus-pocus, by means of which the Shaman strives to penetrate with his soul into the highest possible region of heaven in order to undertake an interrogation of the god of heaven himself.
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