Author Description

This book takes you to the "classical academy of shamanism," Siberian tribal spirituality that gave birth to the expression "shamanism." Popular imagination frequently associates this phenomenon with Native American religions. At the same time, because of the language barrier, a large number of primary sources coming from Siberia, the "motherland" of shamanism, have been inaccessible not only to the general reader but also to scholars. For the first time, in this volume Znamenski has rendered in readable English more than one hundred books and articles that describe all aspects of Siberian shamanism: ideology, ritual, mythology, spiritual pantheon, and paraphernalia. The anthology is also supplemented with an extensive interpretive essay, in which Znamenski introduces the reader to shamanism studies and shows how Russian and Western writers and scholars have covered Siberian spirituality from the eighteenth century to the present. Both anthropologists, historians of religion, psychologists and practitioners of shamanism will find in this text plenty of valuable information, which they can use in their research, seminars and workshops.