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Shamanic Elements in Some Early Eighteenth Century Russian Woodcuts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Dianne E. Farrell
Dianne E. Farrell*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Moorhead State University (MN)
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Extract

While several authorities have held that the shamanism of indigenous Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples influenced the Russians with whom they lived in close proximity, particularly via pagan Slavic volkhvy or sorcerers, little concrete evidence of that influence persisting in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries has been discovered. However, several early eighteenth century woodcuts (lubki) which refer to sorcery reveal concrete links to shamanic cosmology and practice in what are otherwise enigmatic textual references and visual symbols.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , Winter 1993 , pp. 725 - 744
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1993

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References

I would like to acknowledge support received from the International Research and Exchanges Board in 1984, which contributed to this article. I would also like to acknowledge a partial leave granted me by Moorhead State University for spring term 1989 in support of this and other work. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the April 1990 meeting of the Western Social Science Association and the October 1990 meeting of the AAASS.

1. A distinction is generally made between sorcerer (witch, wizard) and shaman as practitioners of the occult. Both function as healers and diviners but the shaman is distinguished by his/her direct contact with the spirit world through a special state of consciousness (trance), whereas the sorcerer relies upon incantations or the manipulation of objects to work his/her magic. See Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (New York: Pantheon, 1964 Google Scholar), revised and enlarged from the original 1951 French edition; and Doniger, Wendy, ed., Mythologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 2: 1103 Google Scholar; a restructured translation of Bonnefoy, Yves, comp., Dietionnaire des mythologies et des religions des societes traditionnelles et du monde antique (Paris: Flammarion, 1981)Google Scholar. Flaherty, Gloria, in Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992 CrossRefGoogle Scholar) deals with the assimilation of rediscovered shamanism by Europeans and provides an extensive bibliography. She pays particular attention to Catherine the Great, who wrote a play ridiculing shamanism and generally made a cause of combatting serious intellectual interest in it.

2. On the influence of shamanism on volkhvy, see George P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, Kievan Christianity: The Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries (New York: Harper Brothers, 1960), 356-57. On the persistence of volkhvy in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who, as leaders of popular revolts, seriously contested the authority of the church, see Fedotov, and Zguta, Russell, Russian Minstrels: A History of the Skomorokhi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 128, fn. 73Google Scholar. Information on the still active volkhvy is based on chronicle entries and ecclesiastical admonitions. As to whether a volkhv functioned through trance states like a shaman, these sources tell us nothing. It would appear that, by the seventeenth century, the volkhv had become a practitioner of magic, marginal rather than central to community life (see Ivanits, Linda, Russian Folk Belief [Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1989], 86, fn.9Google Scholar, citing Nikitina, N. A., “K voprosu o russkikh koldunakh,” Sbornik Muzeia antropologii i etnografii (Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1928), 7: 299–325 Google Scholar). Nikitina believes that the Russian sorcerers in the pagan era were shamans but that, under pressure from Christianity, they had by the seventeenth century been consigned to serving the dark forces and were achieving their trance states via large amounts of alcohol (ibid., 324-25). Her study of sorcery among Russians is based on field research done in 1926 in Nizhegorodskaia province and on ethnographic literature, some of which was based on old court records.

3. In Rovinskii, D. A., Russkie narodnye kartinki, 5 vols, and 4 folios (St. Petersburg, 1881-93), folio 1, No. 37 Google Scholar; hereafter, RNK.

4. The Lubok: Russian Folk Pictures, 17th to 19th Centuries, intro. Alia Sytova, trans. Alex Miller (Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1984), fig. 27.

5. Cherniavsky, Michael, “The Old Believers and the New Religion,” Slavic Review 25, no. 1 (March 1966): 23–35 and figs. 7 and 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Communicated to me by E.I. Itkina of the State Historical Museum in Moscow in 1984. See her Russkii risovannyi lubok (Moscow: Russkaia Kniga, 1992).

7. Alekseeva, M. A., “Graviura na dereve ‘Myshi kota na pogost volokut'—pamiatnik russkogo narodnogo tvorchestva kontsa XVII—nachala XVIII v.,” in XVIII vek, Sbornik 14 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1983), 45–79 Google Scholar.

8. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul'tura srednevekov'ia i renessansa (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965 Google Scholar); translated by Iswolsky, Helene as Rabelais andHis World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968)Google Scholar; reprinted by Indiana University Press, 1984. See, e.g. my “Laughter Transformed: The Shift from Medieval to Enlightenment Humor in Russian Popular Prints,” in Russia and the World of the Eighteenth Century, eds. R.P. Bartlett, A.G. Cross and Karen Rasmussen (Columbus: Slavica, 1988) 157-76; and “Medieval Popular Humor in Eighteenth-Century Lubki,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 551-65. Notable treatments of premodern popular culture and its transformation are found in Davis, Natalie Z., Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975 Google Scholar); and Raeff, Marc, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through the Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983 Google Scholar).

9. Maria-Gabriele Wosien, The Russian Folk-Tale: Some Structural and Thematic Aspects (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1969Google Scholar); and Afanas'ev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, Poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu (Moscow: Izd. K. Soldatenkova, 1865–1869 Google Scholar).

10. Nikitina, A. N., “K voprosu o russkikh koldunakh,” Sbornik Muzeia antropologii i etnografii 7 (1928): 304 Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., 320.

12. Ivanits, 118.

13. RNK, No. 810/4.

14. See illustration reprinted in Doniger, ed., Mythologies 2: 1137.

15. Å. Hultkrantz, , “Ecological and Phenomenological Aspects of Shamanism” in Shamanism in Siberia, ed. Dioszegi, V. and Hoppal, M. (Budapest: Akademiai kiado, 1978), 30–36 Google Scholar.

16. Doniger, 1103-4.

17. Hultkrantz, 36-39.

18. Vastokas, Joan M., “The Shamanic Tree of Life,” in Stones, Bones and Skin: Ritual and Shamanic Art, eds. Brodzky, A., Danesewich, R. and Johnson, N. (Toronto: Society for Art Publications, 1977), 107Google Scholar.

19. The difficulty with this supposition is that no shamanic costume I have seen illustrated is simply the pelt of an animal; most are of leather or cloth adorned with drawn or painted designs, feathers, tufts of hair, bits of metal, colored rags, etc. This difficulty is overcome if the figure is a shaman-werewolf, as I show below.

20. Nikitina, 324.

21. I.S. Gurvich, “Kosmogonicheskie predstavleniia i perezhitki totemicheskogo kul'ta u naseleniia olenekskogo raiona,” Sovetskaia etnografiia, no. 3 (1948a): 130; Bo Lonnqvist, “Problems Concerning the Siberian Shaman Costume,” Ethnologia Fennica, no. 1-2 (1976): 6. The symbological functional theory was advanced early in the century by various ethnographers: Troshchanskii (1902), Nioradze (1925) and modified by Uno Harva of Holmberg in 1938.

22. Siikala, Anna-Leena, The Rite Technique of the Siberian Shaman (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1978), 164 Google Scholar, citing Gondatti, N., Sledy iazychestva u inorodtsev Severo-Zapadnoi Sibiri (Moscow, 1888 Google Scholar). This practice was not unique to northwestern Siberia; Pallas reports it from neolithic burials of the Pribaikal'e (Siikala, 168). Afanas'ev (Poeticheskie vozzreniia 1: 576-79) finds reference to such customs among the Greeks, Slavs, Germans and Lithuanians (putting coins in the dead person's mouth to pay the ferryman); Vikings (the burial of Baldur on a ship set afire and put out to sea described in the Edda); Ibn Foszlan describes the Rus’ doing the same; in Greek mythology Charon ferries souls across the River Styx. Afanas'ev also reports Old Believers making coffins by hollowing out a whole tree, just as boats were made in former times. All of this indicates that boat-burials and soul-ferrying have a wide geographical and chronological range.

23. Mikhailovskii, V.M., “Shamanism in Siberia and European Russia, Being the Second Part of ‘Shamanstvo?” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 24 (1895)Google Scholar citing Tret'iakov, P.I., Turukhanskii krai, ego priroda i zhiteli (St. Petersburg, 1871), 217–18Google Scholar.

24. Doniger, 1117.

25. RNKW, 158-59.

26. (Moscow: Nauka, 1980-1981), v. 7, “korkodil',” v. 8, “krokodil” . “

27. Cited in Riasanovsky, Nicholas, A History of Russia, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 89–90 Google Scholar, from The Hypatian Codex II: The Galician-Volynian Chronicle, annot. and trans. George Perfecky (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1973).

28. Quoted in Jakobson, Roman and Szeftel, Marc, “The Vseslav Epos,” Russian Epic Studies, ed. Jakobson, Roman and Simmons, Ernest (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1949), 76 Google Scholar. Even the spelling of crocodile in the chronograph entry, “korkodil,” matches that in figure 1. Jakobson and Szeftel present sound reasons for identifying Prince Volkhov with Volkh Vseslavevich of the epic and this pr'mce-bogatyr with the historic Prince Vseslav of Polotsk.

29. Ibid., 70-80. The intermingling of mythical, historical and literary elements are treated here.

30. The Buriats called their god of the underworld Okodil and apparently this term achieved wider currency. ( Georgi, Johann Gottlieb, Beschreibung alter Nationen des russischen Reichs: Ihr Lebensart, Religion, Gebrauche, Wohnungen, Kleidungen und ubrigen Merkwurdigkeiten [St. Petersburg: C.W. Muller, 1776-1780], 171 Google Scholar).

31. On Baba Iaga as Great Mother and Zmei or Koshchei Bessmertnyi as the reptilian monster, see Wosien, , The Russian Folk-Tale, 136–44Google Scholar. Wosien understands both as having evolved from positive to negative functions as they lost out in the competition with monotheistic religions; but the dragon, as the earliest historically known personification of evil, seems to have been left without positive functions in the folk tale.

32. RNK, no. 93.

33. For a random example, see figure 95 (Florentine, late fifteenth century) in Musper, H. T., Der Holzschnitt in fünf Jahrhunderten (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964 Google Scholar).

34. Ewa Thompson, M., Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture (Lanham: University Press of America, 1987), 105Google Scholar, citing Kostomarov, N. I., Ocherk domashnei zhizni i nravov velikorusskogo naroda v XVI i XVII w. (St. Petersburg: Karl Wul'f, 1860 Google Scholar) to the effect that witches and sorcerers fought duels in contention for supremacy.

35. Wosien, 138.

36. Ginzburg, Carlo, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Rosenthal, Raymond (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 136 Google Scholar; Ivanits, 100-101. This emptying of archaic popular culture into carnival is dealt with throughout in Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World.

37. Belitser, V. N., Narodnaia odezhda Mordvy (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), 15 Google Scholar. All information concerning the ethnicity of Baba Iaga's costuming, jewelry and implements was communicated to me by Udiko Lehtinen, curator of the Finno-Ugric collection of the National Museum of Finland in a letter of 7 August 1991.

38. Figures 3 and 4 are RNK Nos. 38 and 39 respectively.

39. Georgi, Pt. I.

40. Lehtinen, Ildiko, Naisten Korut: Keski-Venajalla ja Lansi Siperiassa (Women's jewellery in Central Russia and Western Siberia) (Helsinki: Museovirasto, n.d.), 162.Google Scholar

41. With respect to the dating of woodcut lubki, it should be noted that of all the Russian non-book woodcuts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there are only three dated works and they are all late seventeenth century. But these firmly link the Koren’ school to the 1690s. See M.A. Alekseeva, for an authoritative discussion of dating, especially 48, 57-58. All surviving copies of these late seventeenth-early eighteenth century prints were printed from old blocks in the 1760s or 1770s, with the exception of the Koren’ Bible, printed on Dutch paper with a late seventeenth century watermark. I infer that RNK No. 38 is somewhat later than RNK No. 37 and derived from it because they are obviously closely related and the reverse is improbable. A better executed, more coherent print will not be derived from a worse executed, less coherent one. Also the “flowered variants” in other related pairs of prints seem to be the later ones. But all derive from the very end of the seventeenth through the first quarter of the eighteenth centuries.

42. Sakovich, A. G., Narodnaia gravirovannaia kniga Vasiliia Korenia, 1692-1696 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1983 Google Scholar.

43. See Henry, Avril, Biblia Pauperum: A Facsimile and Edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987 Google Scholar).

44. Sakovich, 8.

45. Ivanits, 87-88.

46. Ibid., 88; Askalon Truvorov, in “Volkhvy i vorozhei na Rusi, v kontse XVII veka,” Istoricheskii vestnik: istoriko-literatumyi zhurnal 36 (1889): 713, cites evidence of sorcery cases in all three volumes of the Rozysknykh” del” o Fedore Shakhlovitom published by the Arkhiograficheskaia Kommissiia.

47. Diószegi and Hbenandanti (1966), English translation by John and Anne Tedeschi published first in Great Britain by Routledge and Kegan Paul (1983) and in the United States by Johns Hopkins University Press (1983) and Penguin Books (1983, 1985). References here are from the latter, in which, see the preface to the Italian edition; it treats the problems of connections to any “real” witch cult and the probable connection of such phenomena as the benandanti and Livonian werewolves to shamanism. Ginzburg's account of the Livonian trial is section 16 of chap. 1, which he draws from Hermann von Bruiningk, “Der Werwolf in Livland und das letzte im Wendeschen Landgericht und Dorptschen Hofgericht i. J. 1692 deshalb stattgehabte Strafverfahren,” Mitteilungen aus der livlandischen Geschichte 22 (1924): 163-220.

49. Von Bruiningk, 193-96.

50. Ibid., 194.

51. Ginzburg, , The Night Battles, i xGoogle Scholar.

52. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991).

53. Ginzburg concurs with the general rejection of Margaret Murray's book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921; repr. Oxford Clarendon Press 1962, 1970, 1977), because it sees in the confessions of the witch trials direct evidence of a real cult of witches worshipping Diana in an ancient fertility rite. He agrees that Murray's work is not usable because it takes the confessions as accurate descriptions of rituals, does not discount distortions and accretions introduced by inquisitors, judges and demonologists, nor does it distinguish between surviving belief systems and practising cultists. The general scorn heaped upon Murray's work for over fifty years discouraged anyone else from examining the question of real agrarian fertility cults surviving into the era of witch persecution. Ginzburg's benandanti are one such group, the magical part taking place in ecstatic trance, not in ordinary reality. Livonian werewolves may be an example of belief survival or old Thiess may have been a surviving individual practitioner, or a member of a cult like the benandanti. That he was a lone practitioner seems likely from evidence given by his neighbors (his healing of animals), his own description of how he received his powers and how he intended to pass them on before he should die, etc.; but no evidence was adduced that there were any other locals who belonged to his werewolf band. The fact that ten years earlier Thiess had brought charges against another man (since deceased) for breaking his nose in one of these combats does not help much. That man supposedly was a witch—an opponent—and broke Thiess's nose with his broom. Von Bruiningk, 192-93.

54. Doniger (1103-4) begs the question of antiquity, stating that, while the antiquity of shamanism can no longer be questioned, as the Turkic term qam appears in the ninth century Tang Annals, what exacdy is comprised by the term cannot be determined. It asserts that only from the seventeenth century do actual accounts of shamanic trance journeys survive.

55. Ginzburg, , Ecstasies, 207–10Google Scholar.

56. See Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism, 503 Google Scholar and A History of Religious Ideas, trans. Trask, Willard R., vol. 1, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 16–22 Google Scholar and corresponding bibliography, 380-83.

57. Peucer, Caspar, Commentarius de praecipuis generibus divinationum (Witebergae, 1560 Google Scholar).

58. Herodotus, 4: 105.

59. “The people of Narva and Livonia become werewolves every year, as incredible as it may seem to me: however, they assert and swear, kissing the cross, that it is actually so” (as quoted in Jakobson and Szeftel, 68-69, citing F. Psalman, “Un Russisant anglais au XVI-e-XVII-e siècle, Richard James [1572-1638],” Bulletin de Géographie Historique et Descriptive [1911]: 372).

60. Summers, Montague, The Werewolf (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1934; repr., New Hyde Park: University Books, 1966), 245.Google Scholar

61. The Tale of the Campaign of Igor: A Russian Epic Poem of the Twelfth Century, trans, and annot. Robert C. Howes (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 46.

62. Ginzburg, , Ecstasies, 155 Google Scholar.

63. Ibid., 174 fn. 9 cites two articles on the Vseslav epos: Jakobson and Szeftel, “The Vseslav Epos,” 13-86; and Roman Jakobson and G. Ružičić, “The Serbian Zmaj Ognjeni Vuk and the Russian Vseslav Epos,” Annuaire de I'Institut dephilologie et d'histoire orientates et slaves X (1950): 343-55.

64. Jakobson and Szeftel, 75-76.

65. Von Bruiningk, 169-71. Ginzburg links this drinking of beer and mead with myths about the “inquenchable thirst of the dead.” This element is present in the benandanti beliefs as well. See Ecstasies, 100-01, 159.

66. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 175, fn. 16, citing Peucer, Commentarius. Philip Melancthon, Luther's colleague and Peucer's father-in-law, also lectured on this topic at Wittenberg and quoted a letter he had received from Hermann Witekind concerning the Livonian werewolf, (ibid., 157).

67. Ibid., 156.

68. Ibid., 154, 159 and especially pt. II, chaps. 1 and 3.

69. Von Bruiningk, 201-2.

70. Ibid., 189.

71. Ginzburg, , Ecstasies, 170–71Google Scholar.