Shamanic and Mythic Cultures of Ethnic Peoples in Northern China I

Shamanic Deities and Rituals

Fu Yuguang, Liang Yanjun, Liu Ying

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367676537
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000295580
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

On the basis of first-hand materials gathered through decades of field research and fleshed out with the author's insightful religious, cultural, and historical observations extending back to the Qing dynasty, ancient archaeological discoveries, and the legacy of Siberian peoples, this two-volume ethnological study investigates shamanic rituals, myths, and lore in northern China and explores the common ideology underlying the origins of the region's cultures.

Drawing from numerous oral myths, ancient documents, and archaeological findings, this first volume discusses the spiritual world of northern shamanism and investigates the various rituals, including ancestor worship, fertility, nature deities, blood sacrifice and rites, the worshiping of nature, and shrines. The book illuminates how these rituals and worships, animism, and ideas of the soul are imbedded in and interweave with the indigenous environment, culture, and history of the clans and people of northern China.

The book will be of great value to scholars of religion and to both anthropologists and ethnologists in the fields of shamanism studies, Northeast Asian folklore, and Manchu studies.

1
The spirit world of northern shamanism

1.1 The operational laws of the spirits

The essential concept of shamanism in any region or ethnic group is the following: All beings in the cosmos that human beings depend on, living and nonliving, constitute an abode of deities and spirits who are present everywhere, give rise to everything, and possess everything. This is why they are so earnestly worshipped. This pantheistic conception constitutes the basis for an understanding of shaman deities and spirits and the ground on which shamanic perceptions and modes of expression in all sacrificial rituals in northern China is rooted.

To study shaman spirits, we must first know what spirit activity means in northern Chinese shamanism. Every ethnic group in northern China has its spirit-chosen shaman, who acts as an intermediary between human beings and spirits and serves as the spirits’ representative and mouthpiece. Shamans state unequivocally that gods and spirits really exist. They are celestial beings, and they have almighty power. A spiritual being is a substance made up of qi (气: literally “breath,” “air,” or “gas”; figuratively “material energy”), an invisible force that people know but cannot see, the active principle of any living thing. In most cases in shamanic belief, however, a spirit exerts their power and influence through a physical substance. A shaman who attains a supernatural level will state not only that supernatural power exists but also that they can feel that power. It possesses a shaman’s body, coming suddenly and going quickly. That power may influence the shaman’s own vital energy and may even command a shaman in trance to act supernaturally or ecstatically. In shamanic parlance, such phenomena are referred to as the coming of the spirit, presence of the spirit, or possession by the spirit. Only a person who can experience this is a true shaman, a proper medium between the spirits and human beings. Only such a shaman can communicate with spirits and keenly observe how they behave. A shaman who reaches this level can hear, see, perceive, know, and understand all phenomena in the supernatural world. Moreover, they can discover the dwellings of cosmic spirits at any time and communicate with them. In a word, a true shaman can move freely between the spiritual world and the earthly world. According to veteran Chinese shamans, this is the way to thoroughly understand the basic operational laws of the spirits.

What does the operational laws of the spirits mean? It goes beyond the understanding of common people. It points to supernatural power beyond the human that embraces all beings in the cosmos. It is, in fact, a primitive form of pantheism. In the minds of ancient peoples, everything around them, supernatural or wondrous, was a life-threatening danger. The psychological mechanism behind their worship amounted to trying to counteract or defend themselves against such danger. In northern China, this led them to believe in a wide variety of types of spirits. According to shamanic beliefs of northern peoples, there are various spiritual beings in the universe, each with their own ideas, likings, habits, endowments, tastes, and personalities, which are not subject to interference from the earthly world. They live and move in accord with their own primordial principles of generation and their respective orbits of activity.

Spirits act independently in their worlds, which are separate from ours. In the northern Chinese understanding of shamanic gods and spirits, they have urges, emotions, ideas, and character traits like us on the one hand; on the other, they possess amazing power, which can be categorized according to various criteria, such as locality, nature, status, size, level of ability, distance, and good or evil. They descend to mortal beings or communicate with them by the channels of prayer, sacrificial rituals, and dreams, and they may use or possess a medium to bring about the object of their prayers once the prayers have been conveyed to them. Only a shaman assigned by a particular spirit can feel, see, hear, and understand that spirit’s presence and wishes. This is because only the shaman can sense the primordial operational laws of the spirits. If people want to know or invite a spirit, shamans need to enter the spirit realm through ritual.

Each deity and each spirit have their own origin, such as materially embodied spirits, human spirits, animal spirits, and nature spirits. Every natural phenomena, such as thunder and lightning, rivers and lakes, and the sun and the moon, may have a supernatural power and so can be called god or spirit, in both cases in Chinese shen (神). The world that they inhabit can be shown as follows:

The diagram shows that beyond the mortal world, there are cosmic spaces or a divine world in which spirit beings live and from which they can travel to the world of the inner circle as they like. All this constitutes the primordial pantheistic world of northern Chinese shamanism. The ideas and beliefs associated with it have risen from specific sociohistorical conditions bound up with people’s means of livelihood and mindset. Over the long history of the shamanic pantheism in China, its meaning has varied greatly.

1.2 The evolution of northern shamanism

Religious reflections on the fragility of human beings in our fight for survival against nature, no doubt, did not come with the first origins of humankind. Archaeology has confirmed that in the era when primitive groups of human beings separated themselves from animals, their thinking was underdeveloped. At that time, it can hardly be thought that they could form religious concepts or perform acts of worship, because they probably could not distinguish themselves from the natural world to which they had adapted. Ancient religion must have surfaced in primitive tribal society only after their mode of thinking became further developed. That Neanderthals of the mid-Palaeolithic period had a budding form of religious worship is attested to by archaeological findings that they had acquired customs, such as when burying the dead, they placed ram horns around the body and scattered chips of red stone around the remains.

As for northern China, definitive relics of budding shamanism have been rarely discerned, analysed, or identified, and it is difficult to date their earliest appearance. Red hematite powder, however, was sprinkled around the bone fossils in the Upper Cave in Zhoukoudian, Beijing, from the late Palaeolithic period, and flint stones, teeth with drilled holes, cockle shells, bone pendants, and other burial objects were scattered around the corpses, along with the sprinkled powder. All this indicates that the cavepeople there had come to have primitive religious notions about eighteen thousand years ago. According to local folk belief in northern China, red powder, standing for blood, reflects people’s desire to soothe the souls of the deceased. Archaeological investigations have disclosed that in northeast China and in Siberia, many remains and skeletons dating back to the Palaeolithic period and the Neolithic period were buried amid similar objects. At Siunvge, northeast of Moscow, the remains of an adult male and a boy were similarly sprinkled with red ochre powder and those of the adult with three thousand beads, animal teeth, mammoth tusks, and other ornaments. Examples of other artefacts unearthed in China are the bone-carved hawk’s head; fish and pottery figurines; and patterns of a dog, a pig, a bear, and water ripples, all on shards from Xinkailiu in Jixi, Heilongjiang. In Yinggeling in Heilongjiang were grey pottery shaped in the form of birds, deer, sheep, and frogs, and there are primitive drawings on earthenware from Heilongjiang sites in Ang’angxi, Bai Jinbao and Qinghua. At Baicheng, the capital of the Jin dynasty (1115–1234) near the Ashi River, Heilongjiang, B.R. Tolmachevo unearthed a bronze vessel with two little birds carved in relief, which reflects the ancient worship of divine birds. All these totemic objects represent creatures worshipped in the periods of gathering and both fishing and hunting economies. They are the product of peoples who worshipped primordial shamanistic deities, and they show that clan societies of those times worshipped animals such as the eagle, fish, swine, bears, and deer.

For his part, Alexander Okladnikov, in Archeological Discoveries in the Far East of the Soviet Union, depicts in detail the cave paintings at Sakaci Aliyang left by the Jurchen ancestors of the Manchu before they moved to northern China. One of the paintings, as shown next, reflects their sun worship:

These petroglyphs reflect a Jurchen myth that has been passed down to this day, which begins as follows:

Long, long ago, our earth was once all flooded, but some divine birds carried sand and stones to pile up a small patch of land on which human beings lived and multiplied. Blessed by the sun goddess, they thus had a chance to survive the flood, and all beings revived again.

The paintings point to the religious ideology and mythic concepts of the inhabitants of northern China and Northeast Asia in the distant past. They indicate that they brought their conceptual religious beliefs to life by countless physical artistic objects around the time of the transition from the Palaeolithic period to the Neolithic period. These old beliefs formed the soil for cultures in which shamanic ideology originated.

Along with the development of material means of production, the pantheistic ideology of shamanism was unceasingly enriched, improved as it evolved. In light of cultural artefacts available, its evolution falls into the following stages: The recently excavated Goddess Temple at Niuheliang Village, Liaoning, shows that there was a fully developed ideology of religious worship in northern China at least five thousand years ago. However, religious practices may well have extended back to more than a million years ago, and ancient relics verify the early birth of such activity in the region. Numerous artefacts have been unearthed that indicate that it began before clan-centred societies evolved. As human beings became homo sapiens, they, no doubt, sought to explain the cause of their fears and ease them. With their high intelligence quotient, humans adapted to life in their ever-changing natural environment, reproduced, and found means to extend their lifespan, and their environment drew them to think, explore, and seek out the power and means to conquer it. In this way, low-level beginnings of religious awe, worship, and prayer emerged.

This is evidenced by the ancient stone vessels unearthed in northern China that scholars understand as having religious significance. Some have a willow-leaf shape that resembles the female vulva: a symbol of human life and reproduction. Others are engraved with various other patterns, such as the following Palaeolithic figures that also exist as fish-scale patterns on modern shamans’ costumes. They are taken from pendants on the ritual costumes and headdresses of Manchu shamans Lang (郎) and Xu (徐) that have been passed down for generations as heirlooms.

The first pattern might symbolize murky night, the second sunshine, the third rippling water or rising vapour, and the fourth heaven and earth. The figures, moreover, show that the thinking of human beings even in that ancient era was complex enough to express natural phenomena in abstract terms.

The most prominent aspect of shamanism is the worship of the cosmos, and that religious outlook apparently appeared early in the north as our pioneering ancestors sought to conquer nature in that chilly land. Sunshine and warmth are the first conditions for survival, so it is perhaps for this reason that the above patterns can be found on ancient stone tools in the region. We should not regard them as either chance scribbling or mimetic reflections of natural phenomena or simply aesthetic objects. They express what the ancients thought about life, their desires for light and warmth, their religious perceptions, their myths, their knowledge of the cycles of day and night, and their understanding of nature. They felt warm on the land and cold underground in summer and vice versa in winter. They wondered about natural phenomena and sought the forces behind them, and when they received no support from nature, they turned to the spiritual world for comfort. In great fear and awe, they thus worshipped all natural things, which they knew could protect them but could destroy them instead. They had no choice but to prayerfully entreat the forces of nature when they confronted them in their weakness and helplessness. These were the earliest ideas of shamanism of which we can find evidence. There is no evidence of religious rites based on a definite image of a deity.

Ever since its inception, however, shamanism has been advancing in its religious thinking along with evolving human society. From about forty thousand to ten thousand years ago, between the mid to late Palaeolithic period and early Neolithic period, our northern ancients entered into primordial clan society. The numerous manuscripts of ancient shamanic tales that have been collected are a rare cornucopia from which I infer that shamanism in the matriarchal era had by then matured with diversified characteristics and full-blown sacrificial rituals that would continue to develop as it then stepped into a more mature and more active phase in emerging clan society. Nature worship, totem worship, animism, and ideas of the soul all became imbedded in clan life and customs. The frequent celebration of colourful sacred sacrificial rites and reliance on judgements of the spirits in the form of oracles, spirit testing, and divination became typical of ancestral northern fishing and hunting peoples and took on strong regional features.

According to historical documents, next come the shamanistic developments of the Tungusic Sushen (Sušen) peoples: Jurchen (Nvzhen), Shiwei, Wuji, Mohe, Bohai, and others who lived in caves and trees in the north of China – fishing, farming, and using flint-headed arrows to hunt up into the Liao and Jin dynasties. With the Sushen, northern shamanism evolved from a matriarchal clan religion into a patriarchal one. The most important change in shamanic belief was that the worship of patriarchal ancestors and relevant sacrificial rites came to occupy a central position with earlier nature and animal worship. At the same time, the myriad deities and regulations and customs surrounding the rites became increasingly more complicated with the absorption of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian creeds and Han ritual practices, such that the original face of shamanism was greatly changed. Then, too, as endless migrations occurred, when some northern ethnic groups moved year after year, and some peoples were reunited after division and others divided after unification. Shamanism became a huge stream of multiple cultural currents, such that it is now exceedingly hard to trace it back to its original roots. Much research needs to be done to do so, and much has been done in recent years in both China and abroad in the way of identification, analysis, and sifting out data from primary sources. However, all this has actually added to the difficulty of probing the basic nature and significance of northern shamanism. Mistakes have been made in trying to do so, with shamanism’s sometimes being almost equated with ordinary witchcraft.

Finally, from late Qing dynasty until the present, shamanism in northern China has been increasingly on the decline. In the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911), its Manchu founders incorporated their traditional shamanic beliefs and sacrificial rites into the Han palace rituals of previous dynasties. Descendants of the Jurchen, they held traditional Jurchen tangse rites (堂子祭) at the Qing imperial ritual shrine. In the seventeenth year of the reign of Qianlong, the sixth Qing emperor,¹ there was promulgated t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Author’s preface and acknowledgements
• Author’s profile
• Preface to the 1990 Chinese edition
• Introduction to the English edition
• Introduction
• 1 The spirit world of northern shamanism
• 2 Nature worship
• 3 Ancestor and fertility worship
• 4 Blood sacrifice and fire rituals
• 5 Rituals for nature deities
• 6 Tangse and jia rituals
• Bibliography
• Index