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Updated: June 8, 2025
The pursuers were terribly harassed by the ice and snow, which Mailla said was produced by one of their own shamans, or necromancers, and which proved more hurtful to them than to the Mongols. Many of them perished, and when they issued from the defiles they were too weak to attack the two allies. The latter spent the winter at Altchia Kungur.
But the most valuable piece of news she had heard from the intruders was that three days hence a solemn dance, the ayash tyucotz, was to be performed at the Rito. These ceremonies, which are always of a religious nature, are proposed generally by the principal shamans to the civil chiefs, in council or privately, either on the strength of some presage or dream, or as a public necessity.
To know those details is one of the attributes of the shamans. The latter constitute a circle of their own, a cluster of adepts, nominally in the arts of healing, but really in the arts of magic. That circle is wide, and whoever stands outside of it has no right to infringe upon the duties of its members by attempting to follow their example.
It is the invocation to the gods for rain. We arrive about sundown, and are taken into a large subterranean chamber, into which we descend by a ladder. Soon about a dozen Shamans are gathered with us, and the ceremony continues from sunset to sunrise. It is a series of formal invocations, incantations, and sacrifices, especially of holy meal and holy water.
They were carefully kept in secrecy, and transmitted to the initiated only, in the secret societies of witches, shamans, and priests, which we find among all savages. By the same time, wars and invasions created military authority, as also castes of warriors, whose associations or clubs acquired great powers. However, at no period of man's life were wars the normal state of existence.
It takes its name from the shamáns or priests, who act as interpreters of the evil spirits' wishes and as mediators between them and man. All unnatural phenomena, and especially those of a disastrous and terrible nature, are attributed to the direct action of these evil spirits, and are considered as plain manifestations of their displeasure.
They have no particular reverence for anything or anybody except the evil spirits who bring calamities upon them, and the "shamáns" or priests, who act as infernal mediators between these devils and their victims. Earthly rank they treat with contempt, and the Tsar of all the Russias, if he entered a Korak tent, would stand upon the same level with its owner.
The leader of the Shamans is a great burly bald-headed Indian, which is a remarkable sight, for I have never seen one before. Whatever he says or does is repeated by three others in turn. The paraphernalia of their worship is very interesting.
The shamans, or priests, made their strongest charms to no purpose, for the darkness of night continued. In a village of the lower Yukon there lived an orphan boy who always sat upon the bench with the humble people, over the entrance way of the kashim or assembly house. The other people thought he was foolish, and he was despised and ill-treated by everyone.
Perchance some day I'll tell thee my other name." "Pocahontas, then," he repeated slowly, impressing the name on his memory, "I will obey thee. We are but men, as are thy kinsfolk, subject to cold and hunger, ills and death. Yet, as God, our Okee, is greater than your Okee, so our power and our medicine excel those of the mighty Powhatan and of his shamans.
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