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Updated: July 1, 2025
Philosophic Taoism continued in this time, aside from the church-Taoism of Chang Ling and, naturally, all kinds of contacts between these three currents occurred. The Chinese state cult, the cult of Heaven saturated with Confucianism, was another living form of religion. The alien rulers, in turn, had brought their own mixture of worship of Heaven and shamanism.
As out of Animism or Shamanism grows Fetichism in which a visible object is found for the abode or medium of the spirit, so also, out of the same soil arises what we may call Imaginary Zoölogy. In this mental growth, the nightmare of the diseased imagination or of the mind unable to draw the line between the real and the unreal, Chinese Asia differs notably from the Aryan world.
He goes to the patient, touches the painful parts and rubs them and after a few minutes, he shows a little piece of wood which he had hidden in his hand and which he claims to have extracted from the body of the sufferer. The native feels actually cured after such manipulation of the koonkie, who evidently believes himself in his power. In Siberia, we find shamanism.
We have no concern here with the development of religious systems, other than to say that in the primitive agricultural community a succession of ideas of man's relation to the unseen arose, yielding, in addition to the widespread ancestor worship, a system of shamanism, or belief in the presence and power of malignant spirits, and one of fetichism, which developed into mythology, or worship of the great powers of nature.
Traveling through Russia one may see many forms of worship. He will find the altars of Shamanism, the temples of Bhudha, the mosques of Islam, and the synagogues of Israel. On one single avenue of the Russian capital he will pass in succession the churches of the Greek, the Catholic, the Armenian, the Lutheran, and the Episcopal faith.
Among the tribes of the northern part of the Chinese Empire and the Ainos of Japan this Shamanism exists as something like an organized cultus. Indeed, it would be hard to find any part of Chinese Asia from Korea to Annam or from Tibet to Formosa, not dominated by this belief in the power and presence of minor spirits.
The Shaman is the priest or doctor, who professes to be able, by his counter-charms, to counteract or neutralize this devil's work. It will be long ere the scholar definitely determines whether Shamanism as it now exists originated spontaneously in different countries where the same causes were to be found, or whether it is historical; that is, derived from a single source.
Shamanism, or a vague fear of invisible evils and the sorcerer, may indeed have sprung up independently in Tartary, Central Africa, Finland, and North America.
There is a mystery connected with the eating of the liver, which is to be explained, like many other Indian mysteries, by having recourse to the Eskimo Shamanism. "In Greenland a man who has been murdered can revenge himself by rushing into him," that is, entering his soul, "which can only be prevented by eating a piece of his liver."
The price was sometimes a hundred roubles for a single mouser, and by curtailing the supply the Manjours kept the market good. The Gilyaks, like nearly all the natives of Northern Asia, are addicted to Shamanism. The shaman combines the double function of priest and doctor, ministering to the physical and spiritual being at the same time.
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