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Updated: May 14, 2025
The upper classes among the Chinese had in general little interest in religion, but the Mongols, owing to their historical development, were very religious. Some of them and some of their allies were Buddhists, some were still shamanists.
Yet, besides the Ainos, there are millions of Japanese who are Shamanists, even though they know not the name or organized cult.
In their religions likewise the two races differ. The Mongols are as a rule Shamanists or Buddhists, while the Tartars are Mahometans.
The Ainos of Yezo may be called Shamanists or Animists; that is, their minds are cramped and confused by their belief in a multitude of inferior spirits whom they worship and propitiate by rites and incantations through their medicine-man or sorcerer.
North of them, in the northern parts of western Siberia and in north-eastern Europe, live the Samoyeds, of Ural-Altai origin, who are still fewer in number than the preceding tribe, and live by reindeer-breeding and fishing. All these Siberian tribes and many others are Shamanists, and are so called after their priests, Shamans.
If a band of ignorant, barbarous Mahometans were transported to north-eastern Siberia, and compelled to live alone in tents, century after century, amid the wild, gloomy scenery of the Stanavoi Mountains, to suffer terrific storms whose causes they could not explain, to lose their reindeer suddenly by an epidemic disease which defied human remedies, to be frightened by magnificent auroras that set the whole universe in a blaze, and decimated by pestilences whose nature they could not understand and whose disastrous effects they were powerless to avert they would almost inevitably lose by degrees their faith in Allah and Mahomet, and become precisely such Shamanists as the Siberian Koraks and Chukchis are today.
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