Shamanic Dialogues with the Invisible Dark in Tuva, Siberia

Book excerpt: Intentional acts of “assault sorcery”, involving operations of extracting the souls of unsuspecting victims or eliminating one’s antagonists, are central to the perceived proliferation of occult threats and shamanic assassins in Tuva, Siberia. Following the restoration of shamanism as an official religion in the region, indigenous spiritual practitioners have propagated a vindictive strand of rituals, associated with supernatural retaliation and political assassination. This book probes the unforeseen implications of state-sanctioned appropriations of religious revival, through an unsettling context of encounters with various agencies embodying “dark shamanism”. The invisible presence of this shamanic complex is manifested in the book’s presentation of a shaman’s thoughts about an epidemic of curses, his counter-cursing rituals for Russians and ethnic Tuvans, and his dialogues with dead shamanic ancestors and spectres experiencing ideological tensions.