The Eurasian steppe is a vast swath of land stretching from the Hungarian plain to eastern Siberia consisting of several biomes—grassland in the south; forest and tundra in the north. It is the home of several large mountain chains including the Urals, the Pamirs, the Altai, and the Tien Shan. Three major rivers flow through Siberia: the Ob in the west, the Lena in the east, and the Yenesei in central Siberia.
The core basic tenet of magical beliefs on the Steppe was animism—a belief that all things are alive in some way and that humans and nature are not separate but interrelated. Of course, the primary relationship for the peoples of the Steppe was between humans and the horse.
We can think of the Steppe as a history of animism, which is not just one thing but many, as people explore relations with landscape, plants and animals in changing ways…Animism is not best seen as internal, a state of belief, but as a mode of action, creating relationships between kinds. In conceiving of such relations it may be that all things, living and non-living, are seen as persons.
Many groups do believe that all things are human and hence have personhood, even though they may appear as a rock, a tapir, or the Sun. Relations between person are those of amity, indifference or enmity...Animism usefully points to the many cultures that extend the idea of being human far and wide. As with any term, it needs immediate qualifying and fleshing out. To say a group is animist is the start of a description, not its end. (155-156)
Nomadic societies based around the horse emerged on the Steppe around 3,500 years ago in the Late Bronze Age. Around 1500 BCE, large monuments known as khirigsuurs start to spring up across the Steppe, first in Mongolia, then later in eastern Siberia. Khirigsuurs are monuments with a central mound surrounded by a rectangular or circular stone fence, with smaller outlying mounds. One of the largest is Urt Bulagyn in central Mongolia, although thousands have been found across central and western Mongolia.
Many khirigsuurs have an orientation just west of north, indicating that they were aligned on a celestial body rather than with the features of the local landscape. It is just possible that horses were sacrificed in late autumn as offerings to the rising Sun. It is also likely that each monument had a long and variable history, being used for a variety of magical and ritual activities at any one time, which would have changed over time. Magical practices lay at the heart of organizing space and time in Late Bronze Age Mongolia. (163)
These monuments contained as many as 1,000 horse burials, but they were not slaughtered all at once. Instead, these khirigsuurs were added to incrementally over long periods of time, and were likely the source for regular gatherings, feasts and funerals that united people across long distances: "People mapped their worlds through monuments, which formed visible and fixed points on the huge grassy plains, but also stayed in the memory of the group because of the important events of life and death that took place there." (150) Kurgan burials are associated with the Steppe people moving into Neolithic Europe after 1500 BCE.
After 800 BCE, similar art forms are burial practices are seen from Siberia all the way to Western Europe. The earliest of these practices are associated with a people known as the Scythians—an umbrella term for a variety of nomadic horse pastoralists often living on the margins of sedentary farming civilizations. The styles and motifs of Scythian art are quite similar to Celtic Art, which leads Gosden to conclude that the magical beliefs of Steppe people and the Celts in Europe were somehow related: "In Celtic Art we can see the influence of the Steppe…" (189)
The archaeological sites of Arzhan 1 and 2 in the Republic of Tuva contained burials which are associated with the Scythians. Another famous discovery in this region are the frozen tombs of Pazyryk on the Ukok Plateau in Siberia. Due to the extreme cold at this location, organic remains have been preserved to a remarkable degree, including cloth, leather, wood, and even human skin! A woman who was found buried here, known as the “Ukok Princess” (or Siberian Ice Maiden), gives us perhaps our most spectacular glimpse of the art of tattooing in ancient times—her elaborate and beautiful tattoos are emulated by artists even today. Clearly these images were connected with their spiritual beliefs in some way—perhaps the tattoo allowed her to acquire the essence of the animal.
FOCUS ON TUVA: Stunning treasures - and macabre slaughter - in Siberia's Valley of the Kings (Siberian Times)
Arzhan, the Golden Burial of a Scythian King (World Archaeology)
The mystery of Siberia's 2,500-year-old 'Ice Maiden' (BBC)
A riot of relationships emerges from the graves of the Scythians. To be a powerful person was not just to operate in the human world; nor was it to have a purely economic relationship with other species, in which they were valued only as food, drink, or in terms of their worth in exchanges. Human power was part of broader cosmological powers, which were found distributed through the universe: in the rocks, mud and turf making up the kurgans, in close links to the horse, and in the varied realms of sky, the land, and the underworld.
All sorts of things were probably animate in this world, and might even have been seen as varied forms of humans, as we find in animistic beliefs of more recent periods. The sharing of energies, of spirit and muscular power, involved mutual respect of all kinds the acknowledgement of kinship and much manoeuvering for position within a complex world. (178-179)
Towards the end of the first millennium BCE, several nomadic horseriding peoples established vast empires—the Xiongnu, the Uighurs, the Turks, and the most famous of them all, the Mongols, whose empire spanned the Steppe from China to Europe.
The Mongols mixed many beliefs, with some notion of a transcendent deity (Tengerri) who was part-personified god but also an embodiment of a cosmic order. There was a host of lesser gods (possibly ninety-nine), in addition to the local spirits of place and personal guardian angels. A fire deity may show influence from Persian Zoroastrianism. (181)
Shamanism was in part a reaction to the development of these large empires, based on earlier animistic beliefs. The word itself, Gosden informs us, comes from the Evenk language—the stress in on the last syllable: shamán. Rather than being an ancient and primordial form of religion dating all the way back to Paleolithic times, as is often surmised, Gosden argues that shamanism is a much more recent development originating tribal Steppe cultures like the Ket and Evenk as a reaction to the presence of neighboring imperialist societies—first other nomadic empires, and later encroaching Western civilization. Shamanism was developed by peoples whose culture and natural environment were under persistent attack from outsiders:
We can now see that there were many layers of belief systems earlier than shamanism. Shamanistic practice probably came together in the last 2,000 years, with some features arising over the last few centuries as a resistance to Russian colonialism. (149)...Present-day shamanism cannot be traced back to the Paleolithic, or only in the very general sense that people lived in an explored an animate universe. Recent shamanism has come about in a particular cultural and political context of resistance. Shamans have not been able to change the basic facts of incursion and dispossession, but perhaps their actions have helped to ensure some cultural continuity in the face of continuing threat. (182-183)
Shamanistic beliefs and rituals tend to have some similarities the world over. The shaman has been transformed through death and rebirth—as if the bones of his or her skeleton were literally disassembled and reassembled into the same shape. The clothing of the shaman is made from animals who have mystical powers like the elk, deer or bear, and invokes the form of these animals. He or she wields objects like charms, drums and rattles made from objects charged with magical power, such as a drum made with wood from a sacred tree and the skin of a sacred animal stretched over it. The shaman is seen as a kind of dangerous figure—upon their death their robes and implements must be hung from a tree a great distance away from the village or burned immediately.
The tree is a recurring motif in shamanism. The tree connects the three worlds: its branches and leaves connect with the sky above; its trunk exists in the world of mortals; and its roots penetrate the underworld where living and dead objects are inverted. The shaman moved between these worlds, as well as across vast distances in this plane, bringing back knowledge and healing powers, sometimes with the aid of psychedelic substances.
The shaman has exerted an attraction on the recent, popular imagination, due to the allure of the charismatic magician, able to enter spirit worlds and wrestle with their inhabitants at considerable risk to themselves but to the potential benefit of their group. Shamans break the rules, partly because of their own unusual characters but also because of the strength and unpredictability of the forces they encounter. The anarchic magic of the shaman is in stark contrast to the formality of the actions of the priest and the conventional nature of his demeanor, obeying the rules and statutes of the rite, following the letter of the lore while losing its spirit. (152)
Why did shamanism evolve in societies all around the globe? (Aeon)
While initially referring to the practices of these Siberian peoples, the term shaman is now broadly applied to magical practitioners in tribal societies lacking an organized religion all over the world—from the Sámi reindeer herders of Lapland, to the Aleuts and Inuit of Greenland and the Arctic, to the Amazonian rain forest, to dispensers of Ayahuasca in the present-day United States.
Archaeological sites in Mesolithic Europe give us some indications as to the what their magical beliefs might have been. Three common motifs emerge: 1.) An obsession with celestial alignments reflected in the various monuments found throughout Northern Europe at this time—cromlechs, dolmens, menhirs, stone circles, cairns, passage tombs and barrows. The most famous of these are Stonehenge in England and Newgrange in Ireland. Both these monuments were built and rebuilt over the millennia, making their exact astronomical alignments impossible to know, but certainly they existed; 2.) The deposition of precious objects in in rivers, lakes, bogs, marshes and fens, especially during the Bronze Age. These were thought to be transactional offerings to supernatural entities to ensure the fertility of these landscapes; and 3.) The imbuing of certain special objects with mystical power, such as swords and shields, houses and chariots (and rings—as Tolkien used to great effect).
Three sets of magical traditions coexisted in prehistoric Europe: astrological practices based on the Moon and Sun among other bodies; a series of careful deposits of artefacts and bodies across the landscape as a means of transacting with the spirits of place and perhaps the human dead; and a concern for transformation and the creation of powerful objects, seen in the constant play with materials but also in so-called Celtic art of the later Iron Age...Europe presents a combination of transcendence, transaction and transformation, with the latter two probably the most important...(188-189)
At the site of Lepensky Vir in modern-day Serbia, the inhabitants lived in triangular houses shaped like slices of pizza—a shape which was also reflected in their burials. Numerous statues and figurines have been found here with rather unusual features that have often been described as "fish people". We know that this particular site was occupied for a very long time by both Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers, leading to speculation about a possible synthesis of lifestyles, including beliefs concerning magic.
Lepensky Vir (Atlas Obscura)
An Archaeological Puzzle on the Danube (New York Times)
Another prominent Mesolithic site is Star Carr in Yorkshire, England, dating from around 9000 BCE. Here riparian hunter-gatherers inhabited crannogs built alongside a lake surrounded by forests and wetlands—Britain’s oldest known structure was discovered here. At the time, Britain was still connected to mainland Europe due to lowered sea levels. Prominent among the discoveries were over thirty red deer stag skull-cap headdresses, leading to comparisons with Siberian shamanism. These caps were clearly used for ritual purposes, but their precise meaning is unknown.
Reconstruction of 11,000-Year-Old Shamanic Headdresses Sheds Light on Hunter-Gatherer Rituals (Sci-News)
One of the most striking artifacts from Bronze Age Europe is the Nebra Sky Disc, which has been called “the world’s oldest astronomical depiction of the cosmos” (although it has recently been redated). Another bronze artifact, the Trundholm Sun Chariot, (the topmost photo) is thought to depict the sun's passage across the sky. These artifacts clearly demonstrate a fascination with the the cosmos and the position of the sun, moon, stars and planets among the Neolithic peoples of Northern Europe.
People in the later Neolithic, around 3000 BCE, were linking the movement of bodies in the sky with the cycle of the year and that of human life and death. It is most likely that human life was linked in some way to broader cosmological cycles, so that humans and the rest of the phenomenal world were viewed as interwoven (210)...it is clear that very sophisticated forms of knowledge of what we now call astrology and astronomy existed among the peoples of Europe's prehistoric past. We can even make some more positive observations, such as there seems to be a shift in Britain around 2000 BCE from an interest in the Sun to alignments that more emphasize the moon...
The huge and directed effort that went into the alignment at Newgrange shows that power and astronomy were linked, so that it's possible that the group who controlled the movement of the sun through their monument could be controlling other things too. The Sun, Moon and stars were never neutral to those observing them, but rather powers playing out in the world below, to be controlled and constrained if at all possible. (214)
All across Northern Europe, numerous artifacts have been found in bogs which appear to have been intentionally placed there as sacrificial offerings to supernatural entities and tutelary deities that were thought to dwell in and protect these landscapes. Many of these were bronze items of great value such as swords, shields and chariots (strangely not mentioned by Gosden are signs of ritual human sacrifice found in peat bogs, such as Tollund Man in Denmark). It is thought that these offerings were part of an ongoing reciprocal relationship with supernatural entities, as described earlier. In prehistoric Europe, forests and wetlands were not dead matter to be exploited at will, but landscapes that were alive and imbued with mystical power. Gosden even makes a connection between these practices and the "Lady of the Lake" of later Arthurian legends:
All over north-western Europe during the Bronze Age people were placing items in rivers, bogs, and on dry land, although the details of what they did and how they did it varied from place to place. We know that traditions of making offerings were already ancient, going back to Star Carr and the Mesolithic, but they also went forward into the Medieval world of Excalibur.
We cannot make any direct comparison between the Medieval World and that of thousands of years earlier, but Medieval accounts can help us to question the things we take for granted, such as those in the Bronze and Iron Ages, our focus here. Broadly speaking, when more things are placed in graves, fewer items are thrown into rivers and bogs. The existence of this pattern shows active human choice and engagement in how things are thrown away, which cannot be seen as accidental loss in the main (223)
Gosden contends that the similar motifs found in Scythian and Celtic art indicate a connection between the magical beliefs of the Steppe peoples and those of prehistoric Europe. Both these art styles, he argues, are centered around ideas of ambiguity and transformation. It is the concept of gestalt—the perception of reality as a functionally integrated whole rather than as a series of discrete objects. Instead of appealing to a transcendent reality occupied by supernatural deities (as in Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures) or departed ancestors (as in the Far East), the peoples of the Steppe and Neolithic Europe sought to integrate themselves into the tangible, living world around them through interdependence and transformation. Artifacts discussed include the Glauberg Brooch, the Aylesford Bucket, the Battersea Shield, the Torrs Pony Cap, the Desborough Mirror, and a bronze couch from Hochdorf, Germany.
Celtic art played with time and space, not just with species distinctions. There is a long tradition across Eurasia, surviving most commonly in rock art, of showing a variety of views of an object or combinations of objects at once. From opposite ends of Eurasia, we can see depictions of chariots and carts, first from a deer stone at Darvi Sum in Mongolia, and secondly from the Early Iron Age burial of Hichdorf near Stuttgart, Germany… (231)
Celtic art does not combine people, plants and animals, as they were never separated in the first place. Rather, it starts in the middle of things, from with the generative powers of the world, allowing many composite creatures to share attributes and powers...Magical mixing opened up explorations into the generative powers of the world, as well as how people could link to these.
So-called Celtic art is the Westernmost expression of a series of related art forms found from Siberia to the Atlantic seaboard. These are continent-scale magical worlds, to be compared and contrasted with the slowly emerging rational modes of being in the Mediterranean. Together the rational and the magical form two traditions within Eurasian culture, which have coexisted in creative tension with each other for many millennia. (233-234)
Later, many of these magical traditions became merged with those of the Classical Greek and Roman worlds as the Roman empire conquered and occupied Northwest Europe. This led to "hybrid cultures" which combined magical forms from European tribal cultures like the Celts and Germans along with Greek and Roman beliefs. We can see this cultural integration, for example, in the the illuminated Bibles made just after the fall of the Western Roman Empire such has the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. As we’ll see in the final post of this series, Medieval Christianity was not the death of European magical practices, but rather the continuation of them.
Increasingly a blended culture emerged in places like Roman Britain, with the Roman element evident, for example, in straight roads, a more rational calculation encouraged by taxation and the imposition of bureaucracy. But older British ways persisted, not just through a reciprocal relationship with the landscape and deposition, or the continuance of Iron Age art styles to the end of the Roman period and beyond, but also in people's refusal to adopt the new rectangular architecture, sticking instead to their tradition of round houses. (236)
...Magic is a constant factor in Europe's past and present. However, ancient wisdom has not been transmitted over millennia through the chosen indigenous few. Magic has been invented and reinvented, just as the inhabitants of Europe have been mixed and remixed. (237)