THE ROAD TO ERZIN

Siberians are generous with their knowledge, but they drip-feed it to you bit by bit, and it's only by making a return trip that you get the next instalment.

It's been like that for me since 1990 when Tim Hodgkinson and I first went there to play - and to find the last of the soviet shamans.

We were initially interested in the parallels between the ways musicians approach performing and the way shamans approach healing.

But each time we went back - and we've been about half a dozen times, now - we'd find out a little more. The extra knowledge however usually prompted a whole heap of other questions, and you have to plan another trip.

On this particular trip - a summer-time jaunt through Lake Baikal, Tuva and the Altai - we found that some shamans specialised in healing through music. We already knew that some shamans were supposed to be able to heal at a distance.

Partial explanations then came from an unlikely and accidental source - the Russian scientific establishment. An unscheduled visit to Akademgorodok - a purpose-built town for scientists - introduced us to a team of boffins experimenting with machinery which allows people to replicate some shamanic skills.

Some of the questions arising from our conversations with shamans just a few days earlier were actually being addressed by these hi-tech scientists.

The visit to their laboratories near Novosibirsk came at the end of the month-long trip which was part-performance and part-research. And being a Siberian trip, it was full of adventure, too.

We began with an expedition to Lake Baikal. Baikal is an extraordinary place.
It's 400 miles long and contains one fifth of all the fresh water in the world. Everywhere you look there are fish or butterflies you don't get anywhere else in the world.

And it has a holy island, Olkhon. And in the holy island is a bay with a promontory known as the shaman's rock where the Buryat people still conduct an old ceremony which involves a sacrificial horse and splashing a lot of vodka on to the ground.

The idea was to meet old friends in Angarsk and do a concert there to finance a trip north to Olkhon. On the way to Lake Baikal we stopped off at Oost Oordat - a Buryat village where we were given a civic reception, and where we would play in the village hall.

We're given taraso, the Buryat version of komiss the Siberian fermented and alcoholic mares' milk drink. Tim liked it. But for me it was too sour.

We were introduced to a Buryat shaman Yeremi Hagayev who heals and diagnoses with his hands. He is an Oot Kha, a hereditory shaman. He felt the call when he was 35 - 40 and began curing relatives. We were told that he might shamanise for us after the gig.

After the official lunch and the toasts to friendship and the rest, we're driven out of the village to see the master instrument maker Baldin Gamboyev (right). As we walk through the garden to his wooden house Scottish bagpipe music blasts out from the radio. It gets everywhere.

He shows us an amazing array of folk instruments some of which he has customised by inventing weird shapes for the stringed instruments and finishing them off with a Gibson-type sunburst.

We do the gig in the village hall. It's a village-hall audience of grandparents and toddlers and folks in between. They are not at all phased by free improv.

Siberians are the hippest of audiences. Buryat grandmothers pray to the spirits as we play. An old Buryat man comes up and shakes our hands afterwards. Then it's off to a sacred ridge outside the village for a night-time picnic round an open fire. The mosquitos are huge mothers and they are going for Yeremi the shaman in a big way. We lay some anti-mosquito-stuff on him. There's lots of vodka toasting. The old master-instrument-maker proposes a toast saying that the music we played tonight "is not avant-garde. It's just old spirit-music played in a new way."

We hear that Yeremi's grandfather was a blacksmith. One day when he was about six, his grandfather showed him something extraordinary.
He put a knife in the fire until it was red hot, then ran it between his lips. He said nothing to the boy.

When the grandfather died, Yeremi felt the power passing to him. After a few more toasts, Yeremi gets ready to do some shamanising. He stands by the fire with a bottle of Vodka.

He pours some on the ground and says some prayers quietly. He checks the knife in the fire and calls us round in a circle. Then he goes to the fire and does the red hot knife thing.

He comes to each of us in turn, moving his hands over our bodies from the head to the ground and said that he was cleansing us of negative spirits which could effect our health.

Whatever it is, we feel that something happened.

Later when I'm back in London I come across a book on the Chinese healing system, Chi Kung, and notice one exercise for ridding the body of negative energy - and it was identical to what Yeremi was doing. After that, we were set up for Olkhon. We pass through countryside which moves from Scottish moorland to wide, wide steppe, and eventually to mountains, and on to the ferry to Olkhon.

The sun's up and it's hot. We buy some smoked omul - a kind of salmon which lives only in Lake Baikal. The island is a traditionally sacred place, and the spiritual feel of the place is palpable, especially on the east coast.

The roads are like Forestry Commission landrover tracks and the drivers of the beat-up Ladas are skilful and heroic. We get to to Pishanka village and a deserted gulag camp.
The prisoners used to work in the wooden fish-processing factory which was constructed in the 30s. It closed in the 50s. After we get the tents up we meet a local muzhik (Siberian equivalent of a Glasgow hard-man but three times as tough. The sort of guy who goes out to chop logs in minus 35 wearing an open-necked shirt).

Gennady lives with Jenna a Buryat woman who walks like an American Indian. He trades fish with visitors, and makes an arrangement to go out fishing with our drivers next morning.

At around eight as the rest of us are getting up, the fishermen come back with omul and a fish which looks like sea bass, and we have fresh fish, and roe for breakfast. It's very hot and sunny.

I find some red-admiral looking butterflies on a pine tree. When they close their wings, they look like bark. We're told that the Makhaon butterflies are "endemic" to Olkhon.

After a week at Baikal, it's flyaway time to Kyzyl, capital of Tuva, where the cannabis grows wild and free on the outskirts of the town. Maybe it is the extremes of climate - down to minus 40 centigrade and up to 35 plus - which make the grass so strong. People just amble over, rub it between their hands and hey presto - black hash, or "mazla" as they call it locally.

We were given to understand that its effects are also strong. Local musicians seem to be divided in its use - but not on its strength. Some won't touch it, and stick to vodka. And those who do, leave it out if they start drinking.

We hook up again with Gendos Chamzyryn (left) a kargiraa (bass khoomei overtone singing) vocalist. He's a musical shaman.

He makes drums for shamans, but when people ask Gendos to heal them, he says he only works on stage.

We first met him when he was with Biosynthesis an avant-garde band that simultaneously reminded me of Sun Ra, James Brown, Albert Ayler and Marc Bolan. Gendos learned shamanic-dancing - another discrete form we were previously unaware of - then he later began getting rid of evil spirits on stage in his music.

He tells us he does it by cleansing himself and people around him. He says : "Sher-herrikan" three times. Then he does a backwards scream and calls up all his spirits. Next day in the early morning, we drive out to Hirakan - bear mountain, the holiest shamanic spot in Tuva - with Gendos.

Bear mountain looks very much like Cezane's Mont St Victoire in Provence - except it's surrounded by wild cannabis. Gendos takes us up a track and further into the side of the mountain.

There we see a wig-wam style obo - an outdoor shrine - and nine cairns. Inside the obo, there's a bear skull and offerings of coins, money and some other objects. Gendos gets out his drum and Tim unpacks his alto.

Gendos said it was ok to play there and we followed his lead. But the next day there was the first snow on the Sayan mountains in August for years and Gendos was worried about what we'd done. It was the first sax-jam on Bear mountain.

We go back to the flat in Kyzyl and record some kitchen tracks on pots and pans, alto sax, shaman's drum, zither and Gendos's kargiraa vocals. The next day we visited Kenin Lopsan Mongush who is a kind of academic shaman.

He runs the museum in Kyzyl, but for the last few decades he's also been keeping the shamanic tradition alive - in secret until recently.

I notice his ovaa of deer and yak horns, stones, and two bird figures. He says that the horns are the most sacred parts of animals, especially for Tuvan shamans.

They are like antennae which can catch signals from the sky and the stars. Big horns - like maral deer's - can catch signs of catastrophe. The old Tuvans had great respect for an old instrument - bazanchi - made of wood and horse-hair plus cow-horn. It was like a European violin - only with horns.

It was used by shamans medically - for example, if a child had a speech problem.
Kenin Lopsan said: "The sound of the horn comes from heaven and when it's transferred to the patient it heals. A healthy man meets a snow-tiger and he can go mad and lose his speech. The only way is to play an igil (also a violin-like instrument)."

He said that there are two old music-shamans still working in the regions and he talked about another way of using music. When a tree is struck by lightning the brittle splinters can be played - like a giant thumb piano.

It's good for healing mental patients. Then they cut off the splinters and make a tea with them for the patient.

Kungaa-Tash Ool-Boo is an extraordinary shaman, because he is also a lama and a village administrator at Erzin down near the Mongolian border.

We first met Kungaa-Boo in 1992 when he was still keeping his shamanism under wraps. On that occasion we were visiting schools and nomadic settlements and we happened to stop by his khram - a small wooden Buddhist temple - on the day it was consecrated.

Kungaa-Boo did his lama apprenticeship over the border in Mongolia because there were no opportunities in Tuva.

Many lamas and shamans were carted off to the gulag by the KGB. Even when he returned as a lama he kept his shamanic activity under wraps, and finally came out just four years ago.
The last time I was in Tuva, both he and another shaman had talked about being able to heal someone from a distance, but they didn't go further and explain how it is done.

So this time we took the road south to meet Kungaa Boo, driving through the eagles. There are so many of them about that on one occasion, Gendos leaned out of the car window and whistled to an eagle which flew past only a few feet away.

While most shamans use drums, and some Tuvan shamans use throat-singing, some of the most powerful shamans use a jaw-harp - or khoumous.

Kungaa-Boo is a third generation shaman. His father used a khoumous - a lot of Erzin shams did. He again talks about healing from a distance, but does not elaborate. Instead he discusses the general state of shamanism in the area.

These days he says, lots of lamas are not powerful, and just read texts, and a few shamans are not very good either, and don't know what they are doing.

Some shamans can only work near a sacred tree, for example - they have a greater need to be plugged in. He says that when an individual is bad, bad spirits collect around him or her. But a shaman can clean them out.

He says: "I can take on an illness from a patient, then go out to the taiga (forest) and get rid of it. Everyone should go to a temple, or see a shaman at least once a year for cleansing of spirits."

We drive back through an amazing sunset of reds, purples oranges and blacks. At one point we see a cloud looking like a flying shaman.

For the last few gigs in Siberia we team up with Altai throat-singer Bolot Biryshev.

The plan is for us to travel south from the capital, Gorno-Altai to meet a shaman Bolot knows. After a long drive we would have to transfer to horses for a five hour ride to the cave where the shaman lives. But word comes back that the shaman doesn't want to meet foreigners, and that's all right with us.

A couple of Bolot's relatives appear to have been cured by this shaman, including one woman who went on to become a shamanka herself. Sometimes the distinctions get blurred - not all shamanism is dressing up and banging the drum.

Gendos and Kunga-Boo are also stone-carvers and Gendos talked about putting his shamanic power into the carvings.

In Gorno-Altai we meet Nohon, another singer and he takes us to meet Sergei Dikov. We get to Sergei's flat, not knowing who we're going to meet, and it turns out to be an artist's studio full of paintings - spirit-paintings.

And sculptures and ceramics too. Sergei paints spirits, much in the same way that Albert Ayler may have played spirits. His work (right) has a primal, earthy quality like pre-historic cave paintings. He works fast - like a Zen calligraphy artist - and the following night he comes to our gig in Gorno Altai and draws 20 pictures during the performance.

Although Gorno Altai is the capital, the atmosphere is similar to the Buryat village - in spite of the TV cameras. Bolot is a national hero and it seems like the whole town has turned out. At the end of the concert Nohon and Bolot perform an Altai ceremony and wrap cloth cummerbunds around our waists.

Then we drive off into the night to stay with a friend of Bolot's in Chamal. The excitement is arriving in the dark, hearing the sound of a river and feeling the bulk of the mountains, but having no idea what it will look like in the morning.

It is stunning, and the people who live in the Altai know it, and they love it, and Bolot talks about striving to get the sound of the mountains into his playing.

The next gig is a one-day mini jazz festival in Novosibirsk, and the music we play is wild. In fact it is so wild that some people are reportedly frightened by the music, claiming that it's too shamanistic, and that it's Bolot's fault.

The people in the Altai had no problem with this music, but these days Novosibirk is getting very Western.

The place looks very different now, with advertising hoardings, and nearly every woman is sashaying along the street with very expensive looking ankle-length leather coats with enhanced shoulders. After the gig, Bolot heads back to the Altai mountains.

Tim and I are due to play in Omsk, but the gig falls through and we play Akademgorogok instead. Akademgorogok is a science-city set up in the fifties.

We do the last gig in a students' club then spend the night drinking. In the morning, it's our last day, and we have nothing to do and we ask : "Is there anyone here who's an expert on shamanism?" Someone suggests we try Vlail Kaznacheev.

He's an expert on bioenergy and cosmology at the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences (Siberian Division). Normally he doesn't see people for long, but he agrees to give us an hour.

He selected the site of his institute by dousing, and when we ask him about shamanism he said: "Shamanism is not a religion. It's a special phenomenon of the intellect and spirit of the human being." He said that we - meaning society - have to study shamanism as a unique phenomenon.

His line of argument goes like this. In the beginning, humankind communicated with a different field of the brain but there were cosmological changes in the earth's magnetism. This made it difficult for people to continue communicating in this psychic way - except for shamans.

And people went on to invent and use language. Experiments in Akademgorodok with hypo-magnetic chambers where the magnetic field is greatly reduced, induces changes in intellectual and spiritual properties.

Humans can transfer thoughts while in the chambers - and the professor talked about distant-viewing experiments thousands of miles apart.

Some people were seeing the image BEFORE it was transmitted. He talked about carbon 13 disappearing from people's cells as they get older.

But there are some periods of life where there is special growth - like shamanic ecstasy.

Nuclear tests and a surfeit of radio and tv signals are making the earth very much older.

He says: "We're coming to a new ecology with a deficit of isotopical atoms like carbon and oxygen. Step by step, intellectual properties will move to global craziness. "In order to survive as human kind, the instrument we need is shamanism."

He talked about healing from a distance and experiments which showed how cells anticipated changes due to the eclipse, hours or even up to two weeks beforehand.

We are shown the hypo-magnetic chambers and Professor Kaznacheev says that when scientists looked at a number of prehistoric sites they found that the special power spots - like altar stones - tended to be bang on magnetic anomalies. We try out the chambers one switched on, the other not. They look like big bodyscanners. Immediately I felt a tingling on my hands in one, but nothing in the other. Then he talked about Kozyrev's mirrors - a kind of room where aluminium sheets distort time and space. They use the room for distant viewing experiments.

Kozyrev's space was invented by Russian astro-physicist Nicolai Kozyrev (left) who believed that time was a conduit for energy. Like a lot of scientists, he spent time in the gulag - where he was said to have had discussions on time and energy and transferring thoughts over a distance with shamans who were also prisoners.

Professor Kaznacheev's assistant Alexander Trofimov (below) asks us if we would like to experience Kozyrev's Mirrors, but warns that people are often not the same when they come out.

He takes us down to the basement and through a door which can be sealed with a wheel like on a submarine.

The room is a kind of spiral and does not look particularly special or weird. He asks us again if we want to go ahead and warns that a lot of people get frightened.

We are to shout stop if we can't take it. So the lights go out. I feel a pressure on my hands, yet at the same time there's a feeling of weightlessness.

Tim feels dizzy and sick and is almost on the point of stopping. I have a sensation of flying. Tim also has physical sensations, twinges.

We experienced other things in this space which we don't want to talk about.

The whole thing made us determined to check out the phenomena when we got back.

Summing it all up, Professor Kaznacheev talks about art and music and shamanism. And magnetic anomalies. And communicating with the mind over long distances. And how music and art are really holograms.

He says : "It's not just a flat painting that you see, but also the way the painter was seeing the sky, or his girlfriend yesterday, or in the pub the day before. While the time and place is fixed, the rhythm of nature and music is a hologram of time, and rhythm in time.

"So if you create this hologram right you can heal people. But it can also kill people."

The Akademgorodok coda took us by surprise. In Siberia it seemed the shamans were doing their thing while the scientists were trying to figure out how they did it.

I trawled the net for information on Kozyrev. Information is limited and few British scientists are aware of his work. We still don't know the secret of Kozyrev's Mirrors.
It looks like we'll have to go back again.

* Footnote. All over Siberia there are thousands of ovaa structures at springs and mountain passes, where people tie a ribon to give thanks to the spirits for a safe journey - or to ward off illness.

And you even get them in Scotland - like left, the clootie well at Munlochy on the Black Isle.

Back To Ken Hyder's Homepage