The World Tree and the Shaman Who Climbs It

The drum is the horse.

Every shaman in the taiga knows this. The flat drum made from a single elk skin — painted on its inner face with the map of the three worlds — is not an instrument in the ordinary sense. When the shaman beats it in the dark of the healing tent, the drum becomes a horse that carries him through the smoke-hole and up the first branches of the World Tree.

The tree stands at the center of the world. It is a birch. It is always a birch in the taiga, because the birch is the tree that can survive anything: it grows back from fire, from the permafrost edge, from the slashed stumps that foresters leave. Its white bark glows in the dark forest like a lamp that no one lit. Seven notches are cut into the ritual pole that stands inside the shaman’s tent — seven platforms, one for each of the lower heavens — and the shaman climbs them in his trance while his body stays seated on the floor.

The sick man is lying nearby. Something has left him. That is how sickness works in this cosmology: the soul — one of several souls the body carries — has been frightened away, or stolen by a spirit, or it has simply wandered too far into the spirit country and forgotten how to come back. The shaman’s job is to go find it.

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He has been a shaman for eleven years, but the calling came decades before his initiation.

The calling always comes as illness. When he was seventeen, something broke inside him. He could not eat. He dreamed continuously — of being dismembered, his bones cleaned and counted by spirits who spoke in a language he barely understood. The dismemberment dreams lasted three years. The spirits took him apart to rebuild him: new bones, sometimes of iron, new eyes that could see in the dark, a second spine running alongside the first. When the community’s elder shaman finally recognized what was happening and brought him in for training, the young man had already been half-initiated by the spirits themselves.

This is the standard curriculum. You do not choose to become a shaman. Being chosen feels, at first, like being destroyed.

Now he sits in the healing tent. His spirit helpers — a raven, a brown bear, the ghost of his grandfather’s teacher — are already gathering at the edges of the firelight. He can see them, though no one else in the tent can. He begins to drum.

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The drumming is rhythmic and accelerating. Eight beats per second, approaching ten. The research done a century later by neurologists will confirm what the shaman already knows: at this frequency, the drum entrains the brain into a specific altered state, theta-wave dominant, in which the boundary between visual imagination and visual perception becomes permeable. The spirits become visible. The tree becomes climbable.

He goes up.

The first heaven is where the moon lives, and the moon is a woman with silver hair who tends a herd of white reindeer. He passes her with a respectful gesture. The second heaven is where the morning star burns. The third is where the thunder lives — a man with an iron hammer sitting in a tent made of clouds. The shaman passes them all, climbing the tree that is also his drum-beat, that is also the smoke rising through the tent’s central hole, that is also the birch pole with its seven notches.

At the ninth heaven he finds Ülgen, the supreme sky deity, seated on a golden throne.

And near Ülgen, confused and blinking, is something small and luminous — the escaped soul of the sick man below. The shaman coaxes it. He speaks the proper words. He reaches out with the cup his grandfather’s teacher showed him how to hold — invisible to everyone but him, present as anything — and captures the soul like a small warm bird.

He comes back down.

The drumming slows. He opens his eyes. The tent is full of smoke and the smell of juniper and the salt of the helpers’ tears, because they always cry when the shaman returns safely. He walks to the sick man and breathes the soul back in through the man’s crown.

The man’s color, which had been gray, shifts almost immediately. By morning he is sitting up asking for food.

The tree stands at the center. The drum is still.