The Yakut Shaman Descends to Abasy

The man named Semyon has been wrong for eleven days.

His family cannot specify exactly how he is wrong — he breathes, he sits up, he takes broth when it is held to his lips — but there is a quality absent from his presence that everyone who knows him can identify and none of them can name. He is not sick in any way the body registers. He is depleted. The shadow-soul — the buor kut, the earth-bound portion of the soul that mediates between the body and the physical world — has been taken from him, and without it he is becoming progressively less attached to the surface of his own life, fading the way a fire fades when the wood is consumed and no one has thought to add more.

The oyuun — the Yakut shaman — arrives on the twelfth day. He has been called from two villages away because the local spirits know him, and more importantly because he is the one practitioner in this region who has made the descent to the lower tiers and returned intact. Not all oyuun can do this. The upper-world journey is dangerous in the way that high mountains are dangerous: the altitude alone can kill you if you are not prepared. The lower-world journey is dangerous in a different way — the Abasy demons who populate the lower tiers are not merely hostile; they are organized, intelligent, and experienced at preventing exactly what the shaman intends to do. They know him. He knows them. The negotiation will be adversarial and prolonged.

He examines Semyon without touching him. He looks at the quality of the light around the man’s head. He listens. He makes a sound with the drum — a single low beat, then silence — and watches how the air in the tent responds to the resonance. He knows within the first few minutes that the shadow-soul is in the lower tiers. He knows which tier by the quality of Semyon’s depletion, by the specific signature of the absence, the way a doctor knows the pathogen from the symptoms.

He asks the family for nine days. They agree because they have no choice.

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The Yakut cosmology is not vague. This is the first thing to understand about it. The world-tree — Aal Luuk Mas, the great branching center — stands at the exact midpoint of the middle world, which is where the living reside. Its crown rises through tier after tier of the upper world: nine tiers, or sometimes seven, depending on which clan’s counting you trust, each one inhabited by progressively more powerful sky-spirits, the highest presided over by Ürüng Aiyy Toyon, the White Lord Creator, who is so remote from human affairs that even the most powerful shamans rarely reach him. The roots of the tree descend in the opposite direction, through the ice-road, past the frozen intermediate zones where lesser spirits accumulate, down to the depths where the Abasy rule their own tiered darkness.

The serpent at the root and the eagle at the crown are not decorative. They are the two poles of spiritual power — the chthonic and the celestial — and the shaman who can negotiate with both has earned a position in the cosmological structure that no other human being holds. Most oyuun work the middle world and the upper tiers. The lower-tier shamans are rarer, more feared, and more physically destroyed by the work. The trance that the lower journey requires is not the light catalepsy of an upper-world session. It is nine days, and the body at the surface must be monitored continuously, and the assistants who keep the drum-thread running are themselves exhausted by the end.

The oyuun knows all of this from his initiation — the dream-dismemberment, the rebuilding, the years of training under the spirits who claimed him. He does not think about it in these terms as he begins the séance on the first evening. He thinks about the drum. The drum is everything. The drum is his mount, his anchor, his weapon, and his compass. When the drum rhythm reaches a certain speed and a certain quality of resonance — a quality that cannot be transcribed in any notation but can be learned — the upper half of the world begins to thin, and the lower begins to become accessible, and the shaman’s consciousness begins the process of departure from the body that is the core of everything he knows.

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The ice-road is exactly what the name suggests: a path through frozen darkness, the temperature dropping as the tiers descend, the light available becoming less and less until it is entirely interior light — the shaman’s own luminosity, which his training has developed into something navigable. He has landmarks. Every shaman who makes this journey leaves markers — spirit-agreements with certain entities at certain junctures — and the marks of previous shamans who have traveled this route are also visible, the way cairns on a mountain trail mark passage for those who come after.

The Abasy who have Semyon’s shadow-soul are in the third lower tier. The oyuun can read this from the ice: there are traces of the shadow-soul’s passage, the disturbance in the spiritual substrate that a forcibly-taken soul leaves behind, and the depth of the traces indicates the tier. Third tier is difficult but manageable. The deeper tiers — where Uluu Toyon, the great lord of the Abasy, holds court in his iron palace — would require a different kind of intervention entirely and a different kind of negotiation.

The Abasy at the third tier are numerous. They are not the abstract evil that some traditions assign to underworld entities; they are specific beings with specific temperaments, specific desires, specific histories with the shamans who have dealt with them before. The oyuun knows several of them by name, or by the names shamans use for them, which may not be their own names at all. He knows what they want: payment, primarily. Shadow-souls are currency in the lower tiers — they can be consumed for sustenance, traded for other things, hoarded as wealth. A freshly taken shadow-soul from a living man is worth considerably more than an old one.

He offers the sacrifice of a horse, the promise of future tobacco at the altar, and the return of a spirit-debt from a previous séance that he has been carrying for four years waiting for exactly this kind of negotiation. The Abasy consider. The Abasy counter. The oyuun is not improvising; he has modeled this negotiation in advance, the way a chess player models positions, and he has reserves that the Abasy do not know he has.

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By the fourth day, his body at the surface has become a concern. His assistants are feeding him broth through the semi-trance states when his consciousness partially returns, and during these surface intervals he is able to communicate in fragments — enough to let them know the negotiation is proceeding, not enough to describe the detail. His wife sits with him through the nights. She does not drum — that is not her role — but her presence is a thread, a warmth that he can feel from the lower tiers as a faint upward pull, and experienced oyuun use this pull the way sailors use the pole star.

On the seventh day the Abasy yield the shadow-soul. The payment has been accepted, the counter-offers resolved, the spirit-debt settled. The oyuun gathers Semyon’s shadow-soul from the third-tier darkness the same way a Tungus shaman gathers a lost soul — carefully, with both hands in the spirit sense, accepting nothing broken in the process. A broken shadow-soul would be worse than its absence: a man with a fractured buor kut becomes something that is not quite either the living or the dead, a condition the Yakut call oghus, which translates approximately as ‘ghost-adjacent,’ and which no amount of subsequent shamanic work can fully repair.

The ascent takes two days. The ice-road going up is harder than going down, because the lower tiers do not want to release what they have agreed to release — agreement and desire are not the same thing, even for spirits, and the Abasy who surrendered the shadow-soul are following him up the ice-road with the persistent attention of creditors who are not sure they were paid enough. He has to manage this from behind: a series of spirit-agreements at the junctures he marked on the way down, each one providing a threshold the Abasy cannot cross, each one costing something he has prepared for this purpose.

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On the ninth morning the oyuun’s eyes focus.

He sits up without assistance. He looks at Semyon across the tent and finds what he is looking for — the specific luminosity that indicates the shadow-soul has been received, the quality of presence that has been absent for eleven days now returned. He breathes. He eats for the first time in nine days from a bowl his wife hands him without comment.

Semyon also sits up on the ninth morning. Not by coincidence. The return of a shadow-soul is not gradual; it arrives or it does not, and when it arrives the change is immediate, the way a fire catches immediately once the conditions are right. He asks for water. He asks what has happened. His family tells him.

He does not remember the absence. This is characteristic. The person whose soul is taken does not experience the taking as loss; they experience it as a slow indefinite wrongness, a fading of the quality that makes life feel like their own life, which resolves into clear memory the moment the soul is restored and which cannot be recalled or described in the gap while it was absent.

The oyuun is paid in horses and food and the goodwill of the clan, which is worth more than horses and food in the economy he actually lives in. He rests for three days before beginning the journey back to his own village. The Abasy at the third tier will be looking for another shadow-soul within the month; they always are. He will hear about it from whatever oyuun is called, and he will offer what counsel he can.

The Yakut word for shaman — oyuun — is cognate with similar terms across a vast stretch of northeastern Siberia, suggesting a lineage of practice that predates any current ethnic or linguistic boundary. The specific cosmological features — the nine upper tiers, the world-tree, the ice-road to the lower tiers, the Abasy demons and their appetite for shadow-souls — are documented in the Olonkho epics, which UNESCO recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2005. The oyuun in this story is historical in type if not in individual; the nine-day trance for lower-world soul retrieval is documented in multiple nineteenth-century ethnographic accounts.