Pásztor Emília (szerk.): Sámánizmus és természethit régen és ma - Bajai dolgozatok 23. (Baja, 2019)
Andrzej Rozwadowski: Varázslyukak: Átjárók a szellemek világába a szibériai sámánizmusban
Sacred holes: Portals to the world of spirits in Siberian shamanism A precondition for understanding shamanism is to accept a worldview, according to which, apart from the visible world, there is another reality, for shamanic cultures truly real (not an illusionary or imaginary). Access to this other world is not easy, however, it requires special knowledge and skills that are the domain of shamans. The social need to have a shaman in society stemmed from the belief that everything that is happening here and now is closely linked with and depend on the spirits who populate the invisible world. The shaman played thus the role of an intermediary between the human world and the spirits. His/her significance resulted from the fact that he could actively influence these relations. Shamans could contribute to a successful hunt (allowing animals to be hunted), influence the weather (which is also controlled by forces unavailable to an ordinary mortal), assist the soul of the deceased on its way to the kingdom of ancestors, sometimes bringing the soul of the deceased person back into the world of the living (if human death occurred in unexpected "premature" circumstances - Burnakov 2008, 614), and finally to heal. In the case of illness, for example, it was believed that the source of physical or mental ailments is the loss of the soul of a sick person (or one of his souls - it was believed that man has several of them). To cure the "patient", the shaman set out for a journey to search for a stolen or lost soul to bring it back to the body of the sick person. Therefore, the shamanic ritual was a symbolic journey to a world inhabited by spirits. Since the latter had their residences in different and distant corners of the universe, the shaman journeyed into its distant spheres. Shamans traveled vertically (ascending to the upper or descending to lower levels of cosmos) as well as horizontally. In its vertical model, the Siberian cosmos was multi-leveled. Its three-layered structure (implying the upper, middle and lower worlds) should, however, be treated as a working concept, since each of these zones could consist (depending on the given tradition) of more subzones. The "Sky" itself, for example, could contain up to six layers (Funk 1997), and in the folklore of south Siberia (Khakas people) researchers registered beliefs in as many as seventy layers of the lower world (Burnakov 2008, 609). Crossing so many layers was not an easy task, and only most experienced shamans possessed the power and knowledge how to reach the outermost points of the universe - the "bottom of the Sky" or "the bottom of the Earth", as it was sometimes defined (Sagalaev 1992, 46).
