Hear the tale of Shaman Claus
Odds are good you’ve already come across the wide array of origins that make up Christmas tradition. Festive trees from ancient Rome to Germany’s evergreen Tannenbaum, Victorian Christmas carols, Viking yule logs. It’s a long list.
But did you know the Shamanic part of Santa’s story? Yes, there were certain red-clothed, gift-giving Scandinavians who went by many names, yet even before those, the Tungusic peoples of Siberia laid a credible claim to his legend.
The Evenki are one of these indigenous northern cultures. Historically these hunter-gatherers were also — get this — reindeer herders. Their survival in a frigid climate depended on the food, milk, transportation and clothing domesticated reindeer could provide.
The Evenki were also a shamanic culture. A shaman is like a healer-plus, someone believed to have direct access to, and influence upon, the spirit world, typically through rituals. Shamanism is commonly part of Asian and North American indigenous cultures.
The word “shaman” itself may derive from the Tungus word “saman,” which means “one who knows or knows the spirits.” Some classic shamanic characteristics, later reflected in cultures all over the world, were originally documented by Russian and European explorers who observed the Tungus peoples.
Getting back to Christmas traditions, one aspect of Evenki shamanism was their use of the sacred and psychoactive Fly Agaric mushroom (a.k.a. the Alice in Wonderland mushroom). The round, red mushrooms grow beneath certain types of evergreen trees and were believed, due to the lack of seed, to be divinely reproduced.
The toxic properties of these mushrooms could be reduced by drying them out, so people simply placed them among the branches of the tree from which they were picked — kind of like decorating it with little red, round things. Sound familiar?
If that isn’t enough, the shaman would carry the mushrooms in a sack when he visited the homes of village people. Who, the story goes, sometimes dried them further in a sock near a fire. Maybe that’s conjecture by now, but it flies.
Speaking of flying: Reindeer like these mushrooms, too. Apparently one of the visions humans have while on the ‘shrooms, in addition to space and time distortions, is flying.
Reindeer and gift-sack-carrying shamans flying? Near the magnetic North Pole? Hmm. That’s a lot more interesting than visions of sugarplums.
Merry Christmas Eve!
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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network who has never tried a sugarplum. She can be reached at [email protected].