May 9-16, 2008: In the city
Figure 4.
My first week conducting field research in Ulaanbaatar I met with an urban shaman named Zorigtbataar who practices in a ger in front of Gandan Monastery42, right behind a store that specializes in the sale of Russian groceries. When I had told residents of Ulaanbaatar in passing that I was going to try and meet with him, many people told me something along the lines of “You’re studying shamanism, why do you want to meet with someone who is clearly a showman?” I showed up at his ger with my translator and an open mind going into the interview nonetheless. You see, dear reader, I believe in magic, and I enjoy pleasant surprises.
There is a fence that surrounds the two gers that this urban shaman uses for his practice. I arrived there with my translator in the midst of what appeared to be a serious construction project (I was told a rumor wherein the lamas of the most central monastery in Mongolia had requested that Zorigtbaatar not practice shamanism in a ger directly in front of their premises.) The shaman appeared to be building a permanent sedentary structure, as there was a big pit directly alongside the main ger (although the two were the same size.) There were scores of people waiting to be granted an audience by this shaman43, and one of his women attendants, (clad in what I can only describe as something vaguely reminiscent of a del that called forth images of modern dance competitions, all sparkly and polyester and bright pink,) told us that we could speak with the shaman in a few minutes.
When we went inside, I noticed that there were three other young women wearing the same costume in various colors. The ger was one of the strangest places I have ever been to because of the range and sheer mass of bizarre objects it contained. Directly to the left and right of the entrance, there were two taxidermied eagles, their full wingspan extended. Hanging from the latticework along the left side of the entrance was a medieval style coat of Mongolian leather armor. Adjacent to the entrance, to the right, there was a giant screen television set that was playing a Japanese knock-off of Britney Spears’s seminal classic music video “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” Schoolgirl costumes and cheesy choreography were not compromised.
There were many things that looked like antiques from other parts of Asia, posters of Buddhist deities, shamanic paraphernalia44, as well as some dramatic looking indiscernible objects that looked like they had come out from the darkest recesses of a closet that might come from a nightmare a circus might have. Cluttering almost every surface, these objects created a sensory overload for me, and they co-occupied the space with a variety of goods one often sees in tourist shops in Ulaanbaatar. There were two altars across from the ger door that were covered in butter candles, one of the chests carved very beautifully with a reindeer scene that evoked petroglyphic art, painted in bright colors, and to the left of the altars was an ornately carved throne in fine Zanabazar45-ian form, behind which several shamans’ drums or hitz46 and costumes hung, inanimate. To the left of the throne was a leather wall hanging of Chinggis Khan, complete with coarse black hair glued to all of the right places.
The Mongolian shaman’s costume varies based upon ethnicity, color designation, and from shaman to shaman as it is created under the direction of the shaman’s ongod, and it has three basic components: headdress, del and tashoor47 which all become “alive” during a ritual when a shaman is in trance or partial possession.
Figure 5.
Figure 7.
(some other prints I can't find my photographs of...)
Figure 8.
However, this particular costume looked much more like the kind that I had seen the ancient shamans (professional dancers) wearing in a tourist show when I first arrived in Ulaanbaatar––meets day-glow powwow wear. The three versions hanging behind the throne came in an assortment of unusually jazzy colors had the basic components of the shaman’s costume I had become familiar with, with snakes dangling48 (in this case showy tassels) from them, mirrors49 (usually a necklace strung with khaddag, but in this case made of plastic and sewn onto the front.) But it was wholly unlike any costume I had seen thus far because it was a short vest, not a long, long-sleeved traditional style shaman’s del.
Zorigtbataar came in long enough after I arrived in this space that I had an opportunity to make notes of and digest some of my surroundings. He was clad in western style cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a plaid shirt, with two little braids that were wrapped in leather string to keep them from falling out of his curly black hair. When he sat down on the throne, one of the women in the matching costumes came and put a shorter, version on him that matched hers, of a more typically masculine cut and style.
Figure 9.
I introduced myself, and he began by telling me about his experiences going to shamanic gatherings in the U.S., next winter he said he would be in Santa Fe, California. He told me that it would be alright for me to ask him some questions, so I proceeded to do so. Zorigtbaatar has been a shaman for around 20 years, and he is a white shaman from Tov aimag. Unfortunately the few times that he answered a question directly, after I would probe him for a little bit further clarification he would change his answer. He told me that his ongod never left his head; that he had no teacher, and then later that he had had a teacher who was a lama; that he didn’t go into trance; and that he didn’t have shamans’ sickness, but he did have a rather outrageous origin story. He told me of an experience wherein he was wandering in the Gobi while in the army with no water while his two companions wasted away. He thought that he was going to die too, lying in the beating sun, parched, when a vision of cosmic creatures dressed in silver came to him in a dream, and he woke up alive.
As open as my mind was going into the interview, and even throughout (I thought perhaps that he was misunderstanding my questions, or at least that he believed most of what he told me) I became skeptical of his honesty and soundness of mind when the interview disintegrated into Zorigtbaatar talking about a book that he had written that was a bestseller in France, even though there was only one copy translated into French in the world, and he didn’t know its title in Mongolian either. Then came the numbers. He spoke of numbers that he could interpret that came from the eternal heavens from what he referred to as his “angels.” He interpreted the numbers into a kind of cryptic verse that my translator could not understand in Mongolian, except for this poetic prophesy:
Have to let people know about
The people from space that will come
The people who created earth
But people brought trouble to earth
Therefore trouble is coming
Big storm and flood, the black flood.
He continued,
You are sky messenger so I’m happy to help you, maybe you can deliver message of the shaman to the world—in trouble. I am also sky messenger. There are many shamans in Mongolia but I am the only one to deliver the message. Earth trouble is going to be first of all in America, so now many shamans in America. So only shamans know/can help with the Earth trouble.
My translator Zulaa was frightened that the tea (sudtai-tsai) one of his assistants had served us was poisoned or drugged, because at the time when it was served to us, after I had tried to conclude the interview, Zorigtbaatar had allegedly tried convince my translator and I to become his students “Because you have strong energy” and are “pretty girls” for the last half-hour. He did this while my translator merely nodded and tried to casually disengage. When we finally got up to leave (I was not included in the last half hour of conversation, but it was related to me later), my translator asked Zorigtbaatar in passing about the symbolic value of the eagles that decorated his entryway, to which he replied “Do you want to see a real eagle?” So we followed him to his second ger, his hands full of raw meat, to meet an eagle that was chained inside, looking reasonably perturbed at its imprisonment. Then, we left, and my translator laughed a great deal because she did not think that Zorigtbaatar was an authentic shaman at all. But I was uncertain, because he seemed to speak with the conviction of a man possessed, so to speak. When I discussed the interview with my academic advisor Bumochir later, he suggested that perhaps Zorigtbaatar50 was a teshren, or merely a showman, but most likely one who would fit into the “non-conventional” category. (Interview with Zorigtbaatar, 5-13-08)
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