The exhibition Shamanism of the Peoples of Siberia, from the Russian Museum of Ethnography, Saint Petersburg, reveals a unique phenomenon in world civilisation – the shamanism across mythological world view of the peoples of Siberia and the Russian Far East in the late 19th and early 20th century - carried out by shamans, as intermediaries between heaven and earth.

The shaman considered himself a person chosen by spirits because he was able to establish contact with spiritual beings of all three worlds. In a ritual called mutton, he achieved a stagnation in which he crossed the world of ghosts. He was a mediator between man, nature, and the holy world, inhabited by ghosts, and he strives for the coexistence of nature and humankind. He was a guardian of rare knowledge and traditions and he had essential knowledge the role in the life of a community into which it was incorporated through its rituals into its social, economic and spiritual activities. The rituals were accompanied by the ancestors and his ancestors spiritual helpers.

Sacred objects, together with photographs, sounds and a film of shamanic ecstatic rituals, reflect the special interconnectedness found in the inspiring characteristics of Siberian shamanism, which is made manifest in the inseparable link between man, nature and cultural tradition. 

Text from www.etno-muzej.si.