Olkhon Island

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The strait that the lake-people call the Little Sea is narrow enough that, on a still morning, a voice from the western shore carries to the island opposite. Across that water lies a body of dry land seventy kilometers long, ribbed with steppe and pine, its eastern flank rising to a single high ridge and its western coast broken by capes of pale stone. This is Olkhon, the largest island of Lake Baikal, and the people who have herded and fished its shores for centuries reckon it the holiest ground of their whole country — the seat from which the spirit-lords of the lake hold their court, and the home of the masters whom the Buryats have served for as long as the island has carried their dead.

The island in the deep lake

Lake Baikal is, by the measure of the sciences that study it, the oldest and the deepest lake on the planet — a rift valley some twenty-five million years in the making, its floor more than 1,600 meters below the surface, holding by volume the largest store of unfrozen fresh water on earth. The lake holds, by volume, between a fifth and a quarter of the unfrozen fresh water on the planet’s surface. It lies in southern Siberia, in the angle between Irkutsk Oblast to the northwest and the Republic of Buryatia to the southeast; in 1996 UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List for the age and isolation that have made it a closed world of endemic life. Into the western reach of this lake, set off from the mainland by the shallow channel of the Little Sea and the deeper Olkhon Gate, juts Olkhon.

It is by far the largest island of Baikal — about 730 square kilometers, the fourth-largest lake island in the world — and its character is not that of the wet taiga around it but of the open steppe. The eastern side climbs to Mount Zhima, near 1,276 meters; the western side runs in low headlands of marble and dolomite down to the water. Olkhon takes almost no rain, so that pine groves alternate with bare grassland and shifting sand, and the few villages — chief among them Khuzhir, the island’s center — have lived by herding cattle and horses, by fishing the lake, and, in the last generation, by the travelers who now come in great numbers. The people of these shores are Buryats, the northernmost of the Mongol peoples, together with Russians; and to the Buryats the island has never been ground like other ground.

In their reckoning the island is the dwelling of spirit-lords, the masters of the place, who must be honored by anyone who lives on it or passes through it. One body of these powers, revered in particular by the Buryats whose shamanism took on a Buddhist coloring, is named the oikhony noyod, the thirteen lords of Olkhon — a council of high spirits seated on the island and ruling the lake around it. Olkhon, in this frame, is not a place that happens to be sacred. It is the residence of the powers themselves, the firm land at the center of the lake-world, and the rock at its western edge is the door to their house.

Shaman Rock (Shamanka) at Cape Burkhan, Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal. Photograph by amanderson2, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Cape Burkhan and the lord of the lake

A little outside Khuzhir, where the steppe runs out into the water, two peaks of white marble rise joined at the base by a saddle of stone — one some thirty meters, the other near forty-two — their pale rock stained across with the red of lichen. This is Cape Burkhan, known across the Baikal world as the Shamanka, the Shaman Rock: the most revered shrine of the entire lake. Through the seaward peak the wind and water have cut a passage clean through the stone, a cave open at both ends, and it is this cave that holds the rock’s sanctity. A second cave, low and narrow, runs through the near-shore peak, worn out of the marble over ages by the water and the wind; it is this hollow in the stone that gives the place its holiness. Within it, the Buryats hold, dwells the lord-spirit of Olkhon — Ugute-noion, the master of the island, named in other tellings Khan Khute-Baabai, reckoned the eldest and most powerful of the thirteen lords of the lake, the fiercest and most honored of all the powers of Baikal, the lord to whom the lake-shore cult was first directed. To call the spirit by one settled name is already to simplify; the lake-people speak of him under several, and the variation is itself a mark of how old and how deeply local the honoring of him is. The headland has carried many names — the Cave Cape, the Shaman Cape, the Shamanka — and when, in later centuries, the Buddhist teaching reached the island, the place took the name Burkhan, the Mongol word for a Buddha or a divine being, so that the rock now bears at once the name of the shaman and the name of the Buddha.

The depth of the place in time is plain in the ground around it. Diggers have lifted from the cave and the isthmus the arrowheads, the potsherds, and the worked gold of burials reckoned more than five thousand years old — so that the rock was a holy site, and a place of the dead, long before any name we can now read was given to its lord. The later layering is written there too: when Tibetan Buddhism began to spread among the Buryats from the seventeenth century, the lamas took the cave for a sanctuary of their own and set up within it an altar to the Buddha, and for a season even an icon of the Orthodox wonder-worker Nikolai is said to have hung in the same hollow. One door, and many who have knocked at it — the shaman, the lama, the priest, each finding the place already holy and each leaving his mark on it without unseating the lord who held it first.

The sanctity of the rock was guarded by a hedge of taboo. In the older custom women were kept from the cape altogether, forbidden even to draw near it, and only a male shaman might enter the cave; the dead, likewise, were not to be carried past so holy a seat, lest a corpse defile the ground of the lord. A rider crossing near it would muffle his horse’s hooves or dismount, would lower his voice, would make no sound that might trouble the master of the place. These were not the rules of a shrine one entered to worship. They were the manners owed to a powerful lord at home, on the threshold of whose house one walked softly.

Serge posts hung with ribbons of petition at Cape Burkhan, Olkhon Island. Photograph by amanderson2, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The rite of the lake-shore

The worship that gathers at the rock, and at the other sacred capes of the island, is the worship of the masters of the place — and it is conducted in the idiom of the steppe and the lake, not of a temple. Its most visible signs are the serge: tall wooden posts set upright in the ground near the holy places, in the old life the hitching-posts to which a household tied its horses, and in the sacred grammar of the Buryats the posts raised to the spirits, the standing markers that a place is claimed and a power honored. At Cape Burkhan a row of them stands above the cave. To the posts, and to the trees about the shrines, the petitioners tie ribbons and strips of cloth — blue and white, red and yellow and green — each color carrying its own address to the powers: the blue of the sky, the white of milk, the red of fire, the green of the earth. A ribbon left at the post is a prayer made fast in the world, a petition tied where the spirit will find it.

The offering that goes with the prayer is drink. To the masters of the lake one gives a little of what one carries — milk, kumys, the fermented mare’s milk of the steppe, or vodka in the modern day — flicked into the air or sprinkled on the ground with the ring finger toward the cape, a share rendered to the lord before one takes one’s own. This is the brizganie, the libation that no traveler on the island is wise to neglect; the powers are owed their portion, and the road past the rock is safer for the giving. None of this is the business of a priesthood set apart. It is the daily courtesy of a people who live among spirits, the ordinary commerce of the living with the lords of their ground.

Above this common piety stands the shaman — the böö, in the Buryat tongue, the man or woman called by the spirits to the office and made by them through the long sickness of the calling. The Buryat lands are, in the wider study of these traditions, the great reservoir of Mongol shamanism, the country where the office kept its strength when it had thinned elsewhere; and Olkhon has long been counted the heart of that country, the island whose lords gave the shamans of the Baikal shore their power. The shaman is the one who can pass where the ordinary petitioner cannot — who can send the soul through the layered cosmos that the steppe and taiga peoples share, the upper world of the bright sky-powers, the middle world of the living, the lower world of the dead and of Erlik the king beneath. He treats the sickness that is soul-loss, escorts the dead, reads the will of the masters, and stands between the household and the powers it cannot face alone. The vocation is genuine, sealed by the spirits’ choice and not by any human appointment; the serge, in one of its meanings, marks the grave of a shaman, the post set where such a one was laid. The rites are described here, not taught — what the shaman does in the séance belongs to the shaman and the spirits, and the soul-journey is no traveler’s exercise.

The same hospitality of the lake-shore later made room for the Buddhist teaching that spread among the Buryats from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On Olkhon the two did not so much replace as layer: the rock’s lord kept his cave, the lamas used it as a sanctuary, and the very name Burkhan married the shaman’s shrine to the Buddha’s word. The thirteen lords of the island belong to a stratum of Buryat practice in which the spirit-cult and the Buddhist powers stand side by side, honored by the same petitioners at the same posts. It is a coexistence, not a conquest — the older masters of the place receiving their milk while the newer teaching builds its own house beside theirs.

Valentin Khagdaev, a Buryat shaman of Olkhon Island. Photograph by Arkadiy Zarubin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Suppression, survival, and the open rock

For a long stretch of the twentieth century the worship of the island was driven into silence. The early-Soviet campaigns against religion ranked the shaman among the class enemies, alongside the priest and the rich herder; through the collectivizing years the rituals were forbidden, the drums and the regalia seized and burned, and the practitioners faced denunciation, arrest, and worse, so that the open service of the lake-lords all but ceased. The record of how many were lost is incomplete. What is certain is that the cult went quiet — its rites pared down, its posts left untended, its shamans dead or hidden — through decades in which the masters of Olkhon were honored only out of sight.

It did not die. When the Soviet state fell away, the worship of the island returned into the open, part of a wider revival that saw shamanism listed among the traditional religions of Buryatia and the neighboring republics and its practitioners gathered into registered associations. On Olkhon the serge stand thick again above Cape Burkhan, hung with new ribbons; the libations are poured; and shamans practice on the island once more — among them Valentin Khagdaev, consecrated to the office in his family’s old line after the death of its last shaman, who serves the rites of the Baikal Buryats and takes the lead role at the Yordynskie igry, the ethnic festival held near the island. Scholars who watch this revival note that the institutional shape it has taken — the associations, the certificates, the place of tourism — owes much to forms worked out under the very state that had tried to end it; the anthropologist Aleksandra Wierucka, who carried out fieldwork on the island in 2010, distinguishes several coexisting forms of modern shaman activity on Olkhon — one shaped to the expectations of visitors, one run through the shamans’ registered association, one kept quietly in the villages — a practice at once continuous with the old cult and reshaped by the conditions of its return. Whether one calls it recovery or remaking, the lords of Olkhon are again honored on their rock.

And the rock is now famous far beyond the lake. Cape Burkhan, the twin peaks of white marble at the water’s edge, has become the single most photographed of all the sacred places of Siberia, the image by which Baikal is known to the world, and the goal of pilgrims and travelers who come in their thousands across the Little Sea. The crowding has its own weight — the old taboos strained by the press of visitors, the sacred ground worn by feet that do not know the manners owed to the masters. Yet the island holds its character through it. It remains what it has been: the firm land at the center of the deepest lake, the seat of the spirit-lords of the Baikal world, where the milk is still flicked toward the cave and the lord of the lake is still honored on the rock that carries the shaman’s name.

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