Shaman gathering in Tuva

The gathering of the most powerful shamans from different parts of the globe, have arrived in the Republic of Tuva in southern Siberia, near the border with Mongolia. Shamans from Sweden, Greenland, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, gathering at the festival devoted to the shamanic culture.

Asite from participants all over the world, this festival attracted shamans from four different corners of the regions of Russia. Altai, Khakassia, Yakutia and Tuva. All sorts of shamanic practices can been seen in this great event, such as drum rites, rituals, throat singing and meditation. The organizers also promise to hold interesting seminars and master classes on the spiritual practices of shamans and divination. Typical healing dances will also be taught to whoever wants to learn. The global goal of the festival is the revival of the shamanic traditions.

The festival is called "Call of 13 Shamans" and the idea came from its originator, the khoomei throat singing master Nikolay Oorzhak, a hereditary Tuvan shaman from the Black Heaven clan. 

The festival is taking place for the first time and so far without any sponsor support.

The honorary guest of the festival, the Mexican shaman Don Rogelio Carrillo, said that it was the similarity in the traditions of his people and those of Tuvans that drew him to the distant Siberian region.

Yggdrasil the symbol of Initiation

Initiation in shamanism usually means the passage into a normal mundane state of life into a higher state of mind when one is more connected with his/her own spirit and is able to live between this world and the world that can be seen through an altered state of consciousness, experiencing "death" through self-sacrifice. This also means achieving greater knowledge, it does not require any exchanges, only full sincere devotion of the individual. A search of the true spiritual sense, freeing the mind of the condition of being a human being limited in their ability to act towards what seems elusive, untouchable and unknown, opening the door to another reality and very much alive, completely destroying the meaning of the earthly world being the only possible reality.
We can see this kind of self-sacrífice in Odin, one of the most famous shamans, and all the symbolism contained in his history, being a metaphor to release the mind to the world of spirits, in Yggdrasil, the world tree, the symbol of life, houses everything that has life and has conscious. Odin wounded himself with his spear Gungnir to precipitate delirium which comes in many ways, one of which is near death from blood loss, hanging in the great Ash tree upside down in complete fasting and sensorial abstinence, the most ancient manner to induce trance by shamans, through a series of brutal acts against the body to reach the state of near death and hallucinate. By doing this, Odin was able to leave his body, and earn the knowledge of the sacret language, the Runes. Many shamans used such ways to enter in trance in the most primordial times of humanity, in search for aid and answers from the spirits, visiting the spiritual world for knowledge and such knowledge was shared amoung the communities and thus learning from the shaman and from the spirits, people would understand better the world around them and life itself. This also facilitated communication between mortals with the deities and natural forces of our world and the spirits of each living creature. The story of Odin seeking knowledge of the Runes helps us understand how shamans acted when seeking knowledge beyond what could be seen in the normal world we know, not only by the way the trance was induced but also the symbolism of riding into a spiritual journey to another world, just as the shamans rides his/her horse that might be the drum of a animal/spirit/deity in the other world, so did Odin rode in his journey, the meaning of Yggdrasil is the very channel that connects us to the world of the spirits, being Ygg one of the names of Odin and Drasil means Horse, so it is literally the horse of Ygg, the passage that might take us beyond the thin veil that separates this world from the world of spirits.

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Curiosity: In old Lusitania

For those of you who dont know where Lusitania is or was, i will help you with that:


Lusitania was the country where the Lusitanian people lived, in the Iberian peninsula in the continent of Europe, where today exists the modern countrys of Spain and Portugal.
The Portuguese people and some of the spanish people, are decendents from the Lusitans, often people think about the Lusitans, as Iberians or Celtiberians, but in truth, the Lusitanian people were Celts. The Celts start their expansion over the European territories something like 1200 B.C./B.C.E. and that was the year when they first arrived to the Iberian peninsula, 200 years before they went to Great Britain. There were a lot of Celtic tribes in Spain and Portugal, and each tribe settled in a place, one of those tribes of Celts, were the Lusitans, or the Lusitanian peoples. Probably their name wasn't that, because the Romans called them Lusus/Lusos, probably they had an other name, a Celtic one. These tribe had the biggest part of Central Portugal and they became the most powerful people in the Iberian peninsula. They were no longer a Celtic Tribe, now they were a nation. They conquered most of Portugal exept the North that belonged to their other Celtic brothers, and conquered a large territory of Spain. Today we know that their language was of germanic source, it was found in archaeological discoveries, that they wrote in the celtic language called Ogham and also in the Runic Alphabet, not with the runes we know today, but with the first symbols where the runes came from, called ur-runes.


We have all heard about the Druids, but before the Druid's time, the Lusitanian people had already a spiritual guide, elders in each Lusitanian tribe, called Endre, in plural, Endres. These men and probably women, were something between a shaman and a druid, they were teachers of philosophy, anatomy, spiritualism, science etc. and they knew how to work with the neolithic monuments such as Dolmens, henges, sacred mounds, menhirs etc.


So this is very important to know, because most people think that the Lusitanian people were just Iberians, but in fact they were Celts, and the Celtiberians were the mixture with other Celts from the Central Iberian peninsula, with the Iberian people that were the native folk from the Cost line of Spain to the East and Northeast.

Also a very curious thing, when the Celts arrived in Irland, they have not passed through england to get there, they came by sea from the Iberian peninsula, some Celts, some Iberians and many Lusitans. So many people in Irland, have the same ancestry as the Portuguese people.

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