Flames and Doorways
John Lord Couper
I love learning from students. One example is the adventure sparked during an advising session with a graduate advisee in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Aigul’s name means “moon flower.”
After I casually mentioned my interest in local spiritual culture, she invited me to several events. The most dramatic was a sense-churning shamanic mountain ceremony.
“Shaman” is the Central Asian word of someone who teaches, leads and practices the ancient, animistic traditions that blend the spiritual, cultural, natural, and educational.
It tells us that all of life is imbued with spirits — around and within us. A traditional Central Asian shaman looks beyond everyday life to team with good spirits against malicious spirits that cause disease. People access this usually-unseen dimension by altering their consciousness through music, herbs, fire, and prayer.
Despite Soviet efforts to eradicate it, and Islamic efforts to replace it, the timeless steppe faith usually called “Tengrism” remains strong. Almost every village and neighborhood in Kazakhstan has a shamanic healer, while others focus on cultural and spiritual aspects.
One friend is a leading western-trained surgeon who mixes western and shamanic treatments in his operating theatre.
Like all faiths, it is often deeply personal. During most strolls through a park, it’s normal to see someone (usually an old woman) hugging a birch tree as she connects with a spirit or loved one.
My wife Naila, who grew up in a village near the dynamic Altai and Tuva regions, has her own ceremonies at home every day.
So I’ll always be grateful to Aigul for introducing me to an ancient when she invited Naila and I to a ceremony in the nearby foothills of the continent-spanning Tien Shan mountains.
Ceremonial Valley
The short drive to the ceremony, from city to village to valley, was like passing through a door into an unfamiliar room. Everyone was welcoming, but I still felt like a friendly intruder mixed with the buzz of a new experience.
The ceremony was led by the respected Siberian musician and teacher Nikolay Oorzhak. He is a master of the mysterious Tuvan “throat singing” that pairs deep throaty sounds with a high-pitched tone.
The short-grass hills were softening in the evening sun as we reached a simple parking area. About a dozen people were gathering there — some were advanced students of the faith, others newcomers to a tradition that merges spiritual, natural, cultural, and eternal.
I arrived with little sense of what to expect. At first I regretted my ignorance, but quickly felt that arriving as a blank slate made my experience deeper and more direct.
After 15 minutes ambling up a small valley footpath, we arrived in an open area dotted with bear-sized stones, just above a stream and a small tree. This power-rich spot, Aigul explained, was often used for ceremonies. Oorzhak’s co-leader, Olga, asked us to gather firewood to feed the flames that would serve as the ceremony’s hub.
As dusk settled in, Oorzhak arrived in the full traditional shamanic suit of skins, long fringe, beads, and a feathered headdress. Olga returned wearing her own traditional clothes.
This tradition spans not only millennia, but continents. 19th-century visitors to the American west painted identical outfits on dancers in tribes like the Arikara.
The third leader was the kindly Kazakh man who gave us a ride to the valley, wearing white Buddhist robes for this ecumenical gathering.
A Mystical Door
Then Oorzhak pushed wide open the spiritual doorway. He led with prayers in the ancient Tuvan language, beating a sacred drum. He switched to song while playing the two-stringed traditional instrument called a “kobuz.” This is said to be bridge between a shaman and the cleansing forces of spirit and nature — especially the main god Tengri.
The lilting music, chant-like and dramatic, wove among the crackling flames and into the darkness.
The sensations that tugged at me were both jarring and comforting. I couldn’t really join in the singing, but welcomed its connection to nature and culture. I was a clueless guest, but could see this as a spiritual homecoming for Naila.
After a while, Oorzhak’s singing trailed into silence. Then each of us selected a colored ribbon from a leather bag, carrying it across the stream to a small tree just below the bonfire. We tied our ribbon on a branch as a fluttering prayer to someone we felt inspired to care about. It was startling to see that this prayer ribbon tradition was exactly like those of sacred Plains Indian spots, like Bear Butte in South Dakota.
After returning to the fire for another hour of singing and prayer, we shared snacks then prayed a little longer. Returning down the path to the cars, we said goodbye then drove back to the city. The road beneath us felt hard and strange after the ceremony’s resonant warmth and the earth’s welcome.
In the years since, I’ve never lost this hazy, unforgettable bond with spirits of nature, history and community.
Travel and cross-cultural connections are keys to being human — the most memorable are usually unexpected. A casual comment to Aigul opened a doorway for me into intense, beautiful Central Asia, a place that will never leave me.
If you’d like to learn more about my experience in Central Asia, my decades of travel, or my program training people who want to develop an “Adventure Attitude”, please contact me at info@johnlordcouper.com or visit my page Substack.com/profile/18117052-johnlordcouper-ph.d.
Nikolay Oorzhak
