ABSTRACT
In Imperial Russia, Orthodoxy was the state religion, and a political dimension must therefore be immediately taken into consideration when studying the interactions between shamanism and Christianity. For the Orthodox Church was directly dependent on political power. In 1721, Peter the Great abandoned the old Byzantine model in which the patriarch represented religious power. The patriarchate was abolished and the Church was run by the Holy Synod, whose members had the rank of state officials. The two powers were from then on both in the hands of the Emperor. The patriarchate would not be re-established until 1917, when the tsarist Empire had disappeared, and less than three months before the separation of the State and the Church. In Siberia, it was Peter the Great who initiated massive Christianization in the early eighteenth century. The reforming Tsar considered that all the Empire’s inhabitants must know that there is only one God in heaven and that there is, and can only be, one Tsar on earth. Of course, there were two issues involved in evangelization. It was a question of both Christianizing the shamanistic ethnic groups and Russianizing these non-Slav populations of the Empire in order to assimilate them. In this general context of an Empire grappling with cultural diversity, it is legitimate to wonder about the real or symbolic presence of Russians in the rituals organized by the shamanistic minorities in Siberia. Examples in which supposedly Russian spirits intervene directly in shamanism therefore deserve consideration. However, ritual links between Russians and minorities are neither restricted to this fairly simple case, nor are they confined to a limited field which could be described as ‘religious’ and would seem to be closely related to the work of the Orthodox missions as well as to Siberian shamanism. The situation appears more complex. For this Imperial State also deemed it necessary to institute rituals bringing together representatives of the State and Siberians. This is particularly the case for oaths of allegiance to the sovereign or for probatory oaths in court for, in Imperial Russia, these juratory practices play an important role. We are here at the junction of the religious, the political and the legal, and we shall need to ask ourselves how this Russian Orthodox State came to make its shamanistic minorities take oaths inasmuch as the Russian oath is explicitly associated with Christian representations.
