ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at shamans as religious specialists who exercise power over other people: their patients, members of their own vocation, specialists of other religions, and agents of the spiritual world, who bring illness and misfortune to the healers' clients. The use of physical strength paired with magical power is also a topos in purely shamanic stories. Shamans are not only colleagues in a common professional guild, they are, as a rule, also competitors with one another boastful enemies claiming to strive for their combatants' blood. In Mongolia, the persecutions were stirred by another power; one whose doctrine of non-violence would not suggest such destructive energies. Here, beginning in the seventeenth century, it was above all the Lamaist clergy whose proselytising methods administered the systematic suppression of shamanism. In Tibet and in the Himalayan regions south, the clash between shamanism and Buddhism took the form of physical competition between two protagonists, each of which represented one of the two creeds.
