Central & North Asia
Thread · Northern European Folk · 1692
The Trial of Anders Poulsen
The Drum on the Court Table
The fullest account of a Sámi drum exists because the court prosecuting its owner wrote it down.
SignificanceHe explained his drum to the court in detail — what each figure meant, what he asked it — and the clerk wrote it down as evidence. The fullest account of Sámi practice in its own words exists because a prosecution required the defendant to describe it.
The FindingOne of the very few explanations of a Sámi drum by its owner was made under a capital charge — and Willumsen argued in 2020 that, naming no deity and no sacrificial site, it is not a record of Sámi religion.
Practice · Northern European Folk○
Joik
A Sámi song form that does not describe its subject but is held to embody it directly.
What it isCondemned as sin by the Læstadian revival from the 1840s and banned in Sámi schools well into the twentieth century. Some joiks belong to named individuals rather than to the tradition at large, and are not free to reproduce.
Thread · Comparative Religion○
The Soviet Repression of Shamans
Soviet anti-religious campaigns of the late 1920s to 1930s that arrested and deported Siberian shamanic practitioners and confiscated their ritual objects.
SignificanceFor Siberian communities this history is remembered as an ordeal survived, rites kept in secret; the revival that followed is understood as ancestral spirits calling their lineages back, so that relearning genealogies and shamanising again restore the bond between the living and the dead.
The FindingThe oft-repeated story that shamans were thrown from helicopters to 'prove' they could fly has no documentary source and should be treated as legend. The actual campaigns, which broke ritual transmission for two generations and only saw organised revival after 1991, are the part that is genuinely documented.