Book Description

In the popular imagination, shamans and drums go together like bread and butter.No-one knows the historical origin of drums, but they have certainly been made and played by people for thousands of years. Part of the way animal skins are prepared for eventual use as clothing or other things, is to stretch them on a frame so they dry flat, and if you tap such a skin drying on its frame, it sounds like a drum. I suspect these drying skins were probably the first drums ever made, and eventually the stretching frame became the drum frame.It is now fairly-well known that the word shaman comes from Siberia, and it is in this vast geographical area that shamanism proper is still to be found.Nowadays the word 'shamanism' has become a rather general word, applied to all sorts of practices - many of which are unrelated to the word's original meaning. Alongside this, many of the spiritual practices of the world's 'first-nations' have also become labeled as 'shamanic, ' although some anthropologists do not consider real shamanism to be found anywhere outside of Siberia. But if we allow a much wider definition of shamanism, and say that many forms of shamanic spirituality occur across the planet, we would still have to admit that many of them do not use drums at all in their shamanism, and those that do, don't use them like the shamans of Central Asia and Siberia, as these people have an unique understanding of the sacred role of the spirit of the drum.Indeed, the drum is so important to Siberian shamanism, that beginning in 1929 the Soviet clamp-down on shamanism - and the turning of shamans from figures of social importance to 'enemies of the people, ' was achieved largely by the destruction or confiscation of their drums. The same thing was done to the Sami shamans of Finland by the Christian Lutheran Church in the previous century. The Church had a habit of burning the drums, although a few - together with some of the Siberian drums taken by the Communists - were kept and put into museums.All the drums used in Siberian shamanism are the type known as 'frame drums.' A frame drum is made by stretching an animal skin over a frame of wood. This frame is generally made from a long thin strip of wood, bent into a rough circle - the two ends of the plank being joined together in some way to keep the hoop closed and firmly fixed.However, wood does not have to be the only material for drum frames. A traditional shaman's drum from Manchuria in Northern China has a thin metal frame with metal jingles attached to it. But whether of metal, or wood, or even plastic - as found on some modern drums - these type of drums are all known as frame drums. Frame drums occur all over the world, from the shaman's drums of Siberia, to the bodhran of Ireland, the bendir of North Africa and the daf of Persia. They are probably the oldest form of drum on earth. Frame drums like this also occur amongst the native peoples of America. - no doubt related to the shamanic drums of their ancestral homelands on the steppes of Central Asia, where the people lived before they migrated across the land bridge that once connected the two continents. However the 'medicine' drums of North America do not have the same degree of sacred lore as their Siberian cousins have.