Meditations: Syncretism

All over Mongolia, at the tops of almost every hill or mountain, you might be able to discern an irregularity in the silhouette. If you’re close enough, you can make out clearly a big pile of rocks, sometimes with something sticking out of the top of the pile. These are ovoos, sacred cairns. Usually they are covered in blue scarves, with maybe some yellow ones as well. If you’re enterprising enough to walk up to one, you’ll find more thrown onto the pile. Single cigarettes, cakes, apples, small bills, and once I even saw a steering wheel cover (although I’m not sure that was an offering, exactly.) They are not always at the tops of mountains; often they are just sitting by the side of the road. They range from huge and imposing to piles so small that I’m not even sure they are meant to be ovoos, and not just where someone dumped out some gravel for whatever reason.

At the shaman ritual a couple weeks ago, I noticed a bunch of scarves tied to some rocks, and though I’d read that ovoos existed, I wanted to get more insight, so I asked Prof. C about it. “Oh, that is a place sacred to the shamans.” The blue of the scarves represents the blue of the sky, because the sky gods are the most important gods in Mongolian shamanism. While we were there, a few women did go up to this boulder-ovoo and pray. 

While we were driving back after the ceremony, I noticed an ovoo on the way and tried to take a picture of it. Prof. C stopped the car, and we got out to see it. He collected three stones from the road, instructed me to do the same, and we walked up to the ovoo. “Go always in this direction, like the sun,” he explained, motioning with his finger. (Oh, I realized, that’s why the clock goes in that direction… I guess?) As we walked around, we threw each of our three stones onto the cairn. “You walk around three times,” he explained. We walked around three (more) times, and then headed back to the car. “They are near passes on the road, so you get good luck. Sometimes, if I do not want to stop the car, I just honk three times. One, two three!” He laughed, and I did, too. Once we were back on the road, I asked him what was the significance of three. “It is for the Buddha. One is for the Buddha, one is for his teachings, and one is for his monks.” …Wait. I thought it was a space sacred to shamans? I asked, “So it is shamanistic, but also Buddhist?” Prof. C didn’t seem too concerned by the question. “Yes. It is for both."

The next day, when I went to the Zanabazar Fine Arts Museum with R and Prof. O, we saw a lot of Mongolian Buddhist art, much of it by Zanabazar, the founder of an important style of Monoglian Buddhist art, and the leader of the Mongolian Renaissance. Zanabazar had studied in Tibet, so his sculptures were very heavily influenced by Tibetan art. The paintings of the Zanabazar schools, likewise, strongly resembled Tibetan/Indian art. While looking at all the sculptures, I noticed one of Ganesha, and one of another Hindu god. I stopped and asked Prof. O about it: “Aren’t those Hindu gods?” Her nonchalance was similar to Prof. C’s when I asked about Buddhism and shamanism. “Yes, they are from Hinduism.” So what were they doing being sculpted by Buddhists? “Oh, Buddhism uses many things from Hinduism; some of the art, some of the gods, lots of things.” Apparently, as R continued to explain, there was no way, really, to separate Buddhist philosophy from Hindu philosophy, or to separate their cultures or even philosophies. “It is all syncretism,” she said.

Ah, syncretism. In Christianity, syncretism is most obvious with pagan-Christian syncretism. The combination of Easter (a goddess) and pagan fertility rituals with the springtime resurrection of Christ, or images of Christ as Apollo, or the merging of the Christ-figure with Dionysus. But in these cases, there are clear lines to be drawn. Easter, the bunnies and the eggs = pagan, Apollo = pagan, Dionsus = pagan. Christ = Christian. Even in Christianity, however, things aren’t always so simple. Irish mythology is especially complex, because it was all recorded by Christian scribes, and set in a Christian framework. Thus, though it features gods with strange powers who seem to live forever, they may live in a world that is untouched by the Fall of Man, a Paradise near Ireland. Their powers are witchcraft, but it’s not evil witchcraft, exactly. There’s no way to explain the case clearly, because it’s just not clear. Somewhere along the way gods became remnants of an Unfallen world became fairies became something that wasn’t exactly Christian, but wasn’t exactly pagan either.

This is what it looks like in Mongolian Buddhism and shamanism, as well. There is no way to separate one from the other, because each intrudes on the other so that they become one entity, waters flowing from tributaries into a single river. You might be able to trace from where the water came originally, but there is no way to separate the two streams now that they’ve joined. Blue scarves, sacred to the sky gods, are tied around the doors to Buddhist monasteries and the lions guarding their stairs. Yet Buddhist ideas of reincarnation (and Hindu ideas of reincarnation?) are also, in some ways, shamanist ideas of reincarnation. To be honest, I’m not sure which came from where first, and that’s sort of the point.

I wonder, why did the two fuse so completely here? Only 5% of the population identifies as shamanist, but many shamanist traditions live on. There are no longer any true pagans, (neopagans, sure, but that’s as different from paganism as “neo-shamanism” is from the old kind), but do any other pagan rituals live on in Western religions today? Do any significant pagan rituals live on, or any significant pagan philosophies? (Bunnies and sweets don’t quite make the cut.) Buddhism and shamanism did come into conflict in the past, but now there doesn’t seem to be much tension between them, perhaps because they share so much in common. So if things had gone differently in Europe and the Middle East, would it have been possible for religions that sprung out of each other (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) to syncretize in a significant way? Have they? Are Islam and Christianity reconcilable in the way that shamanism and Buddhism are? Why or why not? And if they had become one flowing river, how might that have looked, not only for the religions, but for the world?