Siberian Shamanism and the Perm Animal Style

Reconstructions made from detailed drawings

of a now lost archaeological collection from Perm

I wrote back in 2011 about the strange Elk Men of Perm, based on the artifact descriptions at the Hermitage Museum web site.

Today, trying to trace this amazing belt buckle back to its source, I discovered a weird and wonderful Russian web site with a lot more material on what its creators call the Perm Animal Style. With the help of Google translate, which seems to have gotten a little better at Russian lately (because of the war?), we can delve more deeply into what these objects mean.

Perm Animal Style (PZS) is the name of a style of cast bronze artifacts from the 6th-12th centuries AD created by the medieval civilization of the Urals. In the center of Eurasia, three roads to Siberia from Europe and Central Asia intersected: the Byzantine, Iranian and Scandinavian routes. At the gates of Siberia, at the intersection of roads in the Upper Kama region, a civilization with a special culture arose, leaving us its pantheon of gods and spirits, embodied in metal. Scientists call this civilization the Lomatov and Nevolin culture. The pre-literate culture of hunters was combined in the Kama region with a developed religious and magical system, born of the Ural civilization in dialogue with the great cultures of the world. 

The location of the modern Perm district, from which many of these finds come.

Medieval Norse sources mention a place they call Bjarmaland. From the narrative of Ohthere (c. 890) to the sixteenth century, various sources placed Bjarmaland either near the White Sea or much farther south, somewhere beyond Novgorod. A few words of Bjarmic that appear in the sagas appear to come from Finnish; Vikings traded there for furs. Most western authorities are skeptical about this wandering Finnish kingdom and think the stories about it are either garbled or just made up. 

But Russian archaeologists have taken over the name and applied it to the Perm culture, which they sometimes call Bjarmic. (The name has also been taken over by Russian artisans who make reconstructions of Perm artifacts, and by the makers of at least one Alternate European History game, which you can play as Bjarmaland.) It seems weird to this western archaeologist to use a name from Norse literature to describe an archaeological culture in central Russia. I suppose they wanted a name for their imagined cultural construct that would be distinct from terms describing the well known archaeological finds. What they have been doing, which I find so fascinating, is using the myths of Siberian cultures documented in the 1800s and early 1900s to analyze the iconography of Perm, calling the results Bjarmic myth. 

Hundreds of artifacts in this style are known, found either in burials or ritual deposits like this one:

This artifact was found in 1957 together with three other amulets depicting the goddess and fragments of a bronze cauldron. [That seems to be the factual part. But the text goes on.]  Perhaps this treasure was the result of the Sacrifice of the Seven Cauldrons. Seven cauldrons with amulets and other gifts were buried in the ground in a circle as an offering to the Goddess of the Earth. This circle blocked the opening to the Lower World, from which illnesses and other misfortunes came. The ritual was preserved by the Khanty.

Here is an example of this interpretation, a continuation of the paragraph above, describing this object:

The goddess stands on spiders, weaving a web, along which the souls of the dead must pass over a boiling resin river. We see the waves of this river at the bottom of the composition. People pray to the goddess, they are in trouble. The goddess with wings is the first ancestor of the family (the mask on the chest) and the intercessor for people before the supreme deity. An amulet of special power, this would have been invoked only when misfortune (epidemic, invasion) threatened the whole people. 

I love this. Shamanistic lore often emphasized the peril of the bridge to the other lands, which might be described as a giant sword blade or a thin rope, but I have never seen it described as a spider web.

The motif of standing on animals represents being carried by them. Which is wonderfully shamanistic; Siberian shamans often described themselves riding on magical animals in their otherwordly journeys.

Notice the circles drawn on the foreheads of these triple goddesses. Our authors interpret this as a sun sign, because the Khanty had a sun ritual in which they drew such circles on the foreheads of the participants, using the blood of the sacrificial animal.

Then there is the figure known as "the deity surrounded by elk." (Or moose, same word in Russian.)

These are interpreted as depictions of a boy hero found in the myths of several Siberian peoples:

This god had many names. The Mansi called this deity the Bright Boy, the Khantyn Alvi, the Tarpyg, As-tyi-iki. As-tyi-iki was revered in the form of seven babies; the Khanty of the 19th century believed that his native land was somewhere beyond the Urals.

Alvi from childhood was distinguished by his extraordinary intelligence and strength, first he broke a wooden, then a copper and iron cradle. He gave smart advice to his father, the heavenly god. As soon as he got out of the cradle, he performed feats, caught up and killed a six-legged elk, cutting off a pair of its legs. He nailed the skin to the sky, creating the constellation Elk (our Big Dipper).

These family scenes are thought to depict Alvi with his parents. 

Birds are common in this art, either in natural forms or in human-bird hybrids. Many stories describe the gods transforming into birds. Which is another shamanistic thing to do.

And this is (no, seriously) the Lame Owl God.

This one they could not connect to any surviving myth, but both lameness and bird suits have been associated with shamans for thousands of years, so it must represent a god or hero on some kind of shamanistic adventure.

Discovering all of this made my weekend.