Shamans of the Steppe
Despite the naive rejection of traditional knowledge in the 20th century modernizing project and globalized mainstream cultures dismissive attitude, some ideas are coming back. In some parts of the world the heritage of ancient power never died, and in others, new people are learning them. It seems that we’re finally realizing the value of different approaches to health and well-being by understanding the multiple dimensions of nature around us. Or at least accepting them as possible. Something that can work if you acknowledge it.
Shamans are the keepers of this knowledge. They live in all kinds of environments, as part of all kinds of cultural realities that are kept alive through tradition, faith, discipline and understanding. The case of the steppe shamans in Siberia and Mongolia is probably one of the strongest traditions worldwide. Their territories, the power of the land where they live, the strength of their belief and the harmony of their knowledge with other kinds of knowledge, make them accessible and attractive to a growing number of people. Not only people seeking for answers about their lives or looking for peace, but even academics. People are fascinated and inspired by shamanism’s relationship and contact with the spirit world.
What is shamanism? Though it varies with each region of the world, it can be explained as the power of the body to contact spirits through physical feelings and vibration, a practice that, in part, comes from the steppes of Asia. Even the word “Shaman” is believed to come from the Evenki language, from the Tungusic region of Central Asia, between Mongolia, China and Russia. The peoples of the steppe teach that benevolent and malevolent spirits live in a supernatural world that can be reached by altering the state of consciousness through specific substances, precise rituals and a chosen soul. A few of those chosen souls live within Marianna Baker’s novel, Red Snow, Gold Clouds, illuminating the cultural history of Siberia and aiding our protagonists with their journey.
Visit our sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamanism
http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/nr1/heredit.htm
http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/changing/journey/healing.html
And watch this documentary on shamanism:
The Sacred Lake
The Pearl of Asia, the Blue Eye of Siberia, bigger than some countries and deeper than anything in the world, Lake Baikal is one of the most important freshwater bodies of our planet. Fed by around 330 rivers and containing around 25 islands, it is home to an unthinkable amount of life in all sizes and forms, four cities with around a million inhabitants altogether and numerous traditional towns from different cultures and times settled on its shores. But more importantly, beyond data, it is home to an unbelievable mystery and power that arises from its depths with mighty songs from ancient times.
It was among the Siberian territories conquered by the Russian Empire in the mid-seventeenth century, taking with it peoples like the Yakuts and the Buryats, who actually named the lake: Bay göl “Rich lake.” Rich indeed, it contains the remains of a derailed train linked to the lost gold of the last Czar, Nicholas II. We already know this has raised all kinds of speculation and exploration, dragging even more interest to the grand waters.
Keeping on with the list, Baikal is the biggest, with 12,000 square miles, the deepest, with almost 2 miles at its maximum depth, and it is also the oldest lake in the world. It was formed at least 25 million years ago. It was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco 20 years ago. Along with its physical attributes, it is very rich in energy, accordingly to the Buryat shamans that pay tribute to its waters and build their religious life around them. Buddhist lamas constructed monasteries around Baikal in the 18th century, and since then people from all over the world come to pray to its spirits for well-being or prosperity, good weather, or just to learn from the peace that the lake brings. Despite scientist skepticism towards what they call “supernatural beliefs,” even they admit they feel something very special when they come to study earthquakes or something else, to the point that some of them have started experiments about this “supernatural” phenomena.
And not only do the Buddhists take strength from Baikal, but many other traditional peoples (also forbidden and ignored during the soviet era) have learned about its power. Like the Old Believers that remain loyal to their faith and pray to God and to the lake for better farming or fishing, with visible results. Old Believers like Zoya’s mother, whose diary keeps the secret to finding the lost gold. Could it be hidden in the depths of Baikal? And if it is, will the lake allow Andrew and Katya to access it? Find out more in Red Snow, Gold Clouds, by Marianna Baker.
If you want to learn more, visit our sources:
http://lakebaikal.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal
And watch this beautiful documentary:
The Old Believers
When reading ‘Red Snow, Gold Clouds‘ thriller, you will find that some characters seek refuge in places full of hidden mysteries and ancient traditions. One of the most important being a lost temple of Old Believers—a religious sect who, despite the odds, still live in places that are completely isolated from any external contact or technological innovation. There are some families who never heard about the war except for a few distant explosions and sporadic aircraft flights.
This is the case of Agafia Lykova, an Old Believer who survived isolation for more than 70 years after her father took her, along with her mother and siblings, to the cold Siberian Taiga fleeing from war and persecution. After her mother starved to death to feed the family and after her brothers and father were killed by viruses that an unexpected scouting party brought, Agafia was completely alone. And she survived. The tools she had and the strong work habits she learned from her father were enough to feed herself along with the company of just a few pets. Besides that: she had her faith.
So who are the Old Believers? Their history dates back to the mid-seventeenth century. In the year 1666, the Moscow Patriarch Nikon introduced a series of reforms to the dogma of the Orthodox Church in order to reduce the differences with the Greek tradition, seeking to unify faith with the old times. We now know that Nikon’s ideas were not that correct and actually contrary to what he wanted because it increased the differences and created new gaps within his own people. Old Believers are those who kept the original faith from before the reforms took place.
The differences between one tradition and the other would seem trivial today, but for people like Agafia, they mean everything. Using two fingers instead of three for the sign of the cross, or seven proshpora instead of five for the liturgy, constitute the essence of one ritual or another and in everyday religious details make a difference. God’s help is achieved with honesty and integrity. The Old Believers had been persecuted and killed for centuries for not adhering to official dogma and for not having the power to do something about it.
If you want to learn more about the Old Believers, you can visit these sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers
http://library.uoregon.edu/ec/oldbelievers/index.html
You can also watch this great documentary about Agafia:
The Treasure Train
The missing gold is a permanent mystery. That is what it has been during the last century, ever since its disappearance in August 1919. It could be in a monastery, hidden in caves, buried in a forest on the outskirts of a town, in the cellars of a bank or buried in containers in the bottom of a lake. Or all at once. In the fictional reconstruction of Red Snow, Gold Clouds, Marianna Baker explores the diverse theories on the gold`s fate. It should be noted that one of the antagonistic characters in the story, Zharkov, works for the Bank of Kazan, in which part of the official story occurs. Though also, the protagonist`s grandmother sought refuge with the gold in an Old Believer monestary in the Taiga, Siberia. And Zharkov`s wife died in Lake Baikal. Which clue will lead us to the gold?
After the Admiral Kolchak was commissioned by the White Army to hide the gold, he engaged the services of the Czechoslovak Legion to help him in this mission. The particular objective of the legion was to protect the Trans Siberian Train from possible Bolshevik attacks on its journey between Kazan and Irkutsk. However, the Legionnaires` lack of interest of in a foreign war led to an attempt to get some of the treasure for themselves. Thus, in one of the stops at the Kutin station, the Czechs signed an agreement with the Bolshevik army to deliver Kolchak in exchange for a share of the gold (representing in fact, more than half), resulting in his execution.
Plus, on a previous stop in Omsk, one of the wagons had already been robbed by unknown hands, who broke the seals of the train, emptied the containers and killed some of the officers. Through the discovery of an unsent telegram, it was learned that Lenin gave the order to stop the Czech’s treachery and keep all the gold inside the Russian borders. In the end, the Czechs got away with it, returning to Czechoslovakia where they founded a nationally recognized bank. There are numerous records of these dark deals and their results, which still have impact today. But with time, there have been other findings that suggest the treasure has multiple destinations.
For example, a number of medals belonging to the KGB were found in a private building in the city of Tyumen, with irrefutable records that they belong to the treasure. In addition, they have found the remains of tools connected to the train and its protectors in both caves and under Siberian monasteries. And in 2009 a large batch of containers and train parts were found at the bottom of Lake Baikal. Clearly, the gold found its way into many hands leaving a large collection of treasue maps to be discovered.
The elaboration of this post was based on the following documentary:
Mystery of the Russian Tsar’s Lost Gold
When a crown has held power for centuries, it isn’t hard to believe that it will do anything to protect its wealth and power when warning its own vulnerability. Just in the case the proximity of its defeat is mistaken. The Czar’s lost gold is one of the oldest mysteries in the modern world.
As explained in last post, after the revolution there was a red side and a white side that confronted each other for the control of a nation that was mired in scarcity and uncertainty. The whites were defending the interest of the royal family. It is said that the gold reserve of the Romanovs was one of the largest amongst all European kingdoms. It is also said that they managed to keep it safe from the Red Army, thanks to Admiral Alexander Kolchak, after whom the treasure was renamed. What happened to the gold is the body of the mystery.
Theories and conjectures of all kinds have raised and hundreds of searchers have gone to find the treasure using historical documents and mathematical calculations. Kazan, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Lake Baikal and even Beijing and Tokyo, have all been visited by secret, official, and unofficial missions throughout the 20th century. It is probable, however, that each theory has some truth in it and that the gold is distributed in several of these places, scattered along the transiberian railway, which was used as an escape route of the White Army and its resources. It is also possible that the gold had simply been used by the military to supply and fund themselves in the remaining time of the war, which they obviously intended to win. If this is true, the mysterious treasure could have ended up with no pain nor glory in the hands of European Banks and companies that added billionaire interests to the debt.
We can’t be sure of anything. What we do know is that Admiral Kolchak was killed by the reds and that the official record of the gold is missing. Red Snow, Golden Clouds provides a new approach to the query of this mystery, that doesn’t seem to ever die. Our two protagonists Andrew and Katya find the two halfs of a treasure map. Will it lead them to the gold. Will they be able to discover the real fate of the Czar’s lost gold?
If you want to learn more about the lost gold of the Czar you can visit these sources:
http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/international/kolchaks.shtml
And you can also watch this video:
“Red Snow, Gold Clouds” thriller by Marianna Baker and Anna Baker
The Russian Civil War 1918-1922
The plot of the thriller Red Snow, Gold Clouds by Marianna Baker and Anna Baker is based on the diary of Lidia Markov, the great-grandmother of Andrew Bartholomew, the book’s main character. The diary narrates Lidia’s dramatic escape from the Russian Civil War in 1919 to Harbin, China, and tells of Lidia’s tragic love affair with General Baratov and how they and two White Army officers hid seven boxes of the Czar’s Gold in the Siberian taiga. Chapters seven and eight focus on their dramatic journey to a new life. You may want to read a short account of the Russian Civil War to help you better understand the story’s setting.
Two revolutions, two armies, millions of deaths. Russian Civil War can be told in numbers if we’re trying to create a general background, but in this case, the facts are more important.
When the October Revolution of 1917 finally came to an end, giving the victory to the Bolsheviks, (renamed as the Red Army), they had to confront a new difficulty: the inevitable union of all their enemies. The new unified force was known as the great White Army or the White Movement. It was made up of the Czar’s imperial army, the fierce Kozakhs, the Mensheviks and some other left groups defeated in the revolution, and nationalist groups from every territory of the recently extinct empire.
In the wake of the Czar’s assassination and later with the end of the European war; new armies, regional governments, foreign interventions and all kinds of factions started to form in order to continue their own agendas (with the promise of exterminating all the others eventually.) Czarists, liberal republicans, communists, anarchists, Czechs, Ukrainians, Mongols, Allies from other countries, and many others, confronted each other restlessly in what was probably the cruelest and most bloody civil war of the western history.
We’re talking about nearly six years of civil war between November 1917 and June 1923. Historical leaders such as Czar Nicholas II and Alexander Kolchak on the white side (both killed in different moments) and Lenin and Trotsky on the red side (whose implacable strategies would result victorious), headed this long and messy battle for power in the vast territory that would eventually turn into the controversial world power of the Soviet Union. According to some, the final death toll was above three million souls, evaporated between blood and gold, deception and secrecy.
If you want to learn more about the Russian Civil War you can visit these sources:
http://spartacus-educational.com/RUScivilwar.htm
http://www.answers.com/topic/civil-war-of-1917-1922
You can also watch this video: