Sheep for the shaman: few people have heard of Tuva, a small country at the heart of Asia. Still fewer know that Tuvans are shamans …

New Internationalist, May, 1999 by Louisa Waugh

TUVAN IS THE most beautiful language I've ever heard. Words and phrases linger in my mind like bars of music and I repeat them just for the pleasure of the sound they produce.

Here in the far western mountains there are more Tuvans than anywhere else in Mongolia. Tuva, Mongolia's north-western neighbour, is an obscure country, best known for its quirkily named capital, Khyzl (pronounced Kizul), where an obelisk marks the absolute centre of Asia. The Tuvans first crossed the Altai range to Mongolia because this seeming-barren landscape in fact offers good grazing for their livestock. Today, they herd their animals alongside Mongolian nomads.

But there is a difference between them. While the Mongolians worship Buddha and the local Kazakh community pray to Allah, the Tuvans have no God. They are Shamans. Shamanism is not a religion, but a practice, with the Shaman being the link between the animal and land spirits and those who revere and pray to these spirits. Only the Shaman can communicate between these two worlds.

My colleague and friend Gansukh was giving me a Tuvan lesson when her brother Dorj arrived with a host of relatives from these nearby mountains. No-one schedules visits here; hospitality is endemic. Crumpled grandparents, florid husbands and wives and wiry children poured into Gansukh's wooden home, greeting and gossiping as they crowded round the wood-burning stove, the older people crouching on the few narrow stools, the youngsters kneeling on the floor.

Gansukh brewed a vat of salty milk tea, as Sansar-Huu took his dagger outside to slaughter a sheep. A resigned-looking ewe had her throat cut and was instantly skinned, as the guests blew on their scalding tea and warmed their stubby hands.

I helped Gansukh clean the warm internal organs, the stomach and the intestines, which would all be eaten. Everything is used. The head and hooves are boiled and the flesh scraped off and chewed. Every ounce of fat is saved and the skin sewn into the lining of winter clothes. For an ex-vegetarian, I've come to appreciate sheep.

The organs were simmered on the stove for several hours, while the guests settled down.

Sansar-Huu splashed potent local vodka into a shallow wooden bowl, dipping his left ring finger into the clear liquid three times and spraying the drops around us, to toast in turn the spirits, the mountains and the land. I frowned, bemused, as he passed the bowl to a young woman: the men are always served first here.

`Why is she so important?' I whispered to Gansukh.

`Because she's the Shaman,' she hissed. My eyes bulged. I'd heard much about Enktuya, whose spiritual inheritance descends from nine generations of female Tuvan Shamans. I'd been told she was just 23, but her age was impossible to determine: her face was youthful, but she had the gait of an older, more tired woman. Enktuya would spend just one night in the village - a Shaman, Gansukh whispered, can rarely leave the mountains. Now I understood why the ewe had been slain. It was in honour of Enktuya's visit.

When the sheep was finally tender Gansukh took a knife and silently tossed a small section of bone, meat, dried blood and a slither of the heart into the stove flames. Tuvans believe there's a spirit in all fires and this was an offering. They never burn soiled or blood-stained papers or rags, which are instead buried outside.

We feasted, washing down the chunks of dripping meat with more tea. The grandparents relaxed, inhaling snuff from tiny stone bottles and smoking pungent shredded tobacco wrapped in strips of old newspaper. By evening the guests were drifting off to visit other homes and relatives.

Gansukh and I finally finished my Tuvan lesson and began her English revision (I am training her to take over as the teacher in the school when I leave in a month's time).

`So many visitors!' she sighed. `Some of them will come back here and stay, so we'll be up late and I'll be tired at school tomorrow.'

`Don't you want them to return?'

She smiled in the candlelight. `Of course I do, Louisa. I couldn't ever live in a place where people don't visit and wouldn't be welcome to stay as long as they wanted. This isn't just our home; it's also theirs.'

Louisa Waugh lives and works in Mongolia and is writing a book about Mongolian life.