The story of the Shaman of Bigu

On our way down to see the Shaman

The Bigu Shaman

Robin and I followed Tashi half an hour downhill from the monastery, in the hot mid day sun. The skies were a clear blue, allowing us views of the lush, lime spring green of the wheat terraces.

I was wondering what this Shaman would be like. My experience with the Shaman at Photeng was not quite what I expected and I had high hopes, competing with high doubts about this one. I really wanted this Shaman to be impressive and magical. I wanted him to be exuding an aura of spirituality and a command of Nature. I really wanted him to defend all Shamen in the face of my increasing scepticism and to recapture my imagination and faith in all things Shamanic.

...And I was really afraid that he wouldn't be or do any of those things.

The Shaman's house

Finally, descending into the wheat fields, we arrived at a house sitting alone on the edge of the mountain. It had two floors and a sunny, small, clean courtyard.

A grey haired farmer of medium built, as filthy as any I have seen here, greeted us cheerfully and effusively. He, was the Shaman.

I was immediately asked if I wanted to go see his instruments. Maybe it was the disappointment in his appearance, maybe it was my tiredness and cynicism, but it didn't take much hesitation on my part to say that I was just  there to talk. Perhaps next time we visited him he could perform a ceremony for us, I added placatingly. 

Yes, I know, I know! I walked a long way to get here to talk to this man and now I was behaving like a prima donna.  I just didn't feel like swapping the sun and breeze with some probably dingy, dismal room inside and at that stage, despite my high hopes, I had no trust that this was going to be anything other than a waste of my time.

After much delibration in Nepali, I heard from Tashi that the Shaman wanted to do things formally.  I wasn’t sure what that meant but I acquiesced, provided "things" took place on the terrace.

With a bright smile and a burst of energy, the Shaman moved the sitting mats around on the terrace. Boy did he fuss with them! Moving them this way and that, re-positioning them...

Then he brought out a little wooden shelf and showed it to me. It had hideous monsters carved on it. He said that he made it himself and he would make me one if I wanted. Did he mean as gift or to buy? Tashi was noncommittal, and I just smiled, giving no response. I was not sure whether to be amused or annoyed by this premature and irrelevant sales pitch.

After that he disappeared for a while. I begun to get impatient. I was thirsty and hot and had brought no water with me. Yes, indeed duh!

I consciously made a very special effort to go with the flow and relax into waiting. I breathed in and breathed out, smiled at Robin, looked at the lovely green of the terraces and willed myself to slow down and just be there, on that terrace, at that moment.

I noticed an old woman. His mother? She was wearing a red headscarf and had a nose ring and a huge nose stud. Her skin was weather beaten and wrinkled and her eyes were hooted and tired.

In contrast, a little girl of around 9 yrs old, had beautiful velvet skin and big dark  almond eyes. Her smile was fresh and shy.

An old man, a neighbour, sitting in the sun seemed very keen to chat...in Nepali!

Near the front door of the house was a collage of posters and photos. I saw Tashi, using his sleeve and reverently wiping off the dust off a picture of the Dalai Lama. A tender moment that endeared him to me and made me forget our bickering... at least for that moment. 

The Shaman, having reappeared, set the shelf out  in front of the mat and put on it two vases with flowers; one  with plastic dusty red poppies and the other with lovely, lush, red rhododendron blooms.  White silk  scarves were wrapped around each vase. Then out came the dirtiest drum with thick layers of dust. It was set down by the vases of flowers and if it was  ever possible, a dirtier wicker basket backpack followed. He patted the layers of dust congealed with fat (no, I don't know how that was possible) and out of it,  like rabbits out of a magician’s hat, he produced long heavy necklaces of large seed beads, adorned with hefty brass bells of varying sizes.

He barked something to the old woman and  she brought two cups of alcohol with dried flowers floating in them and set them on the altar. Two more cups were for the Shaman and the old man to drink from.

The Shaman disappeared again for a while. When he eventually re-appeared, he offered me two slices of apple. The white flesh of the fruit was gray with dirt and soot. A bottle of local coke-like drink was opened and poured into dirty mugs. Setting the apple discreetly aside, I took a tentative sip from the coke. My whole system went on red alert; my teeth were set on edge with the sweetness and a caffeine and sugar rush made my head spin.

The Shaman said something to the old woman again and she brought him a bundle of  clothes which he took into the house.

And Oh...! When he came out of the house this time, he looked like a different person. He looked like you’d expect a shaman to look:

A long matted dreadlock was hanging from the top of his head to his waist.

He wore a long full pleated skirt of light gray and had three long scarves in green , fuscia and white, bandana-d around his head, and hanging long down his back.

He pulled the bead-bell necklaces over his head, wearing them diagonally on his chest and across from each other.

 Over them, again diagonally, he put on a green and orange embroidered cloth bag.


His  transformation brought me to attention and made me forget the cynical boredom that was gradually seeping into me.


A cap of feathers on his head completed the outfit that transformed him in my eyes to type of Shaman I was longing to meet.










I moved closer, sitting at right angles to him. He ordered the old woman to sit on his right and the little girl on his left. The old man sat next to the little girl and Tashi between me and the Shaman to translate. Robin sat near me ready to take photos.

And so, after an hour and a half of our arrival, he said he was ready to answer my questions.

Ready to pose my questions at last, I stopped cold in my tracks. I had just noticed that one of the adornments of his neckalaces is a dead and dried bird’s head.

After a few split seconds of mental white noise, I pulled myself together and asked my first question.

How long he has been a Shaman?

Here is his story.

Some of it makes sense and some of it doesn’t. Some facts fit and some don’t. Maybe he doesn’t remember and maybe he is lying; time in Nepal is pretty elastic anyway. Probably some of it or a lot of it is lost in translation.

Yet, here it is, as he told it and as I understood it.

He has been a Shaman for eleven years. When he was a small boy, the Shamen of the area  used to take him with them into the forest, whenever they were performed their ceremonies. Then when he was 11,   his uncle died and he touched the dead body. The Shamen after that stopped taking him with them. He is not sure why.

At 13 he got married. At this he pointed at the old woman next to him. So, not his mother!

She was 15 when they got married. They didn’t live together at first, nor did they consummate the marriage, both continuing to live in their family homes.

Before he was 17, his parents moved to Bhutan and he was living alone, here in Bigu. An itinerant Sadhu came to the door and ended up staying with him for six months. He taught him Shamanism. Just before the Sadhu left, he took him into a cave in the forest to meditate for 7 days. The Sadhu gave him an earing and told him not to drink alcohol and not to sleep with any woman.

On his return to the village, he ignored the Sadhu's advice and went to live with his wife. They soon had their first child.

One night he woke up with his earlobe torn and his earing gone. He doesn’t know what happened, but 3 months later he became mentally unstable. He would forget to eat and wouldn’t know where he was or what day it was.  When he closed his eyes he saw dead people with snarling long teeth.

At some stage, he gradually started to pray again and to chant his Sadhu guru’s mantra and little by little he embarked on a long 17 year recovery.

Then, another sadhu appeared at his doorstep. This Sadhu told him to buy some alcohol, a black chicken and a pigeon. In a ceremony, they flung the live birds off a cliff and his health  improved more.  He took this Sadhu as his new guru.

Soon after,  he took his family and joined his parents in Bhutan. As he comes from a long family of Shamen, when they reached Bhutan and even though he was still a little disturbed, he also started practicing as a Shaman, just like his father. He stayed in Bhutan for 10 years travelling around and had 4 more children.

On his return to Nepal, at Charikot city, he almost lost his eyesight.  He thinks it was magic. He sought out another Shaman who performed medicine rites on him and a by sacrifice of 3 chickens.He thankfully recovered.

As an everyday man he is a carpenter, an ordinary person, just like any other.  But as a Shaman, when he meditates, he focuses on thinking about himself and his friends as flowers. His body feels light and the spirits enter him. Then he becomes powerful. He sees and commands other spirits and is not afraid of anything; even standing at crossroads, a vey dangerous and inauspicious place to find yourself in the Nepali culture.  But alas, when he is done and he takes off his uniform, he remembers nothing of these experiences.

He is not sure what the sacrificing of goats and chicken signifies, beyond being an offering to appease the spirits, akin to killing and cooking a chicken for a friend who comes to visit.

His religion is Tami/Kirani; he believes in Nature with tinges of Hinduism and Buddhism.

His wife and he had 10 children, only 5 of which are still alive. The eldest is 34, a daughter married and with a child, living in Oman. The little girl to his left, acting as his helper, is his youngest daughter. His 24 year old son is a Maoist army commander living in Kathmandu.

The best thing about being a Shaman is being able to help people in need; to cure people who then give him their heartfelt gratidute.

He is now 57 and his greatest wish is to travel to other parts of the world and teach Shamanism. He has been highly disappointed by the Shaman's organisation in Kathmand. They promised to bring him foreigners to teach and to also take him abroad. They never fulfilled their promises. I am the first foreigner he speaks to about Shamanism.

Not a Christmas galrand! The round beads are a seed, the
ones below them a snake's spine

At some stage I had noticed that one of his necklace garlands looked suspiciously like the backbone of a snake. Could it really be that? Yes, he confirmed. That is what it is. It gives him great power, as does the tiger tooth that he wears around his neck, which he whipped out for us to see. As does the hollow tiger bone that he uses as a bugle to call the spirits to enter him.

During our talk,  small whirlwinds of earth  stung our eyes and settled layers of white dust on my black clothes. I was dirty, hot and tired and ready to move on.

Would we come back tomorrow so he could perform a ceremony for us? he asked.

Well, his story didn't stuck up, he had been by his own admission mentally unstable, he seemed too keen to perform and his instruments had a layer of dust too many…

Would we?

Damn right we would!

And so we were...Read next the next blog post...

Robin with the Shaman and his daughter

But before that, a hot scalding experience awaited me...

A Shower

I felt really dirty. The last time I had used water to clean myself was at the start of the trek, at the first tea house, 4 days earlier. I had quickly sluiced myself with cold water and gave my hair one shampoo. After that,  I neither washed myself, nor changed my clothes, including yes, my underwear. 

4 days later, my black trousers, already dirty at the beginning of the trek, had 10 day-layers of dust (yes, I did were them for 10 days on the trod)  and spots of mud. I could smell old sweat wafting off my equally dirty t-shirt every time I lifted my arms. And my hair felt  greasy and matted with dust.

The thing is, on a trek like this and in an environment that everything is grimy, you kind of get comfortable with your own dirt. And to be really honest, you don’t care. Everyone is even dirtier than you are and appearance stops to matter. But, when your clothes are stiff enough with dirt to stand up and possibly walk without you in them, you know that it is high time to wash. 

Well, ok! Since I am brutally really frank, let me also say that if the promise of hot water at the eco-lodge, just minutes away from the monastery, was not there, I would have gone another 5 days, till my return to Kathmandu to wash or to change clothes. Because there is no point wearing clean clothes if you yourself are disgustingly smelly and dirty.

But, the hot water was the carrot (and the remarkably clean nuns the embarrassment), so there off I went to have my 50cent shower.

Shower. Shower... Well, it is a small concrete room with moss and mould decorating the walls. The faucet, at waist level, runs very hot water- and only hot water- courtesy of solar power.

A tiny mirror provided ample reinforcement that my hair needed washing. I stripped and discovered that I lost my shampoo bottle. In desperation and scalding my head with the water, I bent and wet my head and  used my body wash on my hair... three times just about produced a passable clean feeling.  I then soaped my body and kept splashing water all over me.

It was hot and burning my skin. It was in a disgusting room. Yet, it was bliss and I did not want to stop splashing water over my by now clean, steaming, pink skin. Only the thread of third degree burns and Frank's voice in the back of my mind, censoring me on my negligent use of water, made me turn off the tap. 

Aaaah…wearing clean knickers and bra, clean trousers and shirt, I sat outside in the sun drinking a coke and talking to a monk. Bliss!

Bliss though for about 5 minutes! Because a very short while later, you are where you started 5 days ago. A clean person in a dirty environment. And it is not bliss anymore, but a torture. You don’t want to touch anything or sit anywhere. You don’t want people touching you.  You loath wearing your dirty fleece, handling your dusty bags, getting into your smelly sleeping bag…

That’s it! No more showers for me until I hit Kathmandu!