A lot has been written about shamanism, but unfortunately not much is published in the Estonian language, except, perhaps, the slightly belletristical works by Carlos Castaneda. Therefore an Estonian treatment of shamanism is very welcome, as it makes competent information available to every average reader, who usually has only limited access to foreign literature. What makes this particular work especially valuable is that it is an original and not a translated work.
While the previous researchers, such as Eliade, Siikala, and others, have treated first and foremost the ritual and technical part of shamanism, Lintrop, on the other hand, is relying in the first place on the process of becoming a shaman. The geographical area under discussion is, above all, Siberia, whereas the author has tried to lean as much as possible on the primary sources, i.e. on the descriptions of rites and the shaman's own explanations as written down by scholars. Although Lintrop admits that the sources do not include materials collected by himself, this statement is not strictly true. In fact, the author has frequently been to Siberia on fieldwork expeditions and film shooting, and he has rich contextual material at his disposal, which is of utmost importance in the interpretation of the texts under study. Therefore we cannot really say that Shamaaniraamat is a work of armchair science.
As said above, the weight of the treatment is laid on becoming a shaman and the attending phenomena. He discriminates between two ways of becoming a shaman - passive, which is typical of the Siberian peoples, and active, which is more characteristic of the indigenous North American Indians. Of course, shamanism has a much wider geographical scope, but the author prefers to stand on a more familiar ground. So the book deals mostly with the passive way of becoming a shaman as customary among North Eurasian peoples.
In the passive way of becoming a shaman the candidate does not make much effort to acquire the role but quite the other way round. The book includes the shamans' descriptions how spirits had forced them to become shamans. "If a young man, not yet physically mature, becomes silent, thoughtful and melancholy, weeps at night and wastes away, people feel pity for him, because they know he will be a shaman," runs a quotation of the Russian scientist Arsenyev. This paragraph shows the attitude of the traditional Siberian communities towards the shaman's status. Often the transition into a new role is accompanied by the so-called shaman's sickness, which manifests itself through various psychic and somatic deviations and does not disappear until the devotee drops his resistance to the spirits and accepts the new way of life. Of course, death is another way out, but from the social point of view this is no solution and these events are not subject to a profound inquiry.
In the second chapter of the work Lintrop uses structuralist methods to point out the principal components of the visions attending the process of becoming a shaman. It appears that these components (e.g. dissection of the body, growing in an iron cradle or on the world tree, receiving gifts of the necessary items for the future trade, feeding on a special food or mother's milk, familiarization with the shaman world, etc.) are characteristic of nearly the whole North Eurasia. Lintrop pays special attention to the item mentioned last, which explains the particularly detailed treatment of the topic in the following chapters. So through this book one gets the outlines of the Siberian popular beliefs about the three-strata world structure and its inhabitants, with the spiritual beings not of the least importance, taking into consideration the bent of the work.
A whole chapter has been dedicated to the descriptions of shaman's aids, specifically the drum and the shaman's robe. The drum has received a particularly detailed treatment, other aids are either mentioned or neglected altogether. At the same time it is clear that drum is the object that hardly any shaman nation has ignored and introducing other aids in their diversity would have made the work dangerously bulky for easy readability.
The logical completion of the work is the last but one chapter describing shaman activities and rites. In the last chapter Lintrop summarizes his scientific interpretations and conclusions about becoming a shaman. He relies chiefly on Ludwig's notion of an altered state of consciousness and Walker's analysis of possession, as well as on Gill and Brenman's psychoanalytic treatment of hypnosis. An important concept in the scientific reasoning is reality orientation, borrowed from Shor, which Lintrop has developed into his working concept of the reality of legends. In the conclusion he has formulated the definition of shamanism, according to which shamanism is a complex of beliefs, ideas and methods that with the help of the activation of the reality of legends evokes a manifestation of the shaman's world and interprets it as an appearance of the shamanic spirits, subjects the visions and behaviour of the devotee to traditionary control, and enables him to use them for solving the problems of the group mates.
One must admit that the work is pleasantly readable, unlike so many other books where serious science is presented in a dry and not easily comprehensible form. The author does not pass off his conclusions upon the reader for the highest instance of truth, but gives him an opportunity to interpret the original text from his own point of view. It is rather an attempt to translate an unfamiliar world view to Western culture into a familiar sign system or language, which perhaps is the very essential task of anthropologists. The theoretical part may be an undue and belated reverence to the positivist paradigm, as the author tries to explain the experiences of a shaman and his community in a rational way from the viewpoint of the 20th century Western world. At the same time he does not stick to this paradigm obstinately and presents the theories of the Western authors in a manner sketchy enough to allow him not to be entangled into their limits of interpreting reality.
The book is provided with an English summary, as required of a proper scholarly work, as well as with a list of bibliography where an interested reader might get a hint for the continuation of his own study.