Chinese sources on the Mongol Shamans in the Yuan Court
(65th Meeting Astana, 2023)
In the court of the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongol rituals were preserved in large quantities. Shamans as the ritualists among the Mongols, must have been active in the Yuan court. However, this topic has not been paid enough attention by previous scholars, partly because the practices are almost exclusively found in Chinese sources. Paul Ratchnevsky’s pioneering research “Über den mongolischen Kult am Hofe der Grosskhane in China” (1970) is based on the Yuanshi “History of the Yuan”. This paper makes use of other Chinese sources, along with Mongolian and Persian texts, to demonstrate the shamanistic rituals in the Yuan court, such as spiritual trance, cult of fire, divination, and sacrifices, etc., so that to illustrate the important role that shamans played in the Yuan court.