The Manchu name for a shamanic shrine or altar to the spirits is
tangse.
[3] Because its Chinese equivalent
tangzi (堂子) means "hall," it may seem that
tangse was derived from Chinese, but only around 1660 did
tangse start to be translated as
tangzi.
[4] Before that, it was rendered into Chinese as
yemiao (謁廟), or "visitation temple."
[4] The term
tangse may have originated in the portable "god boxes" (also "
tangse") in which the
Jurchens placed god figurines when they were still mobile hunters.
[3] Once Jurchen bands started to settle into palisaded villages (their typical kind of settlement), their
tangse became permanent fixtures of the village.
[3]
Each clan—
mukūn, a village or association of villages who claimed to share common ancestors—had its sacred protective spirits (
enduri).
[5] The shaman (often a woman) was in charge of placating spirits and dead ancestors and of contacting them to seek a good hunt or harvest, quick healing, success in battle, and other such favors.
[6] The point of contact between the community and the spirits was the "spirit pole" (
Manchu:
šomo; Chinese: 神柱; pinyin:
shénzhù).
[7] Shamans played a crucial role in these early Jurchen communities, as the authority of the clan headman often depended on the assent of the shaman.
[8]
There were two kinds of Jurchen shamanistic rituals, corresponding to two kinds of shamans.
[9] The most common was "domestic ritual": ritual-based sacrifices to Heaven and to the clan's ancestors conducted by hereditary shamans from that clan.
[10] "Primitive ritual," on the other hand, was performed by people who had undergone a "shamanic illness," which was seen as a sign that they had been chosen by the spirits.
[11] Entering into a
trance, these "transformational" shamans let themselves be possessed by various animal spirits and sought the help of these spirits for purposes like healing or exorcism.
[12] These shamans set up an altar in their own houses and received a different kind of training from hereditary shamans.
[13]
Manchu shamans typically wore an
apron, a feathered cap denoting their ability to fly to the spirit world, and a belt with dangling bells, and carried a knife, two wooden sticks with bells affixed to the top, and a drum they used during ceremonies.
[14] These attributes could still be observed among shamans from
Manchuria and
Mongolia in the early twentieth century.
[15]
Jurchen shamanic practices were transformed by the rise of Qing founder
Nurhaci (1559–1626).
[6] As he started to unify the Jurchen tribes, Nurhaci destroyed the
tangse of the defeated tribes and replaced their protective deities with the magpie, the totemic animal of his own clan, the
Aisin Gioro.
[16] Tribes that voluntarily joined Nurhaci were allowed to keep their own gods.
[3] This absorption of other clans' shamanic rituals into those of Nurhaci's clan started a process of "state codification of religion" that continued into the eighteenth century.
[17]
In another transformation that "mirrored the process of political centralization" in Nurhaci's state, the traditional Jurchen belief in multiple heavens was replaced by one Heaven called "Abka
ama" or "Abka
han."
[14] This new shamanic Heaven became the object of a state cult similar to that of the Jurchen rulers' cult of Heaven in the
Jin dynasty (1115–1234) and to
Chinggis Khan's worship of
Tengri in the thirteenth century.
[18] This state sacrifice became an early counterpart to the Chinese worship of Heaven.
[19] From as early as the 1590s, Nurhaci appealed to Heaven as, "the arbiter of right and wrong."
[18] He worshipped Heaven at a shamanic shrine in 1593 before leaving for a campaign against the Yehe, a Jurchen tribe that belonged to the rival
Hūlun confederacy.
[18] Qing annals also report that when Nurhaci announced his
Seven Great Grievances against the
Ming dynasty in April 1618, he conducted a shamanic ceremony during which he burned an oath to Heaven written on a piece of yellow paper.
[20] This ceremony was deliberately omitted from the later Chinese translation of this event by the Qing court.
[21]
Nurhaci's son
Hong Taiji (r. 1626–1643), who renamed the Jurchens "
Manchus" in 1635, forbade commoners and officials from erecting shamanic shrines for ritual purposes, making the
tangse "the monopoly of the ruler."
[3] He also banned shamans from treating illness, albeit with little success.
[13] The
Old Manchu Archives, a chronicle documenting Manchu history from 1607 to 1636, show that state rituals were held at the
tangse of the Qing capital
Mukden in the 1620s and 1630s.
[22] Just before commanding
Banner troops into China in early 1644, Prince
Dorgon (1612–1650), who was then regent to the newly enthroned
Shunzhi Emperor (r. 1643–1661), led the other Manchu princes in worshipping Heaven at the Mukden
tangse.
[18]
Shamans could also be used for personal purposes, as when Nurhaci's eldest son
Cuyen supposedly tried to bewitch the entire Aisin Gioro lineage with the help of shamans in 1612.
[23]