Siberian Three Souls
Siberian Three Souls is a Indigenous Siberian / Circumpolar — three-soul complex body system as transmitted through the lineage Siberian and circumpolar peoples describe heterogeneous soul, breath, shadow, and life-force concepts in which illness, dreaming, death, and shamanic travel may involve movement or loss of a soul. This entry presents three comparative stations—head-soul, heart/rib-soul, and earth-soul—drawn from cross-cultural ethnography, with a schematic shaman-flight route; it is not a universal doctrine shared by every Siberian nation.. This page lists every point in the system with sourced placements and links to cross-tradition correspondences curated for The Body Spiritual.
Open in interactive explorerPrimary sources
- Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton University Press, 1964) — Comparative study of Siberian and other shamanic traditions, especially soul travel, illness, initiation, and the cosmic axis. Eliade's typology is a secondary synthesis and should not be read as a single indigenous Siberian taxonomy.
- Roberte N. Hamayon, La chasse à l'âme: Esquisse d'une théorie du chamanisme sibérien (Société d'ethnologie, 1990) — Comparative analysis of Siberian shamanism, hunting relations, soul concepts, and ritual action. The work supports the relational and heterogeneous framing of the three stations, not a fixed body diagram.
- Piers Vitebsky, The Shaman (Duncan Baird Publishers, 1995) — Ethnographically informed overview of shamanic cosmology, spirit relations, illness, and travel, with Siberian examples. It is used to contextualise the flight channel as a ritual image rather than an anatomical conduit.
- Mihály Hoppál, Shamanism: An Archaic Technique of Ecstasy (Akadémiai Kiadó, 2005) — Comparative scholarship on Eurasian shamanic symbolism, soul imagery, and ritual specialists. Its broad comparison is used only with the lineage caveat that Siberian traditions remain locally distinct.
Known lineage variants
- There is no single Siberian religion or universally agreed three-soul list. Evenki, Buryat, Yakut/Sakha, Khanty, Nenets, and other traditions use different terms, numbers, and distributions for souls and vital substances; the labels here are comparative English descriptors.
- Head, heart/rib, and earth stations are visual abstractions for recurring ethnographic themes: consciousness or upper-world travel, life/breath centred in the trunk, and an earth/shadow/ancestral relation. Their normalized coordinates are editorial and carry broad uncertainty.
- The flight channel is a ritual-cosmological metaphor for shamanic travel, illness retrieval, and movement between worlds. It is not a nerve, vessel, or universally taught subtle channel, and the front-view route does not imply that traditional specialists used a human silhouette diagram.
- Some traditions distinguish more than three souls or describe a soul as distributed among breath, shadow, bones, name, and animal relations. This record uses three stations only because the assignment requests a comparative three-soul complex.
Cross-tradition overlaps
- Head-soul ↔ Àṣẹ — head (distance 0.015)
Related systems
No other systems share this tradition label.
Points
- Head-soul — Upper awareness · skyward travel
- Heart / rib-soul — Life-breath · embodied vitality
- Earth-soul — Shadow, bone, and ground relation
Frequently asked
What is Head-soul?
The head-soul is a comparative label for the aspect of personhood associated in some Siberian accounts with awareness, dreaming, naming, or travel toward the upper world. Its crown placement is a schematic aid for the flight narrative, not a claim that all Siberian peoples locate one soul in the head.
What is Heart / rib-soul?
This heart/rib station represents life-breath and embodied vitality in the trunk, where comparative ethnographies often describe the felt centre of living presence. It intentionally uses two body terms because Siberian traditions vary, and it should not be mistaken for one standard organ-soul doctrine.
What is Earth-soul?
The earth-soul marks a ground-facing relation involving shadow, ancestry, land, or the part of a person that can be endangered through spirit loss. Its lower-body placement is deliberately broad because these themes are distributed differently across Siberian and circumpolar traditions.