Hmong Shamanism

While inclusive of broader traditions of ancestor veneration and animistic belief in gods, household spirits, and spirits of forest, Hmong Religiosity takes clearest shape as Hmong Shamanism, around the traditional healing practices of txiv neeb, shamans, and their ability to travel and communicate in the spirit world to bring about healing.  Hmong shamans, who can be men or women, have handed down for generations their healing knowledge through oral teaching and apprenticeship.  They can also be "chosen" by spirits for the role, and gifted by these spiritual helpers or spiritual healers with special knowledge for healing. Hmong Shamanism is a tradition that has always been a part of the lives of many Hmong people. .

Who can be a Shaman?

The individual who can communicate with these supernatural beings is known as a txiv neeb, or shaman. The first shaman was known as Siv Yis ("Shee Yee"). According to Hmong cosmology, evil spirits entered into the world of the human beings and released terrible diseases and illnesses. Siv Yis, their rescuer, understood how to heal, for he was sent down to earth by heaven to help the Hmong people.¹ 

Shamans identify themselves with Siv Yis, as the perform rituals involving special chants, physical activity, and achievement of a trance state. During this process, the shaman is believed to communicate with spiritual beings.² This can be understood in terms of “performative utterances” because words are often thought of as articulators of power and energy; put another way, speaking becomes the doing of a consequential action, such as promising, apologizing, praising, and forgiving.³

IIllness and Healing

In the Hmong culture, healing work through engagement with cultural symbols, with souls and not just bodies, and with the spirits themselves. A shaman addresses physical pain and bodily ailments as localized manifestations of cosmological imbalances and disorder, and while occasionally in tension, these healing traditions often take their rightful place for Hmong people alongside professional Western medicine.⁴  Some illnesses are seen as rooted in disturbances in the spiritual ecology of the world.⁵ In other words, when a person is sick, the shaman believes that there is either an imbalance in the cosmology of the individual or that a soul of that person is lost in the spiritual world. Most of the common rituals a shaman performs search for the lost soul and bring it back to earth so that a person might recover from his or her illness.⁶

Shamans are quintessential mediators and are threshold crossers who can go between the earth and the sky. The shaman’s gift and mission is to bring opposites together—to bring the physical and moral worlds into meaningful conjunction. That is why they are identified with archetypal connectors such as images of ladders, bridges, ropes, and cosmic trees that sink roots into the earth while branching towards the sky.⁷ The shaman’s ability to communicate with the spiritual world and the supernatural beings, to be able to see what is hidden and invisible to the rest and to bring back direct and reliable information from the spirit world, can be comforting and transformative for  other members of the Hmong community.⁸ Due to the shaman’s effective communication with the spiritual world, he or she plays an essential role in the Hmong community.

The status of a shaman can be measured by the size of his or her altar. The number of pig jawbones hanging from his or her shrine indicates the shaman's track record.⁹ The more jawbones, the more healing rituals the shaman has performed.