Earth Shamaness: Bridging the Ancient and Digital Worlds

‘Earth Shamaness’ by Cornelia Es Said, 2023, oil on canvas, 42 × 50 cm
Series: Digital Shamans

A shamaness is a female ritual specialist who mediates between her community and the spirit world — through trance, through the body, through technologies of transformation that predate written language by tens of thousands of years. The term derives from the Tungusic šaman with the English suffix -ess; in Russian ethnography, the equivalent is shamanka. In Northern Europe, she was the völva — the staff-carrier, the seeress. Across cultures, from Buryat Mongolia to Korea, from the Chinese Wu priestesses to the machi of the Mapuche, female shamans have operated as healers, diviners, and custodians of knowledge that institutional power structures have consistently worked to erase.

The Painted Face as Threshold

The figure’s face is half-covered in white pigment. Ceremonial face and body painting is among the oldest recorded human practices — older than cave painting, since we painted ourselves before we painted walls. Across shamanic traditions worldwide, face paint functions as threshold technology: it marks the boundary between the mundane self and the spirit-accessible self. The pigment operates like a mask without material obstruction. It signals — to the community, to the spirits, and to the practitioner herself — that the person wearing it has stepped out of ordinary identity. Without the paint, she is her everyday self. With it, she can traverse.

The figure is caught at the moment of transition — simultaneously present in the living world and available to whatever lies beyond it. The eyes are half-closed, the head tilted upward in the posture that recurs across shamanic iconography: the ecstatic tilt, the body offered upward, the gaze directed at something the viewer cannot see.

Antler Crown, Green Collapse

The branches growing from the figure’s head are antlers — or roots, or both. Horned and antlered headdresses appear in shamanic contexts across Siberia, Bronze Age Central Asia, and the Paleolithic cave art of southern France. The “Sorcerer” of Les Trois-Frères (c. 13,000 BCE) wears a stag’s antlers. Female burials designated as shamanic in ancient Central Asia — such as the “Priestess of Ukok” (fifth century BCE) — include elaborate Tree of Life headdresses with gilded animal figures on the branches. The antler marks the practitioner as no longer exclusively human. The boundary between the shamaness and the animal, between the body and the forest, dissolves.

In ‘Earth Shamaness’, this dissolution is literal. The figure does not wear the green — she is becoming it. The vegetation does not frame her; it absorbs her. Brushwork merges skin into leaf, arm into branch. The palette is almost entirely earth: ochre, deep green, raw umber, the orange of clay pigment or firelight. The shamaness is returning to what she came from.

The Bindings

Dark bands circle the figure’s wrists — cord bindings, tight against the skin.

The connection between binding and shamanic practice runs through language itself. The Old Norse word seiðr, which denotes the trance-based magic practiced by the völva (the Norse seeress and female ritual specialist), derives from Proto-Indo-European *seH2i-, meaning “to bind.” The word for Northern European sorcery is, at its etymological root, the word for tying a cord. Proto-Celtic *soito- (“sorcery,” giving Welsh hud and Breton hud, both meaning “magic”) shares the same origin. Binding, sorcery, and the cord are a single concept that runs through European languages like a buried root system.

The function is concrete. Physical constraint — tight wrapping, sensory restriction, sustained bodily pressure — is a documented method for inducing the altered states of consciousness that neuroscience now maps as shifts from left-hemisphere analytical processing to right-hemisphere experiential modes. The bindings anchor the body so the consciousness can travel. They hold the practitioner in place while she goes elsewhere.

They belong to a wider spectrum of body practices that use controlled physical intensity as a gateway: ritual tattooing, scarification, body suspension, piercing. The anthropologist Van Gennep described these bodily transformations as early as 1909 as rites of passage. Lars Krutak’s decade-long fieldwork among shamanic societies across four continents documents how tattooing and scarification function as spiritual technologies — permanent marks that encode access to the supernatural directly onto the skin. Body suspension — hanging from hooks pierced through the flesh — operates on the same principle: the deliberate threshold of pain opens a corridor to altered perception. The Lakota Sun Dance, the Okipa ceremony of the Mandan, the hook-swinging rituals of South India all use controlled suffering to break ordinary consciousness.

In the painting, the cords do something else as well. They are the last markers of human construction on a figure otherwise consumed by organic growth — the final trace of culture on a body dissolving into nature. They hold the figure together.

Europe’s Own Tradition

The shamaness is often presented as a figure belonging to distant cultures — Siberian, Indigenous American, sub-Saharan African. Europe tends to forget that it had its own.

The völva of Norse society was a professional seeress who travelled between settlements, carrying a staff as her badge of office. She sat on a raised platform (seiðhjallr) while a chorus of assistants sang varðlokkur — warding songs, high-pitched and repetitive, designed to attract spirits and protect the practitioner during her trance. The most detailed surviving account, in the Saga of Erik the Red, describes the völva Thorbjörg arriving at a settlement in crisis: famine, bad harvests, uncertainty. She performed her ritual and the community acted on what she saw. Even Odin, in the mythology, practised seiðr — at the cost of being mocked, because it was understood as women’s work. Freyja taught it to the gods.

Europe’s shamaness tradition reaches further back and further south than the Norse world. The Pythia at Delphi — priestess of Apollo, seated on a tripod over volcanic fissures, inhaling pneuma until trance overtook her — delivered oracles that shaped Greek military strategy, colonial expansion, and political alliances for nearly a millennium. The Sibyls — ecstatic prophetesses documented across the Mediterranean from Cumae to Erythrae — operated outside institutional priesthoods, itinerant and unsanctioned, consulted by emperors and feared by establishments. Roman sources record Germanic seeresses as early as the first century CE: Veleda of the Bructeri, who led armed resistance against Rome from a tower on the Lippe river, was consulted as a living oracle by her people. The line from Pythia to völva to village wise woman is continuous. Christianization broke it — systematically. What had been the seeress, the healer, the mediator between worlds, was reframed as the witch: dangerous, demonic, prosecutable. The European witch trials of the 15th to 18th centuries killed an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people, the vast majority women, many of them practitioners of folk healing, herbalism, and forms of spiritual mediation that had been embedded in European communities for centuries. The continuity between the Pythia, the völva, and the “witch” is direct. What changed was the institutional framework that decided whether a woman who communicated with unseen forces was a respected community resource or a criminal.

This history matters for the painting. ‘Earth Shamaness’ does not reference any single cultural tradition. It paints a figure that recurs — across geographies, across millennia, across the vocabularies used to name her. Völva, shamanka, Wu, mudang, wise woman, witch. The face paint, the antlers, the cord bindings, the ecstatic tilt of the head — these are shared grammar. The painting holds them in a single frame.

The iconography of ritual transformation is resurfacing in curated contemporary painting contexts. Earth Shamaness was selected, together with two further works from the Digital Shamans series, for the finalist exhibition of the 2025 Rosenheim-Kunstpreis under the theme ‘Magie und Ritual’ (Haus der Stadtgeschichte, Offenbach, 29.11.2025 – 08.01.2026) — one of 41 works chosen from roughly 900 European submissions.

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