When we were all settled inside, Tsedup produced the video camera he had taken with him and we all settled around its tiny screen to watch the film of their trip. Everyone was fascinated by the camera, but the women were particularly keen to watch; they had never been present at the ceremony that had taken place and clustered around the machine excitedly, awaiting their turn. The men, of course, saw it first.
The screen revealed their journey in miniature. First came the procession of hundreds of men on horseback to the offering site from their base-camp of white tents. They moved silently and ceremoniously through the summer flowers of the valley and alongside a rushing stream, the horses snorting, their bridles clinking in the sunshine. There were small boys, old men and young, some with hats on to protect them from the glare, some with rifles strapped to their backs. Many carried the ndashung with darchok, prayer flags, tied to the end, balancing the enormous lance across their laps or standing it upright in the saddle so that it pointed skyward. They formed an orderly line that snaked up the side of the mountain to the ridge of the offering site where the shogshung stood. The shogshung, or staff of life, marked the site of the mountain worship. It was the most important symbol of the mountain deities and its base had been buried in the ground along with hdir, treasure, sacred offerings to the earth contained in colourful cloth bags, which, at the time of their burial, were placed with extreme care in exactly the right position so as not to offend the gods. Against the main staff leant many ndashung, forming a tepee-like shape of spears, festooned with hundreds of prayer flags from years of offerings, tired and grey with exposure to the elements, flapping in the wind. Along the ridge stood another ten spears placed at intervals of about five paces, again covered in prayer flags. The men assembled beneath the shogshung and placed their own offerings of prayer flags in a pile on the ground before three monks. They sat quietly as the monks consecrated the offerings, purifying them before they could be displayed before the gods. The tip of the shogshung glinted in the sunlight and nothing but their rhythmic chanting and the wind could be heard. It was the calm before the storm.
Suddenly, the crowd erupted into a riot of whooping and shrieking. Gunshots split the air and a blizzard of white snow clouded the blue sky as they tossed thousands of wind horses into the valley in fistfuls. They called the mountain's name, 'Amnye Kula! Amnye Kula!' over and over, and shouted their own messages to the gods, personal appeals for protection from the mountain spirits against their enemies. Gondo cried, 'Har jalo! Har jalo! Har jalo! May the spirit win!' as he cast his own paper to the wind. The chief, Tsenach, bellowed his own guttural eulogy, an enormous silver hoop swinging from his ear. Above the cacophony the deep resonance of the conch boomed out, as a monk blew into the shell and brass bells tinkled. They heaped the offerings of tsampa, rice, cloth, butter and milk that they had brought on to a huge bonfire beneath the shogshung and erected the new ndashung, stringing the prayer flags from spear to spear along the ridge and ropes tufted with merdach, spun sheep's wool, and kacher, long sheep's hair. Each man circumambulated the ridge three times on his horse and the ritual was complete. The ground was littered with thousands of wind horses and still they spiralled densely in the smoke from the fire. It was like a war.
As I watched, I could imagine it happening hundreds of years ago. The timelessness of the scene was disturbed only by a T-shirt or the flash of sunglasses here and there. Apart from the lull of the monks' earlier intervention it had been so wild, as if the men were fearlessly exposing their souls to the mountain. I had never seen such an uninhibited display of worship and was astonished to have witnessed such primitive, raw energy in the men that now sat passively around me, sipping tea.
And, of course, it had been their practice for hundreds of years – thousands, some locals said. For the Amdo nomads still embrace many of the original shamanistic and Bon disciplines of Tibet, despite their acceptance of Buddhism. In fact, Tibet was one of the last Asian countries to turn to Buddhism and the distinctive characteristics of the Tibetan variety developed in response to the strength of shamanic influence. Tsedup's father explained that their gods are divided into the protectors of nature and the protectors of religion. What I had just witnessed was a ceremony to propitiate the gods of nature.
Because of the hostility of their natural environment, it has always been the nomads' religious preoccupation to tame the land. They place great importance on optimising good luck and minimising bad luck by propitiating the gods that determine their fate. I knew that, in shamanic terms, there are three realms of existence: the sky, the earth and the subterranean. The gods live in the sky, serpent spirits live in the earth and humans live on the earth in between. The elemental nature of each domain is also important: the sky representing space, air and fire; the subterranean realm, earth and water, and all the elements being present in the middle realm.
The most powerful sky gods are those who live on the mountain peaks. These warrior-like gods, called nyen, are violent, territorial lords, who require propitiation with complex ritual and offering such as I had just witnessed. Amnye Kula takes the form of a man carrying a spear and riding a white horse, but others take different forms: for example, the mountain god, Archa, close to Tsedup's brother Gondo's tribe, takes the form of a snake.
The most sacred mountain for all the people of Amdo is Amnye Machen. It is considered the Mount Kailash, Kang Rimpoche, of eastern Tibet and its range rises out of the Amdo plains for 125 miles on an east-west axis. Amnye Machen, the mountain god, is lord above all lords of the earth of Amdo. His name means. 'Ancestor of the Amdo People', and he is the greatest and wildest of the mountain gods. But as well as these masculine, warrior gods, there are also female sky goddesses, dakinis or khandromas, who have an elementally malign nature and are said to eat man's flesh and afflict him in his sexual relationships.
The demi-gods of the subterranean realm are serpent spirits, both male and female, called lu and luma, the spirits of earth and water. In contrast to the mountain gods, who rule with patriarchal authority, the serpent spirits have a sensitive, female nature. They live in the earth, in the rocks, in the lakes and streams. They are black, white or red guardians of ecological balance, preventing human interference with the earth. Precious stones belong to them, and the power of a coral or turquoise stone, so important to the nomads in their traditional dress, is deemed auspicious or inauspicious, depending on its guardian serpent spirit's satisfaction with how it was mined and how it has been looked after. According to shamanistic belief, the mining of gold or iron is offensive to the serpent spirits, like stealing from them. Even digging a hole in the ground could risk offending them, and Tsedup told me once that his mother would not leave one tent peg in the ground when they moved to new pasture, for fear of wounding the earth. With all this in mind, it was hard to imagine a more devastating proposition than that which was presented to them when the Chinese began gold-mining recently on a holy mountain in Machu.
The middle domain is inhabited by minor gods, more intimately related to humans and their daily domestic life than the mountain gods and the serpent spirits. They have specific functions and include home gods, who provide protection for the family, a god of horses and of cattle. All of these gods need to be appeased to ensure the success and well-being of a nomad family and its herds in this hostile environment. The rituals are said once to have included animal sacrifice or marcho, blood offering, but when the influence of Buddhism prohibited this, ritual fire-offering or garchot, non-blood offering, became the favoured method of propitiation.