The old Yeniseian deer and reindeer cult is not connected in any way to reindeer herding. There are interesting and far-reaching cultural parallels in the Turkic and Indo-European worlds, linked to the words for ‘deer (doe)’ and ‘fawn’. The cervid attributes of the Yeniseian shamans permit us to separate a cervid type of shamans in general. The word for ‘shaman’ itself can be connected to the word for ‘reindeer’, and thus derived eventually from the Yeniseian languages.
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