Abstract:

Shamans in Shamanism, one of the old Turkish belief systems; In addition to religious duties such as expelling evil spirits, sending the dead to the other world, communicating between humans and gods, they also performed professions such as medicine, fortune-telling and musicians. During the performance of the aforementioned tasks, they performed various rituals in order to get help from ancestor spirits and beings accepted as cults. One of the situations where shamans receive help from these beings is wars. Shamans, who took part in wars as members of the society, supported the army by magic with the help of extraordinary powers. Shamans' help, while contributing to the Turks to defeat the enemy, highlighted their importance in social life. In this article, what magical rituals shamans performed while supporting the Turkish army with the help of animal and nature cults and how these rituals affected the course of the war were examined. For this purpose, evaluations in accordance with this feature have been revealed in historical texts. In the study, it was determined that shamans helped armies in war by taking advantage of the powers of stones, fountains, water, rains, animals and mountains or by fighting themselves.

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