: The Tunguska Event found here:
: http://www.s-d-g.freeserve.co.uk/tunguska.html

: I have a book by a Russian Author entitled "Chekov's
: Journey" which covers the trip they made to
: investigate this.

The Excerpta Reportage #092199
THE RUSSIAN ORIGIN OF THE WORD “SHAMAN”

The following excerpt is taken from a book by Alan Metcalf called “The World In So Many Words; A country-by-country tour of words that have shaped out language” (Houghton Mifflin Co. 1999)

In the morning of June 30, 1908, the most powerful explosion in recorded human history took place in the sky over the Tunguska region of central Siberia. According to eyewitnesses, its cause was the wrath of a shaman.

A shaman is a person with exceptional powers over nature. The Tungus people, as they are known to outsiders, or Evenki, as they call themselves, use “shaman” as both a noun and a verb, and their practice of shamanism has given this word to anthropologists and comparative religionists the world over.

Magankan, the Tunguska shaman, had already demonstrated his powers by catching a bullet shot at him and by stabbing his own chest without leaving a scratch. But his greatest feat was summoning a huge flock of “agdi”, the birds that produce thunder, for the explosion of the land of a rival Evenki clan. It flattened nearly a thousand square miles of forest and started a fire that burned for weeks, sending ash so high that it circled the Northern Hemisphere, making sunsets bright. Needless to say, it scared away his rivals for good.

This is the story they told some twenty years later to the first scientist to reach the remote, swampy, mosquito-ridden site. Since then, the scientists have given other explanations. the forty-megaton explosion, two thousand times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, is now generally thought to have been caused by a meteorite or comet that exploded in the Earth’s dense atmosphere. But there are still Evenki who think differently.

Long before that big bang, English speakers had taken note of the shamans. A book published in 1698 explains, “If five or six of the Tonguese families happen to live near one another...they maintain betwixt them a Shaman, which signifies as much as Sorcerer or Priest.”

The Tungus or Evenki are found over a wide area of both Siberia and northern China, though they are not particularly numerous. There are about 30,000 in Siberia, about one-third of them speaking Evenki as a native language, and another 10,000 in China who speak Evenki. It is an Altaic language. One other Evenki word in English is “pika” (1827), the name of a little round-eared rabbit with a squeaky voice.
--Alan Metcalf “The World In So Many Words; A country-by-country tour of words that have shaped out language” (Houghton Mifflin Co. 1999)