Silk Road Spirits: The Lost Folklore and Mythology of Central Asia

The mythologies of Central Asia have been hiding in plain sight for a thousand years.This is the book that finally brings them into the light.Between the Caspian Sea and the borders of China lies a region the size of India, home to some of the richest folk traditions on earth — traditions almost entirely absent from English-language nonfiction. No shelf in any Western bookshop offers what shelves of Greek, Norse, and Egyptian mythology provide. Until now.Silk Road Spirits is a definitive introduction to the supernatural heritage of Central Asia: the shamans, spirits, sky gods, and heroic epics of the Turkic steppe, the Pamiri highlands, the Uzbek oasis cities, the Turkmen desert, the Kyrgyz mountains, and the Afghan highlands.Inside you will find:- Tengri and the sky religion that ruled the steppe for a millennium before Islam — and survives today in the Altai Republic- The Manas epic, twenty times longer than the Iliad, still performed by the manaschi at Kyrgyz weddings- The Pamiri house, a single room that encodes the entire cosmos in its five pillars- The fire temples of ancient Khorezm and the Zoroastrian substrate beneath contemporary Turkmen tradition- The djinn and pari of the Uzbek oasis cities, the devs of Tajik folktales, the udagan female shamans of Siberia- The surviving Kalash tradition, the closest contemporary parallel to what Nuristan was before its forced conversion- Korkyt Ata and the kobyz, the sacred instrument whose music traditionally held death at bay- The shamanic revival sweeping through post-Soviet Central Asia todayDrawing on ethnographic records, scholarly research, and the testimony of living practitioners, Dmitri Kazan delivers a journey through eight distinct cultural worlds — the product of centuries of Silk Road exchange, Persian influence, Turkic migration, Mongol empire, and Islamic synthesis.These are not museum traditions. They are living cultures, maintained by living people, whose heritage deserves a far wider audience than it has ever received.If you loved Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology, Robert Graves's Greek Myths, or any book that takes you into a complete mythological world you never knew existed — this is your next journey. Read more