Shaman's apprentice - lineart

An old form of a Sun-worshipping ritual – several shamans, young and old, stand in a close circle holding their hands, a long red cord goes around each participant's waist, slightly squeezing it. They begin a round dance to the rhythm of flutes and drums, moving counterclockwise, falling into a deep trance and slowly stepping backwards to enlarge the circle, the smooth red cord sliding around their waists, cinching them tighter and tighter as the circle increases in diameter. Their bellies, well-trained since the earliest age and given a good massage right before the ritual, eventually get squeezed to the size of the neck and smaller under the pressure of the cord as the shamans lean backwards to further increase the circle, sweating in the burning Sun to the gasps of the watching crowd.

According to their beliefs, a big enough circle will get noticed by the Sun, ensuring good hunt, weather and harvest. The ritual goes on until the shamans with the "weakest guts" collapses. The loser then gets stripped of all clothes and tied to a stake or a fence and everyone in the village get the traditional right to punch him or her in the stomach just in case the harvent/hunt goes bad because of this loser. Usually villagers are too scared to punch a shaman, though, even a failed one, so the punches are pretty merciful, and in case the ritual went good the shaman may even receive many kisses on the belly instead. The ritual is performed twice a year.

The same ritual of cinching is used by individual shamans to contact the Sun. The shaman would use the extreme waist cinching technique to fall into a deep trance, the circle around the waist representing the Sun and the two "halves" of the body symbolizing the part still standing on Earth and the part travelling through the Sun to the deep cosmic space for shamanic purposes such as weather forecast, asking for good harvest, good hunt, etc.

Of course, after many, many years of magical experience every shaman has to start searching for a young and talented apprentice to whom he'd pass the knowledge of all these rituals.

Surely there's a self-sacrificial theme here, which was very common in ancient shamanism as they believed that going through a painful experience is essential for successful magic, attracting the Sun-deity's attention and receiving Sun-power.

The act of waist-cinching has survived to our days but got transformed into purely aesthetic phenomenon of tight-lacing and lost its original magical value.