Talgat Baltabek

Talgat Baltabek, PhD is the last traditional shaman of the Kyrgyz, former professor of psychiatry at Heidelberg University, relentless researcher into arcane mysteries, and misunderstood paranoid psychotic.

Youth in Russia
Dr. Baltabek was born into a nomadic Kara-Kyrgyz band in the last years of their freedom to practice a traditional lifestyle of itinerant herding. Their ancestral lands having been annexed into the Russian Empire shortly before his birth, the significance of this control built throughout his youth, culminating in forced settlement and conscription.

Likewise prior to his birth the master shaman Niyazova travelled to find the woman who carried his unborn apprentice. The subject of this vision proved to be the infant Talgat, and as both a father and lover Niyazova would be his only family into manhood. Together they unwittingly added the final link to a chain of sacred knowledge and practice unbroken for centuries.

But a possible future was destroyed with the disruption of nomadic lifestyles by Imperial authorities and the conversion of his tribe to the Russian Church. Unable to practice, Niyazova succumbed fatally to alcoholism in just a few short years and Baltabek acquiesced to an arranged marriage in the hopes of reforging his place in Kyrgyz society. But that relationship was doomed and he fled west.

Academic Career in Germany
It was from the time that he arrived in Europe that Talgat Baltabek began to develop symptoms of mania and schizoid clusters. It is understood that, as a science of the transmutation of the spirit, shamanism and "disordered" consciousness have long gone hand in hand. But cut off from that ancestral outlet he felt inclined to seek out treatment by more modern means.

This brought him into contact with the avant garde of clinical psychiatry in Europe at the time. His inquests developed into enrollment at the University of Lübeck and he participated in experimental trials dealing with cutting edge psychotherapeutic treatments.

Unbeknownst to most in the west the central sacred practice of many southern shamanizing tribes is a tradition of alchemical blacksmithing. This substantial inheritance, in addition to the phenomenal inheritances of shamanism, lead his career and mental health to benefit as an early patient and academic convert to the medicinal value of lithium compounds as discovered by neurologist Carl Lange. Dr. Baltabek developed his association with this vogue and independent therapeutic discoveries into a successful career through his fifth decade of life, taking him to a associate professorship at Heidelberg University.

Madness and The Manor
If only there were some dramatic trigger in Talgat Baltabek's life for the reemergence of symptoms and the unravelling of composure. But all too often old treatments begin to fail and old demons return with a vengeance, denying their victims even the dignity of a reason why. Was he really run out of town by faculty and students alike as he perceived? The evolution of his professional interest toward trance states, mana transference and fetish objects may well have given them pause.

And so he came to take up residence in a well furnished laboratory suite in the North Tower of The Manor. When Dr. Baltabek felt compelled to rusticate one winter a few weeks before the formal end of term it was with every assurance to the dean that he would be back at his post the following semester. The promise of conducting groundbreaking scholarship unrestricted by daily professional concerns had simply been beyond his will to resist.