This study interprets Siberian shaman costumes from the perspective of Siberian shamanism’s spiritual culture by combining theoretical and empirical studies. According to the natural environment and language families, the Siberian people are classified into the Altai, Tungus, Ural, and Paleo-Siberian groups. Se Yin’s research classifies the spiritual culture of Siberian shamanism as cosmic, spiritual, and nature view. Eliade’s research has divided Siberian shaman costumes into form, headdress, and ornament. According to the present study, shaman costume form and decoration reflect the Siberian three-tiered cosmic view, such that the shaman’s head, body and feet correspond to the upperworld, middleworld and underworld. In addition, animism, totemism and ancestral worship appear in the shamanism’s spiritual view. For example, the costume’s form shows the totem of each tribe, while the costume accessories reflect animal worship, plant worship and ancestral worship. Finally, shamanism’s nature view mainly manifests through three processes: personification, deification, and ethics. As an intermediary between man and the spirits, shaman use their clothing to reproduce the image of half man and half spirit. The shaman’s costumes are deified and considered to have divine power. For example, the animals represented on the costume help the shaman travel through space. Generally, good animals help a shaman enter the upperworld, while animals that help a shaman enter the underworld are considered evil. Also, the number of hanging accessories represents the shaman’s ability.

This study attempts to analyze the social and cultural meanings of the ethnic groups to which different types of shamans belong in Siberia from the appearance characteristics in terms of clothing through Roland Barthes’s semiotic theory. The research method here is to analyze three types of shaman costume classified by Holmberg, which are bird-type, deer-type, and bear-type, through theoretical research and to investigate the analysis process of Roland Barthes’s semiotics theory. Roland Barthes’s approach to semiotics presents an analysis model that can explore the sociocultural meaning of the Siberian shaman costume. The research results are as follows. In the first type, to be closer to the god of the upperworld, shamans transform themselves into birds by decorating their costumes with the characteristic elements of birds such as feathers and wings. In the second type, the shamans’ costumes are made of deerskin, and the headdress is shown in the shape of antlers to make it easier to receive messages from the upperworld and run fast in the underworld. In the third type, the shaman’s costume is made of bearskin, the head is covered with bearskin, and the body is decorated with bear pendants. Through the power of the bear, the shaman is sent to the underworld to defeat evil gods and remove diseases. Shamans can show their particularity of being a demigod and non-binary gender through clothing. They use this to reflect their authority as a medium of communication between man and god.