The ideas of the heavenly origin of totemic forefathers of Buryats as well as the ideas of the spirit-hosts of localities, shamans, epical heroes are related to the archaic cult of the Eternal Blue Sky which is taken to be the highest divinity and the creator of all that is found in the Universe. The highest divinity, the sky or the Heaven (tengri in Buryat) is personified in the epos as Khormusta Tengeri or Esege Malan Tengeri. The most archaic cult of the Mother-Earth, the foremother, has genetic ties with the cult of the World Tree and the World Mountain. It has greatly affected the emergence of the other, not less popular cults, like those of the Fire, the Mountain Caves, the Water, the Genealogical tree. When reading the epic one also comes across some other various cults, those of ancestors, the Heaven, the Sun, the Moon, animals, the magic. There are shamanic elements and buddhist inclusions. Then one can mention the cosmogonic prologue of the epic, the creation of the main hero by the Heavenly Gods who was then sent down to the Earth with the mission of fighting the evil, Geser’s three celestial sisters, the theme of cosmic marriage or the motive of being born from a cracked-apart stone. The archetype of the celestial forefather is often connected with the solar motive, e.g. a golden pole or rays of the Sun coming through the upper opening of the yurt are associated with the conception of son.
Nature is inseparable from nomad’s everyday life. It gives strength to the nomad, the latter receives from Nature his/her life energy. The idea of the cohesion of Man and Nature which is depicted in the Geseriade has been of great importance in all times because the alternative idea would be non-acceptance of all the laws of Nature. Thus there were numerous cults connected with Nature.
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| Geser is hunting |
Hunting in the taiga (a thick forest) had territorial limitations, the hunters were well aware of the stock of the hunting areas, they had a good idea of how much game they could catch or kill in order to keep in balance the quantity of wild animals, i.e. the food stock of nomads. The latter abstained from hunting the she-animals, especially with cubs and young animals with no couple. Thus there was the cult of hunting and the Lord of thick forest. Before going hunting Buryats completed special rites, among them chanting of Geser verses.
Atmospheric phenomena are presented in the epic in the personages of tengris. Among 44 eastern tengris there are tengris of summer, autumn, winter mists, black dirt, black smoke. Among the 55 western tengris there are the following: the Tengri of the Upper Wind, the Tengri of Fire, the Tengri of Sun Warmth, the Tengri of Rain, Tengris of Lightning and Thunderstorm, the Tengri of Snow, the Tengri of White Bottom or in other words the cloudless sky, etc.
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| The struggle between western and eastern tengris |
The struggle takes place symbolically between warmth and cold; between clear, sunny weather and black nastiness; between heavy rain contributing to good vegetation which is favourable for the nomad-cattlebreeder and bad weather which interferes with this.
The Geseriade evidences of the fact that Buryats were noted for their ecological approach to Nature which presupposed the adaptation to natural conditions. The form and the type of dwellings, utilitarian constructions, tools, clothes, habbits are chifly dependent on the climate, geographical position, flora, fauna, temperature and other objective factors that gave rise to many religious cults and rituals.
Proto-Buryats, i.e. hunters and pickers of plants representing forest tribe communities entered the new stage of social and economic life brought about by the establishment of the paternal right much later than the ancestors of other nomad tribes. The socio-economical ties were those of a tribal community and Buryats did not undergo the process of unification for a considerable period of time. Even in the end of the XIX century Buryats somewhat preserved patriarchal and tribal relations since new tendencies did not display themselves so vividly in their economy: there were no factories, railroads, electricity, etc. Due to this the epos preserved itself in a pure form with some impacts of feudal and buddhist ideologies. One should mention that the epos of Geser in its versified version which is believed to be the Buryat creation was preserved by the "western" Buryats, among whom most widely spread were shamanic rituals. One can say that the oral "Geser" and shamanism are to some extent interrelated. The versification and shamanic elements evidence of "Geser's" being ancient since it is generally recognised that the most ancient epical works of Mongolian peoples as well as shaman invocations were in verse, not in prose. "Geser" as well as shamanism underwent two gross pressures: one, that of buddhist authorities and the other, that of the Soviet period when in 1940-50s they were persecuted as "anti-people".
One can't understand the essence of current shamanic rituals without touching upon the old beliefs which thecontemporaries hadn't watched but which the epos and other folklore pieces help us reconstruct, though they underwent some changes. With this in view I will often make reference to old legends and motives found in the folklore namely in the epos of Geser. The word boo (shaman) is of Mongolian origin , it might be semandcally connected with the term "to sing, to cam, to invoke". Some ritual functions of Mongolian shamanism or boo are close to bon, an ancient Tibetan belief. The epos of Geser was quite popular among Tibetan bon-po communities. Some nomads take "Geser" to be an oral people's monument of the bon epoch. They liked to recite or rather sing it to musical instruments.
Mythological consciousness or religiousness revealed in the epical sources of Mongolian peoples is of diverse forms. At the early stages of its formation the religiousness reflected the primitive cults of the early communities. The epical material contains evidences of such phenomena as deities, spirits, souls of ancestors, added properties of real objects or fetishes as well as "supernatural" relations amongst the objects of material world (magic, totemism). The ordinary religious consciousness or religious psychology as the epos evidences was being shaped out without any predetermined frame or rather chaotically at first sight. It was certainly sensual reflection of everyday life. More developed was the right (emotional) hemisphere of the human brain. In this period, the "infant" period of evolution of man, of particular importance in his life were the feelings and frames of mind associated with animistic, totemistic, magic ideas which in their turn were related to the formation of shamanism, bon, various cults, those of the Sun, Fire and other natural objects.
Animistic ideas as some authors term them as one of the relics of the primitive religious syncretism penetrate the whole of Mongolian folklore and epic. Widely spread were genealogical myths in which the cult of mountain spirits is depicted . It is just the mountain spirit who appears to be in fact the father of Geser on the Earth. According to the epos man possesses not one soul but a few of them. One soul is in body, the other may leave body in its sleep, one more soul is somewhere else out of body. Very often souls are of zoomorphic type. As an illustration to it in the epos may be two golden fish coming out of mangus' nostrils during his sleep. One might recollect the hero's chasing of three stags who had the soul of a mangus. In the Oirat epos the soul may be found in a copper-headed iron-winged crow which flies out of a cut-open breast of mangus' mother. Then the crow turns info fish, marmot; the hero chases it as eagle, fish or marmot. In demon’s body, both male and female, in one of the big toes or in one of his ninety five stomachs found not infrequently was an invulnerable baby combining in itself the features of enemy's unborn offsprings and of some powerful "inner strength" of the enemy.
Most often come as embodiments of soul the birds and snakes or fish which present universal cosmic symbols of the upper and the lower worlds. Soul saving itself from pursuit flies into the sky as bird or plunges into the sea as fish. It might be associated with the dichotomy of the upper and the lower, e.g. the placement of mangadkhai's "golden seed of soul" firstly in the plume of Khankhan Kherdig bird (Garudi) whose nest is on top of an aspen growing on top of a high mountain, then in the stomach of a gigantic black frog, living in a yellow lake or placement of another soul of the same mangadkhai embodied in thirteen quails in a golden and silver box placed in a silver trunk in a yellow milk sea under the protection of a one-eyed woman whereas the soul of the hero is hidden in the western Heaven with seven celestial smiths. Such episodes are quite typical for the Buryat epos. One can recall some Mongolian epical motives of the destruction of enemy's soul located in three bees (in the plume of the Kherdig bird, in a toad, in the mangus' mother's box, the transformation of the soul into quails, roe deer and the hero pursuing them in the form of a hawk, a wolf, etc. Mentioned as soul keepers are knotted larch, perch, bull, wolf, fox, frog, birds like quail, falcon, crow, eagle and others, snake, fish, roe deer, goat, ram, spide, stallion, lion, mule, Kherdig bird's plume, thread, needle, gold.
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| Bukha noyon |
One should mention the existence of the cult of mountains, prayers on the mountain, begging for children and the birth of the child from a mountain spirit. When building something in the mountains if the necessity arose to move stones from one place to another it was advisable to complete certain rituals to appease the spirit of the mountain. The relics of such consciousness may be observed in our days too. As we have already mentioned there are totemistic features fairly well preserved in the epos. In a Khori genealogical legend of Khoridoi-mergen the hero gets married to a celestial fairy who had been a bird previously. Very well known is the motive of a swan, the ancestor of one of the tribes. In the Mongolian epos of Geser two bulls are shown as fighting, one of them being white, the other black. The white one is taken to be the protector of Geser, the black of the mangus. The totemic ancestors of Bulagats and Ekhirits are the grey Bukha noyon bull and the black and white bull. This motive has its parallel in a Tibetan legend, describing the fight between white and black snakes which come out of the mangus' nostrils or in the Tibetan version of the Geser epos where two snakes fight having come out of the mangus' ears.
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| Geser at the Baikal |
The nomad tribes of Central Asia left monuments resembling "deer stones" or stone slabs with engraved inscriptions, magical formulas. In Transbaikalia and Mongolia they found sacral writings on rocks, the so-called rock paintings or petroglyphs on which depicted most frequently was an eagle in flight. They date back to the second half of the second millenium B. C. (– before Christ). They all are of conventional nature and are given as symbol or sign. It is another evidence of the fact that there existed a written language though primitive. There is much in common between the drawings mentioned and zurags (drawing) of Balagan ongons [mascot, amulet]. Ongons are symbols of ancestors' spirits and eagles are also thought to be the spirits of ancestors. The Baikal region is abundant in legends of genealogical totems depicted in the form of a flying eagle. According to those legends the host of the Oikhon island was married to a tengri's daughter. She gave birth into a son, Burged by name which means "eagle". He adopted eagles as sons. The latter gave the beginning to the kin of Ol’khon shamans who were known as shubuuni noyod [lords of birds]. They say that earlier during the sacrifice ritual to Khan Khoto babai they made three replicas of eagles out of birch bark. When I attended the tayilagan at the Baikal I saw that on the shore of lake Baikal the shamans put three birch trees and under each of them they put meat and bones of the sheep sacrificed, covered them with hides and burned. When an eagle flew down onto one of the trees they said that the spirit of the ancestor of the kin represented by that tree came down. Those belonging to that kin were overwhelmed with joy. There are also legends that the eagle was a shaman, that is why it is much esteemed. One can come across his image everywhere. We might just mention in this respect Khan-Garudi. Garudi came originally from India perhaps through Tibet, its image might have intermingled with that of eagle, the cult of which is so widely spread in Buryatia.
The heroic epos of Mongolian peoples is rich in other diversified mythological elements. One could mention demons who appeared out of the remnants of evil deities thrown down to Earth. Geser has the reputation of destroyer of demons and monsters, personifications of the dark chthonic forces. The epos tells us of the Tengris coming down to Earth, of the middle place between the Sky and the Earth, of dragons, of various "personified" monsters such as mangadkhais, manyheaded snakes, birds, huge dogs, frogs, ants. Fantastic images reflect the mythological essence of the epos and hence its archaic shamanic nature. Cosmic elements are widely presented in the epos of Mongolian peoples. They are the Sky, the Sun, the Moon, the stars, the Earth, the water, etc. To this may be added the cosmogonic prologue of the Geser epos. In "Djangar" the main character gets married to a celestial girl. Geser is often given help by his three celestial sisters. Presented also is the solar motive. The conception of a child is associated with a golden pole of light coming through the upper hole of the yurt.
The performing of the "Geser" epic was of ritual, magic, shamanic nature. The rhapsodes sank into trance when reciting the epos. The epos had protective, healing properties, it was used by shamans for exorcising evil spirits. This is reflected in the shaman practice, in the invocations. Geser is taken to be the son of the Tengri. Sometimes the Earth and Water are regarded as Geser's parents which is associated with the shamanic ideas of human personification of souls of mountains and localities. Reciting of the uliger appeases the spirit of Master of taiga (thick forest) and helps with successful hunting. The rhapsode himself was in fact a shaman or is now a peculiar type of shaman.
Prior to the battle, on the mountain or obo the heroes of the epos performed shamanic smudging asking to protect them and give the victory over the enemy. The petrogenetic motive, i.e. birth of the hero out of stone is evidently associated with the shamanic cult of personified mountain deities.
The common people took shamans to be very powerful and helpful to them. This is reflected in the Buryat epos. A woman shaman throws tears and snot of the poor people onto the Heavenly palace and the latter gets cracked and leans over on one side.
Besides khats, ejins, zayans in Cis-Baikalia there existed spirits of lower categories, i.e. bokholdois, shudkhers and shulmuses, ada or anakhai, ukheri ezi. They caused misfortune, illness, death. People treated them with fear, they kept children away from them. They called shaman, completed smudging, put a knife under the pillow to save children or an axe under the threshold, sanctified mirrors, bells, polecat's fur . The objects sanctified were called hakhyuuhan (protectors).
The mythological consciousness reflected in the epos displays itself in various heterogeneous and heteromorphic forms. The ordinary religious psychology was a syncretism of numerous naive conceptions and ideas concerned with the formation of various cults like those of the Sky, Sun and other natural objects and phenomena. Among a great many shamanic functions as well as those of "Geser" one might as well mention the following: those of healing, protection, entertainment, exorcism, asking for certain favours, etc.
Shamanism is very ancient as everybody knows, it has always accompanied man in his evolution. Archaeologists are of the opinion that some elements of shamanism were inherent in the life of man since the Palaeolithic times. In fact it never disappeared though it wasn't always a state religion. But it was quite flexible, adaptive and was always capable of renewal and perseverance due to its original nature. Its functions do not seem to have undergone significant transformations. At first it served certain clans, then several clans which were united into tribes until it acquired the national, ethnical nature. Now we witness the process of emergence of neo-shamanism both in the West and East. Now we can speak of Asian and Western shamanism. It is found in various cultures which are quite apart both in space and time. Many peoples went through the initial stage of formation which is typologically almost identical.
Shamanism has always been implicitely or explicitely playing an important role in the life of many individuals on the vast territories of Central Asia and Siberia including present Buryatia. Now one often hears people talking of the need to revive the spiritual values predominant in the old times. These calls for bettering one's soul are becoming all the more intense and justified . This is very positive that people have become aware of the importance of moral and ethical values, it is the evidence of their worry and care about the future of their children, the future of mankind. One of the aspects to help improve morality is undoubtedly religion. It doesn't matter which exactly religion is going to play the role of "purifier" in a society, it just should be the one which is most relevant for the given society. Among Buryats perhaps it's going to be Shamanism alongside with Buddhism with which it is closely connected.
Shamanism in the course of its existence has flown into the other forms, acquiring new names and features or became substituted for by other related or more civilized forms or it existed parallelly with other religions being either in exposed or latent conflict with them or maintaining some other kind of coexistence. The shamanism of our ancestors is a universal philosophy, it displays itself in the form of an original spiritual practice of mastering metaphysical reality which is beyond everyday human experience. At the same time it is widely introduced into the life of almost each individuality especially when one is in trouble .
In shamanism the concept of inheritance is conveyed by the term udqa which means "root". The words udqa as well as related to it words udagan, odigon have the same root od/ud. The latter possesses deep esoteric meaning. In Tibetan it means "pure light", in Mongolian "star", in some Western cults it signifies one of the names of the Cosmic Fire. The shaman knowledge and proficiency were associated with the process of meditating based on a cult complex which involves tengris, khuus, buumals, khats, zayans, ejins, etc. It is a generally accepted opinion that the shaman gift or ability was inherited. But there were frequent cases when some people became shamans having accepted somebody else's udqa or when they combined their own udqa with another udqa in order to increase their shamanic potency. Sometimes there were cases when people lost their gift, udqa, and then restored them again. Moreover there were rituals of self-initiation when women became udagan during some calamities when there was urgent need to help people out. The shaman abilities are associated with sharpening of sensitiveness, the shaman illness khii-ubshen presupposes both physical and psychic pains. During the initiation shamans enter some trance and having attained the alternative state of consciousness are able of memorizing big information which one cannot do in a normal state.
Shamanism is the form of expression through enlightenment all of a sudden achieved by the practitioner. There seems to be much in common between buddhism and shamanism, especially in the ritual objects, the interior and costumes. The folklore motives evidence of their close relationship. The author of the uligers or just common people did not want or just could not have them separated, both religions became sometimes closely interwoven in legends. One should mention the fact when lamas sometimes became shamans after suffering the shaman illness. Quite often the prayers of shamans and lamas sound alike to a layman.
Educationalists are looking for the new adequate ways of bringing up man who is to live in the XXI century. In the ancient times knowledge was passed to subsequent generations in the form of folk tales, nowadays we have a lot of various means and methods for educating people but what are we to use in future to this effect? Most probably we think of "building up" a certain level of mentality. In this respect are we to turn our eyes to the past? In those days man did not separate himself from nature, he perceived himself to be just a part of it, above all its product. Such ecological mentality might be of use. Now there is a tendency to identify oneself with nature. Maybe, this is the reason why shamanism as its direct expression is being steadily revived. The age of shamans varies. There is a "professional" differentiation among them.
A conference devoted to shamanism was held in Ulan-Ude and lake Baikal in the summer of 1996. Participating in its work were many shamans, scholars and foreign guests who practice or study shamanism. Such forums should be encouraged. Published in the same year was the book “The Eternal Blue Sky” which contains texts of invocations. The book aroused great enthusiasm since many are aware of the power of word and energy of sound. There was a very interesting shaman exhibition. These are the first signs of deep interest in shamanism. Very many people go to shamans begging for help as they believe that their help is most immediate, effective and just to the point. It is considered to be more "practical" rather than "theoretical" as the common people sometimes put it. Some scholars think that the interpretation of rituals and understanding of the shaman's actions and gestures might be of greater use to us and our culture than we can realise now.
Shamanism is no doubt a common spiritual phenomenon of the peoples of Central Asia. Vast and many-tongued is the geography of its spread. Most peculiar is the Buryat tradition of shamanism for it has most fully preserved all the originality and wisdom of the infant period of the ethnos. It is accounted for by the fact that the ancestors of Buryats passed over to the new forms of social relations much later than the ancestors of other tribes. Hunters and grass-and-root pickers for a long time in fact preserved tribal relations and did not get subject to the trends of unification which might have prompted more intense intertribal economic ties and growth. Above all the Buryats had in many respects preserved partriarchal and tribal relations and did not know as yet all those "benefits" of industrialised life. This is the reason why the archaic forms of the proto-Buryat shamanism preserved its almost pure form and it is easy to identify different layers of the later periods.
Shamanism in our place just as elsewhere had suffered hard times. It was heavily persecuted. One might state that it had suffered a lot from the soviet pressure as well as Buddhist church. It was in constant confrontation with the latter for each of them struggled for its sphere of influence. Nowadays shamanism is being revived and one can't say with full confidence that there is open confrontation between the two religions. One cannot claim it with full certainty but it seems that our people have "reconciled" them because they became two-religioned if one might put it like this. Some people quite willingly go both to the buddhist temple and to shamans without making great differentiation between them. As for the state it encourages freedom of conscience and religion and promotes the development of both of them, since they are the reflection and part of our rich legacy and culture. Besides shamanism carries a very rich aesthetical, ethical, poetical message. Nowadays people began to show interest in their genealogies, partly due to the fact that shamans usually ask: "Which clan or kin do you belong to?" This is a positive aspect rather than a negative one.
