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16HISTORICAL SCIENCES
SHAMANISM IN THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE TUNGUS OF YAKUTIA (historical and ethnographic aspect)
Alekseeva S.
Candidat of Historical Science, Senior Researcher of the Department of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Institute for Humanities Research and Indigenous Studies of the North, Russian Academy of Sciences Siberian Branch Yakutsk, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Russia
Abstract
The work is devoted to the study of shamanism in the light of the system of religious representations of the Tungus. Shamanic cosmology is highlighted, shamanic and pre-Shamanic elements, archaic ideas and beliefs about the world formed by shamanism are analyzed. The ideas about the shamanic World Tree and at the same time about the ancestral river flowing through all three worlds of the conscious Universe deserve special attention in the article. It is noted that the fate of the shaman was associated with a certain tree, and not only his fate, but also the fate of his kind. The image of the shaman, who is drawn in mythology as the central figure of the Middle World, who had access to all three worlds of the Universe, is considered in detail. It is determined that the sacred space of the Universe was actualized in the shamanic ritual to implement the connection between the worlds. For this purpose, the Tunguska shamans built special shamanic structures - the shamanic plague, which modeled the Universe in its spatial, temporal and social aspects and structurally consisted of three parts. In general, the shamanic plague of the Evenks symbolized the vertical and horizontal structure of the worlds of the Universe, which was associated with shamanic cosmogony. The appeal to shamanic themes is extremely relevant today from the point of view of the active functioning of traditional symbols in society.
Keywords: ethnography, North, Tungus, traditional worldview, religious and mythological picture of the world, shamanism.
In the historical and ethnographic literature, a large number of works are devoted to the topic of shamanism, but until now, researchers have not come to a consensus on the nature and social roots of shamanism. At various times, numerous works have been devoted to the topic of shamanism.
So, at the end of the XVII - beginning of the XVIII century. For the first time, scant information about Yakut beliefs appears in the European press (N.K. Witsen, E.I. Idea, I.F. Stralenberg). But more detailed descriptions of shamans were published in the studies of the participants of the Second Kamchatka Expedition (1733-1743) by I.G. Gmelin, G.F. Miller and J.I. Lindenau. The participant of the North-Eastern expedition of the second half of the XVII century, G.A. Sarychev, was one of the first to draw attention to shamanic rituals.
In the XIX century, information about traditional Yakut beliefs was supplemented by the works of N.F. Ostolopov, G. Davydov, F.I. Langans, N.S. Shchukin, Yu. Juliana, N.S. Gorokhov, D.A. Kochnev are found in the works of A.F. Middendorf, R.K. Maak, V.M. Mi-khailovsky, I. Pripuzov, I.A. Khudyakov. The first special articles devoted to Yakut shamanism are being published. Among them is V.L. Seroshevsky's article "How and what the Yakuts believe", which was awarded a special gold medal in Paris by the First International Congress on the History of Religion.
Representatives of political exile - N.A. Vitashev-sky, V.F. Troshchansky, E.K. Pekarsky, V.I. Ionov, I.A. Khudyakov, etc. - made a particularly notable contribution to the study of Yakut shamanism.
The problem of shamanism, which became the second characteristic subject of research, was reflected in the works of S.M. Shirokogorov (1935), who expressed the idea of shamanism as a mechanism of self-regulation of the psychomental ethnic complex of the Tungus.
The study of Yakut shamanism continued in Soviet times. These are the works of A.E. Kulakovsky, G.V. Ksenofontov, N.A. Alekseev, V.N. Vasiliev and others.
The problems of shamanism concerned the research of Tungusologists V.G. Vasilevich, V.A. Tugolukova, A.I. Mazin, A.A. Burykina, A.A. Sirina, M.H. Belyanskaya, A.A. Alekseeva, S.A. Alekseeva, G.N. Varavina, etc.
Among the modern researchers on shamanism, it is necessary to note the works of V.N. Basilova, E. V. Revunenkova, N.L. Zhukovskaya, E.S. Novik, D.A. Funk, V.I. Kharitonova, O.A. Murashko, T.V. Zhere-bina, A.A. Burykin, T.D. Bulgakova, T.Yu. Sem, A.V. Smolyak, E.P. Sleptsov, V.E. Vasiliev, N.D. Vasilyeva, R.I. Bravina, etc.
Despite the fact that much attention has always been paid to the problem of shamanism in the domestic and foreign religious and scientific literature, certain provisions, such as the definition of the concept of shamanism, its origin and essence, are insufficiently studied. Therefore, in the studies of many Western European scientists, much attention is paid to the consideration of these issues. The most complete questions of the origin of shamanism are considered in the works of K. Karjalainen, U. Kharva, G. Nioradze, O. Olmarksa
and many others. The concept of M. Eliade has a special place in historiography. Of the modern foreign researchers , the works of U. should be noted Johanson, M. Balzer and the British anthropologist Piers Vitebsk.
This article is devoted to the problem of shamanism in the light of the consideration of the system of religious representations of the Tungus. The concepts we explored in the project related to the "life circle" (soul, destiny, life) as mental entities reflect the ethno-specific features of the Tungus and were formed on the basis of the shamanic worldview, because the protection of human souls and destinies was in the hands of shamans.
Symbolic actions in shamanic rituals expressing the idea of a communicative exchange of significant values allowed us to come to the conclusion that in shamanism an archaic cosmological scheme was used to model imaginary space.
The Shamanic Universe. Pre-Shamanic ideas about the Upper and Lower Worlds were common Tun-gusic; shamanic ones differed among different ethno-local groups of Tungus. The pre-Shamanic Upper World was higher than the sky, the Lower World was lower than the earth, and with the development of shamanism, shamans were introduced into the early ideas about the worlds of the Tungus.
In Tungus shamanic cosmology there are 12 levels, depending on which shamans have different abilities and functions: to protect a person, family, clan or the entire population of the Earth. The supreme is considered to be the one who has reached the 12th heaven. He is privy to all the secrets of the universe: he can fly to its outer borders and is responsible for all of humanity.
According to shamanic cosmogony, the Upper World was located above the sources of an imaginary river and was located in different directions around the world. These worlds were connected by an imaginary river - Endekit, which had many tributaries - the shamans' own rivers, on which their helper spirits were placed at normal times. Moreover, the tributaries were connected to our land through whirlpools, so the Tungus always avoided them.
Below the mouth of each shamanic river, the world of the dead of the corresponding Tungus clan was placed on Endekit, and the souls of the deceased were brought here by a shaman.
The upper shamanic world is higher than the seven (nine) clouds-the heavens above the source of Endekit. During the kamlaniyas, the shaman got there, first going down his river, then climbing up the Endekit, and finally climbing up the Turu tree. It was believed that at the foot of the upper world are the souls of unborn people and deer.
The lower shamanic world was located below the mouth of the Endekit, they did not return from there. Basically, the souls of the "thin" dead fell into the world of the dead. There the shaman usually sent his assistant spirits, sometimes he himself went in search of the soul of the patient. Below the mouth of any shamanic river there was a border between the directions to the upper and lower worlds, which did not allow souls sent to the world of the dead to return back.
Shamanic plague is a model of the universe. The sacred space of the Universe was actualized in the sha-manic ritual in order to implement the connection between the worlds. For this purpose, the Tunguska shamans built special shamanic structures - a shamanic plague that simulates the universe. The Evenk sha-manic plagues (nym'gandyak, shev'egedek) were temporary structures for particularly important shamanic rituals performed for commercial purposes, therapeutic, during the consecration of new shamanic clothing, a tambourine for conducting the deceased to the world of the dead, etc. The shamanic plague modeled the universe in its spatial, temporal and social aspects and structurally consisted of three parts: the central conical tent - the plague, representing the middle world of living people, the right (eastern) gallery, symbolizing the passage to the upper world, and the left (western) - the passage to the lower world. In general, the shamanic plague of the Evenks symbolized the vertical and horizontal structure of the worlds of the Universe, which was associated with shamanic cosmogony. From west to east, the structure was penetrated by the world sha-manic river, the mouth of which is located in the Lower World, the sources are in the upper world, and the vertical pole in the center of the plague symbolized the World Tree. The internal structure of the shamanic plague was represented by wooden sculptures depicting the spirits of the masters of the Earth, the ancestors and assistants of the shaman.
"The mythological level of the Tungus pantheon is based on an archaic two-dimensional picture of the world, revealed through the dualism of different natural elements (water and air, water and fire, water and earth), life and death, the world of people and the world of ancestors and spirits. At this level, the creation of the world in the view of the Tungus-Manchurian parodies involves the unfolding of the space-time continuum. The starting point is a syncretic prototype by its nature - the World Mountain as a model of the universe emerging in the primordial water chaos.
.....The shamanic level of the pantheon, based on
the idea of a multilevel vertical-horizontal structure of the world, represents the dominant worldview system of all Tungus-Manchurian peoples. The shamanic worldview is based on the developed animistic structure of the universe (an animistic worldview and a system of images of personal patron spirits), as well as ideas about magical connections between the subjects of myth and ritual.
.... Both mythological and shamanic images are distinguished by polysemy and transformations, as relics of the archaic era. What is new in the shamanic image, what is not in the mythological one- is the tendency to split the whole into parts and its new synthesis. This is the basis for the ideas about the hypostases of the main shamanic image, emphasizing the different sides of one whole - the medium of the three worlds. The main direction of the development of the mythological image is a constant cyclic transformation. It is clearly visible on the typology of female characters of the progenitors of the world. The main shamanic characters of the Tunguso-Manchurian pantheon, mainly
male images, or paired deities associated with the cult of fertility and ancestors" [1, pp. 200-201]. The
Tungus in religious terms were shamanists with a developed cult of hunting magic, the cult of the deer and the sun. A shaman, a servant of a cult, performing meditation - mental flights into the Universe (Neel-been) during ritual worship, established relations between the world of people and the world of gods and spirits.
The image of the shaman is drawn in mythology as the central figure of the Middle World, which has access to all three worlds of the universe. Special attention should be paid to the idea of the shamanic World Tree and at the same time - about the ancestral river that flowed through all three worlds of the conscious Universe. The fate of the shaman was connected with a certain tree, and not only his fate, but also the fate of his kind. This tree grew on the ancestral sacred mountain and was understood as a World tree personifying all three shamanic worlds: the tree grew into the Lower World with its roots, the top rested on the Upper World, the Middle World, that is, the Earth, was placed in the middle of the trunk [2, p. 143].
According to other variants, there were three sha-manic trees: the first tree was the habitat of the shaman's ancestral spirits, the second was the habitat of the external shamanic soul, the third - in the Upper World - was the habitat of the souls of relatives [Ibid.]. Also, a shaman can have three such trees - for each world there is a special World tree. The lower tree is associated with the idea of the habitat of the souls of the genus as a special ancestral tree, the guardian of these souls, the beginning of birth, the genus.
So, not only the personal fate of the shaman, but also the fate of all his relatives are connected with the fate of the shaman tree, which was presented as a World, cosmic tree and was thought of as the basis of the genus. The generic tree acts in this case as the collective soul of the genus, since ideas about the life and well-being of the entire genus and relatives are associated with this tree. The concept of the ancestral tree as a collective ancestral soul is also associated with ideas about ancestral souls, in particular, about shamanic ancestral spirits.
The figure of the shaman as a person has always attracted the attention of scientists and travelers, but still causes a lot of controversy. On the issue directly related to the personality of the shaman, it is necessary to note the point of view of S.M. Shirokogorov, who, investigating the ethnopsychological complex of the Tungus-Manchurian peoples, noted individual cases of nervous diseases in shamans, but at the same time strongly emphasized the physical and mental health of most shamans. He considered shamanism as a way of
self-defense and a manifestation of the biological functions of the genus, as a self-regulating mechanism of the mental sphere of people. "The more my observations in the field of shamanism, religion and general worldview expanded, the more parallels I obtained on various Tungus peoples, the clearer it became that Tungus shamanism cannot be considered as a religion in the generally accepted sense of the word, but at the same time it became obvious that shamans cannot be considered as magicians and cheats or as nervous people who generate their teaching in a painful state." "Shamanism among the Tungus, having its sphere of influence mainly mental and nervous diseases in all their manifestations, is not a religion in the usual sense of the word. It is reconciled with any religious system, it is possible to reconcile it with any system of knowledge and with any animistic worldview. Shamanism lies in a completely different plane and for its existence to be possible, it is only necessary for the shaman to recognize the impact on people in special, mysterious and incomprehensible ways for people. The purpose of such an impact is to regulate the mental sphere of people, which has a huge biological significance" [3, 2001]. That is, in the works of S.M. Shirokogorov, ideas were expressed about shamanism as a mechanism of self-regulation of the psychomental ethnic complex of the Tungus.
Thus, in the traditional Tungus society, the shaman played a huge role. "He was called to explain the origin and structure of the universe, analyze and predict the future, accompany the deceased to another world, learn and tell relatives about the news. Shamans were, as a rule, excellent experts in folk customs and traditions, possessed the gift of suggestion, were able to convince people, acted as leaders of their communities" [4, p. 122].
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