Animal and Shaman

Ancient Religions of Central Asia

Julian Baldick

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781786724403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Mysticism

What common features can be found in the ancient customs and native religions of the vast Eurasian landmass? In this unique and invaluable survey of the indigenous pre-Christian and pre-Muslim religions of Central Asia, Julian Baldick - one of the foremost authorities on global comparative religion - describes a common inheritance among the beliefs of the various peoples who have lived in central Asia or have migrated from there: Scythians, Mongols, Manchus, Finns and Hungarians. Shamans - holy men and healers among the pagan faiths - relied heavily on animal sacrifices to create spiritual purity and to nourish the soul. As a result, animals and spirituality were locked in a mutually dependent embrace. The author demonstrates that in pagan times worship and spiritual expression evinced remarkable common features: and that these similarities were largely based on the roles of animals in the different cultures of Central Asia. He shows that these roles have not only survived in the myths and legends of the region, but have also found their way into the mythologies of the West. Now with a fresh postscript, this classic work will find an appreciative interdisciplinary readership.

1

Early Inner Eurasia

In this chapter we will consider the religions of a number of early Inner Eurasian peoples who have in common a lack of clear ethnic identity. We will begin with the famous ‘Scythians’, looking at them through the eyes of Herodotus, then move on to the Hsiung-nu, whose attacks on China resulted in the building of the Great Wall and who figure prominently in Chinese sources. After them we must briefly examine the T’o-pa, who first appeared on China’s frontiers in the third century CE and who, by succeeding in establishing an empire in northern China, also obtained a place in Chinese records. Then we will survey the Huns, as described in the work of Roman historians; the Avars, as mentioned by Christian and Muslim authors, and the Juan-juan, their eastern counterparts, as evoked by the Chinese; and the Khazars and Bulghars, who also appear in Christian and Islamic sources. Finally, we will consider the Khitans, who, as rulers of China, gave their name to ‘Cathay’ and have left plenty of evidence in the Chinese official histories.

The Scythians

Herodotus’ picture of Inner Eurasian religion is given to us as part of his account of an invasion of ‘Scythia’, the region to the north of the Black Sea, led by the famous Persian emperor Darius I (reigned 522–486 BCE), probably between 515 and 510. It must be said that the Greek historian’s narrative of the invasion displays considerable geographical confusion and his depiction of the ‘Scythians’ is also ethnographically imprecise. Herodotus is always trying to present them as the exact opposite of the Egyptians: whereas the latter are for him the oldest of peoples, the ‘Scythians’ are the youngest. Here he is not without good grounds, since recent research has demonstrated that nomads, far from being older than agriculturalists, as was previously imagined, have to depend on them and thus post-date them. Herodotus often says that he knows the ‘Scythians’ from first-hand experience, and he probably did visit Greek colonies on the Black Sea’s north coast. His testimony regarding ‘Scythian’ religion is largely confirmed by modern anthropological and archaeological studies and by comparisons with the folklore of the Ossetians of the Caucasus, the linguistic descendants of the Iranian-speaking Scythians of classical antiquity. ¹

We are told by Herodotus that the Scythians claim to be descended from Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, and a daughter of the River Dnieper who had a son and three grandsons. These grandsons were confronted by three golden objects which fell from the sky: a cup, a sword and a plough joined to a yoke. The eldest and second of the three brothers tried to seize these objects, but were thwarted when the gold started to burn as they approached. When the youngest brother drew near the burning stopped, and so he was recognized as king. To this day the sacred gold is honoured with sacrifices in an annual festival. If any man falls asleep at this festival he is said not to live out the year, and thus, as a consolation prize, is given as much land as he can ride around in a day.²

Now the three golden objects are interpreted by Dumézil as symbolizing the three leading concepts which he found in Indo-European ideology: the cup, as often, represents religious sovereignty [1], being used to pour libations to the gods, whereas the sword naturally stands for the force of the warrior [2] and the plough with its yoke symbolizes fertility [3]. As for the succession to the throne of the youngest son, this seems to be common among Inner Eurasian nomads: nomadism requires that the elder brothers should migrate elsewhere, while the youngest stays as heir to the home. The annual festival in honour of the gold appears to require staying awake in a kind of ordeal. An Ossetian folk tale tells of a magic golden apple which has to be guarded at night: if the guards fall asleep death and disaster will befall their family.³

Further information about other Inner Eurasian peoples is given by Herodotus, notably concerning a people called the Issedones. It is said of them that when a man’s father dies the relatives eat his flesh, mixed with that of livestock which they bring. The dead man’s skull is gilded and kept as an object of worship: his son will make an important sacrifice to it every year. A recent Italian commentator on Herodotus, Aldo Corcella, notes that cannibalism is attributed to various Inner Eurasian societies, along with the use, for magical purposes, of skulls as drinking vessels. We shall find further examples of the use of skulls, along with sacrifices to ancestors, in due course.⁴

As for the religion of the Scythians themselves, Herodotus informs us that they worship Hestia (the Greek personification of the hearth) in particular, and after her Zeus and the Earth (seen as married to him) followed by Apollo, ‘the heavenly Aphrodite’, Heracles and Ares. Only the last of these is worshipped with images, altars and sanctuaries.⁵

This list of Scythian gods, presented in the forms of their Greek equivalents, has been the subject of much comment by modern scholars. The cult of the hearth is widespread among nomadic Turks and Mongols, and also among Indo-European speakers. Here Hestia seems to enter into a particularly Indo-European configuration, as has been observed by Dumézil, who points out that the list corresponds closely to the enumeration of spirits and saints in the famous ‘Prayer of the Ossetian Women’ transcribed around 1870. Further Caucasian parallels have been adduced by Dumézil’s Georgian follower Georges Charachidze, both from among Georgians living in the mountains in the east of the Caucasus and from among the Svans, a people who live in the high valleys in the south of the same region and whose unwritten language (like Georgian, belonging to the Caucasian family) is noted for its many archaic features. Hestia and Zeus appear to represent the usual Indo-European pair of supreme sovereign gods, the former close to humans, the latter remote [symbolizing sub-concepts 1.1b and 1.1a respectively in my notation – see above, p. 13]. They are reflected, in the Prayer of the Ossetian Women, by the Spirit of God on the one hand and God himself on the other, both of whom are invoked together at the start of the prayer. The Earth, in the list of Scythian deities, seems to be echoed, in the Ossetian prayer, by Mary the mother of Jesus, to whom the Ossetian women pray next, as the protectress of the solidarity and continuity of the community formed by the women [sub-concept 1.2]: they ask her to kill their enemies and protect their children. Apollo, the next god in the Scythian list, is paralleled by the next figure invoked by the Ossetian women, the spirit of Smallpox: in Greek religion Apollo is a deity of medicine, who also grants a peaceful death and can bring an epidemic, so that he has an appropriate counterpart in this Ossetian spirit, who is much venerated, surrounded by strict taboos and propitiated with sacrifices when an epidemic occurs.

Charachidze points out that whereas in the rest of the Indo-European domain medicine belongs to the third of Dumézil’s concepts, fertility, in the Caucasus illness is seen above all as a matter of divine possession, and thus belongs to the first concept, that of religious sovereignty. I have argued elsewhere that there are other examples of a figure’s being promoted from the third concept to what I call ‘sub-concept 1.3’, fertility within sovereignty. Here, naturally, the Ossetian women beg the spirit of Smallpox to grant good health to their children. The next Scythian deity, the ‘heavenly Aphrodite’, presumably symbolizes fertility as such [3], and is echoed on the Ossetian side by ‘Saint Elias’, invoked in the third section of the women’s prayer in a call for an abundant harvest. As for the two final gods in the Scythian list, Heracles and Ares, they doubtless represent the common Indo-European pair of a clever war-deity [sub-concept 2.1: sovereignty, in its aspect of intelligence, reflected within the concept of warlike force] and a brutish, stupid war-god [sub-concept 2.2: force within force]. In the Ossetian prayer they are paralleled by two figures invoked in the prayer’s second section, ‘Saint George’, venerated in the Caucasus as the patron of manly, warlike activity, and ‘The Bad One’, a spirit called Tyhost – a savage and extremely violent being who gouges out eyes and tears limbs off.⁶

When Herodotus says that there is a particular enthusiasm for producing religious sculpture and architecture in honour of Ares the comparatist is reminded of a similar enthusiasm for a brutal war-god, Gish, among the warlike Nuristani of north-east Afghanistan, who, linguistically, also belong to the Indo-Iranian sub-family of Indo-European and had an archaic set of gods of the same kind at the end of the nineteenth century ce: Nuristani villages always had one shrine dedicated to Gish, by far their most popular deity and would often pride themselves on having two. Otherwise, the absence of sanctuaries among the Scythians is paralleled by the absence of temples among the Turks and Mongols who declare that God is to be worshipped everywhere.⁷

Herodotus goes on to explain that the Scythians sacrifice animals by strangling them. This is clearly to avoid spilling blood: many Altaic-speaking peoples have a similar taboo and prefer to kill animals (and humans) in such a way that no blood is spilt. So far as the cult of Ares is concerned, however, Herodotus says that the Scythians do spill blood. Every year they make an enormous pile of sticks and put an ancient sword, symbolizing Ares, on it. Along with the usual bloodless animal sacrifices, performed on a greater scale than to other gods, the Scythians cut the throats of prisoners of war and pour their blood on the sword; they also cut off the prisoners’ right arms and throw them away. Corcella comments that the cult of the sword is attested among other early Euroasiatic nomads, while maiming the corpses as the ultimate humiliation is found elsewhere in the Iranian linguistic domain. We may add that the exceptionally large-scale sacrificing of animals to the war-god is paralleled in Nuristan, where prisoners of war have also been taken to religious services in honour of the war-god before being executed.⁸

Proceeding to purely military matters, Herodotus reports that the Scythians scalp their enemies and make cups of their heads. Every year those warriors who have killed enemies drink wine from a special bowl, while those who have killed none sit apart in disgrace. Ossetian folklore also has stories of scalping and a magic cup, filled with beer, which rises of its own accord to a warrior’s lips, but only if his boasts of killings are true.⁹

According to Herodotus the Scythians have many diviners who foretell the future by means of willow rods which they put on the ground. There are also some diviners who are feminized men and claim to have acquired their art from Aphrodite: they practise it with the help of lime tree bark, cut into three parts, which they plait and unplait as they prophesy. Corcella explains that such methods are still used by the Ossetians, while the feminized male diviners are reminiscent of Siberian shamans who often practise ritual transvestism.¹⁰

Herodotus also tells us that the Scythians give each other sworn pledges by pouring their blood, mixed with wine, into a bowl in which they dip a sword, arrows, an axe and a javelin before drinking from it. We may note that the use of arrows in making a ‘blood-brother’ agreement is evidenced in the case of Genghis Khan and also in East (or Chinese) Turkistan (now Sinkiang or Xinjiang in north-west China): there, as generally among the Turks and Mongols, the weapons represent the souls of men themselves.¹¹

Scythian royal funerary customs are described in great detail by Herodotus. When a king dies the mourners cut their faces and take the body to a distant spot. Some of his servants are strangled and buried with him. A year later 50 more of them are strangled, along with 50 horses, and the bodies of the men and animals are impaled around the tomb. Here Herodotus’ testimony is echoed by descriptions of various Inner Eurasian royal funerals: self-laceration and transporting the corpse to a secret, remote location are standard usages, evidenced for Attila and the Mongol conquerors, while human sacrifice for the purpose of serving the king in the hereafter is also well-evidenced: one of Genghis Khan’s sons killed 40 concubines as presents for his father.¹²

Ordinary Scythians, according to Herodotus, have their bodies carried around in waggons for 40 days after death, as their families visit their friends and food is placed before the corpse. After the burial the Scythians purify themselves by taking a vapour bath of hemp smoke in a tent. Corcella comments that in the beliefs of many Indo-European speakers 40 days are needed for the soul to leave the body, and that Altaic-speaking shamans purify the tent of the deceased 40 days after death. Archaeological discoveries in Siberia have shown the great antiquity of the practice of inhaling the smoke of ordinary hemp (Cannabis Sativa), a practice which was widespread before the medieval Islamic adoption of Cannabis Indica.¹³

Later on Herodotus, in his account of Darius’ invasion of Scythia, tells us about a people called the Getae, a subdivision of the Thracians living to the north of Greece. These Getae, he says, claim that after death they go to a god called Zalmoxis. Every five years they choose a messenger and send him to tell Zalmoxis what they need. They do so by throwing the messenger on to their spear points: if he is killed this is taken as a good omen, and if not another messenger is chosen. The Getae also respond to thunder and lightning by shooting arrows at the sky to threaten their god. This Zalmoxis, according to a Greek story re-told by Herodotus, was a man who tricked the Thracians into believing in life after death by vanishing into an underground chamber, where he lived for three years, making the Thracians believe that he was dead before reappearing to them. Corcella comments that shooting arrows at the sky is a practice paralleled among various peoples in their attempts to drive inclement weather away; we shall find it again in Inner Eurasia. As for the sending of the messenger and Zalmoxis’ underground retreat, the American classicist Rhys Carpenter, writing in 1946, pointed out that the Ainu, a people of northern Japan, kill a bear after telling him that he is going to their god as a messenger who must ask for plenty of game. Zalmoxis, according to other ancient sources, fasted in a ‘cave-like place’ and was dressed in a bearskin. Other Greek writers speak of a Thracian cult in which people would descend into a hole in a mountain cave, after a ritual in which references were made to the Underworld.¹⁴

As for Darius’ invasion itself, Herodotus relates that the Scythians responded to it with a strategic retreat and a mocking message to Darius to try and find the graves of their fathers, the only things for which they would be prepared to fight. Here we see again the importance of the secret and sacred royal tombs. Subsequently the Scythians sent Darius a bird, a mouse, a frog and five arrows. An Iranian noble interpreted these gifts as a message meaning ‘Unless you become birds and fly up into the sky, Persians, or become mice and go down into the earth, or become frogs and leap into the lakes, you will be hit by these arrows and not return home.’ The tripartition looks typically Inner Eurasian: it presents [1] the sky, [3] the space stretching from the surface of the earth downwards and [2] water above the surface of the earth. Scholars have noted a close parallel to this story. In 1303 CE a Mongol prince, Toktai, sent a hoe, an arrow and a handful of earth to a rival who took this to mean: ‘If you hide beneath the earth, I shall dig you out. If you fly up to the sky, I shall shoot you. Choose a battlefield.’¹⁵ Another close parallel, however, has been overlooked by recent scholarship. In 1730 a Swedish former prisoner of war, Philipp Johann von Strahlenberg (1676–1747), published a description of north-eastern Eurasia. In it he mentioned a people of north-west Siberia who were to die out in the eightee...