Anzori Barkalaja

The Khanty are a Finno-Ugric people inhabiting the basin of the river Ob in Western Siberia. They subsist mainly on hunting and fishing; north of the river Kazym, they also rear reindeer. Agreements between representatives of oil industry and Khanty land owners ensure that some families derive part of their income from compensations for drilling contracts. The Khanty could roughly be divided into three groups – the Northern, the Eastern, and the Southern Khanty, differentiated from each other by their language, life style and details of world outlook. The present paper rests mostly on data obtained from the Eastern Khanty, more specifically from the inhabitants of the basins of the Pim and the Lyamin.

The Khanty attach great importance to offering sacrifices to their gods and local spirits, since good luck in hunting and fishing – and accordingly, the survival of the people – is thought to depend on the favour of gods. Despite the shaman-hunting campaign (Leete 1996), sacrificial rituals (Khanty poryi) have been kept up till our days. Thus, for instance, the Khanty of the Pim, Lyamin and Tromagan basins never fail to dispatch the soul of each slaughtered reindeer to some deity through sacrifice. The sacrifice can be offered by members of one family or it may be brought by several neighbouring families. In the latter case, the number of reindeer offered up is usually larger. Sometimes, all the Khanty of a given district also bring a joint offering (Karjalainen 1918: 428–430). On such occasions, the first recipient of the offering is usually the god or goddess of the corresponding river, who must then pass on to their rightful owners the souls of the reindeer meant for superior gods.

In December 1995, after a pause of several years, a joint offering was brought by the Khanty of the Pim basin. According to the local informants, the best time for bringing large-scale sacrifices (Khanty jyyr) is during the last waxing or full moon of the year. Karjalainen quotes examples from all over Western Siberia about the greatest sacrifices being brought either in the autumn or in spring. The Khanty of the Tromagan River, next to the Pim, offered their most important sacrifices in November or December. Here we must also keep in mind that the Khanty sacrifices do not fall on fixed calendrical dates but do have terminal deadlines (Karjalainen 1918: 433–435). The Khanty consider it inauspicious to bring sacrifices while the moon is waning; neither is it fit to give offerings while the snow is melting.1 As to the time of day, different authors hold different opinions (Karjalainen 1918: 435); the Khanty of the Pim River bring sacrifices at daytime, preferably while the sun is still rising, that is, before noon. As the informer put it: morning favours all kinds of beginnings, “while the sun is rising, all things thrive; then it’s also good to give offerings, they have effect”.

The initiator of the sacrifice was Fedya K.2 who heard spirits tell him in a dream that he was to call the people together or else he would be taken ill. The site of the offering was to be either at Yegor Kanterov’s or N. Vostokin’s place, who dwelt near by. It is interesting to note here that the Kanterov and Vostokin families are closely connected through a shamanic war waged between their ancestors, which ended only as the head of the Vostokin family deprived the Kanterovs of shamanic power (Barkalaja 1996). Eventually, however, the relations between the two families have normalized and, due to their new survival strategy, the Kanterovs are even better off than the Vostokins who have lost their dominant role in that neighbourhood. Unable to compete with the other families in the traditional way, relying on shamanism, the Kanterovs became more receptive to changes. As a result of the invasion of oil industry, the environment of the Khanty underwent a considerable change to which the Kanterovs responded faster and more openly.

Fedya K. first called on Yegor Kanterov to tell him of the dream; together they went to N. Vostokin in order to discuss it. There it was settled that the elder of the sacrifice should be Yegor Kanterov. Early investigators reported that only a shaman could be in charge of sacrifices; nevertheless, already Karjalainen demonstrated that it wasn’t always the case and pointed out the role of tonx-urt (‘spirit master’) who directs and performs the sacrificial ceremony (Karjalainen 1918: 440–442, 573–574). The hlunk (the Khanty word for genii, spirits, gods) had appointed Yegors’s nephew Valeri to be the keeper of the sacred dolls of the Kanterov family, but after the death of Yegor’s father who was their former keeper, Yegor temporarily acted as the head of the family since the ceremony of exchanging and handing over the dolls was not yet completed (Barkalaja 1996).

The neighbouring Khanty were informed of the sacrifice in the old traditional way, using message sticks. For that purpose, three sticks were made3, each bearing twenty one notches. The sticks were sent out in three different directions and handed over to the neighbours together with the message; the neighbours, in their turn, carried them on to their neighbours; at the end of each day, one notch was whittled off from the sticks. Thus, the next recipient of the message could keep count of the days left till the offering. The head of the last family to receive the stick brought it along to the site of the sacrifice. Similar sticks have been used to mark off the days of mourning after a burial and the feasts given in memory of the dead (Sokolova 1980: 140), as well as the songs sung at the bear-festival. The sticks notched at the bear-festival are stored in sacrificial storehouses. The custom of making such counting sticks seems to be spread throughout the Khanty culture area; numerous sticks of this kind, both from the Northern and the Eastern Khanty, are stored in the treasury of the Estonian National Museum.

Joint offerings, as well as the sacrificial storehouses of gods, also serve a specific purpose, namely the social redistribution of goods. In the course of the sacrifices, a wealth of material riches – meat, cloth, and money – is amassed. The valuables left over from direct sacrifice are distributed equally between all participants as a gift from the god to whom the sacrifice was offered. Also, the keeper of the effigy of the corresponding deity, acting as representative of the god or goddess, may hand out to the participants cloth and money from his sacrificial storehouse, particularly when the storehouse is beginning to get full. Sometimes the money collected in the storehouse is spent to buy sacrificial animals if there are none available in the given area. As a rule, each family brings as rich an offering as it can afford. Thus the rich bring more than they get back at the redistribution, whereas the poor get back more than they brought. The primary aim of the sacrificial rituals being communion with the god or goddess, the rich do not mind that state of affairs, especially since the redistributed goods are regarded as belonging already to the corresponding god or goddess.

According to the informer, offerings were given to all gods lest anyone (i.e. any god) take offence. The number of reindeer coming short, some gods were given three meters of cloth. The cloth was tied around the necks of the sacrificial reindeer. In the lack of reindeer for an “upper” god, white cloth was tied to a tree for him; for “lower” or underworld spirits, black cloth was spread on the ground.

The informer did not describe the actual sacrifice of the reindeer on the assumption that I was already acquainted with it. Therefore, I should like to describe a sacrifice brought in the same area a year before, in March 1994, where I was fortunate enough to participate, myself. The reindeer was brought to stand with its head pointing to the north, white cloth wrapped around its neck. Each participant who desired to placate the god to whom the reindeer was offered, tied banknotes or coins to that cloth. After that, the reindeer was felled with an axe-blow over the back of its head. If the reindeer dropped to its right side, it was considered an auspicious sign; if it fell to the left, an inauspicious omen. That may explain why the men holding the reindeer assisted at the fall, taking care that the animal drop to the right. Next, it was stabbed in the heart with a long knife and turned around once, clockwise. At the same time, the elder of the sacrifice started off with the prayer, invoking in a loud voice the god to whom the reindeer was offered. The others lined up behind the elder, swaying their bodies. From time to time, following the example of the invoker, they turned around once, clockwise, and then went on swaying. If the legs of the reindeer jerked during the prayer, this, too, was taken for a good sign denoting that the animal was already running towards the herd of the god. At the end of the prayer, the lasso (Khanty njuur) that had been used for tethering the animal was flung onto a tree north of the sacrificial site; if it remained hanging in the tree, participants in the sacrifice could expect good luck in hunting and fishing all through the coming year. Then the reindeer was turned onto its back and skinned. Its blood was received into a pail; after cleansing, the stomach was put there, too. Its heart, tongue and part of the meat was immediately boiled, laid out on a dish and set before the images of the gods together with a glass of vodka. Then another prayer was intoned and all the participants drank vodka together, the glass going round clockwise. Each participant was also allotted a piece of the heart and the tongue.

A more detailed survey of different reports concerning the sacrifices can be found in Karjalainen (Karjalainen 1918: 428–498).

Parts of the tongue and the heart were portioned out to the participants at the joint sacrifice of the Pim River Khanty in December 1995 too, the only difference being that women were forbidden to eat of the heart and tongue of the reindeer dedicated to the supreme god, Numi-Torum. The meat of the sacrificed animals was also distributed between the participants. Women were forbidden to step onto the spot splattered with the blood of the sacrificed animals; violation of this rule would have tainted the offender with a heavy sin. The evening was given to feasting, merry-making and story-telling. A shamanic seance took place, too, to find out the gods’ attitude towards the sacrifice. For that end, one of the renowned local shamans ate amanita while another beat the shaman’s drum (Khanty kuijyp), but to no avail. The shaman showed no signs of intoxication. People waited all night long, the shaman who had eaten the mushrooms said the mushroom spirits might possess someone else. The informer speculated that perhaps the young shaman had warded the spirits off, heading them towards the old drummer, but obviously the latter didn’t want to shamanize, either. Eventually, one of the participants began to show symptoms of intoxication, but this time the rest of the company forbade him to shamanize. Then the spirits tried to take possession of another participant, but he did not “give himself up”, did not want to shamanize. The old men scolded him, telling him to stop hiding and sit at the drum, but notwithstanding he walked out into the cold night. Nobody dared to take the responsibility for shamanizing. The bickering went on for about two hours. Finally, however, the shaman who had eaten the mushrooms sat at the drum and “the spirits took to him”. He beat the drum for some time, then began to pronounce on what life would be like and whether the gods (Khanty hlunk) “turned their faces to the poryi4”. He said the gods had looked at the sacrifice, which was a good sign. The shaman’s words had been very garbled, the informer could understand but little of what he said, but those in the know had understood more. Thus the shaman kept alternately beating the drum and speaking, as the spirit of the mushroom (Khanty pong) went between him and Torum-Ati (another name for Numi-Torum). Here, pong is the intermediary between the shaman and the god, communicating by turns the questions and the answers. The informer did not keep count of how many times pong went to the heavens and came back. When it was asked who would live long and who would die, the answer came that one of the participants sitting in the ring would not see the next snow. And indeed the Khanty Timofei Golovanov had died before next snow fell.

In the basins of the Vasyugan and the Irtysh, however, unlike the rite described above, the spirit of the shaman himself goes to travel after eating pong (Karjalainen 1918: 586, 591). He also records cases where it was not the shaman who sang at the ritual, but the mushroom spirit, or the shaman merely repeated the songs sung to him by the spirits of the mushroom (Karjalainen 1918: 568, 586).

It was a great honour to the Kanterov family to be elected elder of the sacrificial ceremonies, particularly because most of the Pim River Khanty had responded to the invitation and more than two hundred people were present. As a rule, any Khanty has the right to perform a sacrifice. It is enough for him to dream of some god or other telling him to perform a sacrifice. Nevertheless, the number of people coming to participate greatly depends on the social status of the inviter. In days gone by, after defeat in the shamanic war and the resulting loss of shamanic power, the Kanterovs had been poor and socially inferior of other families. Successful adaptation to the invasion of oil industry and the fortunate circumstance that oil was found only on the outer fringes of their family lands, combined to make them in a few years the leading family of the area. Naturally, the shrewdness of the present head of the family, Yegor Kanterov, and his peculiar world outlook comprising elements of scientific thinking have played an important role, too.

It is also interesting to follow the aftermath of a sacrifice. Thus, for instance, one of the Khanty, I. K., “went off his head” after the shamanic ritual. Judging by the descriptions, it was a typical seizure of the shamanic disease discussed also in professional literature (Eliade 1974: 20–21, 33–35; Siikala 1977: 312; Lintrop 1995: 19–26). I. K. began to be harassed by spirits forbidding him to walk abroad at night and attacking him upon breach of this ban. When the spirits first visited him, I. K. kept it in secret; but presently he began to feel very ill because the spirits persecuted him and demanded that he inform his neighbours of his experiences. I. K. found the situation intolerable and tried to escape. A path led to the south; he began to walk along it. He met a woman sitting by the path. They engaged in the following dialogue:

The Woman: Where are you going?

I. K.: Along the path; I’ve nowhere else to go.

The Woman: Don’t go, I must first inspect your documents! Got a passport?

I. K. showed her his passport. The woman consulted a list but could not find his name.

Thereupon the woman told I. K. to go back: If your name is not on the list you cannot pass. The episode recalls Gondatti’s account of the Northern Khanty who maintain that the sky god provides the god of underworld with a list of those doomed to die, and the latter refers to it when selecting the souls to be herded to his realm (Kulemzin 1984: 126). Again relating to the Northern Khanty, Karjalainen writes that the sky god does not keep count of the souls himself but has trusted with this job his private secretary, who compiles the list according to his instructions (Karjalainen 1918: 37). Other sources quote evidence that among the Northern Khanty, the life span of men is measured out by Numi-Torum’s wife Kaltesh, who keeps a book of records for this purpose (Schmidt 1989: 223). A similar belief prevails among the Pim River Khanty. By August 1997, the informer was not yet fully convinced whether I. K. would become a shaman or go mad and die.

As another follow-up of the sacrifice, I learned that people were suffering from the scabies and running noses, the disease spreading from north to south. One of the informers, J.N., who had not been present at the sacrifice, himself, argued that it was caused by the stupidity of the performers of the sacrifice and mistakes resulting from that:

Usually, offerings must be given to all gods at a jyyr; but they gave offerings to the gods of sickness, too. Now they’ve been ill for a whole year. The lower gods of sickness must be exempted, otherwise they will rejoice and want to return the gift. But what else can they give, only their diseases, mucus and scabies.

Only leftovers can be given to the spirits of sickness. When the poryi is over, everybody goes home, the “upper ones” (that is, gods of the heavens) go away and only armed guards remain to protect the people. “The lower ones”, the demons, throng around like dogs and the guards drive them back. When everything is finished, then they will come to gobble up the leftovers.

Yegor Kanterov’s poryi would have been very good if they hadn’t given to the three spirits of sickness. But someone with only 99 per cent of wits decided to give to them, too. I asked who thought of giving to them. Yegor didn’t know, the others didn’t know. They were at the higher site of sacrifice. Surely somebody at the lower site wanted to be clever.

Here I should point it out that the sacrifice was performed in two groups. Everyone high enough in social esteem tried to be at the higher site (that is, higher up the river), where sacrifices were offered to the more important upper gods. At the lower site (down the river), offerings were given to lower gods; and the decision to include the spirits of sickness among recipients of the sacrifice was passed there after a discussion, by voting. The informer deemed that kind of a solution, as well as the ado over a spirit doll during the preparations of the ceremony, a sign of the decline of the shamanic tradition.

According to the informer, he dreamt that the son of “the lord of wind and weather” died before the poryi. For that reason, he decided not to participate in the sacrifice. Actually, it was the son of the keeper of the corresponding spirit doll that had died before the sacrifice; and according to the tradition, that doll should not have been used at the ceremony, the family being in connection with death and underworld. Yet the people assembled for the sacrifice raised the question of divesting the family of the right to keep the effigy of the god. Some among them, particularly the old men and shamans, were against it but lacked the authority to settle the matter. Tradition prescribes that the gods themselves choose the person or family to keep their effigies and sacred storehouses, as we saw already in the case of the exchanging of the spirit dolls of the Kanterov family (Barkalaja 1996). In the present case, people decided to take this responsibility upon themselves. The various obstacles and ado encountered in the process of taking away the effigy, however, were again interpreted by the informer as a sign of the disinclination of the god of wind and weather to participate in the ceremony.

In conclusion we can say that the first great offering on the Pim River after the invasion of Russian oil industry colonists in 1960s on the area reflected adequately the social strife among the local Khanty. The Kanterov family, formerly occupying the lowest rungs on the ladder of social hierarchy, has considerably improved its position due to better adjusting to the changes in environment. Because of the loss of shamanic power, the Kanterovs were exiled to the border areas of the society (in social not geographic sense). Among numerous other functions, however, the border area fulfils one more task in the semiosphere – it is the region where semiotic processes are accelerated. Peripheral areas being less strictly organised than central ones, they allow for quicker change. The regions that are not described by the dominant world model or that no longer answer to such descriptions, undergo swifter change (Lotman 1992: 2029–2030) and act at the same time as catalysers for cultural permutation. Here I deliberately use the word “change” instead of Lotman’s “evolve”, since I cannot agree to the positivistic paradigm implied by the latter word. It’s in the above-mentioned peripheries that the so-called syncretic phenomena can take place.

At the same time, the inhabitants of such border areas are in some sense “strangers” regarded by other families with slight prejudice. On the other hand, they may all of a sudden turn out to occupy culturally central positions if the survival strategies adopted by them prove more successful than those of other families. Then, bearers of the older and “purer” tradition find themselves in the periphery and another new behaviour strategy can take shape on this ground, which may in the course of time prove central, in its turn. Such shifts of positions do not pass without strain and open or concealed struggle for dominance. In the Pim basin, the “higher positions” were formerly occupied by the Taibin and Nimperov families. One of the informers also comes from the Nimperov family and has gained the image of a leading figure in dealings with the Russian colonists. Naturally, he is not pleased by Yegor Kanterov’s rise among the leaders of the society.

Concerning the events that accompanied the given sacrifice, it is also interesting to note that “the logic of dreams” reflected the state of affairs in material world. Fedya K. dreamt that the sacrifice was to be performed by representatives of the most successful big family of the district. The “opposing” informer, J.N., however, dreamt of an incident that was bound to cast a shadow on the oncoming sacrifice. We can surmise that the patterns and ways of thinking characteristic of man’s everyday consciousness operate as filters in the changed state of consciousness (Siikala 1992: 26–27; Hamayon 1995), in receiving and interpreting information derived from the “sacred world” just like they do in receiving and interpreting information derived from everyday experience. Whether we regard this as an imaginary construction of the “sacred world” or a real and existing “depth-structural world” (Uus 1994), unfortunately depends on each person’s individual belief, it being exceedingly difficult here to prove anything pro or contra. Again, we can but acknowledge that our ability to envision the “sacred world” and its impact on the world of everyday experience is limited to what we have been taught to see by habit and education and what is defined by attitude (Bachmann, Huik 1989: 99).

Translated by Triinu Pakk

Footnotes

1 One of the informants told me how her husband had fallen ill and been taken to the hospital while the snow was already melting, so he was in no position to arrange for an offering. Then the informant had pledged to the god the reindeer she had brought to the marriage as her dowry, had “marked them off” for the god, as it were. After she had taken the pledge, her husband’s health improved considerably. She also said that she had been afraid her husband might get angry with her for promising to give up her beautiful reindeer, but after all she didn’t mean to live with her reindeer, it was her husband that she wanted. Some authors have also described cases where reindeer sacrifices were not brought in summer but were postponed till winter (Sokolova 1980: 139); or where it was promised to bring offerings at some future date, upon the fulfilment of certain conditions by the god (Karjalainen 1918: 432–433).

2 I have an agreement with some Khantys not to publish their full names. In these cases names are marked by initials.

3 The informer said that either three or seven such sticks were to be made, depending on the god.

4 The expression signifies the attention and goodwill of gods. If a god “turns his face away from someone of something”, it signifies his disgrace and, accordingly, ill luck.

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