Geser. The Вuryat heroic epic. Ye. Khundaeva

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СКАЧАТЬ in the text is semantical, notional, dynamical, structuring and euphonic. It is the symmetry of the laws of motion and growth in nature.

      Due to the principle of the Altan kheblig presented in the main constructive units of the epic of Geser the listeners could not but feel them. The rhapsodes and the listeners could not but get adjusted to the betta-wave which dominated and caused the feeling of joy and success. In the rhythmical build-up of the verse in “Geser” an asymmetric division into the syllables is observed, when in the first hemistich there are 5 syllables, in the second 3 syllables. The interrelationship of 5 to 3 is 1.66 which almost ideally corresponds to the proportion of the golden section.

      In the scene of the struggle between Abai Geser and Orgoli tiger the beginning and the intensification of the action (384 lines) is one and a half times as longer as the culmination and the concluding lines (строка) (223 lines). The interrelation of the numbers 384 to 223 makes approximately 1.7 which is close to the mathematical expression of the golden section equaling 1.618. On the whole there are 607 lines in this scene which is one and a half times as longer as the number of the lines in the intensified action (384 lines). The relation of the two numbers, i.e. 607 and 384 is close to 1.6.

      One can state that the principle of the golden section is traced in architecture, painting, poetry, music, as well as mathematics and the other areas of the natural and human activity. The principle of the Altan keblig, an original analogue of the golden section, is well presented in the text of the Geser epic which was called “the greatest epic of the humanity” by a well-known Russian poet and translator Vladimir Soloukhin. The shamans and narrators or story-tellers have good memory, artistry and expressiveness of speech. Owing to the gifted story-tellers and shamans, the skill for the masterly performance of the ancient pieces of poetry and prose remains well preserved up to now.

      The religious cults and rituals

      The ideas of the heavenly origin of the totemic forefathers of the Buryats as well as the ideas of the spirit-hosts of the localities, the shamans, the 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 epic as Khormusta Tengeri or Esege Malan Tengeri. The most archaic cult of the Mother-Earth, the foremother, has the 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 (rivers, lakes), the genealogical tree. When reading the epic one comes across the other cults, like those of the ancestors, the magic. There are the shamanic elements and the 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 the 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 the rays of the Sun coming through the upper opening of the yurt are associated with the conception of the son.

      The proto-Buryats, i.e. the hunters and gatherers or pickers of the plants including the sorrel, garlic, berries, kind of bulbil lily representing the forest tribe communities entered the new stage of the social and economic life brought about by the establishment of the paternal right much later than the ancestors of the other nomad tribes. The socio-economical ties were those of a tribal community and the Buryats did not undergo the process of unification for a considerable period of time. Even in the end of the XIX century the Buryats somewhat preserved the patriarchal and tribal relations since the new tendencies did not display themselves so vividly in their economy: there were neither factories, nor railroads, nor electricity, etc. Due to this the epic preserved itself in a pure form with some impacts of the feudal and Buddhist ideologies. One should mention that the epic of Geser in its versified version which is believed to be the Buryat creation was preserved by the “western” Buryats. Аmong them most widely spread were the shaman rites. One can say that the oral “Geser” and the shamanism are to some extent interrelated. The versification and the shaman elements evidence of “Geser’s” being old-aged since it is generally recognized that the most ancient epical works of the Mongolian people as well as the shaman invocations were in verse not in prose.

      Widely spread were the genealogical myths in which the cult of the mountain spirits was depicted. It is just the mountain spirit who appears to be in fact the father of Geser on the Earth. According to the epic the man possesses not one soul but a few of them. One soul is in the body, another one may leave the body in its sleep, the other souls are somewhere else out of body. Very often the souls are of the zoomorphic form like the two golden fish coming out of a mangus’ nostrils during his sleep. One might recollect the hero chasing the three stags that were said to keep inside the soul of a mangus. In the Oirat epic the soul may be found in a copper-headed iron-winged crow which flies out of a cut-open breast of the mangus’ mother. Then the crow turns into a fish, marmot; the hero chases it as eagle, fish or marmot. In a demon’s body in one of his big toes or in one of his ninety five stomachs found not infrequently was an

      One should mention the existence of the cult of the 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 the totemistic features fairly well preserved in the epic. In a Khori genealogical legend of Khoridoi-mergen the hero gets married to a celestial fairy that had been a bird previously. Very well known is the motive of a swan, the ancestor of one of the tribes. In the Mongolian epic 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 the Bulagats and the Ekhirits are the grey Bukha noyon bull and the black and white bulls. This motive has its parallel in a Tibetan legend which describes the fight between the white and black snakes coming out of the mangus’ nostrils or in the Tibetan version of the Geser epic where the two snakes fight having come out of the mangus’ ears.

      The nomad tribes of Central Asia left the monuments resembling the “deer stones” or the stone slabs with the engraved inscriptions, the magical formulas. In Transbaikalia and Mongolia they found the sacral writings on the rocks, the so-called rock paintings or petroglyph on which depicted most frequently was an eagle in flight. They date back to the second half of the second millennium B.C. They all are of the 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 the zurags (drawing) of the Balagan ongons. The ongons are the symbols of the ancestors’ spirits and the eagles are also thought to be the spirits of the ancestors. The Baikal region is abundant in the legends of the 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 the eagles as sons. The latter gave the beginning to the kin of the Ol’khon shamans who were known as the shubuuni noyod – the lords of the birds. They say that earlier during the sacrifice ritual to Khan Khoto babai they made the three replicas of eagles out of birch bark. When I attended the tayilagan on the Baikal I saw that on the shore of lake Baikal the shamans put the three birch trees and under each of them they put the meat and the 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 СКАЧАТЬ