The image of hell in the shamanic texts of the Altaians

The aim of this article is to identify images and symbols that reveal the ideas about hell in the shamanic texts of the Altaians. The material of the study was five unpublished archival texts recorded at the beginning of the twentieth century by the ethnomusicologist A.V. Anokhin. To identify the general and the particular, the primordial and the borrowed, to establish trends and patterns in the development of the folklore genre, a comparative historical method was used. The shamanic rites of the Altaians in the past were accompanied by long oral-poetic texts usually performed by recitative singing accompanied by a tambourine. The author of the article prefers to call the analyzed texts as kamlanie ‘text of the shaman' (kam ‘shaman'), because she thinks that the shamanic rite and the text are an inseparable whole. The genre of the rite includes various communicative directions of discourse: invocation, spell, goodwill, request. In the traditional cosmology of the Siberian peoples, including the Turkic, the world is divided into three spheres: the upper world (celestial), the middle world (earth) and the lower world (underground). In the shamanic mythology of the Altaians, the concept of paradise is identified with the upper world, the concept of hell with the lower world. Hell is an imaginary space, a dark place located in the lower tier of the three-tiered world, the place of judgment of the human soul and the place of its punishment. The number of layers of hell corresponds to the number of underground deities: there are seven or nine of them. There are rivers, lakes and seas in hell. Evil spirits, ghosts of the dead, “unclean” demonic animals and monsters created by the god of this world, Erlik, live there. The picture of hell is also represented by images that have symbolic meanings: a black stump personifying the judge; a cast iron pot in which sinners are boiled; an old witch with goats; seven blacksmiths knocking with their tools; a boiling black lake filled with tears and blood; a staircase with nine steps going down into hell; a hair bridge from which sinners fall into the fire; a stone, associated with purgatory, through which the souls of the dead go. The listed images and symbols are the picture of the judgment and punishment of the human soul after death. A comparative analysis of the images and symbols of hell in the shamanic mythology of the Altaians with the images and symbols in the mythologies of other peoples confirms the Altaians' archaic nature of hell and suggests that the Turks of Southern Siberia could form ideas about hell on the basis of ancient archetypes characteristic of the world mythologies. So, for example, the overcoming of seven or nine obstacles by a shaman in hell resembles the sacrifice of gifts to seven underground deities in Sumerian-Akkadian mythology or the passage of the soul through nine circles of hell in Christian mythology. The formation of these ideas was due to historical migrations and contacts of the Turks with other nations.

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