Mysteries of the Chyulyugdeevs of the Urals and Siberia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

At the end of the 17th century, she entered the tsarist Siberian order for a "formal reply" to the Yenisei governor, prince K. O. The “formal reply” says that in February 1685 “there began to be verbal speech between all the ranks, as if in the Yenisei district, up the Tunguska river, wild people appeared with one hand and one leg”.

And so the voivode ordered “to ask about those wild people of those Tungus described above, where are those wild people and in what places they live and what kind of faces they are, those people, and what kind of dress they wear”. During the interrogation, an eyewitness - a baptized Tungus from the Kata River Bogdashka Chekoteev - told the following story:

“I’m going up the Tunguska river, on a high mountain, in stone, from the Tunguska river about three versts he saw Bogdashko, a pit, and that de pit was round in all directions, about one and a half arshins wide, and a stinking spirit emanated from that pit, it is impossible for a person to endure a spirit, and at that pit he, Bogdashko, was for a long time and could not from that stinking spirit, and from the pit he lay from that pit for a day with a headache.

But what kind of hole went into the ground wide and into the depth of that, he, Bogdashko, does not know, because he didn’t look into that hole, and near the other hole there was a shallow and large standing forest at the root, in places the signs were planed with a knife or other than in many places.

And with his brothers, with the Tungus, he, Bogdashko, heard that people live in that pit, and the names of those people are chyulyu, and those people are tall in the chest, about one eye and about one hand and about one leg, and they shoot every beast and bird with bows, and they cut the beast and the tree with a saw, and what kind of example is the bow and arrow and saw that he, Bogdashko, did not hear or see.

And the bargaining between them chulyugdei with them, tungus, is this: they bring de tungus to their roads, along which they walk along the roads, they stick a woodpecker bird's feather and tode, they are near a standing larch tree in the foliage skin and those de chylugdei come, then feathers are eaten without them by the Tungus, and for those de Tungus instead of that they put feathers in the same place with arrows of all sorts of birds and their business and what kind of dishes they put copper or iron or what and why do they eat woodpecker's feathers, so he, Bogdashko, does not I've heard."

Colorful text - you can’t say anything: one style and vocabulary are worth it. But the main thing is different: what exactly did the baptized Tungus Bogdashka Chekoteev see in a huge and deep, like an abyss, pit, going underground, from where such an unpleasant "stench" came from that the battered son of the taiga lay for a whole day in a semi-faint state?

There is no reason not to believe the naive, but honest Tungus. He simply could not correctly interpret what he saw, and therefore used such fanciful concepts and images. It is clear that there was a hole under the ground (“the hole was round in all directions”). It is difficult to say what kind of intoxicating vapors came from there: in any case, they were not fatal, since otherwise no living creatures could survive in such an unfavorable environment.

What, then, were these most mysterious chyulyugdei?

The storyteller himself should have been the least surprised on this score, for everything he saw fit perfectly into the traditional Tunguska worldview. According to the cosmological concepts of the Evenk Tungus, the Universe consists of 5 parts (layers), called buga - "earth":

1. Upper land - Ugu-buga;

2. Middle earth - Dulin-buga;

3. Lower land - Ergu-buga;

4. Dolbor land;

5. Land Buldyar.

The Buldar land stands apart: it is not even the mainland, but seven blissful islands in the distant ocean, its history is lost in the darkness of millennia and vividly resembles Hyperborea. Here, as in the Upper and Middle Lands, the Sun shines and ordinary people live. Only the Upper World is the boundless sky, and the Middle World is the earthly firmament.

It is curious that the Evenk Cosmos is also inhabited by people: they live on the Moon - Bega, and on Venus - Cholpon, and even on the Big Dipper - Evlen. How exactly mortal people became celestials and by what means they ended up in distant Cosmos - the legends are silent. But they describe in detail the deeds of the heroes inhabiting the Middle World.

The inhabitants of the three solar worlds are almost relatives. They marry among themselves, and men sometimes even exchange wives. They communicate with each other through singing, and they fly to visit either on winged deer or using the services of a huge white bird - a real “Tunguska plane”.

But the most interesting from the point of view of incredible information from the "unsubscribe" of the Yenisei governor are the two lower (underground) worlds. Here is the Land of the Dead and the bloodthirsty cannibals Versa live.

The latter regularly get out from under the ground and arrange a hunt for living people: they kill and eat men, boys and old women, and they drag young women and girls into the underworld, where they are used as concubines and slaves. Verse-cannibals penetrate upward through holes similar to the one about which the Tungus Bogdashka Chekoteev told.

By the way, the quality of "one-eyed" in relation to ancient or unfamiliar peoples does not mean the absence of one eye as such, but can only serve as a means of describing unusual clothing, jewelry, weapons or other paraphernalia (for example, a shaman tambourine). This is especially typical for the northern and Siberian ethnic groups, dressed in fur clothes with a doll on their heads.

In the old days, they were often portrayed in such a way that one cannot immediately understand what kind of “one-eyed” creatures they are. True, it is unlikely that the baptized Tungus Bogdashka Chekoteev would confuse a fellow in a doll with a one-eyed “diva”. Nevertheless, the question remains open.

Much more interesting is another thing - the way of communication between underground chyulyugdeev and Siberian aborigines. It is clearly symbolic in nature, and it smells of such archaism that, involuntarily, the Hyperborean times come to mind again, when bird and other animal totems dominated, and clothes and hats were made not only from skins, but also from feathers. Otherwise, why should strange underground inhabitants exchange woodpecker feathers with the inhabitants of the taiga (and below in the interrogation protocol, jay feathers are added to them)?

The woodpecker is one of the oldest global totems: suffice it to recall that the symbol of Olympic Zeus, in addition to the classic eagle, was also a woodpecker. In the collection of the State Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography named after Peter the Great (Kunstkamera) there are samples of feather clothing brought in due time from Russian America. In St. Petersburg, for example, mollok, a ceremonial cloak made of condor skin, and kilikui (kokshui), a ceremonial costume made of raven feathers, are exhibited.

Similar robes were widespread among the Siberian peoples. Grigory Novitsky, a missionary ethnographer of the 18th century, wrote in his treatise “A Brief Description of the Ostyatsky People” that the main clothing of the Khanty of his time consisted of well-processed skins of geese, swans, gulls, magpies and other birds (for the same purpose, skillfully made skins of fish were used, mainly - burbot, sturgeon and sterlet, found in abundance in the Ob).