Historical and Ethnographical Sacred Aspects of Ram’s Shoulder in Nomadic Peoples
(45th Meeting of the PIAC, Budapest 2002)
The bones of home animals played the important role in ideological representations of the nomads, which formation conducts in a deep antiquity. And from epoch of late bronze especially important place in the economic attitude the ram has got also cult meaning. Functions of the surmisers on rams shoulder zhauyrynshy in Kazakh, dalni uzmerch in Mongolian, dalni koruuchuu in Kirgiz, balshi-yavurishi in Nogay, in a role of tellers of the future in the Middle Ages consist in departure of military cult ceremonies and fulfilment of cult rituals against enemies. In the subsequent times the cult of the ram is similar with shamans ritual, ancient philosophic representations of the nomadic peoples. The large importance in spiritual culture was given to various configurations of rams shoulder, which carried in household life sacred character, in particular its morphological structure.
By some researchers of the last century (A. I. Levshin, P. S. Pallas, Sh. Valikhanov, G. Potanin, R. Karutz and others) was described, how was used and interpeted different morphological structures of the rams shoulder by the nomads. In general Shamans could opened not only household aspects of the owner of an animal, but also cycle of life of all society by individual features of a structure of the rams shoulder. All this is generalized in this article with attraction of a wide circle of sources and the beginning of formation of sacrity of the rams shoulder in ethnographic traditions of the nomadic people are opened.