Adam Molnár
University of Szeged
On an Enigmatic Passage of an Old Turkic Book of Divination
35th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, 1992
The paper discusses an enigmatic passage in an Old Turkic book of divination, the Irq Bitig written in the Runic script. The author argues that the sentence är abga barmïš does not mean “A man went hunting,” but “A man went to perform evil magic.” If this explanation of the text is correct, it not only sheds light to Old Turkic ab ‘evil magic’ that has a complicated linguistic history among the Turkic, Mongolian and Manchu-Tungus languages, but at the same time, it is the earliest reference to the heavenly journey of the Turkic shamans.