Фольклор и постфольклор: структура, типология, семиотика

In this section we shall discuss the relationships between rituals and folklore texts. We have shown that the syntagmatic structure of ritual arises or may arise apart from direct reliance on a folkloric plot, as a realization of communicative relationships of varying dimension*a. Does this mean that the folkloric plot arises as a direct reflection of the ritual plot? The answer to this question will largely allow solution of a whole range of other problems confronting the ethnographer wishing to use folklore as a historical source, and the folklorist studying the principles of folklore plot formation.

As early as 1946, V. Ia. Propp pointed out that "complete concurrence of ritual and custom with fable" is very seldom found. Much more often a different relationship prevails, which he termed the "rethinking of ritual", when a separate element or group of elements of the ritual, "having become unnecessary or incomprehensible by reason of historical changes", is replaced by another, whereby a deformation of the ritual occurs. "We should regard as a particular case of rethinking", he writes, "the preservation of all forms of the ritual, although the fable assigns it an opposite meaning or signification, an inverted interpretation. Such instances we shall term inversion" [Propp, 1946, p. 13]. Propp treats both "rethinking" and "inversion" in a dia-

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* Russian text © 1984 by "Nauka" Publishers. Obriad i fol'klor v Sibirskom shamanivne: Opyt sopostavleniia struktur (Moscow: Glavnaia redaktsiia Vostochnoi literatury lzdatel'stva "Nauka," 1984), pp. 223-79, 280-93.

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chronic aspect, arriving at the conclusion that the "plot [of the fable] arises not in an evolutionary manner by direct reflection of reality, but by negation of this reality. The plot corresponds to the antithesis of reality" [ibid., p. 14]. Divergences and discrepancies between ritual and its reflection in folklore he explains in conformity with his idea of the demotion of former idols: the once well-meaning and generous figures of mythology fall into oblivion, and are then repudiated and ridiculed; in connection with a decline of belief in spirit-owners, they are transformed from givers of blessings into evil monsters, with whom the hero wages battle [Propp, 1953]. This idea has aroused objections on the part of E. M. Meletinskii, who points out that, in the archaic epic, "monsters from the other world are not always disenthroned owners and doing battle with them does not show the downfall of ammistic beliefs" [Meletinskii, 1963, p. 18].

Propp regarded the relationships between ritual and folklore as exclusively genetic: he compared the rituals with classical genres — the magical fable and the heroic epos, even though between these and their roots in ritual comes the dense stratum of "archaic epic" — myths, legends, traditions, customary accounts, and "mini-histories" [bylichki] — synchronously related to the ritual institutions and current beliefs. These genres, it would appear, should also be consulted in the present case, in order to trace the transformations experienced by ritual once it has entered the realm of folkloric narration. Furthermore, since religious and mythological conceptions are in fact based largely on the oral poetic tradition, analysis of these texts may throw light on the mechanisms of formation of both religious beliefs and narrative constructions, not yet crystallized into those rigid plots characteristic of the higher genres of narrative folklore, which reduce their underlying mythological concepts and transform them into the conventional mythology of the fable. Finally, since both strata of folklore are often intimately related in the Siberian region, the results from analysis of the subjects of archaic prose could be used subsequently for more detailed study of the ways in which rituals are interpreted in such advanced folkloric genres as the magical fable and the sung bogatyr [heroic] fable — the direct precursor of the heroic epos.

For a synchronous examination of the relationships between ritual and folkloric narration, it would seem necessary to consider, first of all, the functioning of the narratives within the ritual, when they are incorporated into a particular ritual complex. The materials presented above, however, make us doubt the wisdom of this approach to explaining

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the mechanisms of composition of folkloric plots. Indeed, direct comparison of ritual and storytelling presented us with two basic types of situation: 1) incorporation of fragments or even entire stories with completed plot into the fabric of ritual, and 2) reproduction or, at very least, an intention of reproduction of myth in the course of a ritual.

The former of these occurred, for example, in shamanic seances, when the shaman while summoning the spirits would expound the history of his calling, including episodes from the life of a particular spirit or relating the biographies of his ancestors. It has already been mentioned that shamanic genealogies, legends of voyages, feats, accounts of initiatory ordeals, etiological myths and the like are used in this case as a fabric, a plan of expression (along with other nonverbal means) of contact established with the spirits*b. With respect to their role in the structure of the ritual, they represent only one of the codes. There may be other alternatives — actions, implements, and so on. For example, the account of the shaman's initiation is supposed to convince the spirits that the conjuring shaman is entitled to their help, and therefore after the account the spirits are expected to "respond" to the summons. But the same purpose may be achieved by other means: the noise of the drum, into which the spirits come, or the refreshments prepared for them by the participants in the ritual.

The alternation of verbal and nonverbal means of establishing communication leads us to classify the storytelling during the course of the ritual with the superficial, and not the deep-lying level of ritual text. Usually the account covers only an individual episode or group of episodes of the ritual (for example, the account of the shaman's journey to the world of the spirits accomplishes the second syntagmatic unit of the seance). As for the plot structure itself, constituting the intrinsic nature of folkloric storytelling, this is usually easy to disrupt: either the story is greatly shortened or it is transformed entirely into a cue (often sung), addressed to a partner. As a result, the integral plot of the text is replaced by a fragment, a reference to an individual episode, a citation, an allusion.

We encountered the second situation in the Evenk ikenipke ritual, corresponding to the myths of the cosmic hunt, in the animal-escorting ceremonies, which may be compared to myths of a dying and resurrecting beast, or in the shamanic initiations revolving around shamanic legends as to the teaching of the neophyte's soul in the land of the spirits, the re-creation of his body, and so on.

Here, it would seem, there is reason to expect that the plot foundation

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of the narrative will be preserved. Yet this is not so. First of all, it is very difficult to determine which specific version of the myth (and folkloric narrative is always in the form of a series of versions) is intended by the officiants of the ritual. Thus, the majority of versions of the myth of the cosmic hunt tell of the origin of the Great Bear constellation as the result of a rivalry among three hunters (occasionally they are representatives of different ethnic groups, such as a Ket, a Russian, and an Evenk), pursuing a giant elk. A closer connection with the calendar mystery of the ikenipke is revealed by those texts that relate how the prodigious elk Kheglen captured the sun and was pursued by the bogatyr Main-Mangi, who killed the animal, released the sun, and became its guardian and the giver of light, the source of warmth and life [cf. Anisirnov, 1959, pp. 12-13]. However, in this case also, it is not appropriate to speak of a direct dramatization of myth: in the ikenipke ritual the collective of people headed by the shaman pursue the cosmic elk — giver of life and prosperity, but the main conflict of the myth — the battle for the sun — is not portrayed. Of course, we may presume that this ceremony is based on some other unattested or lost version of the myth, corresponding more precisely to the main features of the ritual. But even in such cases when the investigator possesses the text of a myth known with certainty to be the intention of the officiants of the ritual, the discrepancies between the scheme of its syntagmatic unfolding and the plot of the narrative are very considerable.

Thus, A. M. Zolotarev records a special tale of the Ul'ch — the duente sudalini (literally, the "trail of the taiga person", i.e., the bear), which the Ul 'ch themselves viewed as a kind of scenario of the bear festival and took pains to follow unswervingly. This myth tells how the sister of two brothers, after having a dream, sets off into the forest, marries the forest human-bear, gives birth to twin bear cubs and sends them to her brothers "for food". The older cub, humiliated by the perfidious treatment of the wife of one of the hunters, dies and returns to the "people of the taiga". Yet even here he cannot stay, being required to make a purificatory voyage to the spirit-owner of the mountains. There ensues a series of obstacles, which the hero overcomes on this trip [cf. Zolotarev, 1939, p. 178 et seq.].

But the ritual of the bear festival involves the people removing a bear cub from its den, rearing it in a cage, carefully observing ritualistic rules for its handling, then killing it on a special platform and eating it during the course of ceremonial exchanges with members of other clans, chiefly the clan of the sons-in-law. And although a variety of

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episodes of the holiday indeed "symbolize and portray this trail that the bear must follow in journeying to its parents" [Zolotarev, 1939, p. 127], the main twists in the plot of the myth (such as the sister's going into the forest, her transformation into a bear, the birth of the twins, the insult offered to one of the bear cubs during its suckling, and even many vicissitudes of the journey itself) are not directly reflected in the ritual. Orienting themselves to the deeper meaning of the myth and dramatizing it with ritualistic means, i.e., employing the narrative as a plan for the details of the ritual, the participants of the bear festival nevertheless pay special attention to such purely ritualistic elements as the "gifts" the bear transfers to the "people of the taiga" and a careful differentiation of the parts of the carcass, which are consumed in strict conformity with age-sex and social divisions of the collective in a manner reminiscent of the potlatch*c.

Thus, even here the ritualistic scheme does not follow the plot of the narrative, but arranges it in accordance with the rules of its own development: the syntagmatic structure, dictated by the divisions of the social and natural realm, is accomplished in the ritual primarily through interactions and exchanges between these segments, but does not reproduce the scheme of the syntagmatic development of the plot of the story.

Hence, the functioning of narratives within the ritual, whether it is a case of incorporation of the story into the texture of the ritual (where it serves as a plan of expression) or an effort to reproduce the story during the course of the ritual (where it serves as a plan of the details), only allows us to establish the fact of transformation, the fundamental reversibility of the plans of detail and of expression, but does not provide the possibility of discerning the manner of formation of the folkloric plot, for once translated into the "language of ritual," the stories lose their plot organization.

It therefore seems more productive to consider a different situation, when ritual is translated into the "language of folklore," i.e., when it appears as the focus of the story. Such a situation, however, is very seldom encountered. In his time, B. N. Putilov noted that epic production usually "does not contain (or contains hardly any) ethnographical descriptions per se. They are created during the course of the storytelling, having a functional nature suited to the situation. . . . Descriptions that do not advance the plot or that fall outside the given plot situation are not included in the epos. The ritual receives a corresponding treatment" [Putilov, 1974, p. 78].

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As a rare example of the ritual scheme dictating the structure of a folklore plot, he presents epic songs about match-making, taking it as certain that they "contain not just a reflection, but an enduring structural expression of the most characteristic features of the nuptial relations of the clan system: exogamy, with its characteristic practice of finding a wife outside the groom's social microcosm, with the existence of permanent nuptial relations between clans, and so forth; the various ordeals of the groom that accompany marriage; the special role of two parties in the ritual — the party of the groom and the party of the bride, and so forth" [ibid., p. 79].

Although the main conclusions reached by Putilov in comparing the nuptial ritual and the songs of match-making are basically beyond reproach, this comparison itself is not very apt. In particular, it may be suspected that the structural coincidences are a direct result of reflection of the nuptial ceremonies in the epos. Such an assumption is certain, given the statements of Putilov himself that "the classic forms of the heroic epos are genetically related to the typologically earlier forms — the so-called archaic epic"; and "the classic epos does not grow from ritual, it is created by virtue of transformations of older epic forms" [ibid., p. 76].

Meanwhile, the archaic epic itself demonstrates that those plots pertaining to match-making and the wedding do not even reproduce the nuptial ceremony as such. Examples include many stories of conjugal relations between people and animals, in which it is told how, as a result of concluding such conjugal agreements, a hunter himself or relatives of a woman, having married a human-bear, a human-tiger, a human-fish, or the like, acquire power over the forces of nature and thus obtain enduring success in the hunt. The plot composition and semantic paradigm aspects of such stories have been analyzed in great detail by E. M. Meletinskii on the example of the Koryak myths and stories about the marriages of the sons and daughters of Raven [cf. Meletinskii, 1979, p. 71]. In all texts of this type, the "conclusion of marriage" serves merely as a means of establishing contact between human and objects of the hunt, a code whereby this contact is recorded, but in no way the subject of description. It is instructive that these stories, in addition to the establishment of romantic or matrimonial relations, also contain other codes: mutual favors and exchange of valuables between hunter and beast (the man saves a tiger or bear from a snake, removes a thorn, or the like, and in gratitude receives success in the hunt; the bear saves a lost hunter, allowing him to spend the winter in his den, for

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which he receives a gift of dogs, and so forth).

On the contrary, in those stories dealing with the conclusion of matrimonial agreements between two exogamous communities, this element is most often portrayed as a treacherous attack. Even in cases where the text directly mentions an exchange of women between two groups [cf., e.g., Vasilevich, 1936, no. 60-66], one of the groups is portrayed as cannibals, who try to sacrifice or eat outright the girl given as wife, who saves herself by fleeing. Thus, the situation of the conclusion of matrimonial agreements in this case is encoded by a food code, i.e., a picture is created that is directly opposite that in stories about marriages with animals.

And even though the texts of both these groups differ substantially in their plot structure from that of the advanced epic, which is in exact agreement with the structure of the nuptial ceremony, we still may not suppose that the epos is oriented more to the ceremony than to stories resembling the above, or that the structural coincidences in this case result from a clear purpose of reproducing the ceremony, and not from the influence of the epic canon itself, which proposes to portray the epic biography of the hero and only for this reason reflects certain of the main conflicts of the rites of passage, including the nuptial rite.

It follows that one must select, from the multitude of archaic epics, texts about which there is no doubt that they are not only connected with ritual in some way, but also directly describe it. We have just such a situation in the so-called "shamanic legends", in which the hero is the shaman, i.e., the person especially appointed to discharge ritual functions. Therefore, they may serve as convenient laboratory material enabling detailed study of how ritual is interpreted by folkloric tradition, especially since the shamanic seances possessed a plot structure facilitating their comparison with the narratives. The fact that ritual appears in these texts as the focus of the story makes it possible to examine the relationship between ritual and folklore not in a genetic sense, but to employ the shamanic legends as a kind of "description" of the ritual in the language of folklore, and thereby attempt to produce a key to the deciphering of certain purely folkloric motifs.

Before examining the plots of shamanic legends, we should make a number of stipulations concerning the genre. The genre affiliation of these texts is far from clear: there are shamanic myths, and traditions about legendary shamans of the past, and histories of shamanic initiations, and accounts of the competitions between shamans, shamanic journeys, sleight-of-hand, miracles, and so forth. Collectors refer to

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them as fables, myths, customary accounts, genealogical or historical traditions, legends, "mini-histories", or the like. The unifying factor here is usually considered to be the figure of the central hero — the shaman — while the genre features themselves may vary quite freely.

Incidentally, the situation is similar in trying to determine the genre of stories not associated with the figure of the shaman, including some recorded as "fables" by students of the Siberian archaic epic. At the same time, efforts to classify them under the headings "animal", "hunting", "magical" or "ordinary" meet with insurmountable resistance from the material itself, which in terms of composition is again very hard to describe with the current indexes of folkloric plot. It seems that, while openly acknowledging that genres cannot be distinguished in the archaic epic, the diachronic study of folklore is still involuntarily oriented to those genre forms that are known from other, more recent epic traditions. At the same time, elements pertinent to the Siberian region go unnoticed, especially the rather distinct partitioning of all narratives into authentic and nonauthentic or imaginary tales. Here, in essence, a clear logical mistake is committed, replacing the opposition authentic / imagined, consistently employed by those transmitting the folklore, with the opposition real / fantastic (as it appears to the European mind), which, of course, agrees neither with the orientation of the transmitters nor the esthetics of folklore.

Here, for example, are extracts from the preface to the collection "Fables and Myths of the Oroch" [Avrorin and Lebedeva, 1967]. Characterizing the differences between the main genre varieties of the Oroch narrative folklore — the nimapu, sokhori, and telumu — the compilers make the following remarks: "The nimapu and the sokhori are distinguished not by genre, but simply by their genesis [the Oroch classify fables borrowed from other peoples as sokhori — E.N.]. Both of these are distinguished from the genre of telumu as productions with imaginary, fantastic [my emphasis — E.N.] plots versus productions based on authentic reality, not only objectively real, but also 'real' in terms of the religious beliefs of the Oroch". And further: "The Oroch classification based on opposition of fantasy and reality [my emphasis — E.N.] cannot be taken as absolute. It comes more from the incentives, the final purpose in creating the folkloric productions, than from the nature of their content... In giving our classification of the genres of Oroch folklore, we acknowledge the positive elements of the opposition just considered, but take as our basis, quite naturally, a different principle, that which underlies the scientific classification of

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the productions of literature — differences in content and the consequent artistic form" [Avrorin and Lebedeva, 1967, p. 26].

As a result, the sections of this collection follow the traditional classification of folkloric studies oriented toward literary criticism: the material is divided into "fables about animals", "ordinary fables", "heroic fables", while the category of myth — that is, texts that are "authentic" from the standpoint of the Oroch — includes a considerable number of nimapu, i.e., productions that the Oroch themselves regarded as "nonauthentic". Thus, replacing the opposition authentic / imagined with the opposition reality / fantasy deprives this classification of its grounding, since the "nature of the content" of the particular text, from the standpoint of the transmitters of folklore, becomes distorted, and not accessible to study.

To be fair, it must be mentioned that V. A. Avrorin and E. P. Lebedeva, while not folklore specialists, as they themselves declare, have assembled a superb and in fact the first sufficiently complete collection of Oroch folklore (in 1978 we published another collection, supplementing the first: "Oroch Texts and Vocabulary"); and furthermore, in their commentaries they frequently (though unfortunately not always) report how the Oroch themselves categorize the particular text, while such information is often lacking entirely from many publications on Siberian folklore. Their statements are presented here solely to demonstrate how strong is the pressure exerted by the established patterns even on profound and thoughtful scholars.

In working with the Siberian archaic epic, one must constantly realize that, no matter how fantastic the events of the story, no matter how similar their plot to the classical fables, we have no grounds for regarding them as "fables", if the informant assigns them to the category of authentic histories.

In this respect, our task is somewhat facilitated by the fact that folklorists quite unanimously accord the status of shamanic legends to such texts as are regarded by the transmitters of folklore as authentic, despite the fantastic nature of their content. Hence the most common designation of these stories as "legends", which shall also be used hereafter as a working definition for the entire group of texts concerning shamans, and not a particular genre. In actuality, as already stated, the shamanic legends include texts of different genre — from the myth to the mini-history, i.e., they occupy in nonfabulous prose a position similar to that occupied by seances in the ritual tradition, encompassing different levels of ritual. The fact that shamanic legends constitute texts

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of different genre may allow subsequent use of this material for the genre distribution of other divisions of the archaic epic as well.

The poetics of the shamanic legends

Genre characteristics of the accounts regarding shamans

Exactly what are the genre parameters of shamanic legends? In his day, E. M. Meletinskii proposed using a whole array of distinguishing features to differentiate between myth and fable, among which he identified two main groups. The first characterizes the production from the standpoint of transmitters of folklore. Here, in addition to the already-mentioned feature of authenticity / nonauthenticity, are such factors important to our subject as ritualism / nonritualism of the text, its sanctity / nonsanctity, and the ethnographic-particular / conventional-poetic type of imagination. This first group of features is complemented by the second, corresponding to the "content of the production itself—its themes, heroes, the time of the action, the result of the action," specifically: mythical hero / nonmythical, mythological (prehistorical) time of the action / fabulous (outside historical time); presence of etiology / its absence (or ornamental etiology); collective (cosmicity) of the object portrayed / its individuality [cf. Meletinskii, 1970, P. 142].

Using this scheme, we can identify distinguishing features of the shamanic legends. The first group of features basically coincide with the characteristics of myth: account authenticity naturally leads to ethnographic specificity of the imagination and the possibility of using the text for ritual purposes, concomitant with its sanctity.

As for the second group, the following is worthy of note. Accounts about shamans can be assigned not only to the mythological time of the first creation (Tm), as can myth, but also to the historical (or rather, the quasihistorical) past (Ti) or even to the present or recent past (Tn), but not, of course, to the conventional time of the fable. In other words, it is useful to employ an entire scale of times to define the genre of the stories about shamans: Tm — the time of myth, Ti — the time of tradition, Tn — the time of the customary account or mini-history*1.

Although a definition of the shamanic account genre as myth, tradition, or mini-history has, for us, an aspect of metalanguage, within the

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epic tradition itself it is sometimes possible to find correspondences. Thus, for example, the Chukchi divide narratives into the tottomgatken pynylty — "accounts of the time of creation" (cf. myths), akalyletken pynylty — "accounts of the time of discord" (cf. historical traditions), and lyepynyl — "true accounts" (cf. customary accounts), all of which are contrasted with the nonauthentic (from their perspective) stories, or lymnyl (cf. fables). The Nivkhi distinguish myths, tylgund (according to Shternberg, from the word tyland — "remote", "long ago"!), and traditions, concerning more recent events, keraind. G. M. Vasilevich reports that the Evenk, "representing the historical course of the group's existence by legends and traditions, distinguished the periods of nimngakan, very remote, "when the earth started to be formed"; bulemekit, a period of wars and dispersal of the reindeer-breeders; and the period of formation of the present groups. . . . The Evenk defined all events with respect to these three periods" [Vasilevich, 1969, p. 191]. It is important to underscore the fact that the term nimngakan means not only a period of time, but also a genre of story — myth — and is contrasted with narratives of the genre ulgur — stories of happenings preserved in the memory of the living, i.e., customary accounts of recent events [see Vasilevich, 1969, p. 195; Romanova and Myreeva, 1971, p. 12], both genres encompassing accounts taken as authentic.

In other cases, the assignment of the texts to myth, tradition, or customary account is not directly supported in the terminology of the people, which contains only a more general division of the epic into authentic and fictitious narrative. However, it may be presumed that the transmitters of the tradition, in these cases as well, employed a similar time scale, but marked it out in a different fashion, e.g., with the name of the principal hero, or by correlating the stories with the figure of the culture hero (myth), the founder of the clan (tradition), or a neighbor (mini-history).

Just such a situation occurs, perhaps, in the beginnings of the Koryak myths: "This was the time when Great Raven lived", "This was the time when Great Raven and his people lived", "This was the time when the self-creating father of the maker lived". In the monograph of Meletinskii "The paleoasiatic mythological epos", from which these examples are taken, it is shown that, although the Koryak Raven Kuikynniaku, unlike the Raven of Chukotkan myths, is not a creator (he does not procure the earth from the bottom of the sea or the heavenly bodies, does not create the mountains and rivers, and so on, as does the Chukotkan Kurkyl'), and although the Koryak altogether lack the genre

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of "creation accounts", and the raven epos belongs to the group of lymnyl, the texts regarding Raven and his family are indeed myths, and their plot organization results from a markedly mythological semantics [Meletinskii, 1979, ch. 2].

Among the Evenk we find accounts of Un'iany [see Vasilevich, 1936, pp. 41-44 and 245], outwardly little different from the tales about a struggle with a prodigious opponent. This character, however, was regarded as the protecting spirit of the shaman Maieli [see Suslov, 1931,p. 101], from which it may be concluded that these texts should be assigned to the group of clan legends.

The particular temporal locus of the shaman account thus correlates both with a dimension of the main character: being a culture hero with the attributes of a great (the first) shaman in the myth, a venerable ancestor in the legend, and finally a particular shaman contemporaneous with the narrator in the mini-epic; and with a dimension of the topography of the action, unfolding respectively in the cosmos (myth), on defined clan territory (legend), or in a particular locality (customary account).

Action, in turn, is correlated with a type of etiological finale, relating an event in the account to the present state of affairs. For the shamanic myth (as well as myth in general), this is an explanation of the current state of elements in the natural world and the culture; for the legend, genealogical and toponymic aspects pertain, the history of the origin of a particular hallowed precinct or ritual object (including the history of the origin of a venerated shaman); for the mini-history, the expounding of a moral lesson, the explanation of fortunes or misfortunes that have become "ever since then" the lot of the narrator or his relatives.

All these features (the time of the action, the place, the nature of the hero, and the etiology), specifying the genre parameters of the text, appear directly in the narrative, constituting more or less constant elements of its plot structure and occupying a strictly defined place: in the initial part, it is related "when" and "where" the events transpire, and a description of the characters is given, while in the final part comes the etiological conclusion. But these elements, comprising a framework for twists in the plot itself, may easily be omitted; for this very reason, the above-identified correlations of features appear extremely significant to us, since they allow the investigator to determine the genre of the text, even when certain of these characteristics are missing.

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The portrayal of the seance in shamanic legends

One other characteristic is important to our theme concerning those shamanic legends that may be described as tales of by gone days, minihistories, or customary accounts. Among them are both memorates, i.e., recollections by eyewitnesses of seances that were held in their presence, and fabulates, where the main emphasis lies on the vicissitudes of conflicts in the plot. The boundaries between these forms, generally speaking, are rather fluid and not conscientiously perceived by the narrators themselves (in any case, folk terminology in no way distinguishes them). However, a differentiation between them will be highly productive in explaining the lines of formation of the narrative constructions within the immediate realm of the narration, as noted in particular by E. V. Pomerantseva [1975]. Relying mainly on characteristics of storytelling technique, she demonstrated that the desire to explain the circumstances of an individual case in the greatest possible detail results in an account being overgrown with trivial features and psychological motivations, thereby transforming memorates into tabulates. We shall attempt to employ the differences between memorates and tabulates to clarify what happens to ritual when it is recounted by the transmitters of tradition themselves. This may also elucidate certain mechanisms in the composition of folklore plots.

The task is facilitated by the fact that our entire material, with respect to subject matter, falls into two rather distinct groups: 1) legends of miracles, contests, and feats of the shamans; 2) legends of the birth of the first shamans, the obtaining of the shamanic gift, a kind of "biography" of the great shamans of the past, and so on. Thus, the material correlates with the basic forms of shamanic ritual (the first with the seances of the shamans and their contests of strength, the second with ceremonies of shamanic initiation and rituals of worship of shamans who have become cult objects).

We shall deal only with the legends of the first group, which describe seances most fully and consistently, and shall compare their texts with the invariant seance structure that has been identified in the first part of the book.

Recall that the deeper structure of the seance is a sequence of three main blocs, which are realized in three code versions: "transferral of a communication", "transferral of power", and "transferral of valuables". The actor structure, i.e., the collection of roles, consists of three pairs of actors: "giver - receiver", "helper - antagonist", and "subject -

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object" (this structure, as pointed out, covers the chief categories of character in shamanic beliefs: the "giver" is the spirit-owners, the "receiver" is the shaman, the "antagonist" is the evil spirits, the "helper" is the shaman's spirits and the protectors of the hearth, the "subject" is the person who requests the seance, the "object" is the soul, a piece of property, or the like). And finally, the plot structure of the seance resulting from the syntagmatic unfolding of the blocs of the deeper structure along the identical lines of "exchange of information," "exchange of power", and "exchange of valuables", has been described as a sequence of functional relations between 1) the requestor of the seance and the shaman; 2) the shaman with his helping spirits and the addressee of the seance (i.e., one of the characters in the current belief system); 3) the object obtained (valuable) and the requestor of the seance.

Let us now examine how this original scheme becomes refracted in shamanic legends. In terming the structure of the seance "original", we do not mean a genetic derivation of the shamanic legends from these rituals (as will be demonstrated below, their plots in no way duplicate the plots of the seances), but merely intend to use their structure as the most illustrative and syntagmatically developed, as opposed to the other rituals, for comparison with narrative plots.

As a beginning, let us consider a memorate in which an eyewitness describes the seance, as it were, from without. For example, the collection of A. P. Dul'zon has the story "How the Shaman Cures the Sick".

A man takes ill. He is old. All the time he is sick. His son goes to the shaman. "You should shamanize for father", he says. "I will do so". Then people come to him, bring a drum, spread skins on the floor, and start beating. The drum sounds. The shaman arrives, goes up to the sick man, and shamanizes. The shaman hangs a rag on him. He also hangs a rag in back. The shaman shamanizes on and on. He shamanizes, beating the drum, and then sits down and smokes. He finishes smoking. Again he shamanizes. He shamanizes, beats the drum, stops whirling about, sits down and smokes. The people begin to talk to him. The shaman talks. "Now I will shamanize for you, and you will get better". The shaman shamanizes and the people help. He is done shamanizing. "I have shamanized for you and you have been cured. After this, you will still feel bad. Two days will pass, and on the third day you will go out into the street" [Dul'zon, 1972, no. 122].

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There is no mention in this text of the spirit of illness. The narrator's main attention is devoted to such events as the "invitation" of the shaman and his "predictions", while all other actions are described only superficially: "beats the drum", "whirls about", "hangs up a rag", and so on.

E. A. Kreinovich records a similar memorate among the Nivkhi.

Epkun told the shaman Koin''yt that his son was sick and invited him to come and sing and cure his son, and Koin'yt did not refuse. He brought the drum to the dwelling of Epkun and hung up trinkets. The Nivkhi cut down some shrubs and brought them to the dwelling and shaved an inau. From the inau they made a binding for his head, they made spectacles and tied them to the head binding [the "spectacles" are placed on the forehead of the shaman — E.K.]. They made a binding for his neck from the inau, they made him a belt from the inau. They bound up all his joints with the inau: they bound the left knee, they bound the right knee; they bound the left ankle, they bound the right ankle; they bound the left elbow, they bound the right elbow; they bound the left wrist, they bound the right wrist [the bindings are not placed on the joint itself, but slightly higher — E.K.]. Next they placed ledum and spruce in a cup and poured water into it. This is water for the helping spirits of the shaman to drink, so they say. They placed sarana and t'irkh roots into a cup and set it on the edge of the hearth, for the helping spirits of the shaman to eat. They set fire to the ledum and spruce, they fumigated his head binding of inau, placing it on his head, they fumigated his belt with the trinkets, they warmed his drum over this fire [of the ledum and spruce — E.K.I. Then he stood up and began to sing [i.e., shamanize — E.K.]. After shamanizing, he said: "The mountain people desire Epkun's dog. If he kills a dog for the mountain people, the sick one will recover — so they have said." No sooner was the dog killed than his son felt better on the very next day. After that, he recovered completely [Kreinovich, 1973, pp. 442-43].

Here, as we see, the main attention is given to a detailed description of the preparations in which the narrator himself took part. In the only instance when he speaks about the purpose of the preparations, mentioning the helping spirits for whom a cup with refreshment is offered, he gives a kind of "reference" to the prevailing opinion on this subject ("so they say"). But the signification of the seance as an "agreement"

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between the shaman Koin''yt and the mountain spirits regarding a sacrifice is placed in the mouth of the shaman himself.

It is possible that at least some of these memorate accounts are of artificial origin, i.e., rather than being specimens of traditional folkloric prose they are provoked by the questioning of ethnographers, who explained how the seance was conducted in the past. This is suggested, in particular, by the abundance of ritual details, which are seldom found in such quantity in the narratives, and also by the fact (which should be especially emphasized) that there is often no plot whatsoever in such texts (cf. the above account from the Ket, published by Dul'zon). A somewhat different situation occurs when the account describes a particular event (as in the legend presented by Kreinovich): the plot then follows quite accurately the conjunctures of the ritual.

Such is the account, for example, of [R. A.] Silkin, an Enets, recorded by B. O. Dolgikh, relating how the shaman Diabadea saved a sick boy of the Muggadi clan by performing the pu pozu [stone gates] ritual over him [see Dolgikh, 1962, pp. 153-57]. This presents in great detail the history of how the younger son of the Enets Karitua took sick, how his elder son went for the shaman, indicating who of the Muggadi clan was a helper-tetaguzi during the seance, what instructions the shaman gave to the participants of the ritual, what was its general course, what the shaman foretold after the seance, what gifts he received from Karitua, and so forth.

Such memorates sometimes even approach ethnographers' own descriptions of the seances*2. Beyond question, they are of great scientific value, especially when the narrator provides a substantive interpretation along with mentioning actions of the ritual, portraying the seance not only "from without", but also "from within", in the eyes of the shaman himself, as it were. In these cases, the ethnographer obtains additional information to establish the significance of the ritual operations, and the folklorist has an opportunity to discern how a particular ethnographic feature develops into a folklore motif, since the ritual is placed here "as a focus" of the narrative.

Even with respect to such texts, however, both ethnographer and folklorist should display the utmost caution, since the shifting of "external" and "internal" perspectives of the ritual quite often results in distortions that obscure the true relationship between ritual and narrative "reality". We shall present two examples.

From the already-mentioned Enets informant Silkin, B. O. Dolgikh recorded an account of how the shaman Narzale of the Nenets clan

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Iadnia cured the Enets Tebk, who resided in the same tent [chum] as the narrator (i.e., this account should be classed in the genre of the mini-history). The plot structure of this memorate comes not so much from the internal conjunctures of the seance (as in the Enets specimen above), as from the structure of the story itself: at the request of relatives, the narrator first brings to the sick man the shaman Pasu, whose ritual manipulations and sacrifices did not bring success, and only the shaman Narzale was able to save the dying one, at the cost of his own life.

The purpose of a more or less detailed exposition of the ritual side of the seance is replaced here by a desire to recount a specific instance, i.e., to convey the drama of the situation in which the seance was held. After the first shaman's failure, the second, having shamanized for a while, admits that he also is unable to "catch the soul" of the sick man, and asks first to be pierced with an ice pick, and then to be choked. In the text under examination, two somewhat differing interpretations are given for these "shamanic tricks" (to which we shall return). The first is provided by shaman Narzale himself: "I then began to shamanize and did not kill the reindeer. Pasu [the first shaman — E.N.] needlessly killed the reindeer. Instead of the reindeer, I cut my own head with the leash, as one chokes a reindeer. I stabbed myself, as though piercing it in this way. It is the illness that I was stabbing. Had I not stabbed and choked myself, the sick one would not have recovered" [Dolgikh, 1962, p. 106]. Further on in the story it is told how Narzale, after receiving presents, went away, and sometime later Silkin and his neighbors learned that the shaman had been killed by a bear. Commenting on his death, the relatives of the cured man came to the following conclusion: "The bear killed him because he gave up his own soul for the sick man. Did he not choke himself here and give up his soul for the sick man? He said to the kacha [the spirit of illness — B.D.] 'take my soul instead of the sick one'. That is why he died. Why else should a bear come out of its lair in the winter and kill him?" [ibid., pp. 106-7]*d.

As we see, although both interpretations agree with the deeper meaning that characterizes the central core of the seances (the shaman explains his actions as "doing battle" with the spirit of illness, the relatives as an "exchange" of the soul of the sick man for an object of value, in which capacity they regard the life of the shaman himself in this instance), the story as a whole cannot be taken as a strictly documentary record of the ritual, even though it describes a perfectly defined, particular case, including many details of custom and ritual,

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while the narrator himself is an active participant in the described events. This account by Silkin is interesting not so much because it contains authentic information on how the seance is conducted, as because it brings out in high relief the way the goal of a cause-and-effect explanation for events is reached. The shaman's misadventure, placed in context with his actions during the seance, is incorporated into the plot of the story, which, while generally agreeing with the plot of the seance, differs from it in having the last bloc given a negative light in the text: after the function "rewarding the shaman" for saving the sick man comes the function "death of the shaman" from the vengeance of the spirits.

Silkin's story gives both views on the shaman's manipulations, and so this slight deformation of the ritual is readily apparent. The matter is complicated, however, if the "external" view of the ritual by the narrator is omitted (or absent), and the main attention is given to presenting the mere events. Furthermore, this same opportunity of saving the sick man by exchanging his soul for the soul of a sacrifice, including the soul of another person, is frequently used in many legends. For example, a Yakut legend recorded by Ksenofontov tells how a great shaman, living "in ancient times, in the age of the forefathers," was able to resurrect a dead man by giving to the evil spirit the soul of a man living 150 versts away, who "was going to die in three years' time. Whether he dies now or in three years" — observes the shaman — "is of no great import" [Ksenofontov, 1930, p. 91]. The actions of the shaman here are justified by the narrator and even lauded, but in other texts such "exchanges" maybe ascribed to "evil", "black" shamans.

M. N. Khangalov has published several legends in which the residents of a nomad camp, learning that a shaman of ill repute had come to a wealthy neighbor who was sick, and therefore anticipating an attempt on his part to save the sick man at the cost of one of their lives, take precautionary measures, so that the shaman is unable to succeed and the sick man dies [see Khangalov, 1959, pp. 208-9]. In these legends, the first segment (harm) is actually developed as a seance during which the shaman-mediator offers (or tries to offer) the spirit of illness a ransom in the form of a human sacrifice (the Buryat call this dol'o, i.e., "replacement"). Curiously, such legends sometimes directly portray a seance during which the shaman sacrifices one of the members of the household of a wealthy patient [see ibid., pp. 206-7]. Khangalov himself, on the basis of these legends, is inclined to declare, along with his informants, that "in olden times" the custom of human sacrifice

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(the khun dol'o ritual) existed among the Buryat — a conclusion that does not follow from such sources, since these legends could arise simply from folklore modification.

The foregoing examples should demonstrate a progressive departure from direct depletion of the ritual, first into the realm of ideas (in the present case, the idea of "exchange" as a way to "remedy the harm"), then into the realm of beliefs (the belief in shamans able to cause harm), and finally, into the realm of pure narration, rendering the image of human sacrifice after the model of a common ritual. In other words, legends telling of human sacrifices performed in the past use, as their means of expression (the sacrifice image), precisely those accounts with content concerning the exchange of a patient's soul for the soul of another person (the offering of his soul is tantamount to killing him), while these latter transform the situation of the ritual itself, in which one item of value (the soul of the patient) is exchanged for other valuables (the soul of a sacrificed animal, presents, refreshments, etc.)*3.

That the folklore text portrays both the means of expression and the seance content can be proved by comparing two other legends regarding a shaman's battle with a spirit of illness, published by Khangalov.

The first tells how the shamaness Arzut destroyed an evil spirit [ada] that had been "eating up" the children of a certain Buryat in the ulus [locality] Tangut.

The shamaness ordered that meat and salamata be prepared and placed in a domb on the right side of the yurt, the shamaness herself standing outside the yurt, while on the inside a shidekhen [horsehair rope] was stretched around the entire yurt, except the door*e. Four strong men drank themselves drunk, and the shamaness also feigned drunkenness, whereupon the ada entered the yurt through the open doors, which the shamaness instantly blocked with the horsehair rope, so the ada could no longer leave the yurt. The shamaness ordered the four men to grab her by the arms when they realized she had caught something. The shamaness began to shamanize, and indeed she seized something on the eastern side of the yurt; she was flung from side to side, as though fighting with someone, but the sturdy men took her by the arms and hands, holding her body, and passed a sharp knife between her two arms, whereupon there was a sudden smell of onions and something like fish scales was seen; at the same time, a creature resembling a polecat, but without any fur,

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appeared mysteriously, and they killed it [Khangalov, 1958, p. 334].

Here, the seance is portrayed quite "realistically": the structure of the text is such that the meaning of the shamaness's ritual actions is perfectly clear. The pitcher with refreshment is intended to entice the spirit, the imitation of a drunken condition to lull its watchfulness, the rope to close the exit, the tossing from side to side portrays the struggle with the captured spirit, and the cutting of the hitherto unseen ada with the knife results in its becoming a creature that all can see, whose destruction signifies victory over the malefactor.

In the second legend, instead of an external description of the ritual, the shaman's battle with the ada is presented as follows:

From the ulus Ushat of the first babaer clan of the Kudinsk department, the great shaman Zamkhan once traveled to a certain wealthy Buryat of the Verkhnelensk department, who had three wives. The shaman saw thirteen ada in his house. The host requested the shaman to deliver his home from the uninvited guests, who were killing all his children. The shaman ordered that the next day roast meat and salamata should be placed in a domb [a wooden pitcher for tarasun], and promised to come. Arriving in the yurt the next day, the shaman himself assumed the form of an ada and observed that all thirteen ada were sitting in the domb. Relishing the tasty food, the ada said: "How good are our father and mother". Noticing the shaman, i.e., a new ada, they asked: "Where do you come from?" The shaman responded: "I have been wandering from house to house and looking into the cups". And he joined their company. One ada sat on top and kept watch, while the others stayed in the domb. Zarnkhan also ate the salamata and meat. But when his turn arrived to keep watch on top, he slammed the lid on all thirteen ada and ordered the vessel to be taken out in the field and burned" [ibid., p. 333].

In this legend, only the general framework of the text coincides with the ritual: the preparation of the pitcher with refreshment and its burning in the field; while all other actions of the shaman are given in pure storytelling fashion — as a "tricking" of the trusting ada. Even the single ritualistic feature — the pitcher — is used here not only as a means of luring the ada with refreshment and an implement for their capture, but also as the scene of action; instead of the feigned drunkenness of the shamaness in the first story, we have here a "transformation" of the shaman into an ada, the pantomime of the "struggle" of the shamaness

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corresponds to the "dialogue" and the shaman's deceptive partaking of the meal with the spirits. In this legend, the viewpoint of the requestor of the seance is virtually absent, being entirely replaced by the viewpoint of the shaman, which, in turn, also encompasses the viewpoint of the spirits, of whom the shaman pretends to be one. The provoking of the ada to act in a way favorable to the requestor, also the point of the seance, is presented very vividly here, but there is almost no external description of the ritual, unlike the first legend, which portrays it in all major parts. Both legends, let us stress, could be assigned to the genre of the customary account: both report the names of the shamans and the requestors of the seance, and the names of the ulus where the described events took place.

As an intermediate case in which the plot development of the story is accompanied by a change of viewpoint, consider a Nganasan text published by B. O. Dolgikh [Dolgikh, 1976, no. 23]. This tells how two shamans attempted to revive the daughter of the shaman Porbin, who was living in the same chum [tent] with a widow and her two sons. The shaman Porbin sends these boys to ask for help from a young shaman, not being confident of his own powers. In the meantime, he begins the seance himself. The legend states:

When the young shaman arrived, the chum of the old man was already filled with guests. The old man was lying on the floor, his head in the direction of the tundra, because he had already departed for the nether world. He is breathing heavily and shaking his head, exactly as a reindeer on the run. The shaman always imitates a reindeer in this way when going to the nether world. The young shaman then lay down beside the elder and began to tell what he was seeing in a quiet voice. One of the guests sat down near his head, listening and repeating his words for the others.

The explanations of the narrator disclosing the meaning of the ritual actions (shown emphasized above) are then replaced by a description of the journey of the young shaman to the world of the dead, depicted through his own eyes, while the story is also taken up in his own person: "I came to the nether land. A large and very rapid river is now before me. The old shaman stands on the shore in front of this river and cannot cross". Leaving him at the river, the young shaman continues his voyage alone. On the way, he meets the deceased father of the boys living in the chum where the seance is being held and engages him in

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conversation. Learning that his family is impoverished, he promises to give them reindeer when the shaman returns to his "own" world. At length, the youngster gains access to a secret chest in the chum of the dead and says: "Five hearts lie in it. Four of them are completely black. One is still half white. I think that this is the heart of the old man's daughter. I have placed this heart in my pocket. (All the guests saw that the recumbent shaman put something into his pocket. ) I am now going back. Again I meet the father of the two boys. He gives me two reindeer-calves — a buck and a doe. I tie them to the thongs of my parka. (The guests see that the shaman is tying knots in the thongs of his parka)".

The subsequent presentation of the events happening to the shaman in the world of the dead is told in his own person and accompanied by very circumstantial remarks of the narrator, tending to suggest that the entire text should be viewed as the testimony of an eyewitness — one of the participants of the seance. Yet this is not so. The account doubtless uses recollections of particular seances, but is not a memorate in the direct sense. Even though the plot of the legend in large measure follows the plot composition of the seance as a voyage of the shaman to the world of the spirits, and the events are attributed to specific persons — the Porbin family, to which Dolgikh's informant also belonged — it describes an entirely fantastic situation — the reviving of a dead girl*f. In this respect, the ending of the story is also of interest: the young shaman, to the beat of the drum, revives the daughter of the old shaman, gives to the widow's sons the tufts of red and white wool received from their dead father, symbolizing future prosperity, and as reward for the seance obtains not only the customary reindeer of Nganasan ritual practice, but also the rescued girl as a wife. The story concludes with an etiological motif: "Since that time, shamans receive girls and reindeer as payment for their shamanism", in which, as throughout the narrative, a purely ritual element (obtaining reindeer as reward) is combined with a folkloric motif proper (marrying a rescued girl).

The ethnographic authenticity of the latter custom (as well as the mention of human sacrifice practiced "in olden times" in the previous Buryat legends) cannot be admitted without further proof, i.e., solely on the basis of such accounts, since the motif of marriage occurs here as a logical conclusion to the story.

Let us investigate how this happens. The circle of actors in this story is somewhat larger than that in the seances: it includes not only the requestor of the seance, the shaman, and the spirits, but also a spectator,

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or witness of the events; further, the latter character is not the same as the narrator (as in the memorate), although his perspective is also recorded in the text.

As a result, the plot of the legend is no longer a simple following of the seance plot, but arises as an enactment of all these relationships.

Thus, the standpoint of the narrator in this particular legend is recorded in the plot merely by assigning the events to the life of one of his ancestors, and also in the etiological ending, i.e., in the compositional outline of the story. The viewpoint of the spectator or witness of the occurrence is not that of the narrator, yet is also recorded in the characters of the boys living in the same chum with the elder Porbin and is expressed by the incidental remarks as to what the hero is doing during the seance (cf. the Enets legend of the shaman Narzale, related by Silkin, in which the standpoint of the narrator coincides with that of the witness). These boys, however, being the object of the narrator's description, appear here as participants both in the seance and in the story, and therefore the characterization of them at the start of the narrative ("the widow's sons", "poor") becomes one of the plot-forming elements: suffering "want", they hereby become also the requestors of the seance, for whom the shaman obtains the souls of reindeer from their deceased father. An identical defocusing of perspective also occurs in the character of the shaman Porbin, who attempts to revive his daughter: he is characterized as both shaman and a person experiencing "want", i.e., a requestor, and in the latter capacity he must appeal for help to a young shaman living nearby, who in turn not only plays the part of an intermediary between the requestor and the spirits, but also becomes the hero of the fabulate: all the major events are described from his standpoint.

The resolution of all these conflicts is what generates the plot of the legend, which first tells of the parallel seance of the two shamans, after which one of them abandons his attempts to penetrate the other world, while the other continues the voyage and attains objects — reindeer wool, assuring the enrichment of the orphan boys, and the heart of the girl whom he revives. However, this "attainment", making it possible to "supply the want" of the requestors, does not resolve the purely narrative conflict between the old and the young shaman, arising in the course of the story. Since this legend does not deal with a rivalry (such legends do exist and will be considered below), the character of the young shaman instead arises as a mere reduplication of the old shaman, who is pushed by the development of the tale into the role of the

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requestor. The proposal to take the daughter as his wife is a logical resolution of this duplication and at the same time allows identification of the young shaman as the hero of the fabulate. Therefore, the etiological ending, i.e., the conclusion from the standpoint of the narrator, is also primarily a summarization of the outcome of the events described in the legend, but does not generalize the facts of ritual practices, as might appear at first glance (in the commentary on the legend, Dolgikh stresses in particular the tendency of this informant to draw moralizing conclusions from his narratives)*4.

The motif of a shaman marrying the girl rescued by him in another Nganasan legend [Dolgikh, 1976, no. 24], very similar to the preceding, is even more fantastic in ordinary respect but even more logical in respect of the narrative.

The action begins with an episode identical to the previous text: an old shaman brings to his tent the body of his daughter, dead and buried, and attempts to revive her. He sends his son (there is no other characterization of this personage, and he does not figure in the later account) to a shaman living nearby for help, while himself beginning to shamanize. The future hero is depicted here as a very young child ("he only just started to walk"), which entails the inclusion of further episodes (persuading his parents to allow the child to shamanize and a scene where the young shaman is playing with other children), prior to his voyage to the world of the spirits. The voyage itself is presented in the person of the hero, who encounters on the way first the old shaman, who has halted before a river and lacks the strength to cross, and then (on the other shore) two old men, who ask him for help in reaching the land of the dead. The child promises to make them a "shortcut" on the way back. The conflicts occurring in the world of the dead between the shaman and the daughters of the owner of the subterranean ice, Syrady-barb, are developed with particular detail in the story. Having reached their tent, the shaman makes the mistake of allowing them to comb his hair (i.e., instead of rendering them a service, he accepts a service from them). As a result, he is unable to leave their house, and only the cunning of his helper-spirits, who send a storm and thus distract the women (they must leave the tent to secure the niuki, which the wind is carrying away) allows him to steal the heart of the dead girl and run away. On the road back, he helps the old men and learns from them that ice maidens will kill his parents in revenge for the trickery and theft

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(i.e., as in the above-given Enets account, the shaman's "victory" over the evil spirits turns into a "misfortune" for himself). Returning to his "own world", the shaman revives the daughter of the old man, who in fact offers his daughter as wife to the boy as remuneration, this being pointed out in the text: "Well, my lad! You are wrong to say: my father will go, my mother will go. Come and take my daughter!" This feature is accompanied by a commentary of the narrator, though not of an etiological nature: "Even though this child-shaman was little, he took the wife. He will become a man afterwards". This variant entirely lacks an etiological ending as such, although the legend concludes with a typical narrator's remark, vouching for the validity of the whole account: "This is no fable, but the old ways. The old shaman and the child-shaman were both avamskie samodi" (as the Nganasan termed themselves and the Enets).

In this legend, the genealogical connection between the narrator and the old shaman is left out, as is the character of the eyewitness (we note that the text also lacks parallel descriptions of the ritual actions and statements as to their meaning). The legend is seemingly close to the structure of the seance in its role and compositional structure, although the focus of attention is not indeed the outward appearance of the ritual, which is given even less consideration than that of the previous examples, but the vicissitudes of the voyage of the child-shaman and his encounters with the spirits. These determine the development of the plot, concluding not only with a "supplying of the want" of the requestor, but also with a "loss" (of his parents) and an "acquisition" (of a wife) by the young shaman, which transforms him from a mere intermediary (which is what he is in the ritual) into the hero of the fabulate.

Thus, the traditional accounts, even when affixed to wholly specific events in the life of the narrator or rendering events from the recent past (i.e., externally preserving the features of memorate), are fabulates, where the main attention is given not to portraying the ritual as such, but to the relationships between the shaman and other actors in the account. It is these that govern the development of the plot, even in such cases where it appears to follow faithfully the plot of the seance, or is closely connected in theme.

Transformations among legend plots

In seances, plot elements were built mainly by placing a series of intermediate characters into the relationship "requestor of seance —

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required item of value". Matters are completely different in the legends, where conflicts forming the plot may arise between any given pair of actors. In fact, the plot of certain stories is based on conflicts between a common person and the shaman (cf. the first bloc of seances), while all other relationships enacted in the seance are left alone. Other legends describe a collision of a shaman with an opponent, still others only his voyage, and so forth. As a matter of fact, we are dealing here not with accounts of seances, but with accounts of shamans, in which their activity is given either a positive or a negative valuation, which is what generates the plot of the tabulate. Let us examine how this occurs.

Whereas the first bloc enacting the relation "requestor of seance — shaman" appears in the ritual as "request — consent" and is often surrounded by special ceremonies, a number of stories portray it as different, often logically contradictory versions. For example, it is reported that a certain person does not "request", and "does not believe in" the power of the shaman (he ridicules the shaman, greets him impolitely, refuses him a courtesy, or in some way "violates" the customary rules of deportment with a shaman). In response to the insult, the shaman performs actions that allow him to demonstrate his power. In certain texts, these are presented as a "seance" (described with more or less ritual particulars), while in others the seance is reduced to a single action or "miracle", accomplished by the shaman. And while these miracles are often similar in kind to the functions performed by the shaman in his ritual practice, the seance itself is not mentioned in the story. For example, in spite of the skepticism of the onlookers, the shaman saves a sick man not by making a sacrifice or fighting with the spirit of disease, but simply by blowing in his face [see Ksenofontov, 1930, pp. 84-85]; or obtains food, not from the spirit-owners, but simply by smacking his lips [see ibid., p. 85]; or the like. Other miracles may also be regarded as a reduction of syntagmatic links: instead of the "summoning — response" of the spirits as in the seance, the legends often speak of the shaman's ability to "turn" into animals, fly in the form of a bird, and so on.

Having proved his power by such a miracle, the shaman either punishes the profane one ("misfortune" for the requestor) or merely frightens him by demonstrating his power and compelling respect, then showing mercy ("salvation" of the transgressor).

The plot structure of these legends also happens to consist of three main blocs; however, it is quite obvious that this does not result from

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direct following of the seance plot structure, but merely reproduces the underlying structure, itself based on a logic of interaction, syntagmatically unfolding in the sequence of "action --> counteraction --> result".

Such accounts may be further expanded by stringing together links of like function, thus producing a story with cumulative cycles describing miracles once performed by a certain famous shaman. However, it is important to stress that neither repetition nor reduction violate the tripartite syntagmatic structure of the text and only vary the plot within these limits.

But if one of the blocs is omitted (in the present case, the first, in which the shaman is himself subjected to a trial on the part of his ill-wishers), instead of a plot-organized account we have the bipartite composition of a popular belief, ascribing the ability to work wonders to a particular venerated shaman*5.

Another technique of plot development involves one of the blocs being expanded into a hierarchically organized series. For example, on the way to a patient a shaman is exposed to ridicule from relatives. In response to their lack of confidence, he makes an image of a fish out of birch bark, brings it to life, and sticks it into a tree above the campsite of his companions. The fish begins to wriggle so much that the entire site is covered with snow. Next time, the shaman sends a wooden wolf to chase and return escaping horses. Here the "miracle" is achieved by means of special agents — fish and wolf. The episodes of their "fabrication" are comparable to "preparation of the ritual images" in a seance plot composition, but in the legend they are not confined to the seance (once arrived at the home of the requestor, the shaman performs a successful seance, but the seance preparations are not even described), instead serving as only one of the means to demonstrate the shaman's force. They constitute a preliminary plot movement, when the shaman is identified as the hero of the fabulate, and in this respect contrast with episodes in which he performs his main feat — the saving of a dying woman [see Ksenofontov, 1930, pp. 86-88].

Varying of the "requestor — shaman" relation by a reversal of predicates may also result in redistribution of roles. For example, instead of a "request" for help, a shaman is given an "order": a greedy or obstinate man compels him to bring down from the sky a wife, mowers for the fields, servants, or the like. The shaman fulfills the demand, but the arrival of the celestial spirits results in the demise of the requestor [see Popov, 1937, pp. 62-64; Ergis, 1960, nos. 139, 140, 142; Popov,

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1936b, pp. 207-13]. Here, the requestor plays the part of the shaman's opponent, which results in an inversion of the entire plot structure. Instead of a "misfortune" of the requestor, there is a "misfortune" of the shaman (he is whipped and taunted until he consents to shamanize). The second bloc — the shaman's voyage to the spirits — is intended to remedy this very misfortune, although outwardly it coincides with the demand to "supply the want" of the requestor. Fulfillment of the demand is in fact the shaman's vengeance for the humiliation suffered. Instead of a "rewarding of the shaman," there is a "destruction of the requestor".

Although these legends are often associated with historical persons (both shaman and wealthy man are the forebears of certain specific clan subdivisions; current destruction or decline of this clan then is explained as the outcome of punishment by celestial spirits), it is quite apparent that the account in the present case does not portray a particular seance (even though the seance itself is described in great detail by certain texts). Nor is there an "ideological rethinking", resulting from loss of faith in the might of the shamans. On the contrary, this is affirmed in every way. The legends about the vengeance of a shaman result not from shifting of ideology, but pure folkloric variation, the role of the shaman's opponent being played not by an evil spirit (as in the seance), but by a person who has done harm to the shaman or those under his protection. It is instructive that this opponent in a number of texts is also interpreted as a "foreigner" on the superficial level (being assigned to a different clan subdivision or a different ethnic collective), i.e., his personal characteristics are closely tied up with his role.

Such legends often revolve around the personality of a particular renowned shaman [see, e.g., Ksenofontov, 1929a, pp. 43-49; Okladnikov, 1949, p. 87; Popov, 1936a, pp. 214-18, and many others] and apart from the cumulative principle of building elements of like function (as already discussed) this process may bear the nature of a biography, i.e., recounting his deeds from birth to death*6.

Last of all, the temporal characteristics of shamanic miracle legends are interesting: the heroes are generally shamans already dead. Often the text openly declares that "in olden times" such shamans existed, who were able to pierce themselves with an ice pick, remove their head, turn into animals, produce a flood in the yurt, and the like, but "nowadays" such shamans "are no more". The miracles themselves, under the impact of modern understanding, are occasionally explained by the informants as "tricks" or the result of "hypnosis". In other cases, the

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accounts of miracles are assigned to particular persons, recently deceased, and therefore these legends include many alleged histories.

An inversion of the stories about wonder-working shamans is the extensive group of legends about shamans who bring harm [see, e.g., Dolgikh, 1962, pp. 182-87; Ksenofontov, 1930, pp. 34-35, 78; Khudiakov, 1969, pp. 305-6; Ksenofontov, 1977, nos. 159, 167, 230; and so on]. Their plot, again, is based on conflicts between the shaman and a common person, but the main predicate linking this pair in the seances along lines of "saving of the requestor by the shaman" appears here with opposite meaning: "doing of damage by the shaman".

Certain of these, such as an Enets customary account published by Dolgikh, also portray a seance "in reverse": a Sel'kup shaman or mitakhaza (sorcerer), instead of "swallowing" the spirit of disease, "spits out" a patient's soul that he had himself swallowed in response to a refusal by the Enets family, who had come to the Sel'cup trading reindeer for fish, to present him with a live reindeer, offering only the meat and hide. The Enets elder, in accordance with ritual practice, rewards the shaman for saving his son, extracting his promise "not to bewitch people" anymore and warning that if another of his family takes ill he will regard it as the sorcerer's doing.

In this text, the "infliction of harm by the shaman" happens unintentionally ("I was guilty of it" — acknowledges the shaman — "but it couldn't be helped. . . . Out of spite, when I asked for the reindeer, and you didn't give it, I swallowed it without even noticing. He was sitting directly opposite" [Dolgikh, 1962, p. 187]); and an ordinary man comes away with the "victory". But there are many legends attributing to a particular shaman the regular practice of devouring people's souls, sending a cattle plague, and the like. Here again we may observe the tendency for these accounts to revolve around a certain personality, not only a particular famous shaman of the past, but frequently also a narrator's contemporary.

In a certain sense, these legends may be regarded as the source of popular beliefs as to the existence of black shamans, raising the question of whether we should distinguish these beliefs from the classification of shamans (e.g., among the Yakut and Buryat) as "white" and "black" in the ritual itself. White shaman functions among these peoples usually coincide with the activity of the priest, or rather the leader of an entire clan's prayers; while seances, during which a shaman portrays dealings with spirits, enter into the functions of black shamans. It is the latter who engage in therapeutic ritual activity (in the

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broad sense, including not only the cure proper, but also general rectification of an unfavorable situation), and therefore such "black shamanism" in no way involves doing harm*g.

The classification of shamans as black or white is occasionally made according to the world — nether or upper — conjured by a shaman. This also, however, is based not on an opposition of "evil" and "good" shamans, but an opposition between the "bright" upper and the "dark" nether world. Thus, belief in the existence of evil (black) shamans is rooted not so much in rituals (acts of baleful magic can be performed by anyone, not just shamans, although of course they are attributed greater aptitude in this respect; in such case, however, they appear not in the role of mediator, but in the role of an "evil" individual), as in the popular beliefs about the propensity of shamans to send misfortune.

The folkloric nature of these beliefs becomes obvious given the peculiarity of plot variation just considered: the possibility of reducing one of the syntagmatic structural blocs even to the extent of total discarding. In legends about miracles, a shaman punishes his offender "in response" to insult. In legends of shamans who bring harm, this element is often omitted; in its place, the opening piece is a "doing of damage" with no plot motivation, and the story unfolds by depicting actions of "response" undertaken against this evil shaman. But if such development does not occur, then instead of tripartite fabulate composition we have the composition of a belief story, comprising only two blocs: in the present case, the "doing of damage" and the "outcome of doing the damage". The character playing the part of the evil shaman may be a certain shaman ancestor who was known for his harsh manners when alive, or a shaman belonging to the storyteller's generation and suspected of misdeeds for certain reasons. In either case, they come within the scope of current belief and it is possible to perform protective ritual actions against them.

Legends and beliefs about evil-doing shamans can also be contrasted with legends and beliefs about wonder-working shamans in a somewhat different light, associating the positive and negative value of the basic predicates ("help/doing of harm") with the hero's change inperspective. In reality, stories about a shaman who performed various wonders while alive and who after death protects his descendants from oppressors, revenging their enemies and guarding against evil spirits, often revolve around a given ancestral figure venerated by a particular group: the shamans tracing their genealogy from him add him to the number of

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their helping spirits, and sometimes he is even held to be the spirit-owner of the locality where he is buried. A person belonging to the clan under his protection generally becomes the main character in the many mini-histories about the miracles of his relics*h.

Accounts of evil-doing shamans can also be presented as descriptions of a conflict between them and the narrator, or as legends in which the hero entering into battle with a malicious shaman is a person belonging to the narrator's clan (this may be a bogatyr, a brave young man, a blacksmith, or a legendary wonder-working shaman who protects his descendants, i.e., figures endowed with certain preternatural abilities). Therefore, even in such cases when the relations between the shaman and "his" group remain outside the plot and, thus, a story is created from the vicissitudes of the combat between two shamans, the heroes of these legends usually appear as "good" (friendly) and "evil" (foreign).

This welding of the text to its narrator emerges more clearly in those legends where shamans engage in battle because one of them has done harm not to his adversary proper, but to one of his family. If, however, the conflict arises exclusively from their rivalry, then we are dealing with the next link in the chain of transformations between plots — legends of shamanic contests in strength, or the duels between shamans [Popov, 1937, pp. 51-57; 59-62; Dul'zon, 1972, no. 77; Ergis, 1960, nos. 184, 185; Ksenofontov, 1929a, pp. 74-75; Dolgikh, 1961, pp. 64-67; Okladnikov, 1949, p. 96; Khudiakov, 1969, pp. 304-5; see Vasilevich, 1936, no. 41, and many others].

The motive for such conflicts, again, is commonly an insult given to one by the other, although a motivation may also be absent here: it is replaced by the mere description of one of the antagonists as a sorcerer, a ravenous shaman (i.e., one who devours souls), an evil shaman, and the like. The central bloc of the plot, however, involves not just a demonstration of might (as in the above-considered examples, where lack of confidence in the shaman is expressed and he works a wonder to prove his strength), but a "combat" between the two antagonists. The development of this central bloc occurs here by inclusion of such motifs as "deception", "trickery", "wiles", "magical flight", making use of articles that change into insurmountable obstacles; the shamans skirmish in the form of animals or change shape during the duel, becoming various animals, birds, or objects. Such "transformations" are sometimes similar in form to the ritual of black magic: one of the antagonists places the soul of his rival in a substitute image and attacks

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him by magical means. The outcome of the battle (the third bloc) explains the elevation of one of the antagonists, while the etiological ending associates the conflict resolution with the origin of hallowed places where the venerated shaman or his adversary is buried (in customary accounts and clan traditions), landscape features, or elements in the cosmology (in the toponymic legends and myths).

We present a short text recorded by 1. A. Khudiakov among the Yakut:

Once a certain powerful shaman for some reason desired to kill a sorceress, so she fled from him, jumped across the Indigirka, landed on a mountaintop and drilled straight through the bare rock. And ever since, in memory of this, people point to the opening, six feet high, made by the sorceress in the rock lying far to the east of the Indigirka, along the road from Zhigansk to Russkoe Ust'e [Khudiakov, 1969, p. 304] [my emphasis — E.N.].

A similarly constructed but more developed myth concerning a battle between the legendary shaman Al'ba and the evil Khosedam was recorded by A. P. Dul'zon among the Ket [see Dul'zon, 1972, pp. 89-90, no. 77], which explains the origin of the Yenisei (it is cut out by the shamanic sword of the bogatyr Al'ba), the Great Red Mountain below the village of Vorogovo, near an offerings site (it is the body of a giant, wounded by Al'ba), the Osinovskie Rapids (made from reindeer and elk when Al'ba glanced at them), rock outcroppings to the east of the Yenisei (Al'ba himself turned into this), and finally, the origin of death (foreordained by Khosedam, since in the end Al'ba could not defeat her).

The etiological endings of these stories are an operator linking the result of the competitions described therein with the present state of affairs. The mere inclusion of etiological motifs in the fabric of the story clearly demonstrates, first, the universality of the logic of interaction (underlying both narrative plot conflicts and rituals on various levels), and second, the relative independence of the narrative from the ritual structure: the third syntagmatic bloc of the story contains not only the direct resolution of the conflict between the characters, but also the outcome with a bearing on the present condition of the world. Let us recall that, even in the seance — this most developed of ritual forms, mimicking not only the provocative actions of the celebrants, but also the "responding" reactions of the addressee — the last element in the

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chain of the plot is usually only an "elimination of a need", while full "elimination of ill fortune" (regaining health, success in the hunt, birth of offspring, and the like) will occur only in the future, even though also described as the result of a successful seance.

Thus, the syntagmatic structure of even such a laconic account as the above Yakut toponymic legend is more wide-ranging in the sweep of its events than that of the seance. As for plot structure itself, it is in fact much more narrow than that of the seance, due to reduction of almost all intermediate elements: the story is based on a conflict between only two characters.

Legends of shamanic duels offer an interesting range of personalities playing the part of the rivals. These may be two quarreling persons, one of whom is the narrator himself (a true story of such kind has been recorded by 1. A. Khudiakov from a Yakut blacksmith, whom a shaman tried to destroy; it concludes with the following words: "And so, I live to this day, while he died in three weeks' time" [see Khudiakov, 1969, pp. 360-61]. In the customary accounts or true stories it may be a question of two warring shamans of the present or recent past, one of whom — the good one — generally belongs to the group of the narrator, while the other — the evil one — to a "foreign" clan or ethnic group. The outcome of the contest explains the prosperity (or decline) of "his" clan. But if the account concerns a conflict between great shamans of the past, it usually explains the origin of worshipped (or banned) places and sacred precincts, while the etiological ending stresses the details of rituals to be performed in honor of these shamans, now the object of worship. And finally, in the myths where the gods and culture heroes appear, their shamanic feats and duels explain the origin of cosmological points and cultural institutions.

The last group of texts, i.e., the shamanic legends in which the adversary of the shaman is not a member of the community (even one endowed with preternatural qualities, such as a sorcerer or a hostile shaman), but an evil spirit, a spirit of disease, or the like — i.e., a part of the religious system, leads to the next element of the original structure: the relation "shaman — evil spirit." The plot is based on a conflict that also constitutes the central bloc in the seances. It might be expected that these accounts would follow a seance pattern most faithfully, since the distribution of roles among the characters is the same. However, we have already seen that this is not so, that even in the memorate the outward form of the ritual generally receives very little attention, while models of traditional prose often do not dwell on it in the least, or

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employ the elements of the ritual to arrange their own plot structures.

For example, one Buryat legend tells how a famous white shaman, sitting on the bank of a river, caught sight of an evil spirit or anakhai. Spitting beneath the feet of the latter, the shaman froze the anakhai to the ice and began to beat him. The anakhai begged the shaman for mercy, promising not to appear in his village; but he lied, and one day entered the house where the shaman was naizhe [guardian of the children]. Attempting to strike the anakhai with a saber, the shaman missed and cut off the head of a child, after which he slept for three days, so that his soul could catch and kill the evil spirit. But he also failed in this; the anakhai outwitted the shaman and was able to take protection under his tengrii [Zatopliaiev, 1890, p. 3].

In other accounts of the same type, the shaman is victorious:

In olden times, the calves began to disappear from some of the villagers. They summoned a shaman, who hid and waited for the calf-abaasy [evil spirit]. In the evening, after it was dark, a boy wearing a calf-skin jacket appeared in the cowshed, mounted one of the calves, and began to roll his head from side to side, while the calf bleated furiously. The shaman crept up and grabbed the abaasy by the hair. The spirit screamed, broke free, and vanished forever. Ever since then, no more calves were lost [Popov, 1949, p. 318].

In a Chukotkan legend, a shaman of the village of Neten, learning that a plague was drawing near, warns the residents of the arrival of ke1'et spirits and orders them to hide in their homes and wait until they are called, while he himself goes out of the yaranga [tent], sits down in the snow, and when the kele arrive, presents himself as a wayfarer whom they will not let inside (cf. the above Buryat legend where the shaman pretends to be one of the ada in order to entice them into the pitcher, but where the story plot also included the ritual motif of invitation of the shaman by the hosts of the house). By a series of deceptions, the shaman manages to kill first the dog of the kele, then his wife, and finally, with the help of the villagers responding to his call, he captures the kele itself [Menovshchikov, 1974, no. 77]*7.

As we notice, plot conflicts in shamanic legends gradually displace specific circumstances of an "incident" from the text and concentrate

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on the mere encounter of opposing forces.

By speaking of a "narrative prism", I deliberately forego using the term "conceptualizations", which invariably occurs in this context, since I believe that the latter themselves depend in large measure on the arsenal of how events are symbolically recorded. One such means is in fact the plot-organized account, based on a description of the interactions between personages and allowing the fullest possible presentation of the occurrence, including the perspectives of both antagonists.

Instructive in this respect is a legend published by Ju. B. Simchenko [Simchenko, 1976, p. 49]. The scene is set at the end of the latter century, and the hero is the grandfather of the narrator.

Once there was unbearable heat in the summer, the rivers dried up and the reindeer began to die. The hero of the story — Syry'a, a shaman by profession — tells his people that the heat is the result of Kadiu'o-Thunder, who is sitting on the tent poles and cannot move away, because his elder brother has been wounded during a fight with mythological beings [nerymsy] (this motif is a kind of citation of the myth concerning the battle between the god of thunder and the god of cold, Kodu). Kadiu'o-Thunder proposes that the shaman cure his brother, and a seance is performed. "He shamanized for three days, and then said: 1 have cured Kadiu'o-diuntu'o. In three days time, argish [rain clouds] will gather. Three days passed and it rained. The streams began to move and there was water. The ground became moist. All the reindeer got to their feet and lived".

The plot of this legend arises from inverting perspectives with a corresponding redistribution of roles: the beneficial deity, usually bringing warmth and light, appears here in a destructive role, causing a heat wave; yet the shaman, considering the circumstances, does not enter into battle with him, but renders him a service, curing his brother, and in thus allowing them to move on, saves his people from destruction.

However, the shaman's "service" may also be false, if the antagonist is not an unintentional malefactor, as in the incident just cited, but an evil spirit.

As a complement to the legends where the shaman pretends to be an outside party offended by those whom the spirits plan to assail, we present one more, in which a clairvoyant meets three evil spirits

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and goes off with them hunting for a human soul. Along the way, the spirits notice that the grass is trampled beneath the feet of their new companion, but the hero reassures them, saying he has only just died and has not yet learned how to move properly. After they capture the soul of a sick man, the four of them continue on their way, and the human begins asking the spirits what they fear the most. "The spirits replied that they fear most of all the dog rose and the hawthorn. 'And what did you fear the most when you were alive?' ask the spirits. 'When I was alive, I feared fatty meat the most,' answers the crafty Buryat. Again, the spirits believe him. They proceed further. The Buryat coaxes the spirits: 'Give me the soul, I will carry it, you are tired'. The spirits give him the captured soul. Encountering a dog rose and a hawthorn along the way, the Buryat runs there with the soul and lies down among the prickly shrubs. The spirits cannot even come close to the hawthorn and dog rose and vainly try to force the Buryat out of the shrubs. Finally, they hit upon the idea of throwing fatty meat into the bushes. The Buryat cries out: 'I am afraid, I am afraid', but eats up the meat. Seeing their failure, the spirits go away, and the Buryat comes out of the bushes and returns the soul to the sick man, for which he is rewarded" [Khangalov, 1958, pp. 398-99].

The pretended transformation of the hero into one of the evil spirits, making it easier to open contact with them, is further supplemented in the story with a pretended service and a clever ruse, making it possible to provoke the adversary into admissions and actions favorable to oneself.

But the entering into contact, as has been said, may itself develop into a syntagmatic chain of events, where instead of the "transformation" we have the (isofunctional) "translation" of the shaman into the world of the spirits.

Here, then, we arrive at the next element in the transformation between plots — the legends of the shamanic journeys, which hold a central place in both shamanic folklore and shamanic rituals. As in the previous group of legends about the shaman's combat with evil spirits, the point of "inviting" the shaman-mediator may also be omitted here. Often, for example, the shaman himself is the bereaved, having lost a son or one of his relatives during his absence, and he sets out in quest of the soul without resorting to any intermediaries [see, e.g., Bogoraz, 1900, no. 78 and others; Dul'zon, 1972, no. 76; Menovshchikov, 1974, no. 76].

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The plot begins with the "absence" of the shaman, opening the way to "misfortune". The cause of the latter is ascertained by the hero in conformity with a familiar scheme: the death of a person is the result of an evil spirit "capturing" the soul. The "discovery" of which spirit has committed the "misdeed" is expanded in certain legends into a long chain of episodes, repeating these attempts until the shaman succeeds in finding the realm where the soul of the deceased is located. Then comes the "transporting" of the shaman into the spirit's presence, which (again) may be reduced to the declaration of a single action ("he flew away", "he rushed there straightaway"), or be elaborated into a lengthy description of his journey, assuming the form of a cumulative chain where the shaman successively overcomes several obstacles, or (finally) may be set forth in hierarchically organized sequences including a number of ordeals, each ensconced in another. Thus, the method of transport may be a "transformation" (into a bird, a steed), but this "transformation" itself often degenerates into a "fabrication" of a means of transport or an "acquisition" of such from the guardian spirits of the border, and the appearance of these personages entails new sequences of conflict/contact with them (e.g., "request — granting" of a vehicle, rendering of a "service" to the sentries, "deception", "battle", and so forth).

However, the predicate "transporting" may be not only reduced or expanded, but also omitted altogether: the story can focus on only the moment of the shaman's "arrival" at the spirits.

Such, for example, is a Yakut legend, published by Ksenofontov [Ksenofontov, 1930, pp. 94-95]. The shaman's battle with a spirit who has stolen a girl's soul is presented here from the perspective of the young shaman, who is still "lying in the nest", i.e., is being brought up by the chief of the upper spirits {abaasy}, Uluu toion. The story has neither a portrayal of the seance in the tent of the sick girl, nor a description of the shaman's journey: the initiate watches from his nest as the son of Uluu toion comes up from the floor of the yurt and sits in the corner silently. After this, a "shaman of earth" flies into the yurt and asks Uluu toion to return the stolen soul. The master pleads ignorance, while the son does not respond to the shaman's questions and sits with his head on his knees. Then the shaman, turning into a wasp, stings the son, thus forcing him to show his face, and flies up his nose. A silver female ornament — the soul of the victim — falls out of his nostrils, the shaman-wasp grabs it and flies down to earth. Aversion of this legend [ibid., pp. 98-100] has another etiological ending: an old

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woman who is bringing up the souls of future shamans on a bed in her house plasters their eyes shut with the excrement of children, and "ever since then" there have been no such great shamans on earth as are capable of resurrecting the dead.

Such a change in perspective on an event is yet another very important technique for varying the plot, as it opens the fundamental possibility of presenting an occurrence from the viewpoint of the spirit itself. This was done in rituals as well, especially in seances, which are wholly devoted to mimicking the dialogic relations between people and spirits. But while in the seances this contact is achieved along lines of "exchanges" (of power, information, valuables), in the narrations these direct approaches are supplemented by a broad range of deceptive, concealing actions, the occurrence of which is likely due to just such a possibility (and necessity) of a deeper level of mimicking an adversary's thinking processes. Along with characteristic ritual gifts to spirits, the open clashes or negotiations about receiving a desired item of value, shaman vogage legends also deal with clever ruses, deceptive transformations, and hypocrisy, to which both parties resort.

For example, after entering the world of the dead a shaman "seizes" a girl in the tent of the dead, which leads to her sickness. Here we are dealing with actions that are a mirror reflection of a characteristic situation in shamanic beliefs, explaining sickness as the result of contact with a being from another world. Yet the hero does this not merely to occasion harm to the spirits, but to compel them to act in a way favorable to himself: the dead call to the sick girl "their own" shaman, who discovers the newcomer (the other dead do not see him) and proposes to give him, as reward for releasing the girl, either the item of value on whose quest "our" shaman is engaged, or a certain intermediate item of value (e.g., a demon), with whose help the hero can achieve final success [see Dolgikh, 1976, pp. 86-87].

Thus, we have here not only direct conflicts, negotiations, and exchanges, but also inverted actions, which mimic behavior that is seemingly advantageous to the adversary. In the present case, it is not a question of the opposition of direct and deceptive actions, but the opposition of direct deception and deception concealed as assistance, i.e., a "tricking", a "pretended service", a "pretended kinship" with the adversary, and the like*8.

We may also regard as an inversion of perspectives and, thus, a simulation of the reasoning of the adversary, the appearance here of such typically folkloric motifs as "making the worst choice", based on

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the circumstance that everything is reversed in the other world and therefore "what is bad here" will be "good in one's own world" (compare with the "proper" choice, signifying the simple finding of a concealed object); the motif of hide and seek and blind man's bluff, a game involving the task of seeing the invisible; the ban on eating and sleeping in the world of the spirits, violation of which provides the adversary the possibility of the hero's "adaptation," thus depriving him of the ability to return to his own world, and so forth.

Granted, such deflecting of plot lines into a motif is characteristic not so much of shamanic legends as of fables, but it occurs quite frequently in our material as well; still, it is secondary to plot variation using either the positive or the negative value of a function, as already mentioned.

Whereas such variation in the legends considered above led to the formation of plots concerning "good" and "evil" shamans, saving their kinsmen or bringing harm to strangers (i.e., again a result of determining who is the hero), accounts of shamanic voyages deal with the possibility / impossibility of the shaman "arriving", "achieving", or "returning."

The outcome of the voyage to the world of the spirits may also be successful or unsuccessful here, unlike the ritual, where there is a natural tendency to pattern a positive result.

The dependence of goal attainment on the degree of simulation of the adversary's reasoning may be illustrated by the example of legends that describe parallel actions of two shamans, one of whom achieves success, while the other comes to grief.

At the start of the chapter we presented examples where the role of the shaman-mediator was played by several personalities. In the Enets customary account, featuring at first one shaman whose efforts did not help the patient, and then a second shaman who was able to defeat the evil spirit, there was a simple repetition of the function of "inviting an intermediary" (corresponding, incidentally, to ritual practice itself, where a second shaman is invited after one whose seance does not bring the desired result). In the Nganasan legends describing how an old shaman tried to revive his daughter by appealing to a young shaman, who was able to cross the river separating the world of the living from the world of the dead and obtain the heart of the girl, the figure of the old shaman is duplicated by that of the young one, i.e., one of the two shamans is relegated to the role of the "requestor". In the legends that will now be discussed, both shamans arrive in the land of the spirits,

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but one of them behaves "properly" there and achieves success, while the other commits blunders and experiences failure or even death. Whereas in legends about competitions between two shamans the emphasis was placed on their rivalry, and the plot was molded by their confrontations, their role as mediaries — successful and unsuccessful — between humans and spirits is now at the center of the story, i.e., there is no mere repetition of the function of "calling an intermediary" with reduplication of the personalities performing it, nor a redistribution of roles in connection with a reversal of predicates, but a proper or improper performance of a function.

Curiously, outside the context of the account, these actions in themselves are often indistinguishable. For example, if a shaman arriving in the other world produces sickness in a girl simply from inadvertence or while pursuing the goal of satisfying his lust, such behavior is regarded as improper and results in death [see Dolgikh, 1976, no. 31]. But the same action when performed merely as a provocation, i.e., intending a subsequent "deliverance" of the girl from the sickness, results in obtaining the desired item of value in gratitude for this "service" and is therefore regarded as proper [ibid., no. 22]. The "causing of harm" here is merely a means of placing the adversary in a helpless condition, compelling him to search for "his own" means of redemption, thus facilitating the path to the shaman's goal. The fact that the role of the adversary is played by several personages (the dead, the girl taking sick from contact with the newcomer, the shaman who discovers the newcomer and offers him ransom) does not alter the situation, but only brings out the complexity of the hero's tactics, who finds the weak spot in the enemy's clan and a mediating shaman with whom to bargain.

It must be pointed out that accounts of a seance in the spirit world are not always tied to the figure of a shaman. Frequently the hero of this widespread plot is an ordinary person, accidentally arrived in the world of the spirits [see, e.g., Vasilevich, 1936, pp. 33, 34; Popov, 1949, pp. 256-60, and many others]. The picture of the seance in these legends is rendered almost as a mirror image: the outsider is invisible to the inhabitants of that place, his voice is perceived as the crackling of the fire, his touch causes pain, and only "their" shaman is able to discover him and help him return to earth.

That this mirroring is due to a change in perspective and an intensification of reflection is witnessed by the text recorded by Dolgikh [Dolgikh, 1976, no. 33], in which there is a twofold reversal of the picture: first, in accordance with the universal pattern, one of our kind accidentalle

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enters the other world, is discovered there by a "great" shaman and driven back, but upon returning to "our" world and noticing that, instead of a reindeer as steed, which he requested, the shaman has dispatched him on a wooden reindeer, he turns himself and his comrades into spirits of sickness. Concerning this latter motif, Dolgikh mentions in his commentary that the idea of a person arrived in the land of the dead turning into a spirit of sickness is not typical of the Nganasan [ibid., p. 323].

Actually, the return of the hero from the world of the dead more often has the effect of turning him into a shaman, while the dual contrasting of the upper and lower worlds results in the idea that the inhabitants of the "upper" world are spirits of sickness for those of the "lower", and vice versa. But in our example, where the actions of the shaman expelling the outsider are regarded as improper (the "service" — return to earth — is coupled with a "deception" — handing over a wooden, instead of a live reindeer), they consequently entail a hostile move in retaliation (transformation of the hero into a spirit of sickness), located in the etiological ending, which, incidentally, is also delivered in the person of the one who has become a spirit of sickness [ibid p. 129].

This example confirms once more that beliefs themselves are largely conditioned by the storytelling possibilities, i.e., they are based on plot-organized folkloric texts (of course, such rare technique as the double mirroring of the present text has no direct parallels in the sphere of religious ideas).

As in the ritual practice, where the purpose of the seance may be not only a cure, but also the assurance of economic prosperity, so too in the shamanic legends the voyages of the shamans are often dedicated to "acquisition" of success in the hunt, food, happiness, spirits of children, and so on. The material considered above allows a conjecture as to the direction in which these seances will be refracted in the narratives.

Customary accounts (for example, how the shaman solicits from the spirits the soul of a child for childless parents) may describe a ritual framework: the invitation of the shaman, his preparations for the seance, the approach to the deity, dialogues with it, and so forth [see, e.g., Ksenofontov, 1930, pp. 92-94; Ksenofontov, 1977, no. 108; Ergis, 1960, p. 255, and others], but much more often all these ritual features are omitted and the plot is based on the vicissitudes of the shaman's journey, his successful or unsuccessful confrontations with

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the spirit-owners, his proper or improper behavior in the world of the spirits, leading to a positive or negative outcome.

The figure of the requestor is also frequently omitted here. For example [see Popov, 1937, pp. 58-59], it is told how two shaman-brothers, having gone offhunting in a year of famine, become lost and cannot find game even with the help of their spirits. When they at length track down two wild reindeer but are not able to overtake them, the elder brother in vexation utters three loud cries (an action tantamount to violating the ban of ritual silence during the hunt), which results in the death of the reindeer and the wrath of the deity Aiyy. In another part of the story, it is the younger brother who does wrong: taking vengeance on a wolf for damage done, he magically lures him to within shooting distance and himself makes the kill, instead of appealing to Aiyy for help. As punishment, the deity curses the shaman's descendants, dooming them to poverty.

This Dolgan legend, enforcing the necessity of supplicatory seances as the basis of prosperity (with a proof by contradiction), involves the figures of the shamans in only a purely outward manner: the impropriety of their actions consists in the fact that they conjure Aiyy only after having themselves tried to succeed, thereby violating ritual rules with respect to animals.

As an example interpreting the seasonal seances tied to calendarical festivals, we may cite the very common plot of the flight of shamans to the country of the geese or their transformation into fish. Such stories were common among the Ket, Dolgan, Enets, Nganasan, Yakut, and Evenk. Their substantive relationship with seasonal supplicatory seances appears with special clarity in those variants where the voyage of the shaman is prompted by the desire to assure a successful hunt to his fellow clansmen (B. O. Dolgikh has recorded a similar legend among the Enets, directly incorporated into a customary account of how the Enets celebrated the pure tent festival). But in other versions, they represent stories that merely demonstrate the might of the shamans, who are able to turn into birds or fish. In either case, however, the plot describes a parallel journey of two shamans, one of whom is well prepared for the flight (he has provided himself with new clothing, alerted his clansmen as to the necessary preparations for his return, and so forth), while the other has "forgotten" to do this [see, e.g., Dolgikh, 1976, no. 16]; the one crosses an obstacle improperly — reviling an old woman seated at the hole leading to the land of the geese and not recognizing in her the Owner of the Universe — while the other flies

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quietly past her [Popov, 1937, pp. 54-57]; the one chooses a flowing river to shed his feathers, while the other stays on the lake and is killed by hunters [Vasilevich, 1936, p. 255; Dolgikh, 1976, no. 16; Popov, 1937, pp. 54-57, and others].

A Nganasan text involves the figures of shamans from two clan groups — Ngamtuso (who perished because of his mistakes) and Linanchera (who managed to return) and directly explains the relationship between the prosperity of the clan and the results of their voyage: "Ngamtuso shaman has lost his life. There in the ground the geese ate him. And here in the tundra, thus, there is no food at all. The people of Ngamtuso shaman this year were hungry all summer and ate nothing. The people of Linanchera shaman are not hungry, they all eat plenty — they catch the wild reindeer, they catch the geese, they catch every kind of food" [Dolgikh, 1976, p. 61].

But, as we see, in contrast with the seances, whose plot unfolds as a "going" of the shaman to the spirit-owners, a "handing over" of gifts to them, and a "receiving" of the souls of game animals from them, here only the mere fact of a successful or unsuccessful voyage is recorded, while all other plot confrontations of the ritual are reduced and displaced by the description of the events motivating this success or failure as the result of the personal attributes of the shamans themselves. But even in those legends that do describe how the shaman obtains items of value from the spirit-owners, direct correspondences with ritual are extremely infrequent.

The closest to the scheme of the seance is the Nganasan legend, telling how a shamaness "in a dream" goes underground to Nily-nguo (the "god of happiness" or "god of life") so that "the people may live easily", "in order to arrange a happy life". Arriving at the tent of the gods, the woman is subjected to a triple ordeal; she must find the owner of the tent as he hides from her*9. Three times the heroine of the story finds the old man in hiding, and he gives her reindeer wool, fish scales, and dog hair.

But on the return trip, when the shamaness was crossing the river dividing the world of the spirits from the world of people, "a little blood and something white" stuck to her parka: "this blood means that humans will die of blood, of murder; the white means that humans will die of alcohol intoxication". Despite such obviously late touches, the etiological ending assigns the entire action of the story not to the calendar festival of the start of a new annual cycle,

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but to "beginning" times, when the prevailing order was established: "And people began to live as we live today. This proves that gods indeed exist somewhere. Verily, it is said, this happened long ago", concludes the narrator [see Dolgikh, 1976, no. 19].

In connection with such an etiological ending, the question also arises: who is in fact the hero of the legend? The narrator herself at first wavered in her decision: "Nily-nguo, the god of happiness, helps everyone. They say he was a small boy, seven years old, or a woman". In this beginning of the legend, three personages are mentioned at once — one of the major spirit-givers of the Nganasan pantheon, the deity Nily-nguo (Dolgikh considers this a later transformation of Nily-niami — the Mother of Life), who is first identified by the informant with the figure of a small boy (perhaps there is a reference here to the chief culture hero of the Nganasan — the orphan Doiba-nguo), but afterwards with the figure of the shamaness-woman who obtains "fortune" and "misfortune" from Nily-nguo himself. Thus, the role of the spirit-giver is split up here, being duplicated by a chain of intermediaries "giver а helper а procurer а shamaness" (recall that such development took place both in the rituals and in the above-given examples, where the figure of the "requestor-receiver" breaks down into the series "spectator --> requestor --> shaman"), warranting our regarding the entire text as a myth reporting the process of interaction between humans and spirits from the perspective of these latter, and not from the perspective of humans, as in the seances; therefore the correspondence between their plot schemes is the result of a refracted mirroring of the underlying structure of the ritual, and not a direct reflection of the latter in the narrative.

Thus, we have now reached the shamanic myths, in which the culture hero — this central figure of mythology — is depicted as a great shaman-procurer, while the plot records his contacts / confrontations with spirit-owners, the givers or original custodians of cultural and natural objects. The just-mentioned account of a shamaness's journey to Nily-nguo may be compared with the myth of Doiba-nguo himself [Dolgikh, 1976, no. 2], who obtains from Mou-niamy (the Earth Mother) "a sapling and a willow", so that vegetation appeared on earth, from Nilulemy-mou-niamy (the Mother of the Life on Earth or the Mother of Wild Reindeer) a reindeer and a doe, and from Kou-niamy (the Mother of the Sun) a sunbeam so that the snow would melt. The common structure of both stories becomes evident if we

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consider the isomorphism of the threefold repetition of the trials of the shamaness by the gods (the task of finding the old man in hiding) and the threefold repetition of the journeys of Doiba-nguo (Mou-niamy sends him to Nilulemy-niamy, and she to Kou-niamy); moreover, the myth of Doiba-nguo is even closer to the plot scheme of the seances, especially those confined to the calendarical festivals, during which the shaman visits all the major spirit-owners in turn. However, although the plot of this myth does concur in this segment with the plot of the seance, it develops quite independently of the ritual scheme proper and may be regarded as one of the elements in the chain of transformations of the creation myths, in which the formation of the world is described as the result either of "procuring" the natural objects by the cultural hero from their original custodians, or of their "engendering" by the creator, or of "fabrication" by a demiurge [see Meletinskii, 1976, pp. 195-96].

In the myth in question, Doiba-nguo "procures" from the sun god not only warmth, but also a wife, with whom he "generates" the first people ("the Nganasan, to be sure" notes the narrator), i.e., the predicates "procuring" and "generating" stand in a consecutive, and not only a paradigmatic relationship, which in turn leads to episodes encountered in the shamanic initiations, but totally foreign to the seances, these ordinarily employing only the first of these predicates. And finally, in other variants of this Nganasan myth [Dolgikh, 1976, no. 1], Doiba-nguo "procures" nothing whatsoever, but in fact "generates" (and not with a wife obtained from the spirits, but with the owner of earth, Mou-niamy, herself) a grass-child, a reindeer-child, the first human twins, or even "sends" helper-birds beyond the earth to the bottom of the sea [ibid., no. 4 and 5], i.e., he behaves as a true demiurge-sender, and not as a shaman-procurer. In a purely syntagma-tic sense, of course, the creator's "generating" and "sending" of his helper-birds are comparable with the shaman's "making" and "sending" of his helper-spirits with certain errands, i.e., in both cases there is a hierarchically organized plot, resulting from introduction of extra mediator-personages.

As a result, the culture hero not only merges with the creator-demiurge, but the latter, being relegated to the role of a passive "sender", is sometimes directly identified with the "requestor", or the object of procurement is delivered directly to him by the mediator.

Thus, in another Nganasan myth [see ibid., no. 14], the bird-dia-maku during a heavy frost asks a certain "old man" to forge her iron

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wings, beak, and talons, so that she may fly to the god of warmth; the old blacksmith, living alone in a small tent (a personage in whom we may easily identify the familiar culture hero-demiurge and patron of initiation), grants her request, and the bird flies to the south, finds the seven daughters of the god of warmth, who are guarding seven sacks with clouds, makes them drowsy and undoes one of the sacks. Upon returning, she sees that it has become warm on earth, and the "grandfather" who forged her wings is walking about his tent without a coat. One other element is worthy of attention in this text. The "procuring" here is accomplished not by means of the predicate "obtaining of an item of value" from a spirit-giver, as is characteristic of the ritual scheme, but by "theft", i.e., once again a change of perspective takes place: entering into contact with the giver of warmth to facilitate the "obtaining" is replaced by putting the daughters to sleep (i.e., avoiding contact), which facilitates the "theft".

And finally, in yet another Nganasan myth, Doiba-nguo himself appears in the role of "helper," and what is more, a helper of both "your kind" and "our kind" [ibid., no. 20]. He is presented here as the son of one of three gods of the hunt, into whose abode a hunter inadvertently wanders (the episodes describing the man's entering into the world of these spirit-owners contain features allowing them to be interpreted as a highly fanciful recoding of the shamanic initiations, but we shall not dwell on them). The greedy owners of the hunt carefully lock the "guarding ones" on their river, so that the fish and the beasts cannot come to earth; the bodies of those who die of hunger float to the spirits and become their "prize". The whole picture of the interaction between humans and spirits is given here in reversed form, but still obeys the same logic: the seizing of items of value by one of the partners (spirits) leads to the destruction of the other partner (humans), but at the same time the talon [success in the hunt] of the gods is also "bad", since they get only the skinny, famished fish-people. Doiba-nguo (in the text he is termed the Man in the White Soku) tries to rectify the situation by breaking the "guarding ones" and thus freeing the animals of the hunt, but the gods curse him for this, calling him a thief and threatening to kill him. Doiba-nguo then shifts the blame for the broken gates onto the human arrived in their midst, but at the same time arranges the escape of the latter with his sister (she is also called the "mother of shamans", and Dolgikh is inclined to identify her with Mou-niamy, the Earth Mother [see ibid., p. 318]).

Nganasan folklore, as we see, offers examples in which plot variation

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occurs since the culture hero, Doiba-nguo, appears now in the role of sender-requestor, now in the role of shaman-procurer, now in the role of helper, combining in himself the features of demiurge, first ancestor, and trickster — a phenomenon characteristic of the myths of other peoples as well, including other Siberian peoples (see the monograph of E. M. Meletinskii on the paleoasiatic Raven [Meletinskii, 1979])*i.

The very fact that all these roles are played by an identical character — namely, the culture hero of a particular ethnos — may be examined in two ways. In the realm of folklore proper, this has the effect of grouping stories of different plot type around the figure of the very same hero, which under certain conditions (if the grouping takes on a biographical nature) will give rise to a scheme characteristic of the heroic myth, and then the bogatyr fable, the heroic epos, or the magical fable. But if we confine ourselves to a more narrow viewpoint, analyzing only the mechanics of plot generation, it emerges that the ability of the culture hero to change roles is conditioned by a change of predicates, and this in turn derives from a narrative in which views of both interacting parties are fixed and presented.

The culture hero as first ancestor ("orphan", "first human", and so on) doubtless is a model for society in its relationship with the natural surroundings, a model that in turn is reflected by spirits of the different levels. But the very same culture hero as trickster, deceiver, and thief represents a picture of the society rendered (as it were) from the perspective of the spirits themselves. Such shifting of perspective may also result in the fact that the figure of the culture hero is assigned both to the pantheon of spirits (cf. the word nguo, i.e., "god", appearing in the name of this same Nganasan Doiba) and to society. In the plot, this dual view is expressed in the culture hero being endowed with the qualities of a trickster, in motifs such as the hero's celestial, "divine" birth, in his descent to earth to organize it (such are the Mansi Ekva-pyrishch or the son of Turum Pairakht'-Bear), and many accounts of marriage between a celestial man and an earth woman, or the like. By reduction of these themes, the motifs of "abandonment" (celestial parents abandon the child), "solitude," and "orphanhood" of the culture hero arise, receiving further justification by the fact that he is the first man on earth. But the mediating status of the culture hero is established not only on the level of theme or motif, but also on the plane of realities — by his zooanthropomorphic nature, his transgressions (the accounts of incest between the founders of the clan are perhaps a plot development

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of the latter), his androgynism, or his being one of twins, and so on.

Returning to the shamanic legends, we observe that the theme of "procuring" and, in a broader context, the cultural achievements of the shaman-mediator in a final productive result lead to the last bloc of our original scheme — the "transferral" to the requestor of valuables procured by shamans. Whereas in the seances this bloc is implied by all previous elements, in the narratives it is either replaced by the etiological ending, connected only in a kind of account collision by its explanation of a logical conclusion, but not in terms of plot; or it is entirely abstracted from the blocs of the original structure, creating a basis for its own thematic group of shamanic legends. This leads to the situation (already familiar from the other groups), whereby the entire plot of a legend elaborates one particular element of the original structure by varying the relations between a pair of characters, in the present instance the shaman and those persons on whose behalf he is performing (or trying to perform) the seance.

As in the examples considered above, the plot text arises here in those cases where the ritual is violated in some manner. Such is the widely distributed Yakut legend, telling how a shaman ascended into the sky and attempted to cut the fixtures of the stars in the constellation Pleiades, in order to produce warmth on earth. The shaman forbade his clansmen to leave their houses and look at the sky, but one curious woman disobeyed and came out to watch the sparks dropping from the sky as the shaman cut the fixture with a hatchet. He immediately stopped his work, but had managed to cut only two of the nine stars; therefore, it only became a little warmer on earth [Kulakovskii, 1923, p. 12] (compare [Ksenofontov, 1929a, pp. 94-96], where a similar occurrence is presented in a positive, normal aspect, being therefore one of the legends about the shamans who are able to perform great deeds). We cite additional themes of similar structure: because of a faithless wife, a shaman who has flown off with the eaves is unable to return to his previous form [Khudiakov, 1969, p. 310] (note that this text does not contain episodes describing the actual voyage of the shaman with the birds, in contrast with the above-given legends where the death of the shaman was explained by his own mistakes in the land of the geese); the lack of attention of the people gathered for the seance has the result that an ancestor spirit summoned by the shaman — a great shaman of the past who had successfully fought against smallpox during his earthly existence — does not receive a proper reception and goes away, while his tribe perishes from smallpox [Ksenofontov, 1930,

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pp. 18-19]; a lazy fisherman goes out to meet a shaman, transformed into a fish, with a torn net, and thus the shaman dies [Popov, 1937, p. 57]. The last text also has an etiological ending: after trying to return his kin, a new shaman "said during the incantations that the owner of the river will not release those coming into his grasp, and so let shamans no longer descend into the water". We find a similar account among the Nganasan [see Dolgikh and Fainberg, 1960, p. 60], but here the hero is a shaman of the ancient tribe nia, and the etiological ending links him to one of the lakes, i.e., it becomes a toponymic legend.

On the status of the folklore narrative and its programming role

We have gone through basic structural blocs in detail, using them as the basis for discussion of transformations between plots of shamanic legends. It was found that, even in memorates directly devoted to recollections of seances, the account very seldom depicts the latter (such texts exist, but there is doubt whether they are traditional, since in the majority of cases they are clearly provoked by inquiries of collectors as to how the seances were performed). Much more often, the memorate deals with a specific event, when people resorted to a shaman for help, outlining his success or lack of it, and the outcome, good or bad. These are the features that form the plot of the story, while ritual actions themselves, even when presented by the narrator in considerable detail, are transformed from structural elements into background attributes. Thus, even the genre of the mini-history, where the narrator is a participant or eyewitness of events, exhibits a tendency to transform the memorate into a fabulate, unfolding by the pattern of "action а counteraction а result".

The syntagmatic scheme of the account develops by altering the perspective on the events being described: it may coincide with the perspective of the narrator himself, it may settle on one of the witnesses, pass to the hero or to his antagonist, or even be personified (for example, among the Enets, Nganasan, and Nenets, such personified "word" or "speech" passes from one character to another, from one theater of action to another).

It is the change of perspective which, in turn, allows the account to make rather frequent use of the negative values of a particular predicate, in addition to the positive ones; this being totally uncharacteristic

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of the seances, where the appearance of function-impairing negative values results in termination of the proceedings. In the narrative, the plot continues to advance, but this is purchased at the price of departing from ritual description into the realm of pure narration.

The general syntagmatic structure of the seances is transformed hereby in two main directions:

— additional elements are added to a particular bloc of the seance structure (either bringing out a positive/negative value of a predicate or developing the plot into a cumulative chain by repetition of elements of like function);

— the opposite tendency is to reduce the other blocs of the tripartite scheme of the seance even to the extent of their disappearance.

As a result, shamanic legend plots are constructed preferentially on the interaction occurring within one of the pairs of characters, whereas in seances the plot develops as a relay-race, successively linking three such pairs (recall that the action in the seances gradually moves from the requestor to the shaman, from the shaman to his helping spirits, from them to the spirit-owner or an evil spirit, and thereafter in the reverse order).

Depending on the particular pair within which the interaction develops, and in which direction (positive or negative) it unfolds, we may distinguish the corresponding thematic groups, that is, we may classify the shamanic legends according to three basic plot types:

— legends about wonder-working shamans and harmful shamans (the direct and inverted perception of the first plot bloc of the seances);

— legends about the competition between shamans proving strength, their battles with the evil spirits, their successful or unsuccessful attempts to obtain items of value for themselves or for their community in the world of the spirits (the direct and inverted perception of the second bloc of the seances);

— legends about the possibility or impossibility of people using the result achieved by the shaman for their own purposes (direct and inverted perception of the third bloc).

An "inversion" of ritual, interpreted by V. Ja. Propp as the result of shifting in ideology, is thus one of the most important plot-forming mechanisms and therefore cannot be regarded as the result of diachronic changes. The plot of the legend does not follow the plot of the seance, but transforms it by switching around the predicates. Indeed, it often "corresponds to reality in reverse" [Propp, 1946, p. 14], but this element can in no way be attributed to ideological "rethinking" of the

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ritual: the deformation (even to the extent of "inversion") is caused merely by a change in standpoint from which the interaction of the partners (adversaries) is viewed.

Moreover, shamanic legend plots are not exhausted by the abovegiven types, for into the basic tripartite structure of "action а counteraction а result" are incorporated substructures that are isomorphic with it.

A similar mechanism was discovered by S. D. Serebriannyi: analyzing Propp's formula, he proposed eliminating from the group of functions those that (in his opinion) should be classified as linking elements and motivations, obtaining a three-element structure consisting of an "original injury", "retaliating actions by the hero", and "salvation" (generally a favorable outcome, restoration of the state of affairs, frequently on a higher plane).

This three-element structure he proposed taking as

the most simple, original, atomistic formula of the fable. When expanded into an actual fable this original structure generates substructures isomorphic with it and with each other... ; Propp began with a primary expanded formula, consisting of twenty-four functions. If, however, certain plot events in the actual fables had the qualities of two or three functions at the same time, Propp would interpret this as "assimilation"... But the opposite approach may be used to describe the fable. The above-proposed three-element atomistic formula may be taken as the primitive, while the other, more particular functions may be derived from the elements of this formula by fragmentation and differentiation. Choice of a particular method of description will depend, naturally, on the broader goal of the research [Serebriannyi, 1975, pp. 299-300].

And since this is indeed the way in which the plots of both the shamanic legends and the seances develop (the original relation of "subject-object" incorporating the relations of "requestor-shaman", "shaman-helping spirits", and so forth), i.e., by becoming fragmented and differentiated, such a reading of Propp's formula is indeed more productive. Furthermore, this may also contain the very reason for the similarity between plot structures in the seances and the narratives. Indeed, incorporating isomorphic substructures into the nuclear three-element structure of "action а counteraction а result" causes many shamanic legend plots to acquire a hierarchical organization, similar to

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that observed in both the seances and the magical fable.

As for the three-element structure itself, this is the result of encoding interactions between characters (actors) and therefore arises totally independently of the ritual prototype, again through imitation of an adversary/partner's behavior and his perspective on events. Thus, coincidences between syntagmatic structures of the shamanic ritual and the shamanic legends arise not as a result of direct reflection of the ritual in the narrative, but rather are generated by the operation of the very same mechanism, equally manifested in both the realm of the ritual texts and the realm of the narrative texts. In both cases, the scheme has as its source a special kind of reality: a patterning of interaction between two interlocutors, resulting in language production appropriate for the events, and on this basis the plot unfolds.

The unfolding of the syntagmatic structure by incorporation of isomorphic elements characterizes (as has been demonstrated) not only the seances, but also other rituals, being inspired by the very necessity of patterning relations between different segments of the community and nature, which appear as actors in the text of the ritual.

Thus in ritual the structure embraces the addresser-addressee, i.e., it simulates an entire verbal situation, which also allows the ritual to perform a function of reflexive guidance of community behavior. But in the narrative, a reflexive description occurs, recording the interaction of both partners in a special text. Such descriptions, plucked away from the act of direct communication, are a story plot par excellence.

It may be noted, however, that in the realm of nonfictitious prose divorcing a text from the communicative act is far from common, and the relationship of "sender-receiver of a message" is here more broad than the relationship of "narrator-audience", characteristic of the majority of folkloric traditions proper.

To demonstrate this, we should return once more to features of the genre domain*j. We mean those genre criteria that define narrative status through their transmitters, i.e., the etiology, sanctity, and rituality of the plot-organized text, correlated with proofs of authenticity and possible to interpret as a key to communication.

Remember that another group of criteria, also correlated among themselves, pertains to the characterization of a hero, and the time and place of his action, i.e., the range of recounting, which accordingly defines a narrative as myth, legend, or customary account.

The modicum of experience based on the material of the shamanic legends has shown, among other things, that the very same themes can

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be presented now as myth, now as legend, now as mini-history. This occurs since a variation in the hero figure, involving a change in his scope, produces no other major alterations in the plot structure itself, and therefore it may often be observed in nonfictitious prose that the identical themes are attached to different personages. In nonfictitious prose, the hero may easily be not only a shaman, but also a clairvoyant, or even simply a "clever," "shrewd," "knowledgeable," "lucky" person, a hunter, and the like. As we move away from the memorate (in which the hero is either the narrator himself or a companion) through the customary account to the legend and the myth, the hero's scope grows: he is presented as not only an ancestor, but the mythological first ancestor (creator, demiurge, procurer).

However, as in the memorate, where the hero is linked to the narrator by the relation of kinship, friendship, or neighborhood, heroes in legend and myth are also connected to the narrator in certain cases: they are held to belong to "his" group, while their adversaries belong to an "alien" group. This appears with special clarity in accounts of military confrontations, which comprise an extensive substratum of nonfictitious prose among all Siberian peoples and are usually termed "historical legends", but the situation is exactly the same, for example, with the Ket culture hero, or bogatyr, Balna, whom the Ket of the family Balniny (Baldiny) regard as their legendary ancestor [Alekseenko, 1970, p. 46], or with people-eating menkvy — adversaries of the Mansi culture hero Ekva-Pyrishch, who (as noted by V. N. Chernetsov) "represent the ancestor-spirits of the Por-Makhum phratry" [Chernetsov, 1935, p. 138] (regarding the culture hero of archaic mythologies as a model of "his" community cf. [Meletinskii, 1976, p. 193; 1979, pp. 92-94]).

Thus, superimposed on the typology of the hero, defined by his characterization as culture hero / first ancestor, ancestor, or kin, is the further relationship of the narrator to the personages in an account as "one's own kind" or "foreign" — a situation in no way compulsory for establishing authenticity of an archaic tale, in which the hero may simply be "some person".

Moreover, the accounts regarded as authentic are further linked to the narrator by a standard ending "ever since then", which occurs (as we have seen) not only in myths, but also in legends and even customary accounts. The latter circumstance is extremely informative, since etiology is usually regarded as the distinguishing characteristic of the myth proper, and is therefore perceived by many scholars mainly through an

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epistemological prism. At the same time, the etiological endings may be very shallowly connected to the plot itself.

It has already been mentioned several times that the last element in an archaic epic plot may be either positive (victory, elimination of a deficiency, avoidance of misfortune) or negative (defeat, loss, a new misfortune), contrary to the ritual, where the intention of modeling a result favorable to the celebrants precludes such possibility. This feature is especially characteristic of the archaic epic, where the dynamics of plot development are determined (as we have attempted to show) by a change in perspective, now dwelling on one character, now on the other; but not of the elaborate magical fable, where the perspective is again rigidly fixed, this time by the figure of the hero (revealingly, a happy ending becomes an obligatory element of the storytelling canon).

In the archaic epic, the means of establishing perspective is not the canonical plot, since the plot may itself develop here by a change in perspectives, but the etiological ending, which represents a projection of the result of a hero's encounter (interaction, exchange) with an adversary onto the time of the narrator (unlike the etiological endings of the fable, which are ornamental in nature). Even a result that is negative for a story's hero may obtain a positive evaluation here: failure, death, or transformation of the culture hero explain the origin ( = "obtaining" by people) of certain natural or cultural objects. And contrariwise, victory of the story's hero may be valued negatively in the etiological ending: from the body of the slain monster arise serpents; the sparks or ashes of a sorcerer burnt to death turn into gnats and midges, and so forth*k.

The "interchangeable" nature of etiological stories becomes even more obvious by comparing them with another group, in which the origin (= "obtaining" by spirits) of certain objects is declared. Such are the myths where the "nonreturn" of a hero (compare the "return" of the shaman from the spirit world to the human world with necessary items of value in the seances) is responsible for the formation of heavenly bodies, such as the legend of a shaman who becomes stuck to the moon, or a girl spirited into the sky by the sun; such are also the legends of a venerated ancestor, "taken" to their world by bear-people, swallow-people, tiger-people; such are also the mini-histories explaining a kinsman's death as his becoming their "chosen one".

On the syntagmatic plane, the place of the etiological ending is comparable to the "result" that is expected from a ritual, but which

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does not itself appear in the text, being only modeled by this means.

Thus, etiology is not simply an explanation of the origin of things, but rather a declaration of object "displacing", "transferral", or "obtaining". Hence, the text in its entirety describes not only the fact of the contact / conflict between two characters and its outcome, but also the meaning of this outcome for the narrator and his listeners. This function of the etiological ending emerges with special clarity in customary accounts, where the typical "ever since then" explains, not the essence of the thing or the condition, but the mere fact of acquisition or attainment thereof. It is likely, therefore, that even in myths, where explanation of the origin of things is undoubtedly relevant, etiology still cannot be reduced to mere epistemology (the cognitive value of such texts is actually very slight): what is specific to the myths are their themes, and therefore they explain not so much the fact of the origin of things, as the fact of their origin by contacts, by interaction between opposing forces.

While an etiological ending worked into the fabric of an account projects event timing onto the present, the sanctity of accounts taken for authentic may be understood as a projection of the present state of affairs onto mythological time. It had been noted long ago that sacred and profane texts frequently do not differ in plot, and that sanctity involves placing the narrative in a broader context: the narrator shows his listeners the location of stones into which an ancestor was transformed, that is, he explains features of the landscape by tracing them back to events of the past; he communicates the position in the genealogical chain occupied by the listeners with respect to a particular story's hero, that is, he projects the present generation onto the mythological past. Thus, here as well the reason for regarding these accounts as sacred is founded on an actualization of the link between the listeners and the story's hero, and therefore sanctity as a mythological constant may be interpreted in terms of communication: as an establishing of a link between the time of the account (and at the same time the personages of this time — parents, ancestors, original ancestors) and the time of the narrator.

Furthermore, as just pointed out, the etiology of a narrative is usually expressed explicitly by the formula "ever since then". Sanctity also, though much more seldom, receives an explicit expression in the web of a story. Thus, V. 1. Anuchin writes of the great Ket shaman Doh that he is "credited with creating the tenets of the common law of the Yenisei and many tenets of philosophical and worldly wisdom. In great

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vogue among the Yenisei are half-songs, half-parables, sung by shamans in recitative, and each chapter (so to speak) of such parables invariably closes with the words: 'Ton Doh daskansiha! = Thus spake Doh!'

"Besides the all-embracing tenets of morality, ethics, and law, occasionally a by Una [history] and humorous anecdote also close with the words: 'Thus spake Doh' " [Anuchin, 1914, p. 7].

Two features are noteworthy here: these accounts, not only the "parable", but also the "bylina" and "anecdote", as Anuchin calls them, 1) are taken as monologues of Doh and are transmitted in sung or recited form, and 2) serve as the wellspring of judicial determinations and rules of conduct.

The first point confirms that the accounts are regarded as communications having their own author (sender), the second that communication is oriented to the listening audience as recipients.

The sung form of these accounts forcibly recalls the symbolic function of song in archaic culture . . . as a means of denoting someone's voice, of convey ing a particular personage's direct speech. This gives rise to conjecture that many other Siberian archaic epic texts — including specimens of the sung epos, such as the nastund of the Nivkh, which are authentic accounts (from the standpoint of the teller), delivered in a condition of ecstasy or divine inspiration on behalf of special song spirits (Shternberg qualifies them as a kind of improvised tylgund, or "myth"); such as certain Nanai ningman, also regarded as inspired by the spirits, or Evenk nimngakan (at any rate, those describing the origin of the world); such as the Nenets iarabts (literally "lament"), which unlike the siadbabts were considered to be authentic and were told in the first person; such as the epic songs of the Khanty, resembling the iarabts in this respect — may have been regarded as a kind of monologue of the spirits, i.e., definite sacred figures. It is significant that these texts, being perceived as exclusively epic in nature, are classified by scholars in the genre of the sung bogatyr [heroic] folktale [see Meletinskii, 1963, pp. 77-93]. Indeed, they are thematically indistinguishable, and only the characteristic insistence of these songs on authenticity and the attribution of their authorship to the spirits suggests the idea of their possible functioning as sacred texts (cf. the above-mentioned indistinguishability in plots of mini-histories and archaic folktales).

The assumption that the sung bogatyr folktale represents a desacralized form of those epics in which the text is considered the "word of

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god", and not a self-contained epic theme, is supported by the materials gathered by N. A. Nevskii among the Ainu [Nevskii, 1972]. Such are the kamui-iukar — literally "divine songs," delivered by singing in the first person and concluding with the words "thus spake such-and-such a god". Such, also, are the upas'kuma, i.e., "sermons," delivered in a rhythmical recitative in the first person and also containing at the end a reference to the name of the author (usually a clan ancestor). The latter, put to song, became the so-called oina. The majority of the oina are regarded as coming from Aeoinakumi himself (the culture hero of the Ainu, literally "the man smelling like an Ainu, the god of whom we tell"). And the upas'skuma and oina generally unfold as a hero's epic biography; but in addition, "they frequently tell of the origin of a particular god or demon and reveal their nature. All of this, according to the ideas of the Ainu, is necessary to give the Ainu power over the gods and demons. Knowing a deity's nature, its proclivities and deficiencies, enables use of these in a moment of need. Thus (underscores Nevskii), the Ainu learn which deity is best consulted at a certain difficult conjuncture, how to win over a deity, or how to deliver themselves of a certain demon" [Nevskii, 1972, pp. 23-24].

A characteristic feature of "divine songs" is the refrain, about which Nevskii remarks: "Just as people in songs present their thoughts, experiences, and even an autobiography, accompanying each stanza with the refrain 'hore-hore', which is nothing more than a simple shout (or contains a greeting to another person), so too the gods in songs reveal various incidents of their life, accompanying each stanza with a particular cry, depending on the nature of the given god" [ibid., p. 21].

Thus, sanctity may be understood as conferring on a text the status of a communication, sent by the ancestors or the gods to their successors. Accordingly, the text is treated as sacred history.

Let us now turn to the second point, observed by Anuchin among the Ket and Nevskii among the Ainu: these accounts are also treated as "sermons", i.e., they indeed function as communication, sent not only by a particular party (a god, culture hero, or ancestor) and addressed to a certain recipient (the coming generations, and not merely the listening audience), but also carrying information on how one should behave in a particular situation. The plot structure proper is an open one, and the text does not have the status of a self-contained entity: playing the part of a precedent and a paragon, it becomes a kind of "codex of laws" or "legal statute".

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That narratives regulating daily conduct have the status of a communication is confirmed, perhaps, by a peculiarity long noted by folklore students: the legal institutions are often given in a reversed or inverted form. An example of this are the many accounts of how retribution befell those who insulted fire (worship of fire being an absolute law), or the incest between founders of a clan (such marriages being strictly prohibited in the community itself). In all these and many other instances, social institutions are first presented as being "violated", thereby leading to conflicts that create the plot of the story*10.

If it is recalled, however, that inversion is often due (as demonstrated in [the preceding] chapter) to a change of view regarding an event, it may be asked whether the plot is not constructed here from the viewpoint of the spirits, while only the etiological ending, reevaluating conflicts in a story from the perspective of humans, ascertains, by proving the contrary, the "proper" norms of behavior, taking into account the interests of both parties".

Thus, special endings emphasizing authorship ofa text, presentation in the first person, sung forms of delivery, and (possibly) peculiarities of plot development by inversion of rules of behavior might serve as proof of the communicative status of sacred texts as messages addressed by the spirits to people.

Alongside the texts with organized plots, a large number of formulas, often designated by special terms [Evenk ity, odo, ngelemu, Nivkh uit, nigind, Khant atym, iim, and so forth], circulated in the Siberian oral tradition as sermons. These are usually translated as "awful", "bad", "sin", emphasizing their imperative nature, but also as "taboo", "rule", "order", since such texts were also regarded as utterances "left behind" by the gods for the edification of their successors [see, e.g., Vasilevich, 1969, p. 230].

Such taboos and prescriptions regulated, as is known, all essential aspects of life of every member of the collective. In any case, for certain taboos parallels in narrative can be found. Thus, Oroch legends tell how certain former clans perished because their members mocked a particular animal [see Avrorin and Lebedeva, 1967, no. 35-37], it being strictly forbidden to torment animals among hunting societies. Such, also, are accounts of how parents, grieving over their dead child, attracted an evil spirit by their groaning, which transformed itself into their daughter, installed itself in their home, and nearly destroyed the old couple, thus justifying the taboo against crying at funerals.

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E. A. Alekseenko openly declares that, among the Ket, "many taboos (such as a ban on throwing away fish heads or cutting up the main bones of game animals), various prescriptions (such as rules for women), and the like, also have at their heart a legend with corresponding admonition" [Alekseenko, 1970, p. 45]*l. Whereas the taboos, in the observation of G. M. Vasilevich, consist either of a single standard sentence of injunction or are clarified by a brief supplementary explanation, in the narratives the particular social institution is justified by the workings of the plot, i.e., by introduction of opposing forces. The desire to provide the most detailed motivation for each party's behavior often results in the text growing into a long and tangled story, which does not prevent it from retaining the very same function of "instruction" as the taboo — on the contrary, this only helps in its comprehension.

The parallel between the imperative constructions and the narratives suggests that many so-called "religious" taboos, prescriptions, and popular beliefs are derived from plot-based texts as a result of reduction and detachment of one of the three main blocs of the nuclear structure. (We have already noted the ease of such reductions, which not only make possible transformations between plots, but also transformation of a story into a popular belief; for example, accounts of contests in force between two shamans are transformed into the belief regarding "black" shamans who do evil. For structural correlation between the taboo and the narrative see also [Dundes, 1965, p. 213].) Plot-based texts and their fragments in the form of imperative taboos, prescriptions, or popular beliefs constitute, in turn, a world of "concepts", the source of which in such a case is not the "worldview" per se, but the realm of oral communication.

The communicative status of the narratives may further explain yet another peculiarity of their nature, specifically, the use of a plot-based text as a program not only for everyday behavior, but also for ritual. That is to say, the rituality of nonfictitious prose.

As we have already mentioned, the plot of a myth itself is not dramatized in its entirety, even in such cases where there is a direct intention to reproduce it. More often, the account serves as a purveyor of information as to how the ritual should be conducted to achieve the required response from the addressee.

This may be seen quite clearly, again, in the shamanic legends. The events they recount are usually assigned to the past (mythical, quasihistorical, or comparatively recent), but their characteristic claim of

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authenticity and the evaluation of plot conflicts from the perspective of the present day (etiology) result in such accounts becoming a ritual program addressed to the personage of whom they tell. Thus, Yakut shamans during a seance would often exorcise from the sick person, not evil spirits of the upper or lower world, but iuer, i.e., the spirit of a person who died in unnatural circumstances. The biographical details and circumstances of his life and death, contained in a memorate of his violent end, would determine the shaman's choice of sacrificial gifts best suited to this personage, while the songs sung in his name would be a kind of quotation borrowed from the account [see, e.g., Khudiakov, 1969, pp. 407-13]. The same applies to ritual worship of great past shamans — the patrons of the currently living generation. In their honor, the offerings were those very objects the spirit had possessed during its earthly existence [see, e.g., Ksenofontov, 1930, pp. 14-15; Ergis, 1960, no. 191-92; Dolgikh, 1961, pp. 63-67, and others].

In all these instances, an identical projection of the story (whose action pertains to the past) onto the circumstances of the present day occurs, immediately transforming narrative characters into personages of current religious beliefs, and the story itself into a communication, being a source of information on how best to influence a particular interlocutor.

Narrative references to the code of address for a particular spirit may also be important to the present generation. For example, legends telling how a spirit-owner of the beasts was enchanted by singing or story telling at a hunting camp and in gratitude for the entertainment provided a successful hunt were regarded as a kind of "prescription" to take along skillful storytellers, musicians, and singers on the hunt. In this case, the storytelling (but also the singing and music-making) is interpreted as an "item of value to the spirit", in exchange for which it will send the hunters "its livestock — the beasts of the taiga" [see Dyrenkova, 1949a, p. 111].

Thus, another aspect of narrative rituality is the very fact of its delivery for ritual purposes, when storytelling becomes a form of "dispatching" a text addressed by humans to spirits or deities, and not to the listeners or audience. It is this characteristic of the nature of the stories that has been called the "religious-magical function of folklore tales" [see Zelenin, 1934], but even this (we observe) is a technique of reflexive guidance of the behavior of the spirit. Let me emphasize that the rituality of narrative, understood as its use in capacity of a "cue" addressed by humans to spirits, does not require a mandatory "magical"

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formula and does not place special strictures on the genre or thematic particulars of the texts. For example, interesting "yarns", fables, or humorous anecdotes, specifically intended to amuse a spirit-owner of game, might be told on the hunt.

A magical function of storytelling as a means of inducing a spirit's required behavior is exemplified in the use of texts, despite genre characteristics very remote from ritual, within the course of a ritual. Thus, A. A. Popov cites the case of a Dolgan shaman. After utterly failing to discover the evil spirit inhabiting a sick man, he invited an olonkho [epic] singer to his seance. When the olonkhosut reached the point when the hero in battle with an abaasy [evil spirit] is beginning to triumph, the spirit obsessing the sick man crawled out to help its comrade, becoming visible to the shaman, who now began to conjure in full mastery of the situation [Popov, 1937, p. 16].

Unlike the hunting spirit example, when the text itself is valuable as an "offering" (recall that this could also be a song or a folk tune), in the present case the message content itself is important, helping to provoke an interlocution into actions favorable to the narrator.

And finally, a narrative addressed by a storyteller to a deity contains information, in its very plot turns, as to how the recipient should conduct himself during contact with the sender.

An example of this is the Ket myth about the god of warmth. Uses [Dul'zon, 1969, pp. 199-203]. This could be told only in the winter and only to those born during the warm summer months, thus it follows that it was used for "magical" summoning of warmth. Yet contact with the spirit world, in this case with Uses, was achieved not merely by talking, but was activated through the plot, which outwardly resembles a "Morozko" ["Jack Frost"] type fable.

In the myth, the actions of two daughters being courted by Uses are contrasted. Sending the wicked Kolmasam into the sky produces only temporary warming, which is again replaced by bitter cold, for on the way to the groom she offends the spirits inhabiting the celestial headlands, cannot find the home of Uses's parents, and ultimately perishes. The second daughter — a "fair" maiden — brings the necessary offerings to the spirits and is admitted to the main test, a sort of initiation: she is supposed to sew clothes for her husband (the ethnographical parallel here is perhaps the custom, attested among the neighbors of the Ket — the Nganasan — whereby only married women, and not maidens, may sew clothing [see Sirnchenko, 1976, p. 193]). After the heroine passes this test with the help of Uses's mother, she becomes his wife and

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it becomes warm for her parents on earth.

The entire account, including the circumstances of its narration, is a prism of a whole complex of social institutions, not just a particular ritual. There is the shamanic nature of the maidens' journey to the sky (they are supposed to perform the customary shamanic action of feeding the spirits inhabiting the headlands of the sky as they travel past them), and the heroine's performance of "work", confirming her passage from one age group to another, and the "proper" behavior of the maiden with respect to the husband's parents, and finally (most significant), the interpretation of marriage as a form of exchange: dispatching an earthly maiden to the god of warmth is distinctly regarded as the condition for the advent of summer (perhaps this also explains why the myth is the property of those born during the warm months: being the offspring of such marriage, they have a preferential right of contact with Uses).

Thus, the magical function of storytelling relies here on the nature of the plot: by comparing the actions of the two girls, the text is supposed to demonstrate to the god of warmth that humans understand and are capable of performing all the prescribed rules of conduct, and that his descendents are worthy of help. The entire text containing this information becomes instructive, programming the god's behavior with respect to humans, while the etiological ending relating narrative events to the "present state of affairs" (and usually incorporated in the plot) is put out of context: warmth is supposed to arrive as a result of Uses's interactions, provoked by the unfolding logic of the plot structure.

Hence, while etiology actualizes the result of "receiving a communication" by one interlocutor, and sanctity the fact that the communication belongs to its sender, rituality may be understood as a treatment of the text like a communication imparting information:

— for those celebrating the ritual (here the text is a source of knowledge on how to perform the ritual),

— for the recipient of the ritual (here it is a program specifying a spirit's rules of conduct in event of its contact with humans).

Once again I emphasize that a narrative's communicative status does not contradict either a narrator's desire to justify the procedures in the fullest possible manner, so as to allow the fullest possible definition of human and spirit tactics during mutual contacts, nor a narrator's purpose of entertainment, an aspect of the "rules of the game", so to speak, in a number of instances; but both these purposes, as pointed out by E. V. Pomerantseva in her time [see Pomerantseva, 1975, p. 25],

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give rise to a freer play of imagination, a whimsical variation of plot development that opens an avenue for poetic invention and creates prospects for the narrative becoming a fable. Along the way from authentic to invented stories, however, lie desanctification and deritualization, which may be interpreted as loss of the text's status of a message (spirits are no longer regarded as sending it in the case of desanctification, humans in the case of deritualization). From a cue addressed to an interlocutor in a communicative act, the entire narrative then becomes an epic production, separated from the listening audience by the plot framework. It should be understood that the assignment of an epic or a communicative status to a narrative is not tied to diachronic changes: the same texts in one situation can be taken as a message, in another as a story.

Only in those cases when the narrative is detached from its specific ethnographical context does it become a folktale with the characteristic purpose of fiction. This is accomplished, on the one hand, when the hero of a story is not related by genealogy with the narrator or the audience, i.e., when the attitude to him is neutral (as in the case of "a certain man" of the archaic fable), and on the other hand, when the account is borrowed from other neighbors and the personages form no part of the system of current religious beliefs of a particular ethnos.

In this regard, it is significant that borrowed stories (such as the Yakut oustoma [from the Russian "istoriia" and the Oroch sokhori}) are often assigned to the category of fictitious tales in the Siberian folklore tradition. In other cases, the assignment of deritualized and desanctified texts to the category of authentic or fictitious tales varies. (Many scholars point out the difficulty in determining the differences between, e.g., the myth and the folktale; the same applies to the epic songs of nastund and iarabts type, the desanctification of which has not yet resulted in their coming into the category of imaginary tales, although their primary nature was an epos inspired by the special spirits of song).

Editor's Notes

*a. Syntagmatic is used here to describe systematic relationships within ritual, that is, aspects of ritual that follow logically. It is different from the more grammatical (structural) term "syntactical".

*b. This was mentioned on page 95 of the original book.

*c. The term potlatch refers to the ritual feasting and dancing traditional in Northwest Coast American cultures, involving elaborate displays and exchange of wealth on the basis of carefully defined social ranks and categories. The structural correlation of

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potlatching with the bear festival and shamanism is not far-fetched, given Northwest Coast traditions of shamanism and reverence for certain animals and birds (including the bear and raven).

For classic descriptions of the potlatch see Franz Boas, The Kwakiatl of Vancouver island, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, 8, pp. 307-515 (New York, 1909); Frederica de Laguna, Under Mt. Saint Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit, Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, 7, 1972. For comparison of bear festivals in Siberia and North America see A. Irving Hallowell, "Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere", American Anthropologist, 1926, vol. 28, pp. 1-175. A recreation of an Amur River bear festival was sponsored and filmed in 1987 by the Nivkh ethnographer Ch. M. Taksami (head of the Siberian Section of the Institute of Ethnography in Leningrad).

*d. The importance of the bear in northern traditions is further emphasized here. See Boris Chichio, "L'Ourschamane", Etudes Mongoles, 1981, vol. 12, pp. 35-112. Note also the recent story, told in the introduction, of revenge taken by a bear on a Yakut hunter.

*e. The Buryat yurt is a traditional round house (referring both to nomadic felt tent styles and to semisubterranean housing); salamata is a kind of porridge; domb is a wooden dish. M. N. Khangalov was a well-respected Russian-educated Buryat ethnographer, active around the turn of the century.

*f. The issue of determining death was not so clear, according to Khanty who told me in 1976 that shamans occasionally were summoned to revive "dead" patients by shamanizing alone with them for as long as five days.

*g. Note Novik's awareness of the potential of shamans to cure their patients, through psychological therapy, social manipulation, and perhaps other means. This is debated among Soviet scholars: see the previous issue of Soviet Anthropology & Archeology, Summer 1989, on shamanism.

*h. Women as well as men are revered as such ancestral shamans, and are worshipped, for instance among the Khanty, in traditional sacred groves where images of ancestors have been kept.

*i. On the widespread trickster hero see also Ann Chowning, "Raven Myths in Northwestern North America and Northeastern Asia", Arctic Anthropology, 1962, no. I, pp. 1-5.E. M.Meletinskii's analysis is summarized in "The Epic of the Raven among the Paleoasiatics", Diogenes, 1980, vol. 110, pp. 98-133.

*j. This was at the start of chapter 5 in the original book.

*k. Indeed in one Khanty myth the first mosquitoes came from an incinerated shaman,

*l. "Rules for women" refers to widespread taboos imposed on women, derived from beliefs about women as being impure. For an interpretation of such rules, see M. M. Balzer, "Rituals of Gender Identity", AmericanAnthropologist, 1981, vol. 83, no. 4, pp. 850-67.

Notes

*1. On time scale as a basis for distinguishing the RS levels see [Ivanov and Toporov, 1965, p. 122.

*2. See, for example, Dolgikh, 1962, pp. 73-79, where the course of an Enets funerary rite is set forth, involving a shaman of the sabode category, who conducts the soul of the deceased to dia-sie, the "Hole in the Earth"; pp. 96-103, where the narrator recalls how the Enets held the pure tent festival; the account regarding a Yakut ritual for arousing sexual passion, dzhalyn, recorded by Ksenofontov [see Ksenofontov, 1930, pp. 95-97], and many others.

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*3. That the legends themselves may become, in turn, a program for ritual, see below.

*4. We shall see hereafter that the etiological ending of the shamanic legends often serves as a justification for ritual operations, and therefore it may be that the very custom of "taking girls" in return for shamanizing is based on folkloric texts of such type.

*5. Thus, these beliefs have, as their source, not ritual, and not even a social institution or "conceptualization", but epic.

*6. We shall not discuss here the issues in plot formation pertaining to an explanation of the principles of such grouping.

*7. As for this account, a quite ordinary treatment is in fact possible, instead of a ritual one: V. G. Bogoraz mentions a similar legend of the invasion of a tribe that kept dogs and used them to hunt down the Chukchi. The tribe (probably the Yukagir, who employed dogs in their livelihood) is called kel'et [evil spirits] in the legend, "which expresses (as Bogoraz notes) only a difference in origin, especially since the Chukchi call only themselves people [opawedat]" [Bogoraz, 1900, p. X]. Yet even this "reality," refracted through the narrative prism, is cast in a traditional scheme: the story about the conflict between the members of the community and the foreign tribe is portrayed as a battle between their shaman and the kele spirit.

*8. Compare the animal story, where such motifs serve as the main plot-forming cliches [see Meletinskii, 1979; Permiakov, 1972].

*9. This "difficult task", owing to the fact that the spirits (dwellers of other worlds) are invisible to ordinary mortals and can be detected only by shamans, is intended to test the shamanic might of the heroine, but at the same time resembles the details of the seance during the pure tent festival of the Nganasan, when the shaman, in order to secure prosperity for his fellow clansmen, is supposed to find, blindfold, the amulets symbolizing "health", "increase", and the like, at the instance of the visiting spirits.

*10. "Inversion" of relations in folklore is a phenomenon so widespread (embracing not only subjects concerning behavioral rules as such, but also, for example, the cosmogonic myths, which also tell of an original chaos, disorderliness, and the like) that such texts have been interpreted by M. A. Lifshits as a "nostalgia for chaos", allegedly characteristic of myth, where everything exalted has "Mephistophelian" features and represents a kind of "poetics of evil" [Lifshits, 1973].

*11. Regardless of how valid is this view, the fact of inversion of the social institutions in archaic folklore must be taken into account when attempting to use it as an ethnographical source. Thus, if the texts speak about incest among clan founders, a fight for a bride, a husband living with his father-in-law in the sky, and so forth, the presence of these motifs still does not indicate that the particular ethnos once practiced incestuous relations, that marriages were concluded by abduction, or that a matrilocal order existed (on the impropriety of such parallels see [Reshetov, 1970]).

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Acronyms

laF SO AN SSSR. Iakutsk. Filial, Sibirskoe Otdelenie [Yakutsk branch of the Siberian Section of the USSR Academy of Sciences]

IAN. Izvestiia Akademii nauk [Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences (Moscow)]

lSOAN. Izvestiia Sibirskogo otdeleniia Akademii nauk [Proceedings of the Siberian Section of the Academy of Sciences (Novosibirsk)]

IVSORGO. Izvestiia Vostochno-Sibirskogo otdela Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva [Proceedings of the Eastern Siberian Section, Russian Geographic Society (Irkutsk)]

KSIE. Kratkie soobshcheniia Instituta etnografii Akademii nauk SSSR [Short Communications of the Institute of Ethnography)]

MKAEN. Mezhdunarodnyi kongress antropologicheskikh i etnograficheskikh nauk [International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnographic Science]

SAI. Svod arkheologicheskikh istochnikov [Collection of Archeological Sources]

SMAE. Sbornik muzeia antropologii i etnografii Akademii nauk SSSR [Collection of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography]

TIE. Trudy Instituta etnografii Akademii nauk SSSR [Transactions of the Institute of Ethnography]

ZIaKGO. Zapiski Iakutskogo kraevogo geograficheskogo obshchestva [Notes of the Yakut Regional Geographical Society (Yakutsk)]

ZPORGO. Zapiski Priamurskogo otdeleniia Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva [Notes of the Priamursk Section of the Russian Geographic Society (Khabarovsk)]

ZRGO. Zapiski Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva [Notes of the Russian Geographic Society (St. Petersburg)]

ZVORGO. Zapiski Vladivostokskogo otdeleniia Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva [Notes of the Vladivostok Section of the Russian Geographic Society]

ZVUIFF. Zapiski Vladivostokskogo universiteta, istoriko-filologicheskii fakul'tet [Notes of the History-Filology Faculty of Vladivostok University (Vladivostok)]

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