Lightning, Sacrifice, and Possession in the Traditional Religions of the Caucasus
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^nthropos 99.2004
in the Caucasus - that has fascinated ethnographers
for over a century. The shrine officials, especially
those with a lifetime vocation, were required to
attain and maintain a level of “purity” - avoidance
of the proximity of women at certain times of the
year, abstention from certain foods, regular and
costly purificatory sacrifices - that was beyond the
reach of rank-and-file community members. The
increasing systematization, regulation and special
ization of the Pkhovian religious order, I hypoth
esize, made the role of a lightning god with the
properties of Slavic Perumu/Kupala, Abkhazian
Afo or Ossetic Wacilla particularly problematic.
Such a deity represented, in effect, those aspects
of sacrifice and possession which the Pkhovian
hierarchy sought to bring under its control. The
Indo-European and western Caucasian storm gods
struck whenever, wherever, and whomever they
chose, seizing victims without waiting for the com
munity to take the initiative of making a sac
rifice. They also took the initiative in selecting
their prophets, i. e., those lightning-strike victims
who survived, and perhaps (as the Abkhazian data
implies) individuals suffering from certain men
tal disorders. To conceive a divine being in such
terms would imply certain limits on the human
community’s control over exchanges with the di
vine world, both in the form of sacrifice and in
the form of communication through authorized
spokespeople. As a consequence of the Pkhovian
reform, in a sense, the gods retain the appearance
of omnipotence while in fact ceding some of their
authority to specialist priests and oracles drawn
from particular patrilineages in the community.
The socioreligious order observed in 20th-
century Pkhovi bears a certain resemblance to
that of what R. Hamayon has labelled “pastoral
shamanism” in a diachronic study of the religious
institutions of the Buryat tribes of Siberia (Hama-
Von 1996). By contrast with the earlier “hunting
shamanism,” in which the shaman, through his
status as the “son-in-law” of supernatural game
giving spirits, played an integral role in assuring
the success of hunters, in pastoralist Buryat so-
c ieties the shamanic function has been subordi
nated to a patrilineally organized ancestor-based
re hgious order. The primary ritual specialists have
c °me to be more like priests, responsible for mak-
ln g offerings of domestic-animal meat and dairy
Products, or have given way to the clergy of
^arnaistic Buddhism. Of particular interest is the
Poripheralization and feminization of shamanism
among the Buryats: Most shamans are now fe
male, their sphere of activity is limited to pri-
v ate matters such as dealing with the troublesome
wandering souls of people who died unnatural or
premature deaths. In the case of the Caucasus,
it should be noted that there is little evidence
of an institution comparable to Buryat “hunting
shamanism,” although one might discern similari
ties between the Pkhovian ballads of the goddess
Samdzimari sharing the bed of certain legendary
oracles, and the Buryat belief that the shaman had
a supernatural wife of animal origin (Charachidzé
1968: 142-144; Hamayon 1996). What is com
mon to both cases is the evident marginaliza
tion of “horizontal” inspirational practices - those
which are available, in principle, to any member
of the society, and which are marked by trance
and possession - in favor of the institution of
“vertical” inspiration, based on esoteric knowledge
controlled by priest-like specialists, a phenomenon
which often accompanies increasing sociopolitical
complexification and centralization (Hugh-Jones
1996). Although Pkhovi remained a relatively
egalitarian society in most respects, the authority
and prestige held by the chief priests and their
oracles led some Soviet-period ethnographers to
employ such terms as “aristocracy” or “theocracy”
(Bardavelidze 1957: 34-36). Some of this author
ity, it appears, came at the expense of the periph-
eralization and feminization of random (or self-
selected) possession in favor of quasi-hereditary
oracles, accompanied by the “domestication” of
a redoubtable thunderbolt-slinging storm god as
K’op’ala, ogre-slayer and liberator of lost souls.
One wonders - and it is a question that goes far
beyond the modest bounds of this article - whether
the restructuration of Pkhovian society rendered
it particularly capable of resisting the increasing
hegemony of political formations to the north,
south, and east, or whether, on the contrary, the
restructuration was itself the fruit of that spirit of
resistance.
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