E-mail: bravinari@bk.ru Tel.: +7 (411) 235-49-96
1, Petrovskogo str., Yakutsk, 677008, Russian Federation
DSc of History, Professor, Chief Researcher, Head of the Archeology Laboratory, Institute for Humanities Research and Indigenous Studies of the North, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The studies were performed using the scientific equipment of the Central Collective Use Center of the Federal Research Center of the Yakut Scientific Center of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
This article presents previously unpublished folklore texts about occasional rituals of the Yakuts that are connected to traditional beliefs about death and resurrection or the prolongation of life, and it offers structural-semiotic analysis of actions performed in the funeral ritual. The first group of materials contains legends of the Vilyui Yakuts about a three-fold burial of a daughter by a shaman mother. To bring her daughter back to the world of the living, one legend tells how the mother annually organized the ysyakh summer holiday, supported by her friends. She participated in the ritual osuohai dance that enacts an appeal-prayer to the heavenly deities of ayyy, who bestow and preserve life on earth. The mother’s desire to keep her daughter among the living leads her to open the grave, followed by a subsequent re-burial. The second group of material includes legends of the central and Vilyuisk Yakuts, one of which describes the funeral of deceased brides according to the scenario of the kyys syukter wedding ceremony, “moving the bride to the groom’s house.” The funeral participants control the body of the deceased, imitating the spatial movement of the bride (this includes a ceremony of taking the body from the father’s house, ritual bows, and a solemn departure on horseback). The wedding rite of passage is reenacted, solidifying the status of the deceased bride as a married woman. It is possible these occasional practices and associated beliefs are associated with disturbed gravesites, documented in archaeological studies of ancient Eurasian cultures.
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