Esege Malaan Tengri

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The council does not meet on earth. When the fate of the middle world has to be weighed — a sickness let out of its bag, a monster grown too bold, a season that will not turn — the powers of the sky are summoned upward, and they gather, the Buryat say, in the Pleiades and on the moon: the seven close stars and the pale disk beside them made into a chamber where heaven deliberates what the earth below will suffer or be spared. The one who calls the meeting is a father. He heads the fifty-five bright powers of the western sky, and where the sun’s light is thought to come from him he is the clear open heaven itself, made into a person and given a name. In Buryat that name is Esege Malaan Tengri.

The Pleiades — the seven bright stars the Buryat name, with the moon, as a gathering-place of the celestial spirits: the sky-father ‘calls meetings of them in the Pleiades and on the moon.’ NASA / ESA / AURA / Caltech, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Father Clear Sky

The name is read two ways at once, and both are true. Эсэгэ Малаан тэнгэри — esege, father; malaan, bald; tengeri, sky — is on its face Father Bald Sky, the naked, hairless heaven; and it is at the same time, figuratively, Father Clear or Cloudless Sky, the bright open vault swept of weather, which is the sense the tradition hears first (the study of the figure in the Buryat religious-mythological tradition). Behind the person stands the older thing. As the Buryat scholar T. M. Mikhailov put it, the making of Esege Malaan into an anthropomorphic god came later; at the root the name meant the sky itself, and because the sky was held to be the masculine principle that gives life, it was the father — ese — before it was ever a figure with a face. To say his name is to say the daylight heaven, and to make of that heaven a begetter.

He is a specific tengri, not the generic sky. Tengri — the word runs the length of Inner Asia, the same tengri/tngri that the Turkic and Mongol peoples used for the sky and its powers — names in the Buryat reckoning a whole population of celestial spirits, ranked in hosts. Esege Malaan is the chief of one host and, in the widest telling, the elder over the sky as a whole: the creator, the highest existence, the father from whom the ordered world came down. Above or beside him in the genealogies stands a grandmother. Manzan Gurme Toodei, the highest of the Buryat goddesses and daughter of the primordial Ekhe Ekhe Burhan, is named the ancestress of the fifty-five tengri; she keeps two shaman’s mirrors, a book in which all that was and is and will be is written, and a great silver cup, and holds, the tradition says, the greatest power and knowledge of all the sky-spirits (Manzan Gurme Toodei). She is the ancestress of the host, not its captain; the captaincy of the bright west is his.

The figure reaches the outside record by two very different roads, and the difference between them is worth keeping in view. The first is an ethnographer’s notebook. In 1900 the American folklorist and salvage-collector Jeremiah Curtin traveled among the Baikal Buryat and set down what he was told, publishing it in 1909 in A Journey in Southern Siberia, whose tenth chapter is given to the gods of the Buryats. There Esege Malan is the Creator; there he is also called Delquen Sagan Burkan, the World White God, named the highest existence in the universe; and there he is given a wife, Ehe Ureng Ibi (Curtin, A Journey in Southern Siberia). The later record adds a son — Solobung Yubin, a morning-star spirit who, offered sacrifice, returns harvest and prosperity to the people (Esege Malan). Curtin was an outsider working at speed and through interpreters, and what he preserved is precious and partial at once: a real testimony, taken down by a man who did not live inside the world he was copying.

The second road runs through the tradition’s own great poem. Esege Malaan is attested far more richly inside the heroic epic Abai Geser, and above all inside its most archaic branch, the Ekhirit-Bulagat cycle of the western, Cisbaikal Buryat. That cycle — some twenty-two thousand lines — was recorded in 1906 by the Buryat scholar Tsyben Zhamtsarano from the mouth of the illiterate uligershin, the epic-singer, Manshuud Imegenov, remembered also as Emegeev (1849–1909), in the Kukunut ulus of what is now the Ekhirit-Bulagat district of Irkutsk province, and it went into print in 1930–31 (Manshuud Emegeev). Here the source-distance inverts: the bearer is the singer and the scholar who wrote him down was himself a Buryat, and what survives is the sky-father as the tradition sang him, not as a passing traveler heard him. The living tradition, carried by such bards and enacted at the sacrifices, is the primary witness; Curtin, and the later scholarship of Nicholas Poppe, Caroline Humphrey, and Roberte Hamayon, are read alongside it and against it. The full life of the epic that names him belongs to the entry on Geser; what matters here is that Esege Malaan sits at its cosmic summit.

The handful of earth and the fifty-five

In the beginning, the myths recorded from the Buryat say, there was only Esege Malan, the highest god, and everywhere was dark and silent. Then he took up a handful of earth. He squeezed the moisture from it, and from the water he made the sun and the moon; and then he made all the plants, and all the living things (Esege Malan). It is a small myth and a complete one: light struck out of mud, the two lamps of the sky wrung from a fistful of the ground, and after them everything that grows and breathes. Having made the world, he set it in order — he divided it into east and west and gave its keeping to the gods — and then took up the position he keeps still, at the head of the bright half of the heaven.

That heaven is divided the way the world is. The highest rank of the celestial powers numbers ninety-nine tengri, and they fall into two hosts: fifty-five who are benevolent, the white powers of light and mercy of the western side, and forty-four who are terrifying, the black powers of severity and harm of the eastern side (Tngri). Esege Malaan is chief of the fifty-five in the west. Against him, at the head of the eastern forty-four, stands Atai Ulan — heard also as Ataa Ulaan — the black sky-god of the powers that afflict. The arithmetic is old and it is exact enough to carry a liturgy: within each host the great round number is approached one way and the remainder another, so that the fifty of the west and the forty of the east are invoked by prayer, while the last five in the west and the last four in the east are approached through blood sacrifice (Tngri). It is worth naming that the count is not perfectly fixed. The standard division is the fifty-five and the forty-four that sum to ninety-nine, but the numbers on the black side shift between recensions and between tellers, and a reader will meet variant figures; the tidy fifty-five-and-forty-four is one arrangement, if the commonest, among several. This is a living oral cosmology, not a closed ledger.

The white and the black are not simply good and evil in a flat moral opposition, and it repays care to say so. The western fifty-five are the powers of light, of mildness and benefit; the eastern forty-four are the powers of severity, of the storm and the affliction and the hard edge of things — dangerous, to be reckoned with, but part of the ordered whole and fed at their own rites, not demons to be merely cast out. The creator who divided the sky into these two hands did not make one host and abolish the other; he set east against west and gave the world its tension, and then, having ordered it, entrusted its running to the gods rather than keeping every lever in his own grip. Esege Malaan is in this a delegating creator — the father who makes the frame, appoints the powers, and presides — more than a god who micromanages the weather of a single day. His chieftaincy is the chieftaincy of the bright side, and his eldership is over the arrangement itself.

As chief of the sky-spirits he convenes their council, and the place of the council is the sky’s own furniture: he calls meetings of them, the record says, in the Pleiades and on the moon (Esege Malan). In the ordering of the Ekhirit-Bulagat pantheon he is named the head of the front — the southern — ninety-nine heavenly deities, the near host of the sky. And he is, above all, the god first addressed. The Buryat honor the powers by the offering of horses and rams; but the first offering, before the rest, goes to Esege Malan, with the plea that he grant land and livestock and everything needful for a household’s well-being. He stands at the head of the prayer as he stands at the head of the west.

Where that prayer is made is the tailgan, the communal sacrifice of a clan or a locality, raised around the serge — the carved wooden hitching-post that is at once a real post for tethering horses and a model of the world-tree binding the three worlds, its upper groove for the mounts of the heavenly powers, its middle for the horses of men, its lowest for the horses of the world below. The tailgan keeps a calendar. The spring rite falls in late May and is spoken of as opening the gates of heaven; the autumn rite falls in September and closes them again; and through the year’s open gate the sky-father and his host are fed and asked. Esege Malaan stands, then, at the top of a whole ordered religion — the boo murgel, the shamanic faith of Baikal, with its three worlds, its called and initiated priesthood, its liturgy of the tailgan and the serge, and its ancestral spirits, the ongon, housed in their felt figures by the door of the tent. He is the upper world’s father; the heaven-sent hero Geser is the sky’s champion sent down to mend the earth; the sky-descended owners of the land, such as Khan Khoto Baabai of the holy rock of Olkhon, hold the sacred places below. To sacrifice at the serge is to address that whole map, and to address its father first.

The elder above the war

Esege Malaan’s afterlife is a story of layers laid down and none of them wholly erased. In the eighteenth century Tibetan Buddhism came among the Buryat, and its datsans — the Gelug monasteries — rose especially in the country east of Baikal. The two systems came to coexist rather than to cancel: the sky-father of the shamanic upper world was not simply displaced, and a Buryat household could keep the tailgan and the datsan both. The Geser epic itself records the accommodation in its own idiom. There the celestial king who leads the western host into war against Atai Ulan is Khan Khormusta — a name that carries an Iranian and Buddhist coloring, the far northern echo of the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, arrived on the steppe by way of Sogdian and Uyghur intermediaries — while Esege Malaan keeps, above the fighting, his supreme and elder status. The active war-leader of the sky in the sung poem is Khormusta; the eldest father over the sky is Esege Malaan; the two are distinct, and the tradition holds both without strain.

The twentieth century fell hard on the whole world that carried him. The Soviet 1930s brought collectivization and the repression of the shamanic and Buddhist clergy alike — shamans and lamas arrested and killed, datsans closed and pulled down — and with it a framing of the shamanic religion as “backwardness” and “superstition,” the label under which the state licensed the destruction. That framing is a distortion, and it is named here as one and rejected: not a truth about boo murgel but a thing done to it by a government. The living faith it attacked is an ordered system with a cosmology, a priesthood, and a liturgy, and it is described as such. The epic that carries the sky-father was itself put on trial in those years and later redeemed — but that ordeal is the story of the poem, told in full under Geser; what belongs to the sky-father is that his name survived the decade because the households that spoke it were never entirely silenced.

From about 1990 came a broad recovery. Shamanic associations were founded and registered; the tailgan returned to the clan grounds and to new settings as well — anthropologists in Ulan-Ude have studied the “city tailgan,” the communal sacrifice reassembled for an urban, post-Soviet public; and the datsans reopened east of the lake. In that revival the sky-father is addressed again in living rite, the first name spoken over the offered horse. The recovery reaches from the shamanic center of the movement out to the reindeer country of the Soyot and the Tofalar of the Eastern Sayan and the Tungus-Mongol Khamnigan of the eastern valleys, and it belongs to the same sacred geography as the great lake, Lake Baikal, its holy island, and the twin-peaked shaman rock at Cape Burkhan, and the sacred mountain of the Barguzin, Barhan Uula.

The scholarship on the figure stays layered and, in places, contested — and the honest course is to say which of its claims rest on what. Some things are matters of the documentary record: Curtin’s 1909 text and its wording, Zhamtsarano’s 1906 transcription of Imegenov, the eighteenth-century arrival of the datsans, the 1930s repression, the post-1990 revival. Some are genuinely debated: the exact tengri arithmetic, the fifty-five and the forty-four against variant counts; the pre-Buddhist against the Buddhist strata of the whole tengri cosmology; the antiquity of the material the Geser singers preserved. And through all of it runs the question of whose knowledge a given claim rests on — the older Russian and Soviet ethnography, valuable but taken from outside, weighed against the living Buryat voice that sang the sky-father and sings him yet. Curtin heard the World White God through an interpreter for a season; the uligershin held him in twenty-two thousand lines across whole nights of singing, and it is the second witness the tradition trusts.

So the father of the bright western heaven keeps his oldest office. Before the horse is led out and the milk is cast to the four quarters, before Khormusta and the fifty-five are named one by one, the first word of the tailgan rises to him — Esege Malaan, grant land, grant cattle, grant everything needful — the same plea Curtin’s hosts made a century ago, sent up toward the seven stars and the moon where the sky still sits in council over the world below.

→ Related: Geser · Sagaan Ubgen · Khan Khoto Baabai · Ongon · Lake Baikal · Olkhon · Cape Burkhan · Barhan Uula · The Soyot · The Tofalar · The Khamnigan