Khan Khoto Baabai

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On the western shore of Olkhon, where the island’s steppe breaks off into Lake Baikal, a twin-humped rock of white marble and crystalline limestone stands out from the water. A cave runs clean through it, low near the shore and opening on the far side — a pierced grotto worn by weather and the lake. Two names have settled on the one stone. To the boo, the shamans of the Baikal world, it is the Shamanka, the Shaman Rock; and after the datsans of Tibetan Buddhism reached the Buryat, the cape was renamed Burkhan — “God,” “Buddha.” The names sit together on the same marble without one erasing the other. Beneath both is the reason the rock was ever holy: it is a house, and it has an owner. The owner is Khan Khoto Baabai, the sky-son who came down to take the cave for his palace, the strongest of the local lords of the lake, and the one whose blood the eagle is said to carry into the human line.

The names, and how they reach the record

The name arrives in several spellings, none of them settled. The ethnographers who worked on Olkhon and along the Baikal shore wrote it as Khan Khoto Baabai, Khan Khute Baabai, Khaan Khute-baabay, Khan Guta-baabai — the vowels and the middle consonant sliding from one transcription to the next as Russian, then Soviet, then later observers set the Buryat sound into their own alphabets. The parts, though, are stable. Khan is the honorific, the “lord.” Khoto — or Khute, Khotun — is the personal name. And baabai is the Buryat word for father, or grandfather: the elder, the one to whom respect is owed. The whole is something like “Lord Khoto, the Father.” He is not a free-floating deity but the ezhen — also written ezhin — the “owner” or master-spirit of a place, and the place is fixed. He is the ezhen of Olkhon, the great island of Baikal, and of Cape Burkhan on its western coast, whose pierced Shaman Rock is his seat.

In the ordered sky of the Buryat world he holds a rank. Above the middle earth are the tengri, the sky-powers — a benevolent white half and a terrifying black one, their exact count drawn differently from one telling to the next. Below the tengri stand the noyons, the “lords,” heavenly sons who descended to the earth to decide the fates of people. On Olkhon these are the oikhony noyod, the thirteen northern lords, the thirteen masters of the island. Khan Khoto Baabai is named the oldest and the strongest of the thirteen. In the accounts collected on Olkhon he is the son of the head of the fifty-five western tengri — the bright father of the white heavens, the being the tradition names Esege Malaan — so that his lineage runs straight from the highest of the benevolent sky-powers down through the noyons to the rock in the water. The thirteen lords and the white father of the western sky belong to the same cosmology; he sits at the head of the one and is a son of the other.

The word carved onto his rock — shaman — is itself a loan. It is the Tungus term saman, the Evenki word for the one who is called, borrowed into the naming of the Baikal world and fixed to the marble as Shamanka. That a Tungus word names the seat of a Buryat lord is a small map of the region’s layered speech; the peoples of the lake and the taiga behind it have long lent one another gods and words. And there is a bird woven through the whole genealogy. The eagle — the white-tailed sea-eagle of Baikal, the bird that fishes the lake and nests on the cliffs — is named the owner of Olkhon and the totem of the Ekhirit, the Buryat tribe of the Upper Lena. Its place in Khan Khoto Baabai’s story is not decoration but descent: the eagle is his emblem, his form, and, in the island’s own account of how shamans came to be, the channel of his blood into the human clans. The scholarship that has compared the eagle across the region — the studies of the eagle totem in Sakha and Buryat myth among them — reads the bird as one of the oldest and most widely shared images of the Baikal and Lena world, an ancestor-bird and a bringer of the shaman’s calling wherever it is found. On Olkhon the general image is tied down to a particular owner: the eagle is not simply the first shaman’s bird but the lord of this island’s bird, and the clan it fathered is the clan of this island’s shamans.

What is known of him comes down through a particular kind of record, and it is worth naming the lens. Much of the early ethnography of Baikal shamanism was gathered by outside observers — Russian travelers and administrators, then Soviet scholars working under a state that had set itself against the very religion it was cataloging. Jeremiah Curtin, traveling in southern Siberia at the turn of the twentieth century, recorded Buryat eagle-and-first-shaman legends; later fieldwork, from the anthropology of Caroline Humphrey to the studies of contemporary Olkhon practice, has read that older material against the living tradition. The modern ethnography of Olkhon shamanism collected by Aleksandra Wierucka preserves the owner-of-the-island as a figure still named and still honored, not a curiosity of the past. Read critically, these sources do not give a single canon but several tellings, and the variation — the shifting spellings, the eagle who is now his son and now his own form — is part of the record rather than a flaw in it.

The white-tailed sea-eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla), the bird named the owner of Olkhon; in the island’s tradition the lord of the rock is said to live in an eagle’s form and to have sent eagles who founded the clan of Olkhon shamans. Andreas Weith, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The lord of the rock

Within this world Khan Khoto Baabai is no allegory and no personification of nature. He is the living owner of the most sacred rock of Baikal — the strongest of the local master-spirits, seated in the through-cave of the Shamanka, from which the whole of Olkhon and the water and shore around it are held to be under his charge. The doctrine here is the doctrine of ownership, made vivid in stone: the land has a lord, and the lord is present. To pass such a place is to owe the ezhen his honor. Custom on Olkhon held that one could not simply go by the owner’s ground — that failing to acknowledge the master of the place cost a traveler his luck; the exact and severe etiquette of the rock is set down under Cape Burkhan. It is a discipline of respect owed to a spirit who is understood to be really there.

He is said to live in the form of an eagle. He is wedded to a daughter of the Eastern Sky, and beneath him he commands a whole pantheon of subordinate spirits — the housed ancestral powers of the Baikal region, the ongon, each a spirit together with the felt or wood or metal figure it inhabits. He stands, in other words, at the head of a local order of spirits, the greatest owner of a coast thick with lesser owners. And his bird is the hinge of the tradition’s account of its own origin. The Olkhon telling, recorded in several versions, has the lord of the island send eagles — in one version three of them — down to the people. The eagles bestowed the shaman’s gift, the calling, on human beings; and the eagles took Buryat women to wife, so that the clan of the Olkhon shamans was born of that union. In other tellings the great eagle who is master of the island is his son, or the bald eagle of the sacred mountain of the island is named the king of the shamans of the northern world. Across the versions the shape holds: the eagle is the first shaman’s bird, and through the eagle the blood of the owner of the rock enters the human line. To be “called,” in this frame, is to stand in a lineage that runs back through the eagle to Khan Khoto Baabai himself — a descent, not a metaphor.

It is worth holding him apart from the figures he stands near, for the Baikal shore is crowded with powers and the tellings run together easily. He is not the rock itself: the twin-humped Shaman Rock, with its heights and its cave measured out, is a place, and its owner is another thing than the marble he inhabits. He is not the eagle-and-first-shaman motif in the abstract, which recurs across the whole Baikal world and beyond it; on Olkhon that motif is fastened to a named owner, and it is the fastening that makes it his. He is not the thirteen northern lords taken together, though he heads them; nor is he Sagaan Ubgen, the white grandfather who owns the earth’s life, nor the oracle-lord of the island, nor the horned monster of the lake’s deep water. He is the one owner of the one island, the eldest of its lords, seated in the one cave — a figure the tradition keeps distinct even as it lets the eagles and the sky-fathers cross between the stories.

The through-cave was the place where this was honored. In older times rites and sacrifices were made there to the spirit-master of Olkhon, the most revered owner of the whole lake, and the grotto was treated as the earthly palace of the ezhen. The record holds that entry to the cave was restricted: only male shamans were permitted to go in, and women were kept from the grotto, held too open to the powers of the place to be brought near it. This is reported here as recorded custom, at the distance of the public record — the discipline of a working sacred site as observers found it, not a rule endorsed or reproduced. The meaning of the restriction, frame-internal, is of a piece with the whole: the cave is the owner’s house, the most charged point of his ground, and access to it was governed the way access to a lord’s inner chamber is governed. The eagle-and-first-shaman myth, likewise, is set down here as recorded ethnography and read at that distance — a tradition’s account of its own beginning, described rather than performed.

His teaching, if the word can be used for a spirit rather than a text, is entirely this: that the ground is owned, that its owner descended from the bright sky, that the eagle carries his blood into the human clans, and that the one who is called to the shaman’s work stands within that descent. It is a compact and complete theology of place. Everything follows from ownership — the honor owed at the cape, the rites in the cave, the eagle over the water, the lineage of the boo.

Two names on one stone

The rock that is his palace carries the layered history of the whole Baikal sacred world in its very names. To the shamans it was and is the Shamanka, the cave of the owner of Olkhon. When Tibetan Buddhism spread among the Buryat from the eighteenth century, moving north with the lamas and the datsans, the cape was given a second name — Burkhan, the Buryat word for “God,” and for “Buddha.” The older name was not struck out. Both names attach to the one marble, an instance of the coexistence of the two traditions rather than the replacement of one by the other; the Buddhist devotion and the shamanic devotion have long sat, in the Buryat world, on the same holy ground. Which name a visitor uses tells something of which tradition they stand in, and the rock answers to both.

Older still than either name is the record in the ground. The Shaman Rock and the isthmus around it have yielded, to the archaeologists who dug there, arrowheads, ceramics, and gold ornaments recovered from the cave, and burials on the isthmus that the excavators reckon at more than five thousand years old. Whatever the site meant to the peoples of that depth of time, it was a place people used and buried their dead beside long before the noyons or the tengri were named in the forms the record now holds. The cape stands today within Pribaikalsky National Park, on the western coast of Olkhon near the village of Khuzhir, and Lake Baikal itself — the sacred sea of this world, the oldest and deepest lake on earth — was inscribed as a natural World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1996. The rock is counted, in the reckonings of the region’s sacred geography, among the “Nine Holy Sites of Asia.”

The twentieth century bore hard on the world that venerated the owner of Olkhon. The Soviet repression of the 1930s executed shamans and lamas, closed and destroyed the datsans, and drove the rites underground, framing the whole ordered religion of the lake as “backwardness” and “superstition” — a label under which a living faith was persecuted, and one the record now names for what it was rather than adopts. That history in full — the executions, the closing of the temples, the state’s campaign against the epic and the shrine — belongs to the story of the twin-humped Shaman Rock and of the Geser epic that was itself put on trial; here it is enough to say that the ezhen of Olkhon was worshiped through decades in which such worship was dangerous.

The recovery from about 1990 has been vivid on Olkhon. The shamans of Buryatia, organized now in registered associations that gather from across the region, have made the island again a working center of pilgrimage and offering, and have named it a cult center of shamanic importance reaching well beyond the Baikal shore. Wierucka’s fieldwork finds several living forms of the practice on the island at once — one turned toward the pilgrims and travelers who come to the rock, one carried by the shamans’ organizations, one kept quietly in the villages — and in all of them the owner of Olkhon is still the owner. The Shaman Rock is again a place where vows are made and requests are set before the spirits, where the serge poles stand at the cape and the offerings are left. Khan Khoto Baabai, the sky-son in the pierced stone, remains the strongest of the masters of the lake — named by the living tradition, and read, in the ethnography that studies it, as the greatest of the local powers of the Baikal world. The two names still stand on the one rock, and the owner is still at home in the cave beneath them.

→ Related: Geser · Sagaan Ubgen · Esege Malaan Tengri · Ongon · Lake Baikal · Olkhon · Cape Burkhan · Barhan Uula · The Soyot · The Tofalar · The Khamnigan