Ongon

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The figure hangs by the door of the tent, small enough to hold in two hands. It might be a scrap of felt cut in the rough shape of a person, or a doll of cloth, or a face worked in hide, and it is dark with use, because it is fed. Milk is offered to it, and tea, and at the greater rites the blood of a slaughtered animal; fat is smeared across it, so that over the years the thing grows glossy and black with the offerings laid on it. A stranger might take it for a keepsake, or a toy left in the wrong place. The people of the household know exactly what it is. It is an ancestor, given a body they can honor, and it lives on the rafter or by the doorpost the way the elder it holds once lived under the same roof.

The word for it is ongon, and the word does a double duty that no single English term will carry. It names the spirit, and it names the figure the spirit lives in, so that in Buryat-Mongol usage one can point up to the rafter and mean, in the same breath, the ancestor and the felt in which the ancestor is seated. The same word, again, reaches from the small doll by the door to the helper the shaman calls up out of trance while the drum sounds. It is the spirit; it is the house of the spirit; it is the working partner of the one who knows how to summon it. To follow the word is to follow the whole relationship between the living and the powers they keep near — a relationship of housing and feeding, of an unseen force given a place it can be honored in.

The word that names both

In Mongolian the effigy is ongon, from the root ongo; the plural is ongod, and the older romanization ongghon is met in the scholarly literature (Ongon, Wikipedia; ongon, n., Oxford English Dictionary). The term is reckoned among the oldest strata of the Inner Asian religious vocabulary, and its doubleness is not a confusion in the sources but the exact shape of the idea: a spirit and the material object that spirit inhabits are called by one name because, within the tradition, they are one thing addressed at two ends. The figure is not a portrait of the ancestor and not a symbol standing in for an absence. It is the abode a ritual act renders inhabited — the empowered house the spirit comes to occupy and can be found in.

The concept enters the outside record early, and it enters it through an outsider’s eye. Around 1246 the Franciscan Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, sent east to the Mongol court by Pope Innocent IV, set down the first European description of what later ethnography would learn to call the ongon (Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, Britannica). He saw idols of felt made in the likeness of a man, set on the two sides of the door of the dwelling, and below them a felt shape of an udder; these, he wrote, the Mongols held to be the guardians of their herds, made and honored by the women of the household. Carpini was a friar reporting home on the religion of a people he had come to treat with, and his note carries the distance of the man who wrote it. But the thing he described — the paired felt figures at the door, tied to the fortune of the animals, in the women’s keeping — is recognizably the household ongon, and it was already old when he saw it.

Six and a half centuries later the fullest early witness among the Buryats was gathered by another traveler from outside. In 1900 the American ethnographer and folklorist Jeremiah Curtin journeyed into the Baikal country to record the religion and myth of the Buryats, and in A Journey in Southern Siberia (1909) he set down what his hosts showed him: ongons and burkhans — the household spirits — hung up on a rafter in a dark corner of the room. To be given the dark corner was a mark of favor, not of neglect; it was the spirits’ place. Curtin’s Buryats told him, and he recorded, that the figures were fed and honored, and that at the making of a marriage the young couple would bow before them to ask for prosperity, for wealth, and for children (A Journey in Southern Siberia, Internet Sacred Text Archive). Curtin was a salvage-collector working through interpreters, and what he took down bears the lens of the man and the moment; that lens is part of the record, and it is marked here as such. So too is the great body of Russian and Soviet ethnography through which much of the material passed. Against it stands the living Buryat tradition and its own bearers, who kept the ongon through everything the record did to it, and the twentieth-century scholarship — Nicholas Poppe, and after him Caroline Humphrey and Roberte Hamayon — that learned to read the ongon not as a curiosity but as a coherent institution of a coherent religion.

The ancestor given a body

Within the tradition the ongon is the ancestor and the helper made visible — the point at which an unseen power is fitted with a body it can be honored and fed in. The making of one begins, most often, in a death. When a shaman — a boo, in the Buryat word — dies, the tradition holds that the shaman does not simply depart. The shaman becomes an ongod, a shamanic soul, and the soul keeps working. The greatest of the dead shamans become protector-spirits of wide power; the lesser become guardian-spirits bound to a place — a mountain, a river, a stretch of pasture, a locality that is thereafter theirs to watch over (Mongolian shamanism, Wikipedia). To hold such a power near the household or the lineage, a figure is made for it. An idol may be consecrated within three years of the shaman’s death, and into that figure the spirit is invited to come and dwell.

The materials are whatever will make a fit dwelling: felt and cloth, hide and skin, wood carved to a rough human shape, and metal — hammered, cast, bronze. A single figure often joins several at once. A nineteenth-century Buryat ongon from the Balagansky district of the Irkutsk Governorate, known as Anda-Bara and honored as the patron of family well-being, depicts a famous hunter-shaman and is worked in wood, metal, and mammal skin — the ancestor of a lineage’s fortune held in three materials at once. Among the Tuvan neighbors to the south, an ancestor-figure is described set into the very handle of a shaman’s drum, a small carved thing with a pink head and chest, a black crown, and red eyes. The variety is the point. There is no single correct form, because the form is not an image to be got right but a house to be made habitable.

The ongon ‘Anda-Bara,’ depicting a famous hunter-shaman honored as a patron of family well-being; Balagansky District, Irkutsk Governorate, 19th century — wood, metal, and mammal skin. Photograph by Vyacheslav Kirillin, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The ongod are ordered by where they live and by whom they belong to. The commonest division is between the home ongon, kept inside the dwelling — hung by the door, set up on the rafters, given the sacred corner of the tent — and the field ongon, sheltered out in the open away from the house, in a shelter or a fixed locale of its own (Ongon, Wikipedia). Among the Darkhad of the northern Mongolian forests a further distinction is kept, between the lineage talismans, the yazguur ongod, that belong to a whole descent-group, and the household talismans, the geriin ongod, that belong to a single family and its tent. Figures are sorted, too, by office and by kind — the ancestral, the pastoral that watches the herds, the smith’s, the healer’s — so that a household’s ongod amount to a small assembly of the powers it lives among, each with its place and its work.

The relationship the living keep with these figures is one of housing and of feeding. The spirit is given a body; in return it must be maintained, and maintenance means offerings. The ongod are fed with milk and with tea, and at the greater sacrifices with the blood of the animal; the figures are smeared and anointed, fed hand to mouth, so that the spirit stays fed and stays favorable. A neglected ongon is a danger, for the power in it does not simply fade when it is forgotten — it can sour. A tended one is a guardian. This is the ordinary daily face of the ongon, the one that belongs to the women of the household and the turning of the domestic year: the figure by the door, kept fat with offerings, before which a bride and groom bow to ask the ancestors for the plain goods of life. The steppe reckons the greatest of the dead this way too. In the folk religion Genghis Khan himself is honored as an ongon, and is regarded as an embodiment — for many, the chief embodiment — of the Tenger, the sky (Mongolian shamanism, Wikipedia).

The other face of the ongon belongs to the shaman, and it appears in the seance. In the register the ethnographers came to call black shamanism, the shaman’s chief office is to bring people into contact with the ongon — to make the meeting between the living and the ancestral power happen. The spirit is called up while the shaman drums in trance, summoned into the room and, in some tellings, into the shaman’s own body, which is itself understood as a kind of receptacle the spirit can enter. The drum is not incidental to this. The drum can carry the ongon: its handle is understood to stand for the ongon, and the drum itself for the mount that bears the invoked spirit to the shaman — so that the figure carved into a Tuvan drum-handle is the spirit, and the drumhead is the horse it rides in on (Ongon, Encyclopedia of Religion, via Encyclopedia.com). What happens in that summoning is described here at the distance of the public record, and its meaning is explained from within the tradition that keeps it; it is not, and is not offered as, an instruction for how the thing is done. The point that can be stated plainly is the one the whole concept turns on: the ongon is the ancestor made reachable, the power given a body and a name so that it can be fed, addressed, and — when the drum sounds — met.

The lamas, the state, and the return

The ongon has been fought over for the better part of eight centuries, and it is still made today. The first sustained pressure on it came not from Moscow but from the south, with the Tibetan Buddhism that reached the Buryats through the eighteenth century and spread from the datsans, the Gelug monasteries that struck root across the Baikal country. To the lamas the housing and feeding of ancestral spirit-figures was a standing point of friction — the very practice of consecrating an effigy and offering it blood ran against the incoming ethic — and the encounter did not simply erase the older stratum. It layered a second thing over it. A Buddhicized practice, which the literature calls yellow shamanism, grew up alongside the older black stratum, and it kept the ongon on its own terms: in this register the ancestral spirits are renewed on a three-year cycle, gathered and refreshed, and a new effigy is consecrated within three years of a shaman’s death, folded into a calendar the monastery could recognize. The Buryats, here as with the white grandfather Sagaan Ubgen and the shared warrior of the Geser epic, did not trade one faith for the other. They held both, and the ongon lived on both sides of the line.

The heaviest blow came in the twentieth century, from the state. The Soviet 1930s fell hard on the whole religious world that kept the ongon: at the height of programmatic atheism the shamans and the lamas alike were denounced as class enemies, and the instruments of the practice were seized. Drums were impounded — and the drum, in this world, was no mere instrument but the mount that carried the ongon, so that to take the drum was to break the meeting the shaman made. In regions such as Aga the shamans were shot or vanished into the camps, and the datsans were closed and pulled down. That fuller history of the repression and the trial belongs to the story of the Geser epic that the state itself put on the dock, and to the shamanic sites of the lake such as Cape Burkhan where the recovery would later center; here it is enough to record what was done to the ongon in particular — the figures scattered, the drums confiscated, the making of new effigies driven out of the open — and to name the label under which it was done, the framing of a coherent religion as backwardness and superstition, for the distortion it was rather than for a truth about the thing.

The ongon was not extinguished. Even through the Soviet decades the making did not entirely stop, and from the 1970s and 1980s Buryat social scientists were publishing on shamanism again. After 1990 the recovery came into the open across the Baikal region and beyond it: new serge hitching-posts raised at the sacred places, new effigies consecrated, shamanic associations registered and gathering from across the region. The revival has been read closely by the anthropology of the region — by Caroline Humphrey, whose Shamans and Elders (1996) studied the Daur Mongol material and the wider question, and by Roberte Hamayon — and it has raised a genuine debate the scholarship has not closed: how far a shaman who rises in the post-Soviet years stands in unbroken continuity with the lineages the state tried to end, and how far the practice is being reconstructed across the break. The question is a real one, and the honest report is that it is argued over.

What is not in doubt is that the peoples who keep the ongon are living peoples, and that boo murgel, the shamanic religion, is a living religion. The Buryats keep it, and so in their several ways do their neighbors and cousins — the reindeer-herding Soyot of the Oka valley, the Tofalar of the Sayan taiga, the Tungus-Mongol Khamnigan between two inheritances, and the Evenki and the Sakha beyond them. The very word by which the outside world names the whole tradition is one of those peoples’ own: shaman is the Evenki, or Tungus, saman, a real tradition’s term for its own practitioner, and no slur. In the tent of any of them the ongon holds its ordinary place, high in the ordered cosmos of the sky-fathers of the western heavens — the council over which Esege Malaan Tengri presides — and low in the daily round of the household, on the rafter in the dark corner where the ancestor is kept. The figure by the door is still cut and still fed. A little felt, a smear of fat, a name spoken to it — and the elder who lived under the roof is under it still, housed in the body the living made so that they would not have to be without him.

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