New Life of Old Mongolian Demons

Abstract

New Life of Old Mongolian Demons Alevtina Solovyeva (bio) Introduction: Demons under Research In contemporary Mongolian culture, traditional supernatural characters and phenomena are very popular and significant figures in different spheres of life, playing various roles and supplying diverse meanings to personal and public issues. Following the collapse of the socialist regime in the 1990s and the end of its 70-year span of official atheism and restrictions on spiritual expressions, all sorts of deities, spirits, and demons returned to everyday life, aided by the waves of religious revival, openness (glasnost), and new ideologies that favored “traditional roots.” Old traditional characters have kicked the dust from their shoes and flowed into new contexts in this period of drastic and rapid change, and they have provided forms and interpretations for personal experiences (Honko) and collective challenges (Valk, “Ghostly”). In this article, I discuss two sorts of supernatural entity active in Mongolian contemporary life: moving lights and a running woman.1 These are old traditional figures, part of road and travel beliefs and landscape mythology, who were popular in former times and remain so today.2 They are known in every local narrative tradition in Mongolia and present intriguing examples of contemporization. I will describe the specific features of their images and plots and the modifications [End Page 281] they underwent to stay relevant to the conditions and issues of the present. I also discuss their updated meanings and functions in today’s narrative culture and discursive practices. I collected the contemporary data by examining these supernatural entities in personal and public discourses, in narratives of different genres that I drew from media sources (newspapers and internet), and from fieldwork interviews in Mongolia during annual research visits beginning in 2007. To trace the existence of these entities in the past and investigate their trajectories by comparative analysis, I turned to previous published and unpublished written sources, generally represented by narrative collections of scholars and travelers dating back to the close of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Inasmuch as the goals of my research include investigating these characters and phenomena in their textual and social dimensions, I use a combination of approaches to analyze structural and semantic characteristics of these narrative examples (Propp; Neklyudov, “Zametki”; Levkievskai͡a), their modes of transformation, and the dynamics of their pragmatics, functions, and social representations (Ben-Amos; Honko; Valk, “Ontological”). Moving Lights My first set of examples: moving lights/marsh lights that mislead night travelers, a phenomenon also known in many other traditions.3 In Mongolian folklore, this phenomenon, known as chötgöriin gal (demonic fire, ghost light(s), demonic lights),4 can be seen as moving around the steppe, chasing night travelers (and eluding them), talking, being noisy, and even (in some rare cases) physically affecting the person who might accidentally touch them. In contemporary folk traditions, these motifs appear in two basic forms. The first of these has much in common with examples found in earlier folklore collections (Hangalov; Potanin): Chötgöriin gal, demonic lights, exist, they show up at night on the steppe. Once I met such light. I was returning from my brother’s family, it was already dark, suddenly the light appeared. I wondered what it could be and tried to approach it, but the light did not let me come closer and kept escaping. I felt uncomfortable and continued on my way. Then this light started to follow me, keeping at a distance: when I moved, it moved too, when I stopped, it stopped. The light was [End Page 282] following me to my village, before it suddenly fell over a bush and disappeared. People often see such lights, and sometimes hear something calling them by name. (Tsermaa 18) Another variant, more popular nowadays, contains a number of substantial modifications: Once we went with my wife to visit her relatives and were returning late in the evening. Suddenly in the middle of the way back we saw that bad light. My wife first saw it. I did not believe her, but then I too saw the strange light. It was coming to us from the right side of the road. It looks like a...