Notes On Sacred Kingship in Central Asia

Abstract

During the last two decades, we have seen the publication of many important works illuminating the religious conceptions and spiritual universe of the pastoral peoples in Central Asia. Of these, three deserve our special attention. In 1949, Leonardo Olschki attemped to decipher the mythical imagery of felt, the coarse and poor material, which probably represents a first step in the history of early craftsmanship. 1) Mircea Eliade published his celebrated work on shamanism in 1951, enabling us to understand the meaning and structure of shamanism as a religious phenomenon in the general history of religions. 2) Several years later, Jean-Paul Roux elucidated a motif of the heavenly origin of kingship in Central Asia by using a series of the Orkhon inscriptions. 3) With the aid of these brilliant works, supplemented by other studies, it seems that we are now able to clarify and delineate the shamanistic structure of kingship in Central Asian history. For some time I have been engaged in collecting and analyzing the symbolism of the felt carpet, as it was used for the celebration of the enthronement ceremony. In this paper I would like to discuss the symbolism of the felt carpet with special reference to both shamanism and sacred kingship. To simplify our research, we may start with the Eastern Turks