The Power of Words in Mongolian Divination
For the Buryat people of Mongolia, religion is not just something to do for an hour on Sunday morning.
Rather, during Katherine Swancutt’s fieldwork commencing in late 1999, “the Buryats I knew spent long
hours each day on divinations, shamanic ceremonies and correcting rituals” (2012: xvi). The religious
specialists or shamans (see Chapter Three of Introducing Anthropology of Religion) also invented new
rituals and cures and engaged in curse-wars with each other.
Swancutt portrays what she characterizes as the “hyperorderly” form of Buryat magic and religion (5)—a
notion that challenges much familiar thinking about the primitive or irrational nature of magic/religion.
Buryat life, she insists, appears to be pervaded with lack of order, or with unexpected (but not entirely
uncontrollable) forces or factors; however, the moments of disorder and the actions that the people
take in response, including and especially innovative actions, “alter their lives (and not just a given
course of events) by introducing irreversible new starting points from which they can carry out social
relations and from which they can increase their fortunes" (7). Even more significantly, such acts or
events, but particularly the words and actions of shamans, work like “strange attractors” in chaos
theory, with the effect “of creating yet further irreversible changes” (8). Crucial to understanding the
Buryat case is the variety of time scales that are operating simultaneously for them, both “immediate”
and “delay-return” scales, so that some demonic or shamanic acts give results right away while others
take time to manifest. This raises two problems for the local people: first, they often do not know that a
demonic or shamanic force is in action until the effects are felt later (which puts them on constant alert
for reading the signs of this intervention), and second, they find themselves therefore in a “race against
time” (13) to implement cures or blocks which also take time to achieve results.
Swancutt describes the cosmology of the Buryat Mongols and the “‘chaotic’ misfortunes” that befall
them and for which they seek relief. Among the denizens and administrators of their demon-haunted
world are an “ancestral-spirit central government” (51) including the spirits of former shamans, an
“underworld lord’s kingdom” (60), and a host of “shamanic spirits, nature spirits, ghosts, and vampiric
imps” (66), many of which are not completely immaterial or “spiritual” but have physical forms and
social qualities. All of these entities demand divination, with the shaman being the most talented and
powerful diviner, although any person may attempt divinatory rituals (including the anthropologist in
Swancutt’s case). One key to the divination experience is the shift between “foreground” and
“background”: “as the ceremony proceeds, the foreground of activity is occupied by different important
tasks, including the shaman’s adoption of spirit perspectives, the holding of spirit-human dialogues, and
the administering of spirit blessings or purification substances. While focusing on these activities,
Buryats bear in mind their important background tasks, such as keeping the miniature-form shamanic
spirits happy with their feast at the offering table” (74). As needed, participants can and will shift their
focus from the ostensible foreground business to background business that suddenly seems to demand
their attention (as when oil lamps flicker, signaling displeasure among the spirits).
Two important concepts in Buryat religious discourse and ritual are “fortune” and “soul.” As understood
by the Buryat, souls can be lost, and fortune functions as one of those “strange attractors” previously
mentioned. Fortune is a quality (or quantity?) that rises and falls throughout the individual’s lifetime; its
change is gradual and reversible (but only gradually), making it a target of delayed-return verbal curses
and cures. The loss of a soul, interestingly, does not cause immediate death as in some cultures but is a
worry nonetheless, as Buryats look for omens that one’s soul is gone, which surprisingly takes the form
of differences in the length of one’s ring fingers. Hence, the Buryats frequently measure finger length to
diagnose their soul condition, an activity that Swancutt calls not only rigorous but “even scientific”
(120). Naturally, then, a great deal of Buryat shamanic ritual is aimed at calling back the soul and
“reversing the downwards spiral of fortune” (123).
Swancutt also finds what we might call Buryat witchcraft, although she notes strongly that the Buryat
themselves have no such unified concept. Instead, they have various kinds of “bad speech” which can be
practiced by anyone, intentionally or unintentionally. Intentional harmful speech is most associated with
cursing, and the Buryat seem to live (or seem to think that they live) in a world of swirling curses. Words
can hurt, and they believe that curses
acquire their potency from the bad intentions of the curse caster, who sends the curse directly
to his or her target, thereby making the curse traceable and returnable. Any Buryat who casts a
curse always intends to harm another person, so that the intention to cause harm is what gives
curses…their potency. To counteract a curse, shamans or lamas can trace the direct path of the
curse and return it to the curse caster, with the help of shamanic spirits or Buddhist gods (128).
Interestingly, there are no standard or formulaic words for a Buryat curse; indeed, “they do not need to
be spoken aloud to take effect” (130). Instead, mere malevolent thoughts can cause harm. More often,
though, “Buryats cast curses by muttering words that wish their rivals ill, while spitting off to one side”
(130). And curiously, the most likely perpetrator and victim of cursing is a shaman, who typically aims
the words at a rival shaman, thus initiating curse-wars.
As for how curses work, Swancutt reports that the Buryat imagine the words “like projectiles hitting a
target—they immediately strike their victims (kharaal khünd shuud taarana) and are thrown, flung, or
hurled down (khayana) upon people. Because curses are designed to strike with the most heavy (khünd)
ramifications, they are the most secretive (nuutstai) type of speech or thought” (130). Like any missile,
curse words can also be deflected (which is one reason why shamans wear mirrors) and reversed, sent
hurtling back at their source.
However, not all hurtful words are actual curses or even shamanic in origin. More interesting, and more
subtle, is khel am (based on the Mongolian words khel for tongue and am for mouth) or “gossip.” Khel
am is not necessarily intended to do harm at all; in fact, gossip can be positive (or “white”) but no less
dangerous thereby. Khel am, she explains, “gains the full force of its potency through its increasing
omnipresence” (129) rather than its intent. Accordingly, cursing is a comparatively immediate-result
form of malice; like a rocket, curse words go straight to their target. Gossip, on the other hand, is a
delayed-effect threat, because it only builds strength over time as it circulates more and more widely by
word of mouth.
Whether khel am is black or white—malicious or innocent or even positive—it grows “from ordinary
gossip” (132):
White khel am arises when many people use words of praise (magtaal) to speak about a specific
person. Although the praise may be accurate, it has a negative effect on the person who is then
made into the topic of conversation when the praise is circulated widely. By contrast, black khel
am always is preceded by an argument (margaan) or some act in which one person genuinely
offends another. The offended party then speaks poorly about the person who angered him or
her. In circulating his or her story to others, the offended party produces what some people call
slander (muulasan üg) but which others call defamation (gutaasan khel), because its basis is
held to be true. As with white khel am, the circulation of black khel am harms the person who is
made into the topic of conversation. White and black khel am always cause fallen fortune and
general unhappiness, but they only trigger soul loss some of the time (132).
Finally, because khel am does not have immediate effects but depends on the gradual swelling of
gossipy talk, it is more difficult than cursing to counteract and to attribute to any individual culprit.
It may be a proverb in English that words cannot hurt you, but for the Buryat words are very powerful
weapons that can be wielded intentionally and unintentionally.
Reference
Swancutt, Katherine. 2012. Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination.
New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.