CONVEGNO INTERNAZIONALE


DALL'INDIA ALLA STELLA POLARE: IL COSMO SCIAMANICO
11-12 OTTOBRE 1996 - VENEZIA


SHAMANS AND THE SPACE OF THE PURE AMONG THE KALASHA
OF THE HINDU KUSH (PAKISTAN)

by
Augusto Cacopardo

Ist. Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente
(ex Is.M.E.O.) - Roma

SHAMANS AND THE SPHERE OF THE “PURE” AMONG THE KALASHA OF THE HINDUKUSH
E' stato pubblicato nel 1999 in:

"SHAMANIC COSMOS - From India to the North Pole Star"
a cura di R. Mastromattei e A. Rigopoulos

da:

Venetian Academy of Indian Studies - Venice, Italy
e
D.K Printworld (P) Ltd. - New Delhi, India


The cultural environment

The Hindu Kush is a lofty mountain range stretching from western Afghanistan all the way through northern Pakistan where it joins the Karakoram in the highlands of the Pamir.
The inhabitants of both the Hindu Kush and Karakoram ranges speak a variety of archaic indo-european languages belonging to the Dardic and Nuristani groups (Fussman 1972; Morgenstierne 1974; Strand 1973). The eastern sector of this area came in contact with Buddhism and Hinduism during the first millenium of our era (Biddulph 1880: 108-116; Jettmar 1996: 84-89), but the bulk of the population of these secluded mountain areas continued to practice local forms of religion until the advent of Islam. These autochtonous religions were a variety of politheistic systems that, although quite heterogeneous in their forms (pantheons, rituals, calendrical festivals), appear to be variants of a common symbolic model (_).
While the ethnic groups of the Karakoram were already converted at the arrival of the British at the end of last century, an articulated complex of interrelated polytheisms (Jettmar 1986) was still well alive in the Hindu Kush in present-day Afghan Nuristan (once known as Kafiristan, the land of the infidels) until 1896 when, following the demarcation of the frontier between British India and the Afghan kingdom, it was violently wiped out by the army of the Amir Abd-ar-Rahman Khan who forced the population of the area to convert to Islam (Jones 1974: 2-20). Only a few years earlier a British officer had spent about twelve months in one of the valleys of Kafiristan leaving a precious first-hand report of its culture (Robertson 1896).
One of the autochtonous religious systems of the Hindu Kush, however, still survives today in Pakistan's Chitral district. A small group of "pagans", in fact, was left on the British side of the frontier and managed therefore to escape the crusade. These are the Kalasha people where I did my field work (_).
The religious system of the Kalasha is of peculiar interest for anthropological studies because it is the only example of "tribal" indoeuropean religion to have come in direct contact with modern science. Its study can therefore give a precious contribution to the understanding and interpretation of those indoeuropean religious forms which preceded the spread of the great religions, and are at the roots of our civilization: from Greek and Germanic politheisms to Vedic religiousness. Furthermore, it is in all likeness the most direct modern descendant of the pre-Vedic cults practiced by the Aryans before they entered the plains of India.
From the point of view of shamanistic studies, the Kalasha can be of special interest because - maybe a unique example at least in Western Asia - they have preserved a complete archaic symbolic system, with a "...distinctive enphasis upon shamanic revelation and `secret knowledge' (ras mun) rather than priestly tradition..." (Parkes 1991: 92). Among the Kalasha, the shamanic institution can be seen as integrated in a complete functioning structure. A perspective maybe difficult to adopt where shamanism has been forced to cohabit with Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or Taoism.
In this paper I'll first attempt to analyse the Kalasha shamanic institution in the general frame of better known shamanistic practices to focus in the end on the related symbolic construction of physical space.


Is the deh'ar really a shaman?

The Kalasha religious system corresponds to a general morphology that, according to Eliade (1974: 26-29), was found among both Indoeuropean and Turco-Tartar peoples, and which had among its main traits: " ...the supremacy of an uranic God, the absence or lesser importance of female gods, fire-cults..." (Eliade 1974: 404). Among the Kalasha, a supreme Uranic God (D'izala Dez'au) has become a deus otiosus (_), while a number of localized male gods are sacrificed and prayed to for the increase of the population and of the products of herds and fields. Female goddesses are confined to the sphere of reproduction and kinship links. Most important, however, are the female s'uci mountain spirits (_), who are held to be the owners of forests, alpine pastures and wild animals, and are therefore regularly appeased with ritual offerings. A class of evil spirits of hill health and disease (Parkes 1987: 651) hover around the burial places and the house where women retire for menstruation and childbirth.
The role of priest doesn't exist among the Kalasha. Rituals are rather officiated by young virgin boys (onjesta-moc), who alone are held to be in the required state of purity. Respected elders (gadabas'ara) lead prayers and announce the beginning of festivals but do not perform ritual duties. Direct contact with the spiritual world is possible to the deh'ar/shaman, who falls in a trance in the course of sacrificial rites to reveal the will of gods and spirits.
Eliade (1974: 404) did not believe "shamanism to be dominant in the magical-religious life of the Indoeuropeans". In fact, if we analyse the Kalasha deh'ar in the light of what he considers to be the the qualifying elements for a shamanic complex, we shall find most of them to be missing. I refer here to the initiation, the shamanic seance, the ascension to the heavens, the magical flight to the underworld in search of a lost soul (Eliade 1974: 402), the three-layer cosmology around the cosmic axe (ibidem: 283), and other maybe less important traits, like the shamanic costume and drum (_).
The Kalasha deh'ar doesn't fully comply with some of the best known definitions of a shaman. There is no clear belief in the departure of his soul from the body during a trance, which Eliade (1974: 23) indicates as the revealing trait, nor has he really the power to control spirits, as Lewis (1981: 32) considers typical of a shaman. Gods and spirits speak, and may even appear, to him. But he does not typically ascend to their abode. Gods are invisible presences, connected to specific places, who of their own free will manifest themselves to him, causing his trance.
In the literature on the Hindu Kush, however, the deh'ar is generally considered a shaman and I shan't therefore, as Lewis (1981: 34), quoting Popper, suggests "be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings". I shall focus, rather, on questions of fact. I'll start by examining the morphology of the deh'ar institution.
The call to be a deh'ar may come under any circumstance, but the more favourable time is held to be that of calendrical festivals when human beings are closer to the sacred. The chosen person unexpectedly looses consciousness and hears instructions from supernatural voices. He is then consecrated deh'ar through the kaualiy'ak ist'ongas ritual whereby the warm blood of a sacrificed kid is sprikled on his face (Lievre & Loude 1990: 450). Unlike what happens in Northern Asia and elsewhere (Eliade 1974: 133), the call is not followed by any sort of instruction period or initiation (Lievre & Loude 1990: 444; Siiger 1963: 295). The reputation of the new deh'ar will rest solely on the effectiveness of the directions he gives to the people when in trance.
Shamanic seances among the Kalasha can hardly be defined as such. The deh'ar normally falls into a trance during calendrical festivals or prestige feasts, to transmit the will of the gods to the community. The deh'ar does not appear to deliberately seek - as Mastromattei (1995: 24) says to be typical of a seance - a state of trance. The purpose of the gathering is not specifically that of hearing the deh'ar prophesize, but to perform the ritual duties required for the occasion, which would be equally carried out in his absence.
However, the atmosphere created by a great sacrifice at the shrine of one of the gods with the participation of the whole male community, when juniper smoke and the blood of the victims are offered to the divinity, is held to be conducive to a trance. In the holiest days of the main festivals, in fact, a trance seems almost to be expected from the deh'ar. But the event takes place suddenly without any apparent intentional preparation on his part.
The deh'ar may also be called upon to solve individual problems in the course of special sessions. This function, however, may also be performed by other specialists. Only two types of misfortunes, more than diseases, are considered his exclusive domain: coma and early death. Both have to do with the soul. In a coma, one half of the soul is believed to leave the body. The deh'ar's role, however, is not really of a shamanic nature; his task is not to recover the fugitive soul of the patient (Eliade 1974: 206). The cause of misfortune is thought to be some breech of the code of purity, and the deh'ar will indicate which one (Lievre & Loude 1990: 417) prescribing the appropriate ritual reparation. There too, the deh'ar falls in a trance abruptly, without any preparation, when the blood of the sacrificial victim is offered to the gods.
The Kalasha deh'ar does not have the typical shamanic drum nor does he use the sieve, as it is common in north and central India (Eliade 1974: 451). Neither does he resort to any rhythmical gesture. Quite untypically, if we think of seances in other shamanic cultures (Mastromattei 1995: 28), including those of nearby Karakoram (Lievre & Loude 1994: 525-27), music has no part in his trance. Its only agents appear to be the sight of the blood of sacrificed animals and the odorous smoke of burning juniper.
The trance manifests itself in a trembling that runs through the body of the deh'ar (Lievre & Loude 1990: 519; Siiger 1963; Cacopardo Aug. 1985: 741), who stands with outstreched arms, and does umbul'im: uttering words difficult to understand, rotating in a frenzy, blindly dispensing blows to the crowd, or directing ritual activities his gaze fixed on a distant point whence instruction comes from supernatural beings, only he can see (Lievre & Loude 1990: 479-481; Siiger 1963: 300; Cacopardo Aug. 1985: 741, 746). The state of trance is of short duration, rarely lasting over fifteen or twenty minutes. The end of divine communication is marked by an abrupt fall backwards of the deh'ar. He is promptly upheld by a bystander and he lays rigid with closed eyes until, after a few seconds, he recovers consciousness.
The content of the experience was described as perception of voices unheard to other humans or, at times, as the apparition of gods or s'uci spirits (Siiger 1963: 205; Lievre & Loude 1990: 518). We do not hear of a flight along a cosmic axis to an Upper or Lower world as is reportedly often the case in shamanistic contexts (Eliade 1974: 282; Halifax 1982: 229). In therapeutic rituals he is not believed to travel in spirit to the Nether worlds. Of the great deh'ar of the past - like of shamans elsewhere (Eliade 1974: 507) - it is said that they could fly over great distances in no time, appearing abruptly wherever they were needed. Their magical flights, however, did not take them to unknown worlds, but rather across Kalasha territory. They could fly through mountains, perform extraordinary leaps, or reach inaccessible peaks; but always within the frame of the known Kalasha cosmos (Lievre & Loude 1990: 196-201; 206-209).
The idea of the shamanic voyage to other worlds does not seem to have much place in the Kalasha deh'ar institution. Possibly because the gods are not thought of as living in a distant celestial world. The gods the Kalasha pray and sacrifice to, are local divinities identified with a specific holy place, permeated by their presence. There they dwell, and are not omnipresent. Their open-air shrines are held to be their abodes. Those are the places where contact with them must be sought. Similarly the s'uci spirits roam the mountain heights, and the b'ala spirits of disease and corruption nest around the burial places.
The Kalasha are not much concerned with heavenly or ctonic realms. Traces of a three-level cosmology with a celestial heaven and an underworld of the deceased are reported from ancient Kafiristan (Robertson 1896: 380; Jettmar 1986: 36-39), and they do appear also in an important Kalasha narrative (Parkes 1991: 86-88), but it is difficult to ascertain to which extent they are autochtonous or the fruit of borrowings. Parkes (1991: 87) remarks that many details of the narrative mentioned above are by no means generally shared by the community, so that one may suspect "an idiosyncratic accretion of disparate cosmological notions". It is certain, at any rate, that the classical three-layer cosmology is not a functional one.


The Kalasha cosmos

The whole ritual system, as well as ordinary life, revolves among the Kalasha around a rather different conception of the cosmos. Its structure is articulated around two opposite poles: onjesta, the pure, and pr'aghata, the impure. The pure is not in a celestial heaven nor is the impure in a dark underworld. Onjesta and pr'aghata spheres are localized in Kalasha territory.
The Kalasha live in three rather secluded mountain valleys where they practice irriguous agriculture and transhumant goat herding. These are V shaped valleys with steep flanks thinly clad in forests. Above timberline lie the rich summer pastures. As the snow retreats in late spring, the herds are gradually brought to the high alpine grazing grounds in mid-summer, whence they descend in the fall. Only men can go. The women stay behind and take care of agriculture. Fields are located, as possible, on the valley bottom near the river, while villages hang on the mountain slope to save precious cultivable space. Goatsheds are just above the houses where the oak forest begins.
Onjesta are high places like the rocky summits of the mountains, the high summer grazing grounds, the oak and coniferous forests. Wild nature. These areas are inhabited by the mountain spirits who are deemed to be the owners of all resources there. Pr'aghata is the low world at the debouchure of the valleys where the impure Muslims live and where disruptive innovations come from.
Kalasha settlements are generally found in the central part of the valley, equally distant from the pure mountain tops and the impure Muslim areas. Symbolically they pertain to an intermediate zone, neither onjesta nor pr'aghata. We may see here again a the three-layer system, although of a different kind, where the river connects the low pr'aghata world of the muslims, the intermediate world of Kalasha villages, and the onjesta realm of the mountains (cfr. Jettmar 1975: 36-37) (_) (_).
The onjesta/pr'aghata polarity contrapposes Kalasha and Muslims, but it divides also the Kalasha community itself. Men are onjesta and women are pr'aghata. Hence a deh'ar can never be a woman (_). In general terms, onjesta is everything connected with the male sphere, that of hunting and herding, while pr'aghata is the female sphere connected to agriculture. Appropriation of territory displeases the spirits. Hunting and grazing, if not in eccess, leave nature virtually untouched, while agriculture involves a radical modification of the territory.
In the village, the onjesta area is that above the houses, where the goatsheds and the open-air shrines of the male gods are found: both off limits for women. The most pr'aghata of places are the burial grounds and the menstruation-house (bas'ali), both located below or down-stream from the village. Generally avoided the former, and strictly prohibited to males the latter.
Pr'aghata is directly associated with death, which is not surprising. But the bas'ali too, where new lives begin, is deemed impure. Birth brings death with it. The opposition is not between life and death. It is rather between the immortal life of gods and spirits, and the mortal life of men, bound by birth and death. Through the woman, human beings are born in this mortal world. Hence women are impure (Cacopardo Alb. & Aug. 1989: 327).
The quest for immortality is an important drive in traditional Kalasha culture, but it is not concerned with the survival of the soul in a distant afterworld. True immortality is reached by he who is forever remembered by his descendants, thereby transcending the world of birth and death. Ideally, to enter the temple of collective memory, a man must distinguish himself through feast-giving. An elaborate system of merit-feasting is the path to glory (Loude & Lievre 1984: 113-178; Parkes 1992; Cacopardo Alb & Aug 1977). The givers of such feasts are praised in songs and panegyrics (_). The ultimate achievement is the ek az'ar pay biram'or that can only be given by the owner of a herd of 400 goats; the meat of sacrificed animals will be distributed to the whole community and to guests from neighbouring areas. At the death of such a man a wooden statue (Loude 1982; Schomberg 1938: 51-52) would be carved if his heirs gave additional feasting, and thus he would be alive in the memory of generations to come.
The system of ceremonial feast-giving belongs to the onjesta sphere. The main good to be distributed is the meat of the goats, a product of herding. Thereby Kalasha ideology connects the male sphere of pastoral activity to a sort of communality and sharing, also expressed in its organization: shepherds form cooperative herding groups in the summer, rights over alpine pastures are held by the community as such, herds remain long undivided between brothers after the death of the father...
Fields, on the other hand, are owned by individual families and are quickly divided among brothers. The product of agriculture, bread, is the ordinary food cooked and eaten by each family individually. If herding is the sphere of sharing, agriculture is the sphere of keeping. A well structured system emerges, with positive values all connected to the male-pastoral sphere: a non destructive relationship with nature, connection with the divine, sharing of wealth with the community, victory over birth and death through remembrance.
The pr'aghata sphere has definitely a negative connotation, but it is not personified by truly evil demons. There are no ctonic divinities. The bala spirits are anonymous entities attracted by death and corruption of bodily substances. The onjesta-pr'aghata dualism does not involve an opposition between celestial and infernal gods, between Paradise and Hell, or between good and evil. The idea of a reward or punishment after death according to deeds, appears to be foreign to the Kalasha system (cfr. Jettmar 1975: 339a). In the conception expressed by ritual, the souls of the dead dwell around the places where they spent their lives as humans (cfr. Lievre & Loude 1990: 250-251). Hence, when in trance, the Kalasha deh'ar may see the s'uci spirits or the gods but he will not travel, we have seen, to dark underworlds or demonic realms (_).


The deh'ar and the sphere of the pure

The onjesta sphere is the source of shamanic vision. The deh'ar must avoid all contact with the pr'aghata sphere. Rules of avoidance of impure places and people, from Muslims to women, are stricter for him than for the rest of the Kalasha. He belongs to the onjesta sphere and it is his task to strengthen it and preserve it from pollution. Even physically, as far as possible, he must frequent the onjesta areas. The only deh'ar alive at the time of my field work, tended to avoid the villages and spent most of his time in the onjesta environment of the goatsheds and pastures inhabited by the s'uci, the pure mountain spirits.
The deh'ar have a special relation with the s'uci. These spirits are connected to hunting. They are believed to be the owners of the markhor and ibex, that are the prized prey of Kalasha hunters. No animal can be killed without their consent. As Hamayon (1995: 418) notes in discussing Siberian shamanism, among the Kalasha as well the success of hunting is ensured by an alliance between humans and spirits. These spirits, however are not animal spirits as in Siberia; they are humanized and mostly female. The alliance here too echoes the model of matrimonial exchange. The Kalasha deh'ar, however, does not play the ritual role of representative of the community in this symbolic partnership, as does the Siberian shaman. He has privileged communication with the s'uci spirits, but all men on the hunt may encounter them and there are many stories of hunters taken away by them who became their lovers (Lievre & Loude 1990: 43-46) (_).
The Kalasha are a pastoral and agricultural society; consequently, hunting plays a somewhat marginal role in their economy, and it is not essential for the survival of the group. Accordingly, though the deh'ar has a special connection with the mountain spirits who own the wild animals, the world of hunting is not his main concern. Neither, however, is he predominantly concerned with the "cycle of social reproduction", that is the ties between living and dead in the human group, as Hamayon (1995: 421) says is the case among those Siberian groups where herding has gradually marginalized hunting. In that context the spirits of the ancestors take the place of the animal spirits as providers of food. The Kalasha deh'ar indeed may contact the ghosts of the dead if their influence becomes disruptive because of some offense, but his interlocutors are most often the gods themselves or the s'uci spirits.
Like in many other cultures, we find among the Kalasha the notion of a golden age that they call the "mixed times". Humans, animals and gods then lived together and could communicate. By their own fault, human beings were separated. The Kalasha deh'ar, like shamans elsewhere (Eliade 1974: 289), can re-establish the connection with the world beyond life and death.
From the gods, Kalasha shamans have received the norms that regulate the ritual system. The deh'ar is a founding institution of Kalasha society. The whole Kalasha dast'ur, the system of values and rules of behaviour, is held to be derived from the gods through the deh'ar. This is indeed the main function of Kalasha shamans. Accordingly, the eyes of the deh'ar - metaphorically, and also physically when he falls in a trance - are set on the heights of the onjesta sphere, whence he receives the commands of the gods.


Conclusions

After this brief sketch of the position and role of the deh'ar in the Kalasha symbolic system, can we answer the question posed at the beginning? That is, can the deh'ar really be considered a shaman?
Two points emerge from the discussion carried out in the preceding paragraphs. In the first place, we have seen, the deh'ar does not comply with Eliade's characterization of the shamanic complex. In the second place, in contrast with what Jettmar (1972: 107) remarks about the dainy'al of the Shina, the deh'ar does not seem to have much in common with Siberian shamans.
One remark Jettmar (1972: 107-108) makes when comparing the dainy'al with Siberian shamans, however, appears to be very much to the point in our case. He observes that, if we consider globally the religious function, only a small fragment, in comparison to what is the case in Siberia, pertains to the dainy'al. Among the Kalasha too, the deh'ar, though no doubt a central figure, does not have the monopoly over relations with the supernatural. Other specialists can be called upon to devine or to explain the meaning of dreams (Lievre & Loude 1990: 315-342) while, we have seen, any man may enter in contact with the s'uci spirits (_). Hamayon (letter to the author dated 8 December 1996) indeed suggests that, since among the Kalasha, functions generally regarded as shamanic are not concentrated in the deh'ar, it would be more appropriate to speak of "a presence of shamanistic elements" in their culture, rather than of a fullfledged shamanic institution.
Though this seems in fact quite correct, I think we can say that the core experience of the shamanic complex, in its very essential terms, is present among the Kalasha, despite the very real morphological differences discussed above: like shamans, that is, the deh'ar is a specialist who is believed to be able to establish - for the benefit of his community - direct contact with the supernatural world.

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_. I want to express my gratitude to prof. Roberte Hamayon from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) of Paris, who very kindly commented at length on an earlier draft of this paper.
_. Such a view was also expressed by Jettmar in one of his early wrtings (Jettmar 1965).
_. Field work among the Kalasha was carried out by the author in autumn 1973, spring/summer 1977 and summer 1989.
_. That D'izala Dez'au was traditionally a deus otiosus is shown by the fact that he is almost absent from calendrical festivals and that no shrines are dedicated to him. Today, however, he is invoked with the persian name Khoda'i and, under islamic influence, he has come to resemble very much the almighty God of the Quran.
_. Their male partners, the var'oti, play a somewhat marginal role.
_. Eliade's characterization of shamanism is not always agreed upon by scholars. According to R. Hamayon, for example, the various traits he indicates as typical of shamanism are really the fruit of mystical interpretations on his part, not based on rigorous analyses and often unfaithful to the sources he uses (letter to the author dated 8/12/1996). Since there is no consensus on any other definition of shamanism, Eliade's conceptual frame shall be retained here; but only as a device for the description of Kalasha shamanistic practices.
_. On the basis of comparative data, Snoy has argued that such a model is earlier in `cultural historical terms' than the `three-tiered' model of the world (quoted in Jettmar 1986: 37).
_. Quotations from Jettmar 1975 are taken from an unpublished English translation, a copy of which was very kindly given to the author by prof. Jettmar himself.
_. Shamans (dainy'al), in contrast, can be of either sex among the Shina of the Gilgit area (Biddulph 1880: 96-98; Lorimer 1929: 535), in the Karakoram proper. Female shamans are common as well among the islamic peoples of Central Asia (Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazaks, Kirgiz, Uigurs). According to Basilov (1992: 9) "In general, it is the influence of islam that, by reducing the social scope of shamanism, has caused the transfer of the activity to the feminine sphere" (transl. by Aug. Cacopardo).
_. The main corpus of Kalasha oral literature is made in fact of praise songs and eulogies recalling the deeds of the ancestors, while very little exists in terms of religious mythology (Parkes 1991: 76).
_. According to Eliade 1974: 444) the descent to the underworld is generally absent in the shamanic practices of India.
_. Hamayon specifies that in Siberia too, any hunter may have an informal love-story with a supernatural being; but it is only the shaman who, as representative of the community, ritually "marries" a spirit (letter to the author dated 8 December 1996).
_. Furthermore, Morgenstierne (1947: 246) reports that he saw several people, not only the deh'ar, falling into a trance-like state in the course of the Z'osi spring festival, held at the opening of the season of transhumance when the s'uci spirits are held to be particularly close.