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Return of the Light: Religious Revival in Mongolia
| Article
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20111 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
2,383 Words |
| Author
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Michael McNierney
Michael McNierney is a haiku poet and free-lance
writer/photographer living in Boulder, Colorado. |
The dirt road widened as it crested the ridge. At the pass, in the center of the road, stood a large cairn. Sticks jutted from the top; from them, strips of white cloth fluttered in the wind. As we climbed out of the jeep, our two native companions, a professor from the university at Ulan Bator and the driver, a young man she had hired in Khovd, walked around the cairn once, each tossing a rock onto the pile. The professor then explained that one always stopped and tossed a rock onto the cairn; in was a matter of good luck. The rest of us-- a Scotsman, an Englishman, and two Americans, representatives of England's Operation Raleigh--followed suit.
This was late 1990 in the Mongolian People's Republic, a communist country that officially has no religion. Yet we had just taken part in what was left of a religious observance at least a thousand years old.
The scene at the cairn, or obo, could be taken as symbolic of much of Mongolia's history. Reverence for mountain passes and the custom of marking them with cairns date back to the shamanistic animism that was the universal religion of Mongols before Buddhism arrived in the area. The strips of cloth tied to the sticks were a Buddhist addition: prayer flags on a shamanistic cairn. The easy camaraderie and shared customs of the university professor from the capital and the local driver could indicate that there might be some truth to the claim of classless society. The jeep we rode in was Russian, as are almost all vehicles in Mongolia: a sign of the domination of the country by its leviathan neighbor. And that we four westerners were traveling, as we had been for the last few weeks, where we pleased--without a military escort and without any kind of internal travel documents--was a shining indication of the radical changes taking place in Mongolia.
Cult Of High Places
From before the time of Genghis Khan, Mongols worshiped the deities or spirits of natural features, such as lakes, rivers, and mountains, as well as of the sun, moon, and stars. The principal and most remote of the gods was Koko Mongke Tenggri, the Eternal Blue Sky; another major figure was Etugen Eke, the Earth Mother. Similar beliefs are known to have been held by the Huns of the first century A.D. Traveling in Mongolia today, a person will notice that the sky dominates the landscape outside the cities. At night, even in a sizable town, which will boast almost no streetlights, the Mongolian sky is awesome. On the steppe, the Milky Way stretches from horizon to horizon. The early Mongols worshiped
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