Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/62

 50 The Religious Ideas and P7'actices of

Among the Chiikchis bad spirits are called kelet, and W. Bogoraz'^^ distinguishes as many as three different classes of kelct: (i), Invisible, producing sickness; (2), Blood-thirsty cannibals ; and (3), Spirits which on the call of certain (black) shamans help them. Good spirits are called in Chukchi vdirgit. The sun is a vdirgit and the moon is kele. The Kor}'ak called bad spirits kala, but they have no generic name for good spirits.^* The Gilyak call their bad powers knin and milk, and the good bol, lot, and iirif.

In connection with the featureless landscape the ideal division of tiie universe is vertical (into upper and lower worlds) rather than horizontal, and the bad spirits live mostly underground.

Among the Neo-Siberians animism has developed to a very great extent. They worship the whole universe, especially the celestial bodies, and they believe them all to be animated by a kind of soul, sometimes called idgins (lords).^5 The human soul is, according to them, composed of three parts. Among the Yakuts it is composed of: (i), tyn, a breath soul, common to man, animal, and plant; (2), kut, a physical soul composed of earth, air, and a material element, common to men and all animals except fishes ; (3), sur, a psychic soul, which has n-o shadow and enters the mother through the temples before the birth of the child.3G

The Buriats believe that man is composed of: (i), oyeye, material body ; (2), aintn, lower soul, breath ; (3), snnyesim,

exemplified bj- what Jochelson says on the next page (93), as well as by other statements of Jochelson on the Koryak and Vukaghir and by other authors on Palaeo-Siberians.

3' The Chukchee (1904), p. 292.

'* This fact is also in favour of my opinion that black spirits are more powerful among Palaeo-Siberians.

^^ Banzaroff, C/iomaya IViera (1893), PP- 6-19.

3* Trostjanski, Evolucia Chornoy IViery (Shavian stvd) 11 Vakuiov ( J go2), pp. 71-79.