Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/64

 52 The Religious Ideas and Practices of

and terror of black powers which exists among certain primitive tribes.*"

The Altaians" call their good spirits aisi and their bad spirits kawa or kurenies. Among all Altaic Tartars the dualistic division is most clear, and the highest god, Tengre Kaira Khan, is a good power. The local division of the universe is partly horizontal, partly vertical ; the good spirits live in seventeen floors above the earth, and the bad occupy seven or nine under the earth, and Erlik-Khan, the chief of the bad spirits, lives on the lowest floor, where the sun and moon are supposed to give only a very feeble light. This Erlik-Khan is held to have emanated from a heavenly spirit, which shows that even in the past the white spirits were predominant.

Mythology.

The mythology of the Palaeo-Siberians is preoccupied with stories concerning Big Raven, but sometimes the Chukchi kelet and the Koryak kalau also play a part ; on the whole, imagination is poor, the language obscure but voluptuous, and the physiological functions of the human body often form the chief episodes.'*"- '

The Aino-Gilyak myths, though they include a great many North Pacific elements, chiefly resemble those of the Japanese in their description of animal life.

The Palaeo-Siberian mythology does not differentiate between natural and supernatural, animate and inanimate objects, whereas the Neo-Siberian mythology is less animis- tic, in the sense that they believe the transformation of animate into inanimate objects to be the result of super- natural power. Their rich and hyperbolic language could not have originated in the polar regions. While the heroes


 * Gondatti, op. cit., p. 6. *^ Wierbicki, Altayskie Inorodcy (1893).

pologist^ N.S. vol. vi, 1904, Pt. iv.
 * '^W. Jochelson, "The Mythology of the Koryak," The American Anthro-