It was not until the 90-s of the XX century that the principle of the golden section was first mentioned in the academic works of the Buryat Geser experts. The Buryat tales are noted for the specific structural build-up, the image-bearing units, but the Buryat scholars did not associate that symmetry with the principle of the golden section. It was discovered by a Buryat scholar S. Sh. Chagdurov. He devoted one of his books to the phenomenon of the Altan Kheblic which is a Buryat analogue of the golden section.
A comprehensive study of the role of this phenomenon in the Buryat uliger (epic) was carried out by D. B. Badmatsyrenova [2001]. The thesis is called The principle of the golden section in the Buryat epic Geser. The Altan kheblig means the golden model. The Geser epic observes the laws of the poetical structuring, one of which is the principle discussed.
The Altan kheblig was first mentioned in the Buryat epic by Pyokhon Petrov, one of the best Buryat epic-tellers of the XX century. The principle appears when the uliger episodes are in dynamics, when there is the gradual growth, then the highest point, the culmination and, last of all, the fall or the end. This dynamic symmetry was studied in the various epics uligers written down from well-known Buryat epic-tellers.
The academic collection of the musical folklore started in the 60-s of the XXth century by D. S. Dugarov. The uliger tunes are very old, they present kind of a melodious recitative. The uligers did not have a certain fixed melody. Each rhapsode possessed one or more tunes and used it when performing all the uligers (stories, epics) that he knew. The peculiarity of the Buryat folk music is pentatonism. The melody or tune is depended on the structure of the verse. The verse and the tune closely interacted. S. Sh. Chagdurov and D. B. Badmatsyrenova noted that the golden section point is usually in the third quarter of a musical phrase.
The golden section is marked in the compositional lay-out of the uliger (epic) and gives prominence to the culminating points which are found not in the center of the epical text but in its third quarter. The most important function of the golden section in the text is semantical, notional, dynamical, structuring and euphonic. It is the symmetry of the laws of motion and growth in nature.
Due to the principle of the Altan kheblig presented in the main constructive units of the epic of Geser the listeners could not but feel them. The rhapsodes and the listeners could not but get adjusted to the betta-wave which dominated and caused the feeling of joy and success. In the rhythmical build-up of the verse in Geser an asymmetric division into the syllables is observed, when in the first hemistich there are 5 syllables, in the second 3 syllables. The interrelationship of 5 to 3 is 1.66 which almost ideally corresponds to the proportion of the golden section.
In the scene of the struggle between Abai Geser and Orgoli tiger the beginning and the intensification of the action (384 lines) is one and a half times as longer as the culmination and the concluding lines (строка) (223 lines). The interrelation of the numbers 384 to 223 makes approximately 1.7 which is close to the mathematical expression of the golden section equaling 1.618. On the whole there are 607 lines in this scene which is one and a half times as longer as the number of the lines in the intensified action (384 lines). The relation of the two numbers, i.e. 607 and 384 is close to 1.6.
One can state that the principle of the golden section is traced in architecture, painting, poetry, music, as well as mathematics and the other areas of the natural and human activity. The principle of the Altan keblig, an original analogue of the golden section, is well presented in the text of the Geser epic which was called the greatest epic of the humanity by a well-known Russian poet and translator Vladimir Soloukhin. The shamans and narrators or story-tellers have good memory, artistry and expressiveness of speech. Owing to the gifted story-tellers and shamans, the skill for the masterly performance of the ancient pieces of poetry and prose remains well preserved up to now.
The religious cults and rituals
The ideas of the heavenly origin of the totemic forefathers of the Buryats as well as the ideas of the spirit-hosts of the localities, the shamans, the epical heroes are related to the archaic cult of the Eternal Blue Sky which is taken to be the highest divinity and the creator of all that is found in the Universe. The highest divinity, the Sky or the Heaven (tengri in Buryat) is personified in the epic as Khormusta Tengeri or Esege Malan Tengeri. The most archaic cult of the Mother-Earth, the foremother, has the genetic ties with the cult of the World Tree and the World Mountain. It has greatly affected the emergence of the other, not less popular cults, like those of the fire, the mountain caves, the water (rivers, lakes), the genealogical tree. When reading the epic one comes across the other cults, like those of the ancestors, the magic. There are the shamanic elements and the Buddhist inclusions. Then one can mention the cosmogonic prologue of the epic, the creation of the main hero by the Heavenly Gods who was then sent down to the Earth with the mission of fighting the evil, Gesers three celestial sisters, the theme of the cosmic marriage or the motive of being born from a cracked-apart stone. The archetype of the celestial forefather is often connected with the solar motive, e.g. a golden pole or the rays of the Sun coming through the upper opening of the yurt are associated with the conception of the son.
The proto-Buryats, i.e. the hunters and gatherers or pickers of the plants including the sorrel, garlic, berries, kind of bulbil lily representing the forest tribe communities entered the new stage of the social and economic life brought about by the establishment of the paternal right much later than the ancestors of the other nomad tribes. The socio-economical ties were those of a tribal community and the Buryats did not undergo the process of unification for a considerable period of time. Even in the end of the XIX century the Buryats somewhat preserved the patriarchal and tribal relations since the new tendencies did not display themselves so vividly in their economy: there were neither factories, nor railroads, nor electricity, etc. Due to this the epic preserved itself in a pure form with some impacts of the feudal and Buddhist ideologies. One should mention that the epic of Geser in its versified version which is believed to be the Buryat creation was preserved by the western Buryats. Аmong them most widely spread were the shaman rites. One can say that the oral Geser and the shamanism are to some extent interrelated. The versification and the shaman elements evidence of Gesers being old-aged since it is generally recognized that the most ancient epical works of the Mongolian people as well as the shaman invocations were in verse not in prose.
Widely spread were the genealogical myths in which the cult of the mountain spirits was depicted. It is just the mountain spirit who appears to be in fact the father of Geser on the Earth. According to the epic the man possesses not one soul but a few of them. One soul is in the body, another one may leave the body in its sleep, the other souls are somewhere else out of body. Very often the souls are of the zoomorphic form like the two golden fish coming out of a mangus nostrils during his sleep. One might recollect the hero chasing the three stags that were said to keep inside the soul of a mangus. In the Oirat epic the soul may be found in a copper-headed iron-winged crow which flies out of a cut-open breast of the mangus mother. Then the crow turns into a fish, marmot; the hero chases it as eagle, fish or marmot. In a demons body in one of his big toes or in one of his ninety five stomachs found not infrequently was an
Widely spread were the genealogical myths in which the cult of the mountain spirits was depicted. It is just the mountain spirit who appears to be in fact the father of Geser on the Earth. According to the epic the man possesses not one soul but a few of them. One soul is in the body, another one may leave the body in its sleep, the other souls are somewhere else out of body. Very often the souls are of the zoomorphic form like the two golden fish coming out of a mangus nostrils during his sleep. One might recollect the hero chasing the three stags that were said to keep inside the soul of a mangus. In the Oirat epic the soul may be found in a copper-headed iron-winged crow which flies out of a cut-open breast of the mangus mother. Then the crow turns into a fish, marmot; the hero chases it as eagle, fish or marmot. In a demons body in one of his big toes or in one of his ninety five stomachs found not infrequently was an
One should mention the existence of the cult of the mountains, prayers on the mountain, begging for children and the birth of the child from a mountain spirit. When building something in the mountains if the necessity arose to move stones from one place to another it was advisable to complete certain rituals to appease the spirit of the mountain. The relics of such consciousness may be observed in our days too. As we have already mentioned there are the totemistic features fairly well preserved in the epic. In a Khori genealogical legend of Khoridoi-mergen the hero gets married to a celestial fairy that had been a bird previously. Very well known is the motive of a swan, the ancestor of one of the tribes. In the Mongolian epic of Geser two bulls are shown as fighting, one of them being white, the other black. The white one is taken to be the protector of Geser, the black of the mangus. The totemic ancestors of the Bulagats and the Ekhirits are the grey Bukha noyon bull and the black and white bulls. This motive has its parallel in a Tibetan legend which describes the fight between the white and black snakes coming out of the mangus nostrils or in the Tibetan version of the Geser epic where the two snakes fight having come out of the mangus ears.
The nomad tribes of Central Asia left the monuments resembling the deer stones or the stone slabs with the engraved inscriptions, the magical formulas. In Transbaikalia and Mongolia they found the sacral writings on the rocks, the so-called rock paintings or petroglyph on which depicted most frequently was an eagle in flight. They date back to the second half of the second millennium B.C. They all are of the conventional nature and are given as symbol or sign. It is another evidence of the fact that there existed a written language though primitive. There is much in common between the drawings mentioned and the zurags (drawing) of the Balagan ongons. The ongons are the symbols of the ancestors spirits and the eagles are also thought to be the spirits of the ancestors. The Baikal region is abundant in the legends of the genealogical totems depicted in the form of a flying eagle. According to those legends the host of the Oikhon island was married to a tengris daughter. She gave birth into a son, Burged by name which means eagle. He adopted the eagles as sons. The latter gave the beginning to the kin of the Olkhon shamans who were known as the shubuuni noyod the lords of the birds. They say that earlier during the sacrifice ritual to Khan Khoto babai they made the three replicas of eagles out of birch bark. When I attended the tayilagan on the Baikal I saw that on the shore of lake Baikal the shamans put the three birch trees and under each of them they put the meat and the bones of the sheep sacrificed, covered them with hides and burned. When an eagle flew down onto one of the trees they said that the spirit of the ancestor of the kin represented by that tree came down. Those belonging to that kin were overwhelmed with joy. There are also the legends that the eagle was once a shaman, that is why the eagle is much esteemed. One can come across his image everywhere. We might just mention in this respect Khan-Garudi. Garudi came originally from India perhaps through Tibet, its image might have intermingled with that of the eagle, the cult of which is so widely spread in Buryatia.
The heroic epic of the Mongolian people is rich in the other diversified mythological elements. One could mention the demons who appeared out of the remnants of the evil deities thrown down to the Earth. Geser had the reputation of the destroyer of demons and monsters, the personifications of the dark chthonic forces. The epic tells of the Tengris coming down to the Earth, of the middle place between the Sky and the Earth, of the dragons, of the various personified monsters such as the mangadkhais, many-headed snakes, birds, huge dogs, frogs, ants. The fantastic images reflect the mythological essence of the epic and hence its archaic shaman nature. The cosmic elements are widely presented in the epic of the Mongolian people. They are the Sky, the Sun. the Moon, the stars, the Earth, the water, etc. To this may be added the cosmogonic prologue in the Geser epic. Geser is often given help by his three celestial sisters. Presented also is the solar motive. The conception of a child is associated with a golden pole of the light coming through the upper hole of the yurt.
The performing of the Geser epic was of a ritual, magic, shamanic nature. The epic-tellers sank into the trance when reciting the epic. The epic was used by shamans for exorcising the evil spirits. Geser is taken to be the son of the Tengri. Sometimes the Earth and the Water are regarded as Gesers parents which is associated with the shamanic ideas of the human personification of the souls of the mountains and localities. Reciting of the epic-uliger appeases the spirit of the Master of the taiga and helps in hunting. The epic-teller himself was in fact a shaman or a peculiar type of shaman.
Prior to the battle, on the mountain or obo the heroes of the epic performed the shaman smudging asking to protect them and give the victory over the enemy. The petrogenetic motive, i.e. the birth of the hero out of stone is evidently associated with the shaman cult of the personified mountain deities. The common people took the shamans to be very powerful and helpful to them. This is reflected in the Buryat epic. A woman shaman throws the tears and snot of the poor people onto the heavenly palace and the latter gets cracked and leans over on one side. Thus the heavens learned of the sufferings of the people on the Earth. Besides the khats, ejins, zayans in Cis-Baikalia there were the spirits of the lower categories, i.e. the bokholdois, shudkhers and shulmuses, ada or anakhais, ukheri ezi, etc. They caused the misfortune, illnesses, even death. The people were afraid of the evil spirits, they kept their children away from them. They called a shaman, completed smudging, put a knife under the pillow to save their children or an axe under the threshold, they had at home the sanctified mirrors, bells, polecats fur. The objects sanctified were called hakhyuuhan (savior) in the Buryat language.
The everyday traditions and customs
The epic shows that the traditional occupation of the Buryats was hunting, then cattlebreeding. The battles with the epical personages that were quite often the embodiments of the powerful natural forces, for example, Gal-Nurman who personified the prime element of the Fire, played a big part in the life of the Buryats. Before the description of the battle the epic-tellers gave a detailed account of the clothes, weapon and armour of the heroes. A good place in the life of the people was given to the tournaments, for example when matchmaking. After a successful matchmaking they had a big feast, which lasted nine days, on the tenth day the guests went home.