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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 A Kalasha Tale

Dezáu, god of Heaven—some call him Dyaus, or Zeus, or Jupiter, or Tyr, or Tiw—decreed that everyone should keep vigil through all the long Midwinter's Night, and everyone agreed that they would.

But one by one, they all nodded off, all but one: a Kalasha man, a woodcarver.

He stayed awake because he was busy carving a statue of Dezau.

When Dezau saw this, he was pleased, and he blessed the Kalasha. This is why, of all the peoples, only the Kalasha have remained wholly true to the Old Ways.

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Welcome to Kafiristan, the Land of the ...

An Island of Paganism in a Sea of Islam”

The Kalasha people of what is now northwestern Pakistan have begun their celebration of Chaumós, their month-long Winter Solstice festival.

Numbering some 4000, the Kalasha are something of a miracle: the only remaining Indo-European-speaking people who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity.

Though, unsurprisingly, some Hindu nationalists have claimed them as Hindus, their religion is actually closer kin to the Vedic religion as practiced by the Indo-Aryans when they first entered the Indian Subcontinent some 3500 years ago: the ancestral ground from which the various “Hinduisms” later arose.

 

Who Is Balumain?

During Chaumos, the god Balumáin rides into the Kalasha valleys on a steed with flaming hooves to bring back light and bless the Kalasha people for the coming year.

It's unclear what his name means. The Kalasha themselves no longer remember, and various scholars have construed it variously.

His identity, however, is not in question. His secret name, used only in certain chants sung by a handful of elders at high points of the festival, is Indr.

He is the Indra of Vedic mythology.

 

An Indian Thor

Though no longer actively worshiped in Hinduism—to the best of my knowledge, he no longer has any active temples in India—Indra was the major god of the incoming Indo-Aryans' pantheon: the Divine Thunderer, chiefest of gods, akin to Thor, Taranis, Perkunas, Perun, Jupiter, and Zeus.

Like his brother Thunderers, his chiefest deed, as celebrated repeatedly in the hymns of the Rig Veda, is his defeat of the dragon Vritra.

 

What Has the Thunderer to Do with the Solstice?

Why invoke the Thunderer, of all gods, at the Winter Solstice, of all times? The Kalasha themselves no longer remember.

Italian anthropologist Augusto Cacopardo, a lifelong student of Kalasha religion and culture, though, has a theory: that, in its original configuration, Chaumos was precisely a festival that celebrated—and, indeed, actualized—the god's primal triumph over the chaos-dragon.

The name of Balumain's foe has been long forgotten, but an early night of the festival, featuring torchlit processions, is still called by the Kalasha Nong Rat, the “Night of the Serpent.”

 

A Vedic Key

Why does Indra fight Vritra? He does so to free the Waters, Cattle, and the Sun, which the monster has greedily imprisoned in a cave.

O lord Indra: you caused to appear the hidden rays held captive in the cave as the Sun, releasing them to all the people, says the Atharva Veda (20:40:3).

It seems likely that a similar myth once underlay the Kalasha festival.

 

More and Many More

On the final day of the festival, as the Kalasha dance to honor the god's departure from their valleys, it is said that Balumain counts the people. If they number more than in the previous year, then there will be yet more of them in the year to come.

In the face of a hostile Islam, Kalasha culture is currently undergoing something of a renaissance, driven, among other things, by the interest shown in them by Western scholars and, indeed, the knowledge that, here in the West, there exist those of us who are intentionally choosing to return to the Old Ways that are theirs by right of inheritance.

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  • Steven Posch
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    Yah-who? ;-)
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    Anthony Gresham says #
    So, during the eight days of Hanuka Yahweh battles Leviathan to free the rains and bring water back to the land of Israel. That a

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

I'm not sure who shot the white markhor, or when.

For 20 years, though, his head, with its splendid crown of corkscrew horns, horizontal like Khnum's, has hung over my fireplace, watching impassively over conversation and coven meeting alike.

(I found him at a local antiques mall on, of all days of the year, Midsummer's Eve. At our celebration later that night, I waxed enthusiastic about my new purchase to the group, to the utter mystification of a non-pagan guest. “Pagans have a thing about horned animals,” a coven-sib told him, by way of explanation.)

The Kalasha of the Hindu Kush, the last Indo-European-speaking people to have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity, hold this wild mountain caprid sacred to the peri, the mountain fairies or elves. To these goat-herding pagans, markhors are the “flocks of the peri,” just as Highland Scots refer to deer as “fairy cattle.”

(The Kalasha and the Gael are, of course, distant kin, sundered by some 4000 years. Just how old, one wonders, is this metaphor? And what does it say about us that we should expect the lifeways of Faerie to mirror our own?)

Really, he's the centerpiece of the room, the Goat, with a gaze that's hard to avoid.

Through the seasons, I deck him variously. At Samhain this year, I wound his horns with orange lights and hung them with black and orange ornaments.

Playfulness is one thing, disrespect another. I try to be careful about this, never crossing the boundary into mockery. He always lets me know when I've gone too far—anyone who's been around the Maypole a few times will know what I mean by this—and when he does, I always back off.

Somehow, the Old Ways always manage to come down to relationship.

After the Samhain stuff came down this year, the room seemed too dark—oh, our Northern winters!—so I rewrapped the horns in white LED lights with so strong a bluish cast to them that one feels cold just looking at them.

Something was still missing, though, so a few days ago I hung some faux icicles along the light-wound horns. Lights and ice: together, they perfected the look.

He wears them proudly, attitudinously. From Lord of the Sabbat, master of unholy revels, he has become the Snow Goat, lord of Winter.

Maybe, as we get closer to Yule, I'll cut some branches of holly from out front and make him a collar. Or would that seem to tame him too much? We'll see what himself has to say about it.

The Goat always gets the final say.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

In the dream, I'm in the Kalasha valleys for Chaumós, their great month-long celebration of the Winter Solstice.

(Living in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains, the Kalasha are the only Indo-European-speaking people who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity.)

The culmination of the festivities is to be the revelation of the Three Hidden “Idols” of the Kalasha.

When the three wooden images are finally revealed, I realize—much to my surprise and delight—that they are none other than the Three Gods of the Great Temple of Uppsala: Óðinn, Þórr, and Freyr, but rendered in a distinctly Nuristani idiom.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

In Which the Anthropologist Screws Up

 

“But is our religion true?”

It was the final night of Chaumós, the extended Winter Solstice celebration of the Kalasha of NW Pakistan, the only Indo-European-speaking people who have held to their traditional religion continuously since antiquity. Around the huge bonfire, drums throbbed and wine flowed; the dancing was wild and passionate.

Italian anthropologist Augusto S. Cacopardo has made a lifelong study of the Kalasha and their ancient religion, characterized by its polytheism, animal sacrifices, and sacred dances.

Posing the question to him was local informant Bairam Shah, a young Kalasha man who had gone to Islamabad to study law so that, as a lawyer, he could fight for his people's rights in the Pakistani courts.

Of his commitment to his people and their 4000-year tradition, there can be no doubt. As they watch the dancing, the young Kalasha lawyer asks the Italian anthropologist his question, one modern to another.

“But is our religion true?”

Here Cacopardo screws up. Embarrassed, he tries to fob off Bairam Shah with some limp-dick generalization about the nature of truth.

(Although I don't know for certain, I'm guessing that—as an academic—Cacopardo is probably a-religious himself, and believes that no human religion is true, at least not in the sense that Bairam Shah meant. But of course, you can't say that to an informant, even—let us not forget—to a fellow modern, a professional with several degrees.)

But I'll tell you what he should have said.

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Ek.

Du.

Tre.

It even sounds like “one, two, three”, doesn't it?

The Kalasha are the last pagans of the Hindu Kush, and thus kin to every Western pagan. Of all the Indo-European-speaking peoples of the world, they're the only ones who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity.

Numbering about 4000, they live in three remote valleys in what is now Northwestern Pakistan. Famed for their polytheistic religion, their wine-drinking, and the beauty (and freedom) of their women, they are currently undergoing something of a cultural renaissance.

Their language, Kalashamon, is a profoundly archaic dialect closely akin to Sanskrit. In its numbers one through ten, you can hear the distant kinship:

Ek

Du

Tre

Chau

Ponj

Sho

Sat

Asht

No

Dash

You will scarcely be surprised to learn that in Kalashamon, as in English, Ek, du, tre also means: Come on! Now! Hurry up! Let's go!

As I write this, the Kalasha are celebrating their year's greatest festival: Chaumós, their month-long celebration of the Winter Solstice. With its bonfires, sacred dances, evergreens, wine, and feasting, its sacrifices and sacred songs, much here will sound familiar to the Western pagan ear.

Each year at Chaumós, the Kalasha gather together, and their gods count them. If their celebration is worthy, next year there will be more Kalasha than last.

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