The mythological image of the owner of Altai: functions and semantics

Abstract

The paper describes the mythological image of the owner of Altai in the religious beliefs and ritual culture of the Turkic and Mongolian peoples. It has been revealed that the degree of preservation of the Altai cult is currently undergoing certain changes, depending on the area of residence of a particular people. The image the owner of Altai has similar mythological, symbolic, virtual, and real features in different peoples existing in a single historical and cultural context. In most of the texts, the dominant functions in his character are those that personify the owner of the land and all living things on it, the patron of wealth, the deity of fertility and procreation. He embodies the features of a heavenly divine being and traditional land masters, making him similar to the White Elder from the Mongolian cultural tradition. We have studied the features of the folklore text functioning in ritual practice, considered the ritual text structure, determined the stable motives of ritual texts addressed to the spirit-master of Altai, and characterized the ethnic specifics of the sacralization and deification of the Altai space in the traditions of the Turkic-Mongolian world. It should be noted that ritual and mythological contexts suggest that connotative semantics reveals the ancient origins of the primary denotation with the help of epithets determining the sacred character meaning. The verbal material analysis has revealed that in some cases, the primary denotative sign is lost or acquires a new mythological version over time.