Long before the tales of Santa Claus, images of the flying reindeer had been etched onto the Bronze Age’s stones, scattering across the deserts and steppes of western Mongolia and stretching into the Altai Mountains and up to the border of Manchuria in the east. On these stones depicted the reindeer with its antlers reaching to the back of its tail, its neck outstretching and legs flinging out fore and aft, as if not merely galloping but leaping through the air. The antlers sometimes held the disc of the sun or a human figure with the sun as its head, thus associating the act of flying through the sky with the sun deity.
The period between the late upper Paleolithic and the end of Pleistocene, or between 11000 and 18000 years ago, is called “the Age of Reindeer,” when bones and antlers from reindeer hunts have been found across Eurasia and in North America, where they’re called caribou. During the first millennium BC, the climate of Mongolia began to dry into today’s desert conditions, which was no longer livable for reindeer. Yet the animal continued to live on in local customs and lores as a mythical creature. In the 2nd century AD, a horse sacrificed in a grave near Altai Mountains was dressed in a face-mask adorned with life-size antlers, evidently to imitate a reindeer. In the 17th century, at a battle between the Oirot Mongols and the Manchus 60 miles from Ulaan Baatar, a Mongolian chronicle tells the wife of the Khan Daldyn Bashig Tu who rode into battle on a “reindeer with branching antlers,” signifying the local custom of dressing a horse in reindeer mask. The Epic of King Gesar depicts Gesar of Ling mounting a reindeer, representing his connection to the spiritual world.
The reindeer has an outer coat which is hollow and filled with air, providing insulation against the cold and buoyancy for swimming across icy water. Each hollow hair provides such excellent insulation that the blood and organs of a dead reindeer would ferment beneath the uncut skin, while other animals’ would freeze. Just as well, the indigenous peoples of Siberia have been making use of these animals to survive here, where a hot tea cup being thrown into the air would freeze and tinkle downward in a pattern of tiny crystals at temperature below -40F. The Chukchi wear reindeer’s hair as their outercoat, enabling them to stand for hours in bitter winds on the frozen sea by the Bering Strait, waiting for a seal or walrus. The inland Chukchi, who herd reindeer, would keep the thickest fur from the October slaughter to trade with their cousins on the coast.
Domestication of reindeer, which only occurred in Eurasia, is unique in that it was originally domesticated for riding in order to hunt its wild cousins. Humans have hunted reindeers for hundreds of thousands of years, but domestication appears to have begun 3000 years ago. At the heart of domestication lies a mystery, that taming of the wild was once possible, but impossible today, leading some scholars to argue that today’s wild reindeer is not the ancestor of its domestic counterpart, and that the wild strain that was domesticated no longer exists. Among the indigenous of Siberia, the Tungus had innovated their technique for riding reindeer, where the rider mounted the saddle on the animal’s shoulder instead of the middle of its back. It is less of a strain on the animal and enables it to cover greater distance without tiring. The Tungus used reindeer to colonize vast areas of the eastern taiga, which are still only reachable by helicopters today. Moving along rivers in winter and over passes in summer, forever pushing into new territory, a Tungus family could travel for journeys lasting for generations.
The word shaman, or haman, comes from the language of the Eveny and Evenki, two closely related peoples of the Tungus language family. It refers to a figure who draws together many animal powers. In Siberia, shamans combine a distinctive imagery of reindeer and of bird-flight. The elders of the Eveny people said that reindeer was created by the sky god Hovki, not only to provide food and transport on earth, but also to lift the human soul up to the sun. During the white night of the Arctic summer, a rope was stretched between two larch trees to represent a gateway to the sky. As the sun rose high above the horizon in the early dawn, this gateway was filled with the purifying smoke of the aromatic mountain rhododendron, which drifted over the area from two separate bonfires. Each person passed around the first fire against the direction of the sun to symbolize the death of the old year, then they moved around the second fire in the direction of the sun to symbolize the birth of the new year. During this ritual, each person was said to be borne aloft on the back of a winged reindeer which carried its human passenger towards a land of happiness and plenty near the sun. This annual soul-voyage let their souls leave their bodies and fly to other realms of the cosmos.
Like the Sámi, the Eveny people have had to forgo their nomad way of life, following state policies in an effort to turn them toward civilization. Under Russia, then the Soviet Union’s literary programme, many of their brightest sons and daughters were taken to the Hertzen Institute, a special native training college in Leningrad, to become teachers, administrators, and administrative workers. By the 1960’s, whole families were sent on free holidays throughout the Soviet Union and neighboring countries of the socialist bloc, touring Genghis Khan’s medieval capital in Mongolia, conversing about Franz Kafka in a Prague cafe with a Cuban intellectual, or rest-curing at a health farm on the Black Sea. Yet, they have also managed to keep many of their customs intact. A most notable tradition is their burial tradition, in which their dead lie in-house for a week, where a plate with seven pieces of raw reindeer liver is offered next to their bedside so that they would never go hungry. They are now required to bury the body 6-feet underground, but in the old days, when everyone lived in the taiga, the body was laid on the ground or placed in a wooden coffin and lodged on a platform or in a living tree, suspended between the earth and the sky to which the soul would soar.
A reindeer, who is the dead person’s favorite uchakh, a trained reindeer that can be ridden and harnessed for transportation, is then sacrificed so that they could ride it over the swamps and precipices of the next world. The reindeer’s meat, as well as the seven pieces of liver placed earlier at the bedside, are eaten on the spot along with tea and vodka. The skulls and antlers are set high up on a post next to the grave. All other bones are scrupulously gathered together in a wooden box, which is placed underneath the antlers. Every bone has to be extracted from the flesh and meticulously accounted for. If even the smallest bone is lost, the reindeer would be lame and the dead person immobilized. Finally, the skin is suspended from a tree, where it preserves the animal’s original form. But sometimes, it is burnt along with other personal effects.
Bibliography
Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living With Animals and Spirits in Siberia.
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