Night Flights

When I was five, I knew I had a remarkable power. I could fly. Sometimes I’d sit on top of the stairs leading down to the basement, cross my legs (right over left), and float down without touching a single step.

The key was always to have complete faith in my ability; even the tiniest bit of doubt would keep me from flying. But I know I could do it. Flying was effortless.

Other flights took place during my dreams. I would take a few running steps, jump into the air and dive toward the ground, as if I had a diving board and a deep pool before me. A few inches before impact, I’d start skimming along the grass, arms outstretched (“Like Peter Pan,” I’d say, “not like Superman”), then once I had sufficient momentum I’d vault into the sky, skimming the treetops, swooping and doing aerial tricks, playing like an otter in no less fluid a medium.

Kids on the ground would see me and be delighted, and I was able to teach a few of them how to fly, too. Most couldn’t do it, because they couldn’t summon up enough blind faith.

I would wake from these dreams with my heart pounding and my cheeks cold and flushed, even when the dreadful heat and humidity of summer would choke our AC-less home.

I told my friends of my ability. One or two thought they remembered seeing me fly in their dreams. The rest never seemed to think the idea was outlandish, though childhood does engender a certain blanket acceptance of strange ideas.

When I was six I went to the top of the stairs, sat and crossed my legs (right over left), and was suddenly filled with doubt. Could all those previous stairway flights have been dreams too? No, it happened too many times, it was too real. But willing oneself to believe, and believing wholeheartedly, are two different things, and it was no great surprise when I tumbled down the stairs and hurt myself pretty badly.

When my mother came to help me, my first words were, “I forgot how to believe.”

I never flew again.

Where the Leylines Led

Ever since Alfred Watkins announced his discovery of a network of ancient alignments criss-crossing the British countryside, the history of leys has been less of an old straight track and more of a long and winding road, one that has taken detours into everything from ufology to dowsing. Veteran ley hunter Paul Devereux sets out to map this remarkable journey and to see where it has taken us today.

by Paul Devereux, for The Fortean Times

June 2007

Following Alfred Watkins’s famous vision of straight paths crossing the landscape, the concept of “leys” has evolved over several decades, but it has become increasingly obvious to research-minded ley students that there never were such features as “leys,” let alone “leylines.” At best, these were convenient labels to cover a multitude of both actual and imaginary alignments from many different eras and cultures.

This was because most enthusiasts were projecting their own ideas onto the past in various ways. But the handful of research-minded ley hunters cared about actual archæology, and they followed where the mythical leys led—a journey in which they have made some unexpected findings, proving William Blake’s dictum that if the fool persists in his folly he will eventually become wise. These vary from discovering that culturally contrived altered mind-states in past societies caused markings to be left on the land to unravelling the meaning of a passage in a Shakespeare play that has revealed the vestiges of a spiritual geography in Old Europe.

Because the realisation that New World features like the Nazca lines of Peru and other pre-Columbian land markings throughout the Americas seem to be associated with entranced mind states (typically triggered by the ritual use of plant or fungal hallucinogens) has been sufficiently aired previously, we need spend little space on them here—save to note that in the late 1980s, when the present writer introduced the term “shamanic landscapes” to describe such ground markings, few people were aware of the scale of mind-altering drug usage in ancient America and so tended to dismiss the idea at the time as being over-fanciful. Subsequently, though, the role of altered mind-states in explaining certain imagery in prehistoric rock art has become more widely accepted. The land markings share a similar source to these rock art images, so features like the Nazca lines are not to be misunderstood as landing strips for extraterrestrial spacecraft but as the markings of a culture encountering inner space. The human spirit has left its signature on the planet in some surprising ways.

Less well known by academics and folklorists, let alone anyone else, is the fact that the leys led researchers to revelations regarding largely ignored features in the Old World.

A Secret History

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Bard has Puck say:

Now it is that time of night, That the graves all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite, In the church-way paths to glide.

How many actors who have uttered these words, and how many modern audiences of the play, understand what the hell Puck, the archetypal nature spirit, is on about? Some generalized notion of haunting? And what are “church-way paths” anyway?

Only slowly did the ley researchers themselves come to understand that Puck’s words were a reference to the tail-end of a deep-rooted spirit lore that stretched across the Eurasian landmass from China to Ireland, so archaic and widespread that it may even have accompanied modern humans out of Africa, dispersing in all directions from central Asia. It also became apparent that Alfred Watkins had picked up on sections of church-way paths in some of his church leys without realising it.

There are slight variations in different cultures and ages, but the core of the deep-rooted spirit lore is that supposed spirits of one kind or another—spirits of the dead, phantasms of the living, or nature entities like fairies—move through the physical landscape along special routes. In their ideal, pristine form, at least, such routes are conceived of as being straight. By the same token, convoluted linear features hinder spirit movement.

Shakespeare’s “church-way paths” refer to a special class of old pathway or road in Europe known as “corpse roads”. In Britain, they can also be known by a number of other names—bier road, burial road, coffin line, lyke or lych way (from Old English liches, corpse), or funeral road, to mention just some. The feature was called deada waeg in Saxon times, which may be the etymological roots of the Dutch term for corpse roads, Doodwegen (“deathroads”). Corpse roads are primarily mediæval or early modern features. Many have disappeared, while the original purposes of those that still survive as footpaths have been largely forgotten.

The basic, material facts concerning corpse roads are straightforward enough: they provided a functional means of allowing walking funerals to transport corpses to cemeteries that had burial rights. In the 10th century, there was a great expansion of church building in England, which inevitably encroached on the territories of existing mother churches or minsters. There was a demand for autonomy from outlying settlements that minster officials felt could erode their authority, not to mention their revenue, so they decided to institute corpse roads that led from outlying locations to the mother church at the heart of the parish, the one that alone held the burial rights. For some parishioners, this meant corpses had to be transported long distances, sometimes over difficult terrain. Fields crossed by churchway paths often had names like “Churchway Field”, and today it is sometimes possible to plot the course of a lost churchway simply by the sequence of old field names.

But Puck alludes to a secret history of these routes. They attracted already long extant spirit lore, for they ran not only through the physical countryside but also through the invisible geography, the mental terrain, of pre-industrial countryfolk. Vestiges of this archaic spirit lore are revealed by a variety of ‘virtual’ and physical features across Old Europe.

The virtual features were folk beliefs that, while having no physical manifestation, nevertheless had a geographical reality. An example existed in Nemen, Russia, where there was the tradition of a Leichenflugbahn, literally “corpse flightpath.” There were two cemeteries in the town, one Lithuanian, the other German, and the spirits of those interred in them were believed to be able to travel between the two places. These ghosts were said to fly along on a direct course close to the ground, so a straight line connecting the two places was kept clear of fences, walls, and buildings to avoid obstructing the flitting spectres.

The Germans had similar virtual paths they called Geisterwege. Although invisible, these spirit paths had a definite geography in local folklore, and people would be sure to avoid them at night. A German folklore reference work (Handwortbuch de deutschen Aberglaubens) describes them thus:

The paths, with no exception, always run in a straight line over mountains and valleys and through marshes. . . . In towns they pass the houses closely or go right through them. The paths end or originate at a cemetery . . . therefore this way or road was believed to have the same characteristics as a cemetery . . . where spirits of the deceased thrive.

In Ireland and other Celtic lands, there were fairy paths that, again, while being invisible nevertheless had such perceived geographical reality in the minds of the country people that building practices were adopted to ensure they were not obstructed. There are startling similarities to the beliefs underpinning Chinese feng-shui landscape divination, in which homes and ancestral tombs had to be protected from straight roads or other linear landscape features (“arrows”) because troublesome spirits travelled along them and would bring bad luck. In Ireland, people who had illnesses or other misfortune, or who suffered poltergeist activity, were said to live in houses that were “in the way” or in a “contrary place”. In other words, they obstructed a fairy path.

Fairy paths typically linked fairy forts (a class of circular earthwork dating from the Iron Age), “airy” (eerie) mountains and hills, thorn bushes, springs, lakes, rock outcrops, and Stone Age monuments. Although the form of specific fairy paths tended to be mentioned only in passing in the earliest written sources, it is possible to gradually assemble a general picture of their characteristics. Most sources implied that fairy paths were straight. Writing in 1870 (in The Fireside Stories), Patrick Kennedy stated it clearly: fairies “go in a straight line, gliding as it were within a short distance of the ground”. Other accounts record that if fairies marching out at night encountered an obstacle such as a bush “in the way”, they would simply go round it and re-join the course of the fairy route beyond.

An example of this fairy straightness is provided by an account concerning a croft (now a cattle shed) at Knockeencreen, Brosna, County Kerry. In an interview in the 1980s, the last human occupant told of the troubles his grandfather had experienced there, with his cattle periodically and inexplicably dying. The front door is exactly opposite the back door. The grandfather was informed by a passing gypsy that the dwelling stands on a fairy path running between two hills. The gypsy advised the grandfather to keep the doors slightly ajar at night to allow the fairies free passage. The advice was heeded and the problem ceased. It so happens that the building is indeed on a straight line drawn between two local hilltops, and is, moreover, at one end of a long, straight track. If the croft were in China, it would be said to have bad feng-shui.

Fairies and the spirits of the dead enjoyed a curiously ambiguous relationship in the peasant mind: for instance, American folklorist Evans Wentz was told about paths of the dead in Brittany that he could not distinguish from the beliefs about fairy paths. Similar could be said of invisible ghost routes in Albania and elsewhere.

These virtual spirit roads were always conceived of as being straight, but the physical corpse roads of Europe vary between being straight and not particularly so—virtual routes are less affected by contingencies than are physical tracks. Examples of straight physical spirit/corpse paths include a Viking funeral path at Rösaring, Sweden, which runs to a Viking and Bronze Age cemetery, a stone road in the Hartz Mountains in Germany, and the Dutch Doodwegen, which were officially checked on an annual basis to ensure their straightness and regularity of width.

In Old Europe, then, there seems to have been a “virtual blueprint” concerning spirit ways relating to physical cemeteries and material, pragmatic paths actually used for conveying corpses to burial. The precise relationship between these virtual and physical features has not been fully explored, but as Shakespeare revealed, there is no doubt that the physical corpse roads came to be perceived as being spirit routes, taking on qualities of the archaic “blueprint.” For a start, there is an abundance of generalised lore about how corpses were to be conveyed along corpse roads to avoid their spirits returning along them to haunt the living. It was a widespread custom, for example, that the feet of the corpse be kept pointing away from the family home on its journey to the cemetery. Other minor ritualistic means of preventing the return of the dead person’s shade included ensuring that the route the corpse took to burial would take it over bridges or stepping stones across streams (for spirits could not cross open, running water), stiles, and various other liminal (“betwixt and between”) locations, all of which had reputations for preventing or hindering the free passage of spirits. In Old Europe, crossroads fell into a similar category—the corpses of suicides were buried at crossroads, for example, so that their spirits would be “bound” there, and for similar reasons gallows were often erected at them. The living took pains to prevent the dead from wandering the land as lost souls—or even as animated corpses, for the belief in revenants was widespread in mediæval Europe.

All these customary precautions obviously suggest that people using the corpse roads assumed that they could be passages for ghosts, but there is more specific evidence too. For example, a documented contemporary tradition relating to a corpse road at Aalst, Belgium, informs us that mourners had to intone: “Spirit, proceed ahead, I’ll follow you.” This indicates that the spirit connection existed when the roads were being used and is not some falsified folk memory added later. This is reinforced by the fact that one Dutch term for a corpse road was Spokenweg —spook or ghost road. German lore maintained that corpse roads took on the “magical characteristics of the dead” and should not be obstructed. “Church-way paths” were definitely associated with spirits, so Puck knew what he was talking about.

The archaic spirit lore that attached itself to the mediæval and later corpse roads also may have informed certain prehistoric features. In Britain, for instance, Neolithic earthen avenues called “cursuses” link burial mounds: these features can run for considerable distances, even miles, and are largely straight, or straight in segments, always connecting funerary sites. The purpose of these avenues is unknown, but some kind of spirit-way function must be at least one possible explanation. Similarly, some Neolithic and Bronze Age graves, especially in France and Britain, are associated with stone rows—sometimes with blocking stones at their ends. What was being blocked?

Spirit Road Necromancy

In the course of their corpse way revelations, research-minded ley hunters uncovered a forgotten form of necromantic divination. In Britain, we pick it up as the “church porch watch” or “sitting-up.” In this, a village seer would hold a vigil between 11 pm and 1 am at the church door, in the graveyard, at the lych-gate (where the cortège entered the churchyard), or on a nearby lane (presumably a corpse road), in order to look for the wraiths of those who would die in the following 12-month period.

Typically, this “watch” took place on St Mark’s Eve (24 April), Hallowe’en, or the eves of New Year, Midsummer, or Christmas. The wraiths of the doomed, but still living, members of the community would usually appear to the inner eye of the seer as a procession coming in from beyond the churchyard and passing into the church, and then returning back out into the night. However, in some cases, especially in Wales, watchers were more likely to hear a disembodied voice tell the names of those who were soon to die. One apocryphal story tells of a church-watcher who saw a spectral form that was so hazy he had to lean forward to try to identify it. As he did so he heard a disembodied whisper: “’tis yourself!”

It is a reasonable guess that the spectral processions would have come into the churchyard via the corpse roads, the church-way paths. This is supported by the fact that an old woman at Fryup, Yorkshire, who was well known locally for keeping the “Mark’s e’en watch”, lived alongside a corpse road known as the “Old Hell Road.”

The church-watcher custom in Britain seems to have been a variant of a Dutch tradition concerning a class of diviners called voorlopers or veurkieken, “precursors,” who were specifically associated with the Dutch death roads, the Doodwegen. They were seers able to tell who was going to die soon in the community because they had the ability to see spectral funeral processions pass along the death road they visited or lived alongside. Folklorist WY Evans Wentz recorded a similar tradition near Carnac in Brittany.

The Dutch precursors, the Breton funeral seers, and the British churchyard watchers would seem to fall into the same general class of divination as did those who perceived the spirits of the dead in trance by “sitting out” (utiseta) in cemeteries or on burial mounds in old Norse tradition, or by sitting entranced at certain times between St Lucy’s Day (13 December) and Christmas—a seers’ custom known in Hungary as “St Lucy’s Stool.”

Another manifestation of spirit road necromancy in Britain was “stile divination”. An illustration of this is provided by a Cornish folktale in which the ghost of a woman’s dead husband carries her over the treetops and deposits her on a stile on a church-way path leading to Ludgvan church where she is able to interrogate passing ghosts. Stiles were considered “favourite perches for ghosts.” Until now, stile divination has been mentioned in the folk record without its context being understood.

Spirit Control

A further facet of this same overall class of seership is described in Icelandic folklore, in which a seer would visit a crossroads “where four roads run, each in a straight unbroken line, to four churches,” or from where four churches were visible on New Year’s Eve or St John’s Day, cover himself with the hide of a bull or a walrus, and fix his attention on the shiny blade of an axe while lying as still as a corpse throughout the night. He would recite various spells to summon the spirits of the dead from the church cemeteries and they would glide up the roads to the crossroads where the seer could divine information from them. Crossroads divination was also conducted in former times in Britain and other parts of Europe, and is associated with traditions that the Devil could be made to manifest at such intersections. This complex of crossroads lore is also related to the idea that spirits of the dead could be “bound” at crossroads, specifically suicides and hanged criminals, for along with the idea that straight routes could facilitate the movement of spirits, so contrary features like crossroads and stone and turf labyrinths were thought to be able to hinder it.

This was part of a broader fear of spirits that might flit into dwellings. In Bavaria to this day, one can find convoluted patterns of pebbles at doorsteps to confound dangerous entities, or just inside the front door there can be spirit traps looking like little antennæ stuck into ceiling beams. Witch bottles were common throughout Europe – bottles or glass spheres containing a mass of threads, often with charms entangled in them, to forestall the passage of witches flying about at night. ‘Cats’ cradles’ of threads would be laid on the chests of corpses to stop them wandering prior to burial, and nets of threads mounted on poles would be placed along church-way paths that were believed to be haunted. Beyond Europe, too, similar devices were employed—in Tibet, for instance, thread crosses, mdos, would be placed on the roof ridges of houses as “devil catchers,” and much larger ones deployed around monasteries.

These European and Asian devices look very similar to American Indian dreamcatchers, revealing curiously similar notions about the passage of spirits. Curious that is, unless one accepts the premise that it all derived from a common and extremely archaic source in central Asia. The alternative explanation is that the common “wiring” of the human brain produces similar concepts in the minds of people in technologically similar societies. A final option, of course, is that pre-modern peoples around the world were responding to the actual perception of spirits moving through the land. But however far we follow them, the “leylines” cannot lead us to an answer about that.

Paul Devereux is the former editor of The Ley Hunter, a researcher of earth lights, archæoacoustics, and ancient cultures, and a regular FT contributor and columnist. His latest book, Spirit Roads, is now available, published by Collins-Brown.

Mountains of Magic and More

by Tirthankar Mukherjee, The UB Post (Ulaanbatar, Mongolia) Thursday, July 05, 2007

Kalidasa, the Indian poet-dramatist whose Meghadutam was translated into Mongolian in the 17th century (and whose name, I dare say, is totally unknown to the young in the country today), saw hills and mountains as the breasts of the Earth-woman.

The Mongolian would ignore the erotic aspect of the simile, but would have no quarrel with it if female breasts are taken as sources of sustenance, for venerating mountains has been part of the Mongolian life ever since the nomads began their exploration of the country and found they were everywhere under the watchful eyes of hills.

Indeed, in Mongolian mythology, the world is ruled by Heaven and Earth in conjunction, the former male and causing things to be born, and the latter female and ensuring their nourishment and survival. This gradually led to the demarcation of some 800 sites—mountains, hills, lakes, and rivers—as worthy of veneration.

In this, something akin to the Japanese sangaku shinko (meaning “mountain creed”) can be said to have developed independently in Mongolia. Both Shamanism and the Shinto faith express reverence for mountains as sacred places. This is an integral part of a wider veneration of nature that is a feature of both, with both believing that natural features such as trees, lakes, streams, rocks and mountains are the dwelling places of spirits which hold influence over human affairs and respond to human prayer and ritual.

In Mongolia every mountain was given a guardian deity, who could be male or female. The word “deity” may be not very appropriate here, but the English translation I could find of the Mongolian saying is of no help. It reads “Every mountain has a deity and every water body a spirit,” and if any difference is intended between the two categories of superhuman entities, it is not clear.

Anyway, on the steppes, deification was accorded to the hill that was unusually high, or had some outstanding prominence in any other way. This could be its significant geographical position, or any unusual topographical features. Simply being the tallest would suffice, but if it was eye-catching or imposing in some other way, it would be better. In places of higher altitudes, the honor usually went to the peak that stood over the others in a range.

Some of the deities are called “goblins” in English translations of old texts, but they are quite unlike the goblins of English folklore, ugly and dwarf-like, known for their propensity to mischief. These are creatures with a human head on a serpentine body, often friendly of mien, like the one the Oird Mongolians call the White Old Man. They could also be fierce, like the one associated with Mt. Tsambagarav. Whatever their appearance and general nature, they looked after the land around and kept it safe for the herds and the herders, and so had to be kept happy. The propitiation ritual usually consisted of chants, and offerings of food and mare’s milk. There was a wide variety in these rituals because of local and regional traditions.

What the obeisance to the spirits of the land did was to instill in the people a potent reverence for nature and all forms of life around us. This is what modern-day ecological conservation is all about, and the ancient Mongolians almost congenitally acquired the environmental wisdom that to live, men had to see to it that non-human forms of life also thrived. They also realised how delicate and fragile the balance between animate and inanimate was and how carefully this had to be handled.

Accepting the possibility that individual human nature, left unbridled, was likely to turn aggressive and destructive, the community invoked restrictions from the deity. To keep the deity from “getting angry,” which would invariably lead to “destruction of life (of both animals and men) and goods,” people were enjoined not to cut young trees or uproot grass for sport or convenience, or dislodge rocks only to be able to make a short cut. Certain animals were placed under the deity’s special protection and hunting them, at least in certain seasons and situations, forbidden, so as to ensure that supply would never diminish. The water spirit had to be propitiated by making certain that the water was not made impure by dumping carcasses, blood and offal into it.

No matter how or why they were chosen, Mongolians conferred titles on many or most of these venerated mountains throughout the land. Thus we have Undurkhan, Khan Uul, Khan Khentii, Khanbogd, Ajbogd, Ikh Bogd, Tsast Bogd. Honorifics were also common. Khairkhan, not exactly the word for the sky but a term that expresses the all-encompassing canopy over all that is below, was often added to the proper names of mountains, giving rise to such descriptive names of Burenkhairkhan, Buskhairkhan, Zorgolkhairkhan, and Suvargakhairkhan. In the case of many of these, the original name is often not mentioned, at least locally. They are alluded to as just Khairkhan, making for much confusion to those not familiar with the practice.

There are many apparent reasons why many mountains, as well as other places, in Mongolia have several names. The original nomadic herds were not likely to have much traffic with one another, and each named hills and peaks in their way as it liked and stuck to these. The later bigger units retained many of these and since these tribes usually chose not to be friendly with one another, they were loath to let go of the names they had given to places, even if they had no control over them any longer. Feudalism almost always encourages the vanity of human wishes. Many nobles associated their name with a mountain. Much more about all this can be learnt from Professor Sh. Shagdar’s “A Brief Dictionary of Mongolian Geographical Names,” a remarkable work of painstaking scholarship.

When Buddhism came with its new set of values it did not see any need to quarrel with this veneration of natural sites. According to the Jataka tales the Buddha himself had often been born as the guardian deity of a tree. Accepting mountains as sacred places was particularly easy as in Buddhism the climb to a mountain top is a frequently used as a metaphor for a seeker’s spiritual ascent. Assimilating this inflexible part of Mongolian life into its doctrines and rituals, the intellectually-inclined Buddhism set out to formalise the practice.

Over 280 mountains were described and praised in formal texts called sutras but many of these went out of circulation with the suppression of religious practices in the last century. A project was undertaken some years ago to retrieve them from secreted manuscripts and preserved memory. The task was huge and brought together the Gandan Teglichen monastery, the World Bank-Netherlands partnership program, the international Alliance for Religions and Conservation, the World Wildlife Fund, and maybe others. I do not know if anything has followed the publication in 2001 of Sacred Sites of Mongolia written by Dr. Hatgin Osornamjimyn Sukhbaatar who himself came from a place near the sacred mountain of Zotolkhan.

Buddhism also added much to the existing lore, often confounding for us the confusion of lack of correspondence in names of places, deities and such. As it gained power and acceptance, the new religion also enshrined its own deities, giving them Tibetan names and sometimes even Indian ones.

The sutra pertaining to the Byantukhum Lake in Tov aimag makes this process clear when it says, “The Lord Varuna, deity of all waters, and the Eight Great Goblins invited all Mongolian and Tibetan goblins to a symposium. . . .” Mt. Otgontenger got a new deity, Ochirvaani, most likely the same as Vajrapani, one descriptive name for Indra, the king of gods in Hindu/Buddhist mythology, who holds the thunderbolt (vajra) in his hands (pani).

Five of these mountains gradually attained national prominence and claimed country-wide reverence as a sacred site. These are Mount Otgontenger in Zavkhan aimag, Mount Burkhan Khaldun in Khentii aimag, the Bogd Khan mountain near Ulaanbaatar, Mount Altan Khokhii in Khovd aimag, and Mount Altan-Ovoo in Sukhbaatar aimag. Of these Otgontenger, at 4,021 meters, is the highest peak in the Khangai range. It is about 1,100 km. from the capital city.

One thing to note is that unlike sacred peaks in many other countries the Mongolian mountains are not revered because of any event that is claimed to have taken place there. Mount Sinai is sacred because the God of Judaism gave the law to the Israelites there; Sri Pada Peak is sacred because the Buddha performed a miracle there (and to downplay this Buddhist belief, the British renamed it Adam’s Peak, imposing biblical associations on a Sri Lankan site). The Mongolian mountains are venerated because they are the abode of deities of special, supernatural, and exalted powers, much like Mount Kailash is the home of Siva, the Hindu “God of gods,” or Mount Fuji where dwells the Shinto goddess Konohana Sakuya Hime, “the goddess of the flowering trees.”

With the advent of scientific socialism, there was no way a people could be encouraged to worship mountains, but Otgontenger was nevertheless declared to be “protected” in 1928, albeit in a secular way. Post-transition Mongolia was quick to revive the practice. Ritual worship of these five mountains now takes place at formalized intervals under State aegis. This year it was the turn of Mt. Otgontenger on June 29 and it was wonderful watching the whole thing on television, the bustle of puny humans against the serenity of the snow peak.

There are several legends explaining why Otgontenger holds such a prominent place in Mongolian hearts. The most popular takes one back to a time when Zavkhan aimag found itself ravaged by famine and drought, both leading to massive loss of livestock. With nothing that they could do to reverse Nature’s natural erratic ways, the suffering people decided supernatural support was called for. What they needed was a powerful mountain with abundant water sources, and their choice fell upon the Bogd Khan mountain on the Tuul. The strongest wrestler in the aimag was dispatched to drag the mountain to Zavkhan.

The champion took a big rope with him and when he was at the right distance he lassoed it on to the Bogd Khan. It could be that this mountain did not wish to move, it could be the man had thrown the lasso the wrong way, but the mountain broke into two. Those who have read Thomas Mann’s “The Transposed Heads” will know that in traditional Asian belief the head was the repository of all one’s virtues. The wrestler accordingly did not worry about the base of the mountain that had remained in situ but brought the peak home with him, set it up in Zavkhan and as the water from the broken head started to flow, the land was saved.

I have a copy of the Mongolian translation of the long Tibetan sutra for Otgontenger but my friends here found the language too archaic and convoluted for them to understand clearly. It begins with an invocation to Ochirvaani as the deity of the mountain, addressing him as a Vasu. This is also the Vedic term for eight divinities who form a group in the 33-strong pantheon.

Ochirvaani is called “a great protector who has the power to vanquish all creatures of aggressive intent.” He is “the Lord, with rich, holy and amazing attributes,” and he is entreated to stay on in the mountain so that “his worship is spread and his creations flourish.” So it goes on, giving the name or designation of the lama who wrote the sutra, and ending with the supplication, “Please give us people who can fulfill our wishes and desires to live together in peace and harmony with those around us.” One does not have to be a believer to harbor a wish like this that deserves to be fully met.