Alba Regia. Annales Musei Stephani Regis. – Alba Regia. Az István Király Múzeum Évkönyve. 6.-7. 1965-1966 – Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei: C sorozat (1966)
Tanulmányok – Abhandlungen - Makkay János: Some ancient sources to the Shamanism. VI–VII, 1965–66. p. 27–42. t. XV.
Similarly Inanna carries the tree to Uruk at a command. She takes care of it, but she has no more power over it when grown up. She has to ask Gilgamesh to fell it. — A typical product of Hungarian popular poetry is the type of the tale „The tree reaching the sky". 65 As stated by V. Diószegi, it has preserved ancient shamanistic traditions very well. 66 One of the tales starts with relating that there is a sky-high tree in tree royal court, . . . „among the foliage of which a dragon has hidden the kidnapped girl of the king. Therefore someone has to climb the tree. The king will give his daughter to the man who is able to accomplish this task." We have to compare this detail with Inanna offering herself to Gilgamesh, the hero felling the tree and expelling the eagle, the witch and the snake who have occupied the tree. With peoples which have dropped Shamanism as a practised and living religion already it is a common occurrence that the drum of the shaman is replaced by a string instrument. (The same thing happened to peoples which, though retaining Shamanism, have come under strong foreign influence.) E. g. the musical instrument of Veinemöinen is equally the harp. In canto 42 of the Kalevala Veinenöinen, being the first shaman, the first bard in fact, loses his harp, made of a pike bone, his instrument of magic powers, and it falls down to the Nether World. 67 He does not lament his disappeared harp with the words used by Gilgamesh, bemoaning the loss of his drum. On the other hand, we are forced to think of the lament of Gilgamesh over his drum when we read that Veinö bewails his tears, fallen into the Nether Regions („the bosom of the endless waters" is always identical with the Underworld in the Kalevala™): „Is there anyone in this young folk, In this young folk, in this fine folk, In this mighty band of warriors, In this group of a common descent, Anyone willing to catch my tears, To regain them from the bosom of endless waters?" We may suppose that in a more ancestral form of the heroic poems, being the core of the Kalevala, Veinemöinen did not lose his tears but some other property, falling to the Nether World. The central problem of this part of the epic is the loss and the regaining of the harp, or the production of a new one, respectively. 65. We possess an excellent summary of this problem, in the postíiumous book of J. BERZE NAGY: Az égigérő fa. (The Sky-high Tree.) (Pécs 195ß, 2. ed. 1961.) 66. V. DIÓSZEGI: A sámánhit emlékei ... p. ISO. 67. See on this hairp in detail M. HAAVIO: Väinämöinen. We are justified in concluding that it was just the harp which caused Veinemöinen to lament and to shed tears originally, it was this instrument the young people were summoned to regain. Later only the recovery of the tears remained in the poem, the tears shed by him over the fate of his harp. E. g. we read the following in canto 44: „Serious old Veinemöinen Muses in his mind: Music would be at place now, The voice of joy would be fitting To these new, untrodden paths, To these beautiful abodes; But the harp has disappeared, My joy is gone for ever Into the sea dwellings, rich in fishes, Into the stony abodes of salmons, To the fairies of the devouring sea, To the clan of ancient Vellamo; Nobody will bring it back, Ahti will not give it back." All these make the similarity of the Sumerian precursor of tablet XII and some themes of shamanistic tales, epic details, heroic poems the more conspicuous. Naturally it would be very difficult to enter into suppositions as regards the character of this similarity, mainly on account of the immense distance in time and culture. However, one may not regard the actually accurring formal and material parallels as. non-existent. As a matter of fact, they are noticeable in such details that it would be erroneous to suppose their independent evolution and appearance both in shamanistic beliefs and Southern Mesopotamian literature. Another difficulty in the way of clear-cut conclusions is the fact that our data hitherto known as regards shamanism come from a recent period, in spite of the evidently ancient origin of Shamanism. 69 However, theoretical considerations assure us that the mentioned analogies of shamanistic character are also of an ancient derivation. This is the only possible reason for the fact that they have entered the religious beliefs of peoples, living at an immense distance of each other at present, in a scarcely divergent form and meaning. One can hardly doubt, namely, that Shamanism of the Finno-Ugrian and the other Siberian peoples has grown from a common root, being a direct continuation of Shamanism of the Late Palaeolithic Age, surviving for a very long time in the eastern parts of Eurasia. This is FFC 144 (Helsinki 19153) pp. 150 seqq. 68. s. PATKANOV: Die Irtysch—Ostjaiken und ihre VoUkspoesie (St. Petersburg 1897) П, p. Ш. 69. See on this problem in detail J. MAKKAY: Alba Regia 2—3 (1961—62) pp. 5— IL 35
