Uilta. Spiritual culture (mythological worldview, traditional beliefs, holidays, and rituals)

According to the Uilta, the world has three vertically arranged worlds: the Upper world, the Middle world, and the Lower world. The Turu is the sacred pole that connects the Upper and the Middle worlds. The Ulita believe that the Tokp ө , a beam with dents, is the staircase people’s souls use to go up to Burakta (this is the Uilta name for Polaris and it also means “flint”) to get to the Upper world, and that name also means the Cassiopeia constellation (its stars form a staircase). The Middle world is populated by people. Life in the Upper world aligns with all the values of the Middle world (for instance, the Upper world has many reindeer).

The world of the dead is called buni . The road to buni runs through an opening in the “middle” of the earth (other versions place this opening on the bottom of a turbulent river). Once the road enters this opening, it forks: good people go left, and evil people go right (to a marshy tundra with midges). The fork in the road is the place where Karā(u) Amba sits; it is a dark force (an evil spirit) that guides (pulls aside the evil) souls of the dead. Pakta Nakagawa’s legend (Igor V. Nedyalkov recorded it in 1974) says that the Lower world is populated by Nuŋullu spirits that chase people to drag them to the dark forces.

Enduri is the supreme deity of the Sky and the Earth; the spirit master of bears is called Bөjө Enduri. There are other spirit masters: Ede, killer whale, is the lord of the sea; Temu is the lord of the maritime element (the sea, river, and any other body of water), Tava Edeni is the lord of fire.

Information about Uilta shamanism is extremely scanty (the last shamans left their earthly abode in the early 1920s). Uilta shamans were intermediaries between people and spirits/masters of natural forces and entities from other worlds. Uilta legends and tales (called nimŋa among the northern Uilta and niŋma among the Southern Uilta) feature Mergé, a heroic folklore character.

A system of taboos called eneuri regulated the life of the traditional Uilta community. The worship of bears, seals, killer whales, and some other animals played an important part in the Uilta’s life. The Yadukhi site (the “bear cradle” on the Yadukhi river) was a sacred place where bears were believed to produce offspring. The Uilta’s epic tradition reflects the realities of the Uilta’s life. For instance, there is an Uilta legend (told by Otitaro) about heroes traveling along a river and meeting Ambamali (lit. “only the unclean force”); Amba is the Uilta name for the bear that is connected with many toponyms such as Mount Ambamai with Lake Arme on top; this lake is bears’ favorite swimming spot in spring and fall. Thanksgiving celebrations were held in honor of bears and seals; these celebrations symbolized animals’ reincarnation in subsequent generations. The bear celebration was important; it was accompanied by a long cycle of rearing a bear cub in a kori log cage, its ritual feeding and killing, ritual dances, singing, weeping, feasting, smoking the skull and putting it in a tree, storing bones in the forest, etc. Special ritual dishware was used during the celebration; it was decorated with sacral patterns (for instance, ritual ladle spoons were decorated with curved or geometric patterns and with the image of a bear inside it), and every member of the clan performed their own role. Bears could be reared in cages or could be taken out of dens. There were cases of bears killed in a hunt, and then a celebration was held, too. Quite frequently, Uilta clans held such celebrations together with the Ainu and the Nivkh who live in the same natural and interethnic environment.

Yuri A. Sem and Lidia I. Sem noted there was information on similar  celebrations being held with ritual killing of seals and a sacrifice to the lord of the sea. However, this information does not provide us with a complete picture of the ritual’s specifics. Certainly, the worship of water in general and of the sea in particular played an important role in Uilta worship system. Currently, the Southern Uilta in the Poronaisk district hold the ritual feeding of the spirit/lord of the water/sea prior to the Salmonidae spawning run. As before, feeding (sacrifice) includes a ritual kasha made of roots of the sacred lolo plant.

Sevhe amulets depicting various animals and birds the Uilta hunt were worn and worshipped to ensure successful hunt. There are no extant descriptions of the worship of the lord of the earth. Yet in the 21 ^st century, the elderly Uilta still remember certain rituals of worshipping the spirits of the forest, taiga, and tundra in late June – early July before the wild harvest.