As the world marks yet another International Tiger Day today, Down To Earth decided to examine the unique relationship between the magnificent big cat and the peoples of the boreal forest in the Russian Far East, the ‘taiga’.
The lord of the Siberian taiga is the Amur or Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica). The largest cat on earth, it has no natural predator, except humans. It can hunt and eat anything from wild boar to wapiti to even the Russian Brown Bear.
As in other parts of Asia, the tiger has influenced the cultural—and most importantly—spiritual lives of the indigenous inhabitants. While the region is also home to ethnic Russians, it is the indigenous natives of the Russian Far East—Udeghe, Nanai, Oroch and others—that venerate and worship the tiger.
While there are similarities between the taiga tiger cult and the cult of say, Bon Bibi and Dakhin Rai in the Sundarbans or Waghoba in western India, there are also differences. A hallmark of the taiga tiger cult is the fact that Siberia is the heartland of ‘shamanism’, the belief in spirits, whether good or bad and ‘shamans’, the intermediaries between the material and spiritual worlds.
According to Finnish illustrator, writer and folklorist Niina Pekantytär, Siberian shamanism is practiced by groups who were hunters and lived a nomadic lifestyle.
“Hunting was a sacred ritual and in order for the hunt to succeed, the job of the shaman was to take shape of an animal and travel to meet the deity who was in charge of the hunting. The shaman would dress up as animals and mimic their sounds and movements,” she says.
The tiger, or ‘Amba’, is a totemic animal for the Udege, who live primarily in the fabled Primorsky Krai of the Russian Far East, in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, the last stronghold of the Amur tiger.
The Udege’s founding myth connects them with tigers (and bears). According to legend, two orphans, a girl and boy, were in the taiga when they were found by a tiger and a bear. The bear adopted the girl, while the tiger adopted the boy. The girl married a wolf and their descendants are the Udege. The boy married a tigress but did not have any children.
The tiger is thus a revered ‘kinsman’ of the Udege.
In her 2018 paper titled Tiger rituals and beliefs in shamanic TungusManchu cultures, Russian academic, Tatiana Diomidovna Bulgakova, explains the various instances in which the Udege, the Nanai and other taiga peoples practice their unique relationship with ‘Amba’.
“The Oroch, Udeghe, and Nanai consider tigers to be masters of the taiga with power over all other animals: they can command an animal to dress in its expensive “coat” and rush into the trap of a hunter. The Negidals, Ulchi, and Nivkh also believe that tigers, the masters of the taiga, order animals to reveal their most vulnerable spots to hunters for a well-aimed shot,” Bulgakova writes.
Indeed, if a hunter loses his way in the taiga, he can call upon the master of tigers, who will come to him in the form of a tiger and show him the way out. The tiger, writes Bulgakova, is the highest judge and teaches laws to the people.
Even when these groups want to talk about the tiger, they desist from taking its name directly. Bulgakova mentions the example of the Nanai, who use the euphemistic term puren ambani (“dangerous spirit of taiga”) to refer to a tiger.
Perhaps most striking in this taiga cult is the strict taboo against killing a tiger. It is strictly forbidden for an Udege or any other tribesman to kill a tiger.
If, however, “someone is unlucky enough to accidently kill a tiger (for instance, in self-defence) or find a dead tiger in the taiga, he or she has no other choice than to bury it”, she writes.
The burial of a tiger by these groups is an elaborate ritual, as described by Bulgakova.
The tiger is clothed like a human, in trousers, dresses, boots, and mittens. The Udege and Oroch, according to the paper, bury the animals in “special blockhouses called saktаmа (similar to a barn) on four vertical columns. Inside these blockhouses, they spread out some soft shavings (kuaptel’a) to absorb the animal’s blood: the tiger is placed on top of these shavings. The rooves of the blockhouses are covered with birch bark and poles. Long strips of shavings are placed in the corners, denoting that this dwelling is the resting place of a dead ‘kinsman’. Special marks are made on the walls to let people know that this is a place which one is forbidden to visit”.
Not just this, Udege, Nanai and other taiga groups also believe that their girls can ‘marry’ tigers and ‘have children’ with them. Their shamans can also shapeshift into tigers.
While one may be tempted to assume that like other parts of the world, this unique relationship between humans and a non-human species is because of the tiger’s strength and majesty, Bulgakova presents a different hypothesis in her paper.
She concludes that when the taiga peoples “worship a tiger, they are not expressing their awe at the beauty of the mighty beast. Nor do they think it is actually a human; rather, they are addressing the spirit inhabiting the animal because that spirit is able to influence people’s circumstances via their mastery of the objectively manifested world”.
While these beliefs and practices may not make sense to many of us, they are a reminder of the role that non-human animals have played in influencing human spirituality. Whether or not the indigenous taiga peoples of the Russian Far East worship the Amur tiger for its beauty and strength, it nevertheless does not take away the fact that the animal does play a central role in their lives, especially spiritual ones. All the more reason to conserve the last remaining wild Amur tigers.