Spiritual culture

The Oroch were animists. This worldview is underpinned by a belief that the world around people is a living thing and all of its many inhabitants (e.g., people, animals, birds, fish, etc.) have a soul. A soul might not be visible to a human being, but people know that it exists and how it behaves. Most Oroch called the soul khanya. It has another soul khanya umuruni (literally “a soul’s reflection”). In addition to khanya and khanya umuruni there is a soul called egge that can exist outside a person and inhabit any object. To find such a soul means to gain control over the life of its owner. The soul always dwells inside the body and only rarely leaves it: sometimes it happens during sleep, more frequently, during illness, or in the case of death. The first soul travels to the underworld called buni, while the second is reincarnated in a newborn. The khanya soul cannot travel to the underworld on its own since it does not know the way. A shaman must accompany it. If the soul of a deceased person is not sent on to the underworld, it can become an evil spirit and haunt people. The Oroch were afraid of the dead, and even close relatives tried not to look at dying people fearing that they would take the soul of a living person to the underworld. A dead person was mourned for a year until a shaman sent it on to the underworld. From time to time, shamans would celebrate their helping spirits (uni).

Hills, cliffs, mountain streams, and rivers have souls, too. The Oroch believed the universe to consist of three worlds, the heavenly world bua, the earthly world naa, and the underworld buni. The heavenly world is the abode of deities and good spirits led by the Supreme Deity Enduri whom no one has ever met. He can only be seen in dreams. Most frequently, Enduri looks like a tall old man with a long white beard. Life in the heavenly world is just like the life on earth. The heavenly world also has mountains, forests, and rivers. The Oroch imagined the earthly world as a great animal. The shaman Sianu (Savely) Khutunka said that the earth is a huge eight-legged moose without antlers, and individual natural phenomena are parts of its body: a mountain range is its spine, forests, and grass are its pelt. The spirit Temu, or Namu Edzeni, was believed to be the master of the sea. The Oroch also believed in the spirits of an individual clan. People who drowned, died in a fire or were killed by a wild animal would become such spirits. The Oroch had a very special attitude to dogs. Dogs were sacrificed to master spirits at bear holidays when performing funeral rites. A dog pelt and things made of it were placed in a dead person’s coffin.

The Oroch also believe they descended from animal ancestors. Mostly they believe people come from the bear as is vividly described in one folk myth. The myth says that a bear found a girl, raised her, and married her. That marriage produced a boy and a girl, the ancestors of all the Oroch, the Nanai, the Udege, and other peoples. The belief in the bear’s rebirth shaped a special celebration, the bear holiday (mapava yvechety, mapava evigini, or abchi). At first, this holiday was celebrated only after a successful bear hunt when a bear was killed in its lair after it had fully emerged from hibernation. Later, the Oroch also began to celebrate the death of a bear that had been reared in captivity.

The holiday was celebrated universally involving members of all clans linked by marital ties and of clans linked by dokha relations. When guests arrived, they would start a fire using the ancestral flint and steel, and then boil some bear meat. Only men were allowed to take part in the holiday ritual. Women played the music log, udyadinki. Shamanic rituals were prohibited during the celebration, and a shaman could only be present at the celebration as a regular guest. The elder of the hosting clan served as the celebration’s master of ceremonies.

The Oroch believed the soul to go to the underworld after the person’s death. Consequently, the soul had to be sent on with a set of clothes and things for everyday life and hunting and fishing. The Oroch practiced several burial types: air burial (kholdokso), when the coffin was mounted on tree branches; ground burial when the coffin was mounted on tall tree stumps or a dais (peule); underground burial when the coffin was buried. In the past, coffins were made from old boats. In the late 19th and early 20th century, they started making rectangular-shaped coffins from wooden boards. They would select wood without knots and cracks to make sure ptomaine would not get into the soil.

Until the mid-1930s, the Oroch regularly took resources to their shamans. Shamanism was the heart of the Oroch’ spiritual culture, although it did not become their dominant religion.