RUSIN-001 - ethnographic attestation
Mansi / Ob-Ugric
Russia - Khanty-Mansi - Yugra - Berezovsky District - Asia - West Siberia
Weather / fertility magic
вōт вōвнэ товлыӈ пāрт / vot vovne tovlyng part Russian
Source term: wind-calling flying board / rotating aerophone 412.21
вōт вōвнэ товлыӈ пāрт (vot vovne tovlyng part), Mansi: "wind-calling flying board" — the rotating plank spun to raise or change the wind; an earlier form recorded by Bogdanov glosses it as a "board that calls wind by rotating."
Etymology. Mansi вōт вōвнэ товлыӈ пāрт, "wind-calling flying board"; an older form Bogdanov recorded glosses it as a "board that calls wind by rotating." (high confidence)
Among the Mansi of the Ob basin, a thin rotating plank was once spun to summon or change the wind. Its very name preserves the lost purpose: the ethnographer I. A. Bogdanov recorded it as a "board that calls wind by rotating," which Galina Soldatova renders more precisely as вōт вōвнэ товлыӈ пāрт, "wind-calling flying board." According to V. Shestalov it served as a shaman's instrument for altering the weather and was sounded at the Bear Games, the great Ob-Ugric bear feast. The board is classed here as a rotating aerophone, distinct from the children's whirled disc buzzers (Mansi пыгалтоп, ларгалтап; Khanty щовкан) that survive alongside it; by the time Soldatova's team photographed an example at Shchekurya village in 1987, it too had dwindled into a child's toy. The memory of its power lingered among the Khanty: when Soldatova played the instrument's sound at a conference, the ethnographer T. A. Moldanova warned that the weather would now turn windy and that an incantation for fair weather would have to be spoken.
По словам В. Шесталова, она использовалась как шаманский инструмент для изменения погоды и на медвежьих игрищах.
According to V. Shestalov, it was used as a shaman's instrument for changing the weather and at the Bear Games.
Soldatova 2019, Traditsionnaya kul'tura 20(4):51–52 (citing Shestalov 2013:74)
- Object
- A thin plank spun on a cord; distinct from the two-hole children's toy buzzers it survived alongside.
- Function
- Former magical or shamanic instrument for changing weather; also reported in Bear Games context.
- Map confidence
- high - Shchekurya village anchor from Soldatova photo/PMA 1987; not a sacred or exact use site
- Source location
- pp. 51-52; photo field materials September 1987 Shchekurya
- Weather / fertility magic
- Toy / secular survival