Folklore and Religion: Is the Shurale Just a Comic Character of Tatar Fairy Tales?

For Soviet poets and novelists, folk spirits constituted remnants of their childhood. The Stalin-prize winner and folklorist, Gumer Bashirov fondly recalled his mother’s belief that there was no such thing as an empty place—spirits inhabited their home, bathhouse, and every element of nature—and that his father, usually very strict, tickled him while playing shurale. Quoting Maksim Gorky’s keynote address at the First Congress of Soviet writers in 1934, the former civil-war Bolshevik combatant repeated that folk stories constituted a lens into the life, working conditions, and dreams of past generations and a form of prescientific knowledge.  Most important, beyond being a rich source of inspiration for writers as Gorky suggested, folk beliefs could potentially provide an invaluable reservoir of morality for his contemporaries.  While Bashirov blamed prerevolutionary mullahs for their fanaticism toward folk beliefs, he also recognized that Tatar tales were not remnants of a “shamanistic time.”  The story tellers he interviewed mixed elements of Soviet reality such as “respublika” with elements of Islamic cosmology—the Qaf mountain, the Simorgh, or the seven layers of heaven and hell—defying the idea that one could separate folk literature from Islamic cosmology and modernity.

Linguists also pondered over the origins of the shurale.  Rifkat Akhmetianov argued that the forest spirit was related to other Turkic and Finno-Ugric spirits, one of them being yarïmtïk (cut in half).  The term “shurale,” composed of the noun shura and the Turkic suffix -le in Old Chuvash meant “а person possessed by a half-demon.”  Later, Tatars forgot the meaning of “half” and the shurale, described as a one-eye and one-horn creature by the prerevolutionary Russian Orientalist Iakov Koblov, came to be exclusively understood as a forest spirit.  But in 1984, the Tatar writer, Sultan Shamsi criticized Akhmetianov for not capturing the uniqueness of the shurale, which in his view could be found only within the confine of the Great Bulghar kingdom that extended to the Black Sea and the Don River.  The Christian Tatars’ practice of sacrificing a white rooster to the shurale also indicated that the latter was originally more than a spirit but a god whose body, according to Shamsi, was reminiscent of Pan, the Greek god of fields and forests, son of Hermes.  The similarity between the tale of the shurale outwitted by a lumberjack who gave it a false name to escape, and the Odyssey, in which Ulysses used the same type of trick to escape the cyclops’s wrath, indicated that the cyclops in the Odyssey and Pan were early prototypes of the Tatar one-eyed forest spirit.  In short, because the Bulghars had close trade contacts with Pontic Hellenized cities and mixed with Iranian-speaking Sarmatians, the shurale was of Ancient Greek and Persian-Zoroastrian origin. In this new configuration, Chuvash, Maris, Mordvins and others simply borrowed the shurale from the Bulghar-Tatars.

The fall of the Soviet Union was marked by an increased interest in the supernatural and the esoteric.  Tatar imams, however, had to contend with a new reality: Tatars remained suspicious of organized religion, and some experimented with other spiritual paths: Hinduism, Buddhism, and various forms of New Age spirituality such as neopaganism, ESP, ufology, and channeling.  Tatar mythology became even more attractive partly because the founders of the esoteric path Helena Blavatsky and the Silver-Age painter Nicholas Roerich used fairytales, myths, and legends as evidence of an ancient wisdom that contained the secret of all religions.  Shamsi, enthralled by English-language channeling literature, publicized Tatar folklore as a major source of wisdom that Western esotericists, because of their subconscious bias, had long neglected.  For him, Tatar folktale creatures were related to the mysteries of Ancient Greece.  As for Tatar neopagans, they mixed esoteric concepts and folklore, but they integrated them into a practice that Blavatsky and Roerich would not have recognized.  Firdus Devbash, a PhD philosophy graduate from Kazan State University, who recommended New-Age positive thinking and the repetition of the Hindu and Buddhist mantra Om in meditation, advised Tatars to invoke their native spirits by holding their slightly curved palms, chest-level, toward the sky.  Similarly, worshipers of Tatar spirits should conclude their prayers by pronouncing “Amen” while wiping their faces with their palms, as Muslims do when they pray to Allah.  For Devbash, Nasyri’s account of the shurale proved that Tatars always believed in their reality.  In short, the shurale have always lived in the hearts of both Muslim and Christian Tatars (Kriashens), who, like the Japanese, have always practiced religious pluralism.  

Neo-paganism, however, made some uneasy.  A bizarre incident was reported in the Russian press that neopagans had spread chicken or sheep blood over the mouth of the shurale statue near Kamal Theater after trying to recruit adepts at the Kriashen Tikhvin church in Kazan, which caused a stir among the Tatar Christian community.  Contrary to the claims of Tatar nationalists, the Kriashens did not view themselves as superficially Christianized “pagans” and they had no intention to “return” to animism.

The Kriashens were not the only ones disturbed by the neopagans’ antics.  Imams as well were critical of Tengrism.  The first deputy of the Muslim Religious Board of Tatarstan Valiulla Iakupov objected to the neopagans’ characterization of Tatar jinn and other spirits as pre-Islamic and pre-Christian powers associated with Tengri. Another imam Jaghfar Mubarak went further.  All Tatar spirits belonged to the Qur’anic jinn realm, reversing the process of folklorization initiated by Tukay.  Taking visible delight in describing the shurale’s mischievous acts and external appearance, Mubarak humorously delved into the many cunning ways one could protect oneself from the shurale.  Besides reading the Qur’an, reciting prayers, or saying Bismillah (in the name of God), one could, for instance, insert a stick into the hole of their armpit.  Most revealing, Mubarak avoided reminding Tatars that according to the Islamic exegesis, jinn were invisible.  In fact, he doubled down, not without humor again: when the shurale lost a finger, another grew in its place.  Still, the shurale could be a reminder of proper religious practice.  Islamic prayers were the most powerful protection against their mischief.

In conclusion, the shurale is more than a comical creature of fable.  A sociological survey conducted in post-Soviet times indicated that still 69% of Tatars living in the countryside believed in the existence of forest and water spirits. The survey, however, implied that the belief in the existence of nature spirits could only be a rural phenomenon. The post-Soviet evolution of the shurale has proven otherwise.  “Modern” urban neopagans accorded reality to spirits on the basis of their relationship to nature, and others, like imam Mubarak, did it on the basis of scriptural authority.  In doing so, Mubarak, who also resorted to the occult to prove the jinn’s existence, responded to New-Agers’ fascination for the supernatural and their animistic perception of nature.  For public school teachers, as well, nature spirits taught children to be ecologically responsible, and made Tatar Islam unique, as Tatars sought to make sense of new global interpretations of Islam.  In short, it would be hasty to assume that Soviet atheism had successfully demythologized the supernatural, or that post-Soviet folklore had been successfully reduced to a market-driven entertainment commodity.  In fact, folklore is a communicative tool that constantly changes itself depending on the historical context.  While collections of folklore rarely provide a context, the post-Soviet reworking of myths and its pre-history can provide some visible clues of how and why stories take new meanings over time.  To repeat John Lindow’s main argument: folk spirits have always been part of people’s empirical experience and still play a role in the process of identity formation.  The shurale are no exception.