Raven augury in Tibet, northwest Yunnan, Inner Asia, and circumpolar regions: A study in comparative folklore and religion (China, Corvus corax).

详细信息   

• 作者：Mortensen ; Eric David.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2003
• 导师：van der Kuijp, Leonard W. J.
• 毕业院校：Harvard University
• 专业：Literature, Asian.;Religion, History of.;Folklore.
• CBH：3106675
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：9420823
• Pages：232

文摘

Ravens (Corvus corax), through their speech and behavior, serve as divinatory messengers in the folklore traditions of peoples throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The raven is a bird of augury in Tibet and Mongolia, and among the Naxi of Northwest Yunnan. In Inner Asia and across Siberia to Circumpolar regions the significance of the raven transforms from a messenger into trickster and creator god. This thesis examines how, why, and when the raven came to be seen and heard, religiously, in such differing ways. Historical migration of peoples and the transmission of folklore and prognostication texts are examined. Ornithological research on raven language is addressed in conjunction with a discussion of raven dialects and the demography of corvid species. In particular, it is the speech of the raven (and its cousin the crow) that lends the bird such religious and mythical intrigue. The question of how scientific inquiry can incorporate non-empirical possibility into its investigative discourse is also investigated.;Data on the role of ravens is also presented from the folkloric compendia of various religious traditions. Methodological issues surrounding morphological causality are examined in light of evidence of divinatory practices in South Asia, Europe, Inner Asia, Circumpolar regions, and northwestern North America. This thesis explores the bounds of such categories as trickster, messenger, and divinity, and asks why particular archetypes of the raven were manifest in different human religious traditions; did it depend on the archaic religious echoes from generations of intimate association with the bird, i.e. folkloric augury? Did it depend on the mood of the culturally refracted or historically transmuted raven? Or did it depend on intentional communication via the speech and behavior of actual living prescient ravens?;The central argument of the thesis hinges on the original translation of several Tibetan texts and Naxi pictographic manuscripts about the divinatory nature of raven speech. These translations are presented alongside my fieldwork in Tibet, Yunnan, Bhutan, Tuva, and Mongolia. I then survey the published scholarship on the subject, and propose a model for a way in which a comparative methodology can be developed to reconstruct currents of diffusion of archaic folklore across large geographic areas. With detailed augury texts from Asia, folkloric data from throughout the Northern Hemisphere, ornithological and ethological information about the lives and sounds of the birds, and a methodology for comparing this information, we are closer to understanding the language of ravens.