amuletsOngonонгон

said ON-gon; plural ongod

also: ongod · yazguur ongod · geriin ongod · lineage talisman · household talisman

amuletMongolia and the steppeSiberia and the ArcticMongolia Russiaconfidence mediumneeds checking

This one is not fully ours to publish

This record names the people each practice is recorded among — Darkhad, Tuvan, the yellow shamans Otgony Purev describes — and does not generalise any of it to Mongolians or Siberians at large. It prints no procedure for making or consecrating an ongon, because the sources read describe objects and not methods, and filling that gap from a neighbouring people's practice would be a guess. — this project, following the ethnographic record as cited: Pedersen, Birtalan, Pegg, Shimamura and Purev each write of named peoples and named shamans source

The atlas prints the restriction and stops. Why.

Two things under one word. An ongon is a spirit in the shamanic belief of Mongolia — after death, shamans become shamanic souls, ongod — and it is also the made object that stands for that spirit in the physical world, put together by a shaman and central to the ritual that calls on the spirit's protection. Idols can be consecrated to a dead shaman within three years of the death, and are kept in the house, as a home ongon, or out in the open in a shelter, as a field ongon.

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When

18th century to now still carried cited

Period	18th-century shamaness to the present ethnographic record
How the date is known	ethnographic — somebody recorded it being used, on a date
Note	The earliest dated person in the source is the Darkhad shamaness Agaaryn Khairhan, who lived on the mountain that carries her name in the eighteenth century. That is the bar used. It dates the record, not the practice, which the sources read do not date at all.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Figurine
Made of	Wood · Iron · Cloth
Goes	On a wall · In a field · At the hearth
Made by	a shaman; consecrated to a particular dead shaman within three years of the death
Retired	no — it is kept
Note	Materials are taken from the one object described closely in the source — Yamaan's drum-handle figure, carved, with wire arms and suspended holbogo. They are that object's, not a general specification, and no measurement is published.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

Ghosts and hungry spirits citedsaid by Mongolian shamanic practice, in which the made ongon plays a central part in the ritual that invokes the protection of the spirit
Danger to the dead — charms put in a grave for the person in it citedsaid by the practice of consecrating an idol to a dead shaman within three years of the deaththe relation here is contact and continuation rather than defence; the source frames the black shaman's work as bringing people into contact with the ongon
Harm to a house or a field citedsaid by Darkhad households, many of which own lineage talismans (yazguur ongod) or household talismans (geriin ongod) that both contain and attract spirits

The story

The objects are described one at a time in the ethnography, and this record keeps them that way. For the Tuvan shamaness Yamaan, an ancestor spirit is represented in the handle of a drum: a carved figure with a pink head and chest, a black crown, and red eyes and forehead, with a wire for arms and, on a second wire, suspended holbogo standing for the spirit's earring.

Some ongod are not made at all but inhabited. Agaaryn Khairhan, a mountain in Khövsgöl Province, carries the name of one of the most powerful shamanesses of the Darkhad clan — Agaaryn Khairhan, also called Bagdan Udgan — who lived on that mountain in the eighteenth century.

Among the Darkhad in present-day Northern Mongolia, clusters of ongod stand in transitional places: the mouths of rivers, the border between taiga and steppe. That border is also a religious one, with the taiga and the mountains the traditional ground of shamanism and the steppe the ground of Buddhism. Many Darkhad households own lineage talismans, yazguur ongod, or household talismans, geriin ongod, which both contain and attract spirits.

The ongon matters most in black shamanism: the main job of the khar talynkh, the black shaman, is to bring people into contact with the ongon, whose spirit they call up while drumming in a trance. Otgony Purev records that in late-nineteenth-century Mongolia yellow shamans revered ongod as well, and that every three years they gathered at Dayan Deerh monastery in Khövsgöl Province to renew these ancestral spirits. Dayan Deerh is itself one of the well-known ongod.

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How it is made and carried

Made by a shaman, not by a household member, and consecrated to a particular dead shaman. The renewal Purev records for yellow shamans ran on a three-year cycle at a named monastery. This atlas does not print how an ongon is made or what is said over it: the sources read describe particular objects among particular peoples — a Tuvan shamaness's drum handle, Darkhad household talismans — and do not publish a procedure, and neither a Darkhad practice nor a Tuvan one stands in for the other.

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Now

Recorded in the Darkhad Valley of Northern Mongolia in the ethnography of the 2010s, with household and lineage talismans in ordinary houses and clusters of ongod at the edges between taiga and steppe. Morten Axel Pedersen's Not Quite Shamans, 2011, and Ágnes Birtalan's 2011 study of Dayan Deerh are the recent published accounts this record leans on; Dmitry Zelenin's Культ онгонов в Сибири, 1936, is the old one.

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