Zombies, werewolves, ghouls and witches, it turns out, lived in the Caucasus mountains, however, they were called differently. There were also genies, shaitans, Hungry Spirit and Mother of Diseases. Our ancestors lived in a magical world full of amazing creatures - brownies, water, wood goblin. With the advent of monotheistic religions, most of them died out, and the rest turned into demons and shaitans. But in the Caucasus, they still remember the ancient evil and know how to defend themselves against it.
Brownies
If in Russian fairy tales the brownie is an economic peasant, then in the folklore of the Caucasus, gender equality is observed. Thus, the Ossetian patrons of the Bynaty-Khitsau house are both male and female. This creature usually lives in the pantry. On the first Wednesday after the winter solstice, a black hen was sacrificed to him. And among the Ingush, several brownies lived in one house at once - according to the number of married people. They were called Taram - this is a good spirit, but for bad deeds he punishes with the death of cattle and even children. In Dagestan beliefs, the brownie appears in the form of a huge hairy man with one nostril. At night, he falls on the sleeping people and strangles them. To be saved, you must say a Muslim prayer to yourself or move at least your hand.
The brownie has a magic invisibility hat. If you manage to take possession of it, the brownie will fulfill any of your desires, just to get his hat back. But for this you need to have time to jump out of the door threshold - the brownie cannot cross this border. If he overtook the thief, he would take away his hat and beat the man with his paw on the backside. The imprint of his finger remains forever on the body, it cannot be hidden by any clothes: the fabric in this place is spreading. Even nowadays, seeing a person's clothes torn, they make fun of him: "Did the brownie hit, or what?"
The brownie-woman is described as follows: lives in a hay barn, invisible to people, soft to the touch, but heavy, like a stone roller. Having penetrated into the house, she is leaning on the sleeping women. She does not have a magic hat, but she has a necklace of large pearls. If you touch them, all the power of the brownie will go to the person.
It is believed that the brownie helps good people. But which of us is without sin? Therefore, remember the correct remedies for his visits: the brownie is afraid of fire and light, he will never settle in the house where the cat lives. Will not choke if there is a talisman under the pillow: a knife, dagger or the Koran.
Some Avars and Tabasarans also had a ritual of "self-desecration" to help get rid of the brownie. To do this, in the latrine, it was necessary to simultaneously eat bread and relieve a small need. After that, the squeamish brownie will forever leave a person alone. But people rarely resorted to such a ritual: after it, dead relatives cease to dream.
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A completely separate character is the house snake, the patroness of the family and the hearth. Inhabits headroom, walls, support beams or foundations. You can distinguish a magic snake from an ordinary one with the help of shahada - the Muslim “formula of monotheism”. If you say three times in Arabic, “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His prophet,” the house snake will disappear. People believed that if such a snake was killed, the owner of the house would die.
One evil man somehow found a snake's nest with eggs in the attic. He broke them, after which the snake left the house, but all the newborn children began to die in it. House snakes do not bite the inhabitants of the house and rarely leave a secluded place, but they make themselves felt by chirping, rustling and even ticking. They are supposed to be fed with slices of bread with ghee or milk, which is poured into eggshells.
Demons of women in labor and newborns
If brownies are often friendly to people, then other evil spirits are unequivocally hostile. Especially terrible are the demons, which ethnographers call the antagonists of pregnant women, women in labor and newborns. They can kidnap a child from the mother's womb, send illness and death. According to legend, demons do not steal the fruit from everyone, but from God-fearing and pious women. The theft takes place at night, in a dream, unnoticed by the mother. In the morning, the unfortunate woman will see a few drops of blood or a bloody imprint of her child's little feet on the doorstep or on a chest of flour. Only his mother can see this trail.
In some villages, it was believed that "mountain angels" stole the fruit from women. The Laks have preserved legends about the awdals - mythical shepherds of the tours. They appeared in the guise of men with a long white beard and white robes, or women with long hair, covering their nakedness. Sometimes they would carry the nine-month-old fetus out of the mother's womb and make havdala out of it.
Lezghins talk about the "red woman" Alpab - the goddess of forests, clean rivers and streams. She is seductively beautiful. She has green eyes and a dazzling white body. She walks naked, only red hair covers her nakedness. At the same time, she is very evil and is trying with all her might to destroy the human race. People believed that she was able to penetrate a woman during childbirth and steal her lungs, liver and spleen. But Alpab is dangerous only for women in labor - any other person can easily cope with it. If a man finds her at the spring, where she washes the stolen organs, and cuts off one of her braids or a finger on her hand, then she will vow not to destroy any more of his relatives and will keep her oath.
Fleeing from Alpab, the floor in the mother's room was sprinkled with millet. During childbirth, scissors or a knife were placed under the pillow. In addition, they fired from rifles and beat copper cups. And in one village they even dragged a screaming donkey into the house. Apparently, Alpab did not like noise very much. Nowadays, skeptics say that the demons who abducted unborn children appeared due to such phenomena as frozen pregnancy, false pregnancy. But nevertheless, many Caucasian peoples have preserved a reverent attitude towards pregnant women, they are trying to protect them with the help of talismans and not leave alone in the dark.
Mother of disease
The mother of disease is described in different ways. Most often it is an old woman with long, disheveled hair, cracked skin, sharp claws and fangs. She walks around the world and brings epidemics and death to everyone she meets. If she asks for food - expect hunger, if the skin - cattle pestilence. They also say that she is able to take on the appearance of a beauty in order to charm a man. Then she disappears, and the man goes crazy with love. In some beliefs, she is afraid of water, so she asks travelers to carry her across the river. Having made her way into the village, she spreads diseases among people and animals.
To protect themselves from the Mother's disease, the Andians brewed the ritual brew "gudi" from a mixture of nine cereals and beans. The entire perimeter of the village was watered with this broth; the Mother of Diseases could not enter this magic circle. Other peoples had similar rituals; they were performed on December 22, the day of the winter solstice. This "disinfection" should have been enough for the whole year. Balkhar had its own demon of disease - Aju Baba, a small, hunched over, neatly dressed old woman, with a stick and a scarf pulled low over her forehead. It bestows goodness on righteous people: the sick get well, the poor get rich, the mourners find consolation. The opposite is true for sinners.
Childhood illnesses were sent by Orutsala - a demon in the guise of a small, hairy, constantly giggling old woman, with a nose to chin. She came to the village at dusk, in the warm season. Only garlic could scare her away: Orutsala could not stand its smell.
The demon of disease was sometimes presented in a zoomorphic form - like a rooster with the head of an owl, but with a cock's comb. At dusk or at night, he silently sat on the roof of the house, portending illness. If he was seen too often, then they expected war, epidemics, cattle pestilence. To appease him, the entrails of a slaughtered animal were hung on a tree. Since Balkhar is famous for potters, a particularly successful jug, which was smashed to smithereens immediately after firing, could have been a victim.
The Rutulians left a lump of oatmeal with melted butter in the rocks so that the Mother of Disease could eat and not enter the village. The Vainakhs portrayed her as an eternally disgruntled woman with a knapsack, from where she got sickness. With her departure, the disease went away. In the pandemonium of the Abkhaz there was the god of smallpox Ahi Zoskhan and his wife, the goddess Hania shkuakua, who was responsible for headaches and other illnesses. In Ossetian mythology, the lord of smallpox was Alardy - a winged monster that lived in the sky and sometimes descended to earth by stairs. In the mythology of the Karachais and Balkars, a whole detachment of spirits of various diseases, including the plague, is known.
Evil spirits of cemeteries
A special category of evil spirits is associated with the afterlife. For example, the Hungry Spirit is the restless spirit of a dead man who has not received enough funeral alms. He wanders in the form of an incorporeal or quite tangible creature and frightens travelers. If he hits a person, he will soon die. The one who met him was to read a special prayer and give alms on Thursday evening. It was also believed that the Hungry Spirit was sated by smell. To make him full, cook flour halva or throw pieces of fat tail onto a hot frying pan.
In the Lak village of Tsovkra, a legend has been preserved about the spouses Abdullah and Patimat, who lived near the cemetery. Every Friday Patimat baked thin cakes, greased them with oil and distributed them for the repose of the souls of the dead. One Friday she ran out of butter and didn't bake the cakes. As soon as it got dark, knocking on the door began and shouts were heard: "Do sadaqa, hand out cakes!" Patimat replied that she had nothing to grease the cakes and bolted the doors. After a while there was a knock again and a voice: "Open the doors, we brought something to lubricate!" In the morning, the owners found the corpse of a baby dug out of the grave in front of the door. They say that since then Patimat has never violated the Friday custom, being careful not to run out of oil.
In different parts of Dagestan, even now, when distributing alms or at the end of a meal, they say a phrase-incantation: "Let the souls of the dead be satisfied!" If the Hungry Spirit was like a ghost, then the evil Kav from the beliefs of the Bezhtins is like a werewolf. This is a deceased (more precisely, a troubled person) who behaved unrighteously during his lifetime and after his death reincarnated into a shaggy creature with a cat's face, but without a mustache. Staggering around the ruins and hayloft, he scares people, sometimes driving them to madness or death.
There are Caucasians and zombies. Laks believed that misers and sinners after death turned into Khhurtam. He howls and groans in his grave, gnaws at his shroud and other dead people, and at night, having got out of the grave, attacks lonely travelers. They got rid of Khhurtam in the following way: they made an iron shovel red-hot, chopped off the head of the dead man with it, laid it at his feet, and then buried the grave. The Tabasarans have a character called Hyuchkaftar - a living dead man with long hair - and a corresponding curse: "So that you, having turned into Hyuchkaftar, leave the grave!"
In the folklore of the Nogai, there is an eternally hungry, eyeless dead man, Seapush, who climbs into houses near cemeteries and eats everything edible, and Obir with vampire manners: he knows how to take the guise of a cat and sucks blood from children and young women. Chechen Ubur is like him, sucking the blood of babies in the cradle. Judging by these names, the ghoul is not a purely Slavic phenomenon, but at least a Eurasian one. In addition to Ubur, the Chechens also have Almas, a female cemetery creature whose habits resemble Irish banshees. With her moans and howls, she foreshadows the death of a person.
Werewolf witches
Witches are close relatives of the cemetery spirits. As a rule, these are humpbacked old women who can fly, animate any object, predict the future, send damage to people and livestock, cause epidemics, drought, crop failure, become invisible, turn into animals or young beauties. The witch Kaftar-Zhanavar is so terrible that a person who sees her dies of fear. The peoples of southern Dagestan believed that this one-eyed old woman digs up the corpses of children in the cemetery and eats them if they are not buried deep.
Lezghins talk about Kushkaftar, an angry old woman who, out of greed, fed the hungry guests with burnt bread. For this, the Almighty turned her into a demon. The Chechen witch Gorbozh long before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows possessed a resurrecting touchstone. As soon as this stone was held over the body of the dead, he came to life. But more often she used a sharp knife. She lured lost travelers for the night, and ate them the next morning. There is a similar character in the mythology of the Circassians. This is a hunchbacked old woman-eater with iron teeth and huge breasts, which she threw behind her back.
Genies and shaitans
Djinn and their most harmful variety are shaitans, perhaps the youngest of the otherworldly spirits. They believe in them even now, and therefore they are protected from them with the help of prayers and amulets. There are even specialists who exorcise jinn from illegally occupied human bodies. Djinn-vagabonds live in garbage dumps, in abandoned buildings, in mills, cemeteries, in stagnant waters, in deep gorges, rocks, caves and in the forest. It is generally accepted that they can take on a human form, but they can be recognized by their hairy face, furry eyebrows, pointed features, a special cut of the eyes - not along, but across - and the heels turned outward. The horses of the Shaitan-riders always have three legs: two in front and one in the back.
A knife or a dagger, with which a cattle was killed at least once, was a talisman against the wiles of evil genies; the needle with which the shroud of the deceased was sewn, as well as the amulet made by the mullah. They believed that the evil spirits were powerless in front of a person who at least once in his life washed the deceased or made a gravestone for someone.
The people believed that the jinn and shaitan are inherent in the human way of life: they eat, drink, multiply and die, although they live much longer than people. In their world everything is upside down: when we have night, they have day. They say that at night in a deserted place you can hear the devils having fun, feasting, celebrating weddings. If a person caught the jinn for such fun, they tried to involve him in a dance circle and made him dance until exhaustion. To be free, one had to read a prayer.
Djinn could make a gift, help with the housework. Only this had to be kept secret. For the service rendered to one woman from the village of Mugi, the djinn predicted the birth of a son and presented a vessel with flour and sausage that did not end. For three years the family ate enough, until the husband began to try to find out where such an unlimited number came from. As soon as the wife revealed the secret, the flour and sausage disappeared. Their son also disappeared.
Everywhere it was forbidden to pour water over the threshold of a dwelling at night: you can accidentally douse the shaitan, and he will send a disease on a person. It was believed that paralysis comes from a slap in the face, which was awarded to people by offended genies. According to legend, in every village there were people who had the gift of communication with the other world. For example, a woman named Ososhat lived in the Avar village of Muni 15 years ago. The villagers believed that all her housework was done by the genies. True, she herself was reluctant to talk about this: the genies could punish for this with beatings and stop helping with the housework.