An ancient Nenets legend tells that once a year, when the Great Sun reigns in the sky, the Sun Baba rises from under the frozen and lifeless earth, carrying in her womb a baby who is destined to become a spirit of fertility
The Sun Baba illuminates the surroundings with dazzling light, where shepherds, hunters, warriors and tribal leaders flock to worship her. The day comes when the sun deity makes a loud sound, like the sound of thousands of trumpets, and spews out the spirit of fertility from his womb.
And at the same moment the earth turns green, wild animals and domestic creatures give birth, and happy mothers give birth to long-awaited children!
Another legend among the Mansi people tells of how a golden idol crossed the Ural stone belt, but was stopped by an old shaman who considered himself its master. The angry golden idol growled in a thunderous voice, from which all living things in the area died, and the impudent shaman himself turned to stone.
Another story related to the Yakut heroic epic tells about a copper statue standing in the middle of impenetrable swamps, which, when enemies approached, began to emit a sound similar to the chirping of many crickets and emit a blue glow into the sky.
These legends, like dozens of other similar legends of the northern and Siberian peoples, are associated with one of the most mysterious phenomena of the pagan culture of the Eurasian continent - the Golden Baba.
The detachment never returned …
The first mention of her officially extant to this day refers to the Sophia Chronicle of 1398. The chronicle tells about the death of the Monk Stephen of Perm, who brought the light of Orthodoxy to the peoples who lived in the northern forests and worshiped fire, stone and the Golden Baba. The next time this name appears two hundred years later. In 1595, one of the maps of the medieval cartographer G. Mercater was published, on which there is an inscription near the mouth of the Ob River, which sounds in translation as "Golden Woman".
In the 15th century, the Novgorodians-ushkuiniks, who were actively involved in trade, brought to Russia information about "people unknown in the Eastern country, the growth of small, eating each other and praying to the golden idol."
Already in the 16th century in Muscovy the legends about the mysterious golden idol were well known. This is evidenced by the memoirs of the Austrian ambassador S. Herberstein, dated 1520, in which rumors are described that behind the Urals in a stone sanctuary there is a large golden idol in the form of a pregnant woman, emitting a deafening roar. In 1578, the Italian writer A. Gvagnini mentions the stories he heard about an idol standing "behind the cold and gloomy country of Muscovy", the roar of which, like a trumpet, can be heard among the mountains.
That is why the first Cossack detachments of Yermak, who crossed the Stone Belt in 1582, which were driven by an ineradicable thirst for enrichment, in addition to developing the mysterious lands of the Trans-Urals, cherished the dream of finding the famous Golden Baba. This is indirectly confirmed by the writer and historian of the 17th century Y. Krizhanich, exiled to Siberia, in his "Manuscript about Siberia and its peoples." So, in particular, Y. Krizhanich writes that, having reached the Irtysh, Ermak Timofeevich equipped a detachment of twenty Cossacks, who ordered them to move to the northeast behind the "golden idol". This detachment never returned to its chieftain, who three months later, according to the stories of the local population, learned that his envoys disappeared without a trace in the Shaim swamps.
Hypotheses, hypotheses, hypotheses
The history of the origin of the Golden Woman has excited the minds of historians, geographers and travelers for centuries. In his multivolume academic work "History of Siberia", the historian of the 18th century G. Miller suggests that golden pagan idols were made of different materials (gold, bronze, bone, stone) by many peoples of Siberia, since they are mentioned by the Khanty, Evenki, and Yakuts, Buryats and Khakass.
Already in the XX century, in the study "Siberia in the news of foreign travelers and writers" M. Alekseev made the assumption that the Golden Baba is a statue of the Bodhisattva of mercy Avalokiteshvara, who received the female image of the goddess Guanyin in Chinese Buddhism. In support of his hypothesis, he mentions the statues of Guanyin in Tibet, which have a white shell, which makes unusual sounds under the influence of the wind.
The Novosibirsk historian N. Uspensky, not without reason, believes that the pagan golden idol migrated to Siberia from Italy. When in 410 A. D. e. Rome was attacked by tribes of barbarians, they carried out of the plundered and burned city a golden statue of the goddess Juno, with which they returned to their homeland, to the Arctic Ocean. Since then, the antique statue has become the idol of the northern peoples.
A number of other researchers put forward a version that the Golden Baba is nothing more than that gigantic golden pagan idol that stood on the high bank of the Dnieper before the baptism of Kievan Rus, and then disappeared without a trace in the 10th century. According to one of the legends, the stubborn pagans, saving their shrine from the Grand Duke Vladimir, who ordered the use of a golden idol to decorate the temples under construction, managed to secretly transport it behind the Stone Belt and bury the sacred idol for future descendants.
Some of the researchers are inclined to think that the Golden Baba should be understood not as a statue of a woman made of precious metal, but the most ordinary bell, only of gigantic dimensions.
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Alien robot
But perhaps the most unusual is the hypothesis put forward by a number of ufologists and asserting that the Golden Baba is in fact an object of extraterrestrial origin, a robot made of an unknown metal that looks like gold, capable of moving around and making sounds. According to ufologists, this object could have been left by representatives of an extraterrestrial intelligence as a kind of information machine that transmitted "sacred" knowledge to representatives of the indigenous peoples of Siberia, moving across its vast territory. It is no coincidence that references to the Golden Baba are found in the legends of almost all indigenous peoples of the North and Trans-Urals from the upper reaches of the Kama, Vyatka and Northern Dvina rivers to Lake Baikal. In support of their fantastic hypothesis, ufologists refer to the legends associated with the celestial chariot and the Sun God who descended on it,who left his wise daughter on earth. When enemies came to the sacred lands, the daughter of the Sun God turned into a formidable statue, frightening intruders with its terrible voice.
Over time, according to ufologists, the mechanism of the alien robot failed and the object disappeared under the centuries-old layers of soil. However, even today there is a chance to discover this mysterious object, which, quite possibly, sends some signals from underground to the surface. One of the mysterious radio signals was recorded in the mid-70s of the last century during geological exploration work carried out with the help of supersensitive equipment installed on a helicopter in the area of the city of Salekhard. However, the signal was so weak that it was not then possible to establish the location of its source.
In the mid-80s, a group of enthusiastic scientists from Tomsk traveled to those remote northern places and conducted research using echo and dowsing equipment. As a result of two months of work, they established the presence of a certain massive object resting in bogs at the confluence of the Ob and Poluy rivers. However, due to the lack of the necessary funding, the studies were stopped.
To this day, the mystery of the mysterious Golden Woman has not been solved. It is possible that it never existed in the form in which it appears in numerous legends and traditions. However, I want to believe that the day will come, and this pagan idol will shine before us in all its pristine grandeur and original beauty.