Mountains of all literature have been written about the mysterious writings on the rocks, but an attempt to comprehend them from the point of view of cultural studies was made for the first time in Yakutia. “This is a message to descendants in the form of cosmic energy, a secret that the mountains keep. And this is the main mystery of our time,”says Lyubov Kuzmina, Candidate of Cultural Sciences
There are legends that the sacred rocks, on which the petroglyphs (ancient drawings) are placed, carry encoded information. There are different versions about the origin of rock paintings, there is also this: they say, their inspired artist is extraterrestrial intelligence. Drawings found in Africa are cited as proof: images of a man in a spacesuit, images of a comet, and so on. We do not have such images, but the material is rich: to date, 115 scribes with more than five thousand drawings have been recorded and studied.
Culturology is a synthesis of sciences and considers phenomena holographically. To understand the meaning of this "primitive graffiti", it was necessary to turn not only to history, archeology, ethnography, folklore, but also to psychology and mythology.
In Olonkho, for example, there is an image of a world mountain. The sacred rocks with petroglyphs act as a kind of symbol of the world mountain, they are part of the system of knowledge about the universe. Through them, a person feels his connection with the cosmos, it is through the rocks that the innermost knowledge comes in the form of energy to the chosen ones. Of course, this esoteric knowledge is available to few. These initiates are shamans. It is so now, and it was so tens of thousands of years ago. Secret knowledge allowed the shaman to receive information about the past, present and future. Around these sacred places, as the locals have long believed, there is a special energy; healings and other mysterious phenomena take place on the sacred mountain. Until now, the Yakuts do not pass by the rocks without laying a ritual sacrifice at its foot.
Surprisingly, the fact remains: primitive people who lived in the Stone Age, much more often depicted in their drawings not scenes of hunting or peaceful life, but some mysteries taking place with the participation of these primitive "priests". Researchers believe that only shamans were allowed to draw on the stone, so most of the images are mystical signs - guardian spirits, shamanic tambourines, symbols of other worlds.
Take a look at this figurine, captured on rocks in the Bronze Age (in the valley of the Mai River, a tributary of the Aldan) - it has no legs. Accident? And next to it there are two more human figurines with horns (horns are an indispensable attribute of a shaman) - they have only faces and part of the body depicted at all. The fourth figure is a little further away from the others, and his black mask seems a little ominous. Looking at the drawing, there is a feeling that the figures of people in ritual masks, arms outstretched, are floating in the air! And most likely, they make a trip to the Upper World, to the sun (which is represented here in the form of a solar sign) with a prayer for the bestowal of prosperity and fertility.
In the petroglyphs of the Upper Lena, there is even a whole series of ritual dances led by shamans. Figures are especially expressive in the areas of Chopchu-Baga and Mohsogolloh Khaya. In one - dancing shamans, and in the other - a ritual circular dance led by the chief shaman (he has four-horned branches on his head and fringes for his hands, tambourines, sacrificial cattle).
The most ancient images on a rock in Yakutia are located on the Tokko and Olekma rivers. The Suruktaakh-Haya rock on the banks of the Tokko is one of the oldest cult centers of the Middle Lena. A horse and a bull are depicted on the rock. A bull drawn in motion looks very realistic: with its muzzle stretched forward and its tail raised, it seems that its fury will burst out just now! But the figure of the horse is highly stylized: only one leg is drawn from each pair of legs, the outline inside is clean. You may ask: well, what magical background can there be in the image of these animals?
Culturologist Lyubov Kuzmina explains: “In ancient times, the Yakuts opposed a bull from the Lower World and a horse, an animal of the Upper World, personifying, respectively,“long winter”and“short summer”. The Yakut shaman begins his journey to the Upper World from some kind of elevation, for example, a mountain or a rock. According to the shaman Kurupp, the guardian beast is on the top of a high cliff. From what has been said, it follows that the figures of animals painted on the rocks can mean the guardian spirits of the shaman. The soul of the shaman (iye-kut) on a horse, a guardian spirit (mother-beast) soared into the Upper World, and, having turned into a bull, went to the Lower World to find the souls stolen by the spirits. Similar drawings of animals also conveyed the admiration of people for the largest representatives of the then animal world - elks, bears,wild horses as guardian spirits of the Iye-kut shaman's soul.
But in addition to the ritual meaning, the drawings could also have a purely utilitarian character: Under one figure of an elk (painting of Munduruchu on the Amga), horizontal lines are drawn, dissected by vertical lines. Local hunters and ethnographers suggest that these lines represent an original sign-pointer: not far from the rocks with images there is a place for the ferry of large taiga animals, where hunters in the fall and now shoot the elk!
What is most amazing is the unity of symbolic rock carvings throughout the entire territory of our vast Earth (from Mongolia in the east - to Spain in the west, from Africa in the south - to the Far North itself), which suggests that shamanism is a universal ritual practice … Near the rock carvings, shamans in different parts of the world to this day carry out their secret rituals (so you can still argue: whose profession is the oldest on Earth!).
This is evidence of the unity of the historical process, and the fact that man was originally a religious being. Some archaeologists even suggest that he had developed psychic and parapsychological abilities. And this means that the wild ancestor was not so primitive, since he could operate with symbolic images! And we, it seems, only have one day to discover the meaning of the secret message of our mysterious great-great-greatfathers …