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Fairy Flocks: A Kalasha Tale

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

As in Scotland deer are said to be the fairies' cattle, so in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, wild goats are known as the fairies' flocks.

A certain Kalasha man was once benighted while hunting in the mountains, and decided to spend the night in a particular cave.

In the middle of the night, he was awakened by the sound of many people entering the cave. These were the fairies. When they lit a fire, he saw that they had with them a fine, fat ibex. This they proceeded to slaughter, joint, and roast.

They gave some meat to the man. He ate it, but hid two ribs in his shirt.

When the fairies were finished eating, they reassembled the goat's bones in its hide.

“Where are the two ribs?” they asked, but the man said nothing, so the fairies made two ribs from sticks of juniper, the fairies' tree. When they had laid them in place on the skin, the goat sprang up alive again, hale and hearty.

“We give this ibex to Such-and-so,” they said, naming another Kalasha man known to the hunter.

The man fell asleep, and in the morning found himself alone in the cave.

Going out to resume his hunt, he heard gunfire. Following the sound of the shot, he found the very man that the fairies had named, who had just shot a fine, fat ibex.

“Let me help you,” the first hunter said, and the two of them proceeded to skin and butcher the animal. They found that two of its ribs were wooden.

The wild goats of the mountains, the ibexes and markhors, belong to the fairies. No one successfully hunts them without their permission.

 

Of all the Indo-European-speaking peoples, only the Kalasha have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity. Numbering some 4000, they live in three isolated valleys in what is now northwestern Pakistan.

Perhaps most familiar to pagan readers from Norse mythology, the tale of the goats resurrected from their bones and skin is told across northern Eurasia.

 

Vivanne Lièvre and Jean-Yves Loude (1990) Le Chamanisme des Kalash du Pakistan: Des Montagnards Polythéistes Face à l'Islam. Presses Universitaires de Lyon, p. 65-6.

 

 

 

 

 

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Tagged in: Kalasha
Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.

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