“An Island of Paganism in a Sea of Islam”

The Kalasha people of what is now northwestern Pakistan have begun their celebration of Chaumós, their month-long Winter Solstice festival.

Numbering some 4000, the Kalasha are something of a miracle: the only remaining Indo-European-speaking people who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity.

Though, unsurprisingly, some Hindu nationalists have claimed them as Hindus, their religion is actually closer kin to the Vedic religion as practiced by the Indo-Aryans when they first entered the Indian Subcontinent some 3500 years ago: the ancestral ground from which the various “Hinduisms” later arose.

Who Is Balumain?

During Chaumos, the god Balumáin rides into the Kalasha valleys on a steed with flaming hooves to bring back light and bless the Kalasha people for the coming year.

It's unclear what his name means. The Kalasha themselves no longer remember, and various scholars have construed it variously.

His identity, however, is not in question. His secret name, used only in certain chants sung by a handful of elders at high points of the festival, is Indr.

He is the Indra of Vedic mythology.

An Indian Thor

Though no longer actively worshiped in Hinduism—to the best of my knowledge, he no longer has any active temples in India—Indra was the major god of the incoming Indo-Aryans' pantheon: the Divine Thunderer, chiefest of gods, akin to Thor, Taranis, Perkunas, Perun, Jupiter, and Zeus.

Like his brother Thunderers, his chiefest deed, as celebrated repeatedly in the hymns of the Rig Veda, is his defeat of the dragon Vritra.

What Has the Thunderer to Do with the Solstice?

Why invoke the Thunderer, of all gods, at the Winter Solstice, of all times? The Kalasha themselves no longer remember.

Italian anthropologist Augusto Cacopardo, a lifelong student of Kalasha religion and culture, though, has a theory: that, in its original configuration, Chaumos was precisely a festival that celebrated—and, indeed, actualized—the god's primal triumph over the chaos-dragon.

The name of Balumain's foe has been long forgotten, but an early night of the festival, featuring torchlit processions, is still called by the Kalasha Nong Rat, the “Night of the Serpent.”

A Vedic Key

Why does Indra fight Vritra? He does so to free the Waters, Cattle, and the Sun, which the monster has greedily imprisoned in a cave.

O lord Indra: you caused to appear the hidden rays held captive in the cave as the Sun, releasing them to all the people, says the Atharva Veda (20:40:3).

It seems likely that a similar myth once underlay the Kalasha festival.

More and Many More

On the final day of the festival, as the Kalasha dance to honor the god's departure from their valleys, it is said that Balumain counts the people. If they number more than in the previous year, then there will be yet more of them in the year to come.

In the face of a hostile Islam, Kalasha culture is currently undergoing something of a renaissance, driven, among other things, by the interest shown in them by Western scholars and, indeed, the knowledge that, here in the West, there exist those of us who are intentionally choosing to return to the Old Ways that are theirs by right of inheritance.

May the Thunderer Balumain-Indra—and, indeed, all the gods—bless and keep the Kalasha.

Happy Chaumos, brothers and sisters.

In the year to come, may there be more, and many more, of you.

Augusto Cacopardo, Pagan Christmas: Winter Feasts of the Kalasha of the Hindu Kush (London: Gingko Library, 2010)

 Coda

 Interestingly, the Canaanite festival that underlay what later became Hanuka celebrated the triumph of Thunderer Ba'al-Hadad over the Sea-Dragon Yamm.

A pagan friend of mine who once lived in Haifa and has himself seen the awe-inspiring early Winter Thunderstorms over the storm-tossed Mediterranean, informs me that, in our day, strengthened by the lights of Hanuka, He still does battle.

One wonders.