Thread: A while back I wrote this post https://oldeuropeanculture.blo... about a 4000 years old Siberian Odino culture burial of a man and a woman, which contained a strange clay doll...
Archaeologists were of course puzzled by this artefacts until they discovered that the local Chuvash people who lived near the burial practiced a ritual burying of a doll into the grave "when two people from the same family suddenly die one after another"...
Which explained the mysterious clay doll they just found and showed that this ritual could be at least 4000+ years old...
This is a great example of why archaeologists should definitely study the folklore of the people living around their excavation site... You never know what you might find...
In the Odinov culture burial, the woman was laid to rest on top of a man, lying on her front so that she faced him. The two of them were "wrapped in a cocoon of birch bark", which was set on fire before the burial...
Very interesting this thing about wrapping the bodies in birch bark. Because the old burials of the Sámi people dated from 900BC to 1600/1700AD had corpses shrouded or wound in birch bark sewn with reindeer-sinew thread...
From the High Middle Ages, the use of birch bark evolved and was employed as a cover above or a groundsheet beneath the corpse...
This custom of using birch bark to cover or wrap the bodies was also found in (some) Norse graves starting from Roman Iron Age and Migration period, all the way to the High Middle Ages... You can read more about it in this article: #d1e562 class="text-blue-500 hover:underline" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://www.tandfonline.com/do...
Why would all these people wrap their dead in birch bark? We don't know. But Yuriy M. Sokolov in his "Russian Folklore" (ISBN 0-8103-5020-3) writes that "Russians believed that birch trees were considered to be hosts for the souls of the deceased"...
This might explain why Sámi people wrapped their dead in birch bark...I wonder if Sámi themselves preserved the knowledge of why they did that...
This also might explain why Sámi people made their shaman "spirit" drums from birch wood and reindeer-skin, while the drum hammer was formed from a reindeer-antler. Birch and reindeer, the same two things used to wrap the dead bodies in... @occulva/s%C3%A1mi-shamanism-and-witchcraft-4ed557b81ae7 class="text-blue-500 hover:underline" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://medium.com/@occulva/s%...
Cool, right? I wonder if this part of Russian folklore is a bit they got in the same package with the Y-chromosome Haplogroup N1c, which is shared between Sámi, Fin and Russian people?
Or did Sámi people get the birch bark burial customs from Russians together with the Y-chromosome Haplogroup R1a which they got from the Russians? And that Odino people got it from the Proto Russian R1a people too?
The reason I am proposing R1a people as the source of the "wrapping the dead in birch bark custom" is this: https://x.com/serbiaireland/st...
Cockerel has also been identified as a replacement for a human sacrifice in Slavic agricultural cults... https://oldeuropeanculture.blo...
And as a replacement for a human "in death" in general among Serbs, who believed that someone from the family will soon die after they move into the new house, because every house wants to have its protective spirit, which is the spirit of the first person to die in the house...
To prevent this from happening, the man of the new house would kill a cockerel (as a human replacement) on the house doorstep (the seat of the dead) and would sprinkle all four corners of the house with its blood... http://oldeuropeanculture.blog...
So burying a cockerel as a replacement for a third death by Serbian people is the same burying a doll as a replacement for a third death by Odino and Chuvash people...
What connects Odino people and Chuvash people in Siberia and Serbs in Serbia is R1a Slavic population that lives in between...
But then, as I said, it could be that this third death ritual, just like the belief that the souls of the dead live in birch trees was picked up somewhere far up north by the R1a Proto Slavs from N1 Proto Sámi people...
And that eventually the third death ritual arrived with the Slavs to the Balkans, where it was somehow preserved, albeit changed, while it was forgotten by the other Slavs...
Or maybe other Slavs and other people also have this third death ritual and I just don't know about it...I would appreciate any new info about the link between the birch and the dead and about the third death ritual...
That's it. Hope you liked the thread and hope you will like the linked articles too. Have a nice Sunday afternoon...