Avoid Over-Abundance
Religious Fables, Folklore, Legends, and Stories
From All Creatures Articles Archive

Submitted by: Yuri Klitsenko

[Ed. Note] While the moral of this superstition is to limit the killing, it still promotes the hardness of heart and lack of empathy for the animals, as living souls created by God just like us. Thus, it continues to promote killing and not Godly peace.

Superstition well-known among Native Siberians - great luck in hunting means death. The philosophy of pagan superstition is 'keep the balance' and 'avoid over-abundance' :

"Our friend Igor caught a strange fish. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was singing with different voices. I got scared and told Igor to put it back into the river. So he did. That winter, he had great luck in hunting. I believe he took more than fifty sables and God knows how many elk. They just came to him time and time again. The next year was the same. The animals kept coming. However, he did not notice that, in line with his good luck, his own son got worse and worse. He [the son] kept to himself and looked increasingly depressed. In the end, he went and hanged himself, and you saw for yourself how the father died shortly after, while hunting in the forest. Khozyain (spirit master) was in love with him and wanted to live with him. This is why it sent him prey in over-abundance. Khozyain could then go and kill him and drag his "ayibii" back to its house".

In a sharing economy, people have the right to demand that those who possess goods beyond their immediate needs give them up. With regard to the hunter-spirit relationship, this means that, as long as an animal master-spirit possesses prey in plenty, the hunter is entitled to demand the spirit to share its animal resources with him, and the spirit for its part is obliged to comply with the hunter’s demands. However, if the wealth divide between the two agencies becomes displaced, their respective roles as ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ would be inverted, and the spirit would now be entitled to demand the hunter to share his resources with it.

Go on to: Bear's Feast
Return to: Religious Fables, Folklore, Legends, and Stories