Nobody can put a price on forgetting since there is no way to quantify what is being lost. Forgetting is “like an endless abyss” and “no accurate measure to destruction,” therefore it never ends. The absence and loss implied by forgetting makes its study difficult. Forgetting becomes remembering the moment it is brought up. Is it true that no one is aware of anything’s existence if it is truly forgotten? Although this chapter does not have the space to discuss these topics in depth, one possible response is that culturally unique symbols or media may symbolize forgetfulness. The amount of memory is not indicative of forgetfulness nor can it be used to determine it.
Recollection is the key. Volume is irrelevant; what differentiates forgetting from remembering are distinct sets of symbols, things, representations, and interactions. Furthermore, unlike categories based on remembering, those based on forgetting have an impact on cultural and social behaviors; this further demonstrates that forgetting is a process and not an event.
We covered in the last chapter that knowing the spirits’ identities—including their names, familial relationships, huudal buudal, titles, social networks, and more—is the key to remembering. These literary evocations serve as spoken tributes to the primal spirits. In addition, when spirits inhabit a shaman, they transmit stories from the past through the shaman’s body, enriching the living’s representations of memory and the past.
Incomplete spirits with partial identities, relationships, and belongings are a representation of the Buryats’ emphasis on forgetting rather than remembering. Partial or even “empty” recollections constitute incomplete spirits. Depending on how much they have forgotten, they don’t always show up by taking over a shaman’s body and telling tales. The shamans’ chances of successfully calling upon them decrease in proportion to how obscure they become. These departed souls remind the living of their presence by the misfortunes they bring, since they have forgotten and lost contact. The Buryats believe that the vengeance of forgotten spirits is responsible for crimes, early deaths, recurrent illnesses, broken relationships, violence, and poverty.
Since forgetting is an ongoing process, it does not create uniform spirits but rather an endless variety lacking in some respect. From uheer at one extreme to well-remembered ongon and ug garval at the other, there is a vast spectrum spanning from entirely forgotten to somewhat recalled spirits. Ongon, the Buryat name for spirits in general, may also be used to describe these ghosts. Neither are they uheer—nebulous, “empty,” wrathful beings that wander the planet—nor are they completely settled ug garval in the heavenly realm. In general, the majority of Buryats call their ug garval dutuu.
For this reason, a large number of people are always striving to ug garvalaa guitseekh, which translates to the urge to find and worship each and every spirit that originated in their family tree. Hence, it is imperative that families bring to light their long-lost ancestral spirits, as well as their true identities and huudal buudal. The Buryats carefully differentiate between remembering and forgetting by changing their depictions of the two concepts, even if forgotten spirits might be understood as unresolved memories that continuously rupturing into the present from the past.
Uheer symbolize forgetfulness more than anything else. The political brutality of the 1930s and the state’s repression of memory, including shamanic traditions, produced more uheer, even though they are not novel to Mongolian spiritual imagination. Uheer became the fate of the victims of state brutality because of secret burials in unmarked graves, mass executions, and a lack of mourning traditions. When transforming a soul into an origin spirit, it is necessary to provide the exact location of the deceased’s death.
Those who pass away without somebody there to help them recall where they died and perform the appropriate evocations do not enter the afterlife as origin spirits. Uheer is created by mass killings, clandestine mass graves, and the erasing of individual identities from the perspective of shamanism. This is true not just for the souls of forgotten shamans but also for the souls of regular people who aren’t shamans.
It is considered particularly terrible to die alone, without witnesses or loved ones, in a culture where the majority of people live with relatives. Executed political violence victims perished in a spiritual wasteland, apart from any compassionate onlookers or record-keepers of their final resting place. This kind of death has social as well as medical causes. When a person’s identity is erased and the exact moment and location of their death are unknown, it becomes impossible to observe appropriate mourning rites.
If the deceased was a shaman, their loved ones would have wanted to know the exact location of their death so they could honor it with lyrical evocations. In addition to the souls of those who perished in the purge, many more who died of natural reasons without appropriate mourning or burial also became uheer. Notably and unsettlingly, there are no government records on the victims of violence, and there is a plethora of uheer. According to Kaplonski, an expert on the 1930s purges, the national and historical archives, as well as the internal ministry records, show virtually little evidence of brutality against Buryats.
The lack of appropriate grieving and burial even caused the souls of some common people to become uheer after they died peacefully. Because of the dangers associated with passing on shamanism during the communist era, which included the state’s crackdown on religion, subsequent generations were either unaware of it or had minimal exposure to it. Even under socialism, the Buryats couldn’t reanimate their dead and generate new origin spirits. Additionally, they severed ties with the majority of their pre-socialist ancestors. Some of the lost origin spirits and many souls of those who died under socialism became uheer.