Folklore

The Dead Are Alive in All:

Ancestral Memory in the Land and the Oral Tradition of Old Magyar Laments

By: Fehérló Gortva

(Bartók, 105-106, 223-224) The 2nd variant has a variety of different lyrics and a varied melodic structure. We recorded both. To listen to Bartók’s 1907 recording of this traditional lament sung in an authentic style:

1st variant: http://systems.zti.hu/br/en/browse/15/1522.
2nd variant (“Romlott testëm a bokorba”): http://systems.zti.hu/br/en/browse/15/1732.

First of all, I would like to thank my mother Andrea Gortva who helped me with translating lyrics and building an interpretation of the spiritual and cultural context of this particular Hungarian lament. Her assistance in this has been invaluable. I would also like to acknowledge elders in music, scholarship and spirituality who came before me, from whom any knowledge within this essay came, and from the Land and the more-than-human living world from which all knowledge came. This essay itself is written with both some anthropological and philosophical (ontological) basis, but also is expressed from my own spiritual perspective. I feel that the kind of essay that this is cannot really find its way into an academic setting because of the privileging against subjective interpretation and personal practices when engaging with knowledge (i.e. rational objectivism which is the dominant epistemology of modern academia). Notably, this creates significant problems for Indigenous knowledge modes and oral traditions engaging with academic study. (Sepie) (Whetung (Nishnaabeg) and Wakefield, 146-158)

In understanding that this is grounded in both reference to academic literature and personal history and worldview, I hope the reader will engage with it with mind towards what they find useful or interesting and invest time in meditating and researching if they choose to, rather than approach this as a strictly “formal” essay.

In our single “Harangoznak Vecsernyére,” Nøkken + The Grim combines two melodic variants of the eponymous Székely-Magyar lament from Gyergyóújfalu (the “Csík” region) located in the Carpathian mountains in what is now Romania. The Székelys are a Hungarian ethnic group living in mountain communes who were largely isolated from urbanization in the 20th-century and preserved many old Hungarian folk traditions and folk songs. It is common in Hungarian laments in “the old style” for there to be a dialogue between a spirit of the Dead and the Living. Béla Bartók, who was a significant Hungarian ethnomusicologist, composer and anti-fascist, recorded and wrote down this folk song down in 1907 to preserve cultural knowledge, at a time when folk musics and oral traditions were highly derogated (and still are in many ways today). “The old style” of Hungarian folk song or what Bartók calls a “Parlando” song, has roots stretching back to ancient pre-Christian singing and oral traditions. (Bartók, 12-38)

In the first variant of this folk song, the main character who is singing is Uti Miska, a woodsman who cut down a tree and died when it fell on him because it was a dark morning, implying he could not see well enough to avoid it falling. He calls out for you to come to the place in the forest where he died where his spirit now dwells along “the new road”. He addresses you as “friend”, indicating he is a benevolent spirit. He then tells his story of what happened to him, while offering advice (“On a dark morning, chop down no tree,”). This carries the sense of ancestral spirits sharing warnings with others so that they do not suffer the same fate, and folk songs of this kind were meant not only to express emotions, but to convey spiritual and practical knowledge as a form of oral tradition. The sense of it being a dark morning also may carry the meaning that Uti Miska did not seek approval of the forest, tree and land spirits when chopping down the tree—that he had ‘snuck out in the early dawn to do this,’ and the spirits gave him an ill fate as punishment. It could also be that Uti Miska was not abiding by a portent that this was “a dark morning” - one that he should not have chopped a tree down on, as it was “ill-fated”. 

When we arrive at the stanza in quotations (“When his master heard of it / He immediately took to the road.”), it is a living person who is speaking, no longer Uti Miska, indicated by the change of pronoun referring to him in third person. We hear the stanza as if we are listening to someone else speak and it has the character of whispered gossip about Uti Miska’s death, as in ‘did you hear that Uti Miska died’. Alongside the sense that the birds watched his death, there is this idea of a ‘witnessed death’. Being witnessed in such a fashion is important, a kind of reverence for the spirit that helps guide the spirit onwards.

The stanza also conveys that Uti Miska is dead to clarify that the main narrator is Uti Miska’s spirit itself, and he is speaking after he has already died. The lyrics have a somber repetition to them, the sense that the spirit is reliving this over and over again or is telling it over and over again in a ghostly fashion (“Along the new road to the crest,” and ”My red blood cools on the snow,”). They are a memory etched into the Land itself. Their memory is echoes fading into the landscape.

My mother made a very astute observation that there is also some hidden meaning in Uti Miska’s name itself. “Uti” is referring to a sense of “travelling/journeying” as derived from the word “út”, which means “road”. “Travelling/journeying” is also undertaken by spiritual practitioners and shamans who enter into trance states in order to traverse Égig Érő Fa (“The Sky-High Tree”, also known as Világfa, “The World Tree”) and visit other spiritual realms beyond and yet also within this more-than-human living world, including the Land of the Dead.

This could be in reference to a sense that Uti Miska’s spirit is journeying onwards along a “new road”, that his spirit is moving on to a new life. In the second variant, my mother observes that the line “my red blood cools on the snow” is both functioning literally and symbolically. Literally, his blood spilled from his body is cooling. But Uti Miska is already dead, and his body is already rotting. His blood would be dried and gone by now. This suggests the more symbolic expression. Blood is so frequently an expression of spiritual essence as well (‘blood kindred’, ‘blood spirit’, ‘living blood’, ‘blood of ancestors’, etc.). So with this dual meaning, Uti Miska’s essence may be fading, as in “cooling off”. This also stands with a common theme that the inner vital spirit of life contains a kind of “fire”, and for that “fire” to cool off is for the spirit to fade. Uti Miska appears in several other folk songs that deal with the spirit of a deceased person speaking to the living. This suggests that Uti Miska is a symbolic stock character representing spirits of the dead who are here to convey ancestral memory and may have suffered a tragic fate.

As an oral tradition, this folk song transforms specific funerary customs of communing with the Dead and the Land into a musical and poetic medium that conveys general knowledge of this, both the practice, the spirituality and the emotionality. This revolves around an old Hungarian tradition of “lamentation,” a form of funerary singing.

“Harangoznak Vecsernyére” is, of course, related to this tradition of lamentation, and it has the structure of a lament. But in the case of this folk song, music is serving a didactic function, to instruct and convey the spiritual importance of this communication and embodiment of the Dead in the Land and place, to inform and sensitize our emotional being to how to respond to this, and to inform us about the custom of lamentation. In a sense, “Harangoznak Vecsernyére” is more of an art song and would not be inappropriate to sing at other times than funeral lamentation. Expressions of grief in artistic mediums, are, of course, a need in our ordinary lives aside from the exceptional circumstances of a funeral. So “Harangoznak Vecsernyére” serves this function of conveying grief in a way we can examine it and process it, rather than having a specific funerary function. (Holberg, 1-36) In Hungarian funerary folk customs, it is of particular significance lamentation of the dead would be sung during processions, and the songs are often told from the first person perspective as the spirit of the deceased speaking themselves. (Ortutay, 627-633) These songs differ from “Harangoznak Vecsernyére” in a number of ways, especially because Uti Miska is a stock character and not referencing a real person.

Traditional laments would be specifically about the individual who has died. Lamentation as an oral tradition is historically conducted by women who are related kin to the dead. This is one of many significant spiritual responsibilities that women in the community held, and scholar Kornélia Budáy observes in “The Earth has given birth to the Sky”: Female spirituality in the Hungarian folk religion that Magyar spirituality was highly female-centric, with one of the most principle deities known as Boldogasszony, “The Happy Woman”, also known as Földanya, “Earth-Mother”. Boldogasszony gives her name to the names of trees, the names habitations, and the name of the month January and the day Tuesday in Ancient Hungarian, thus expressing the notion of circular time, of the life-death cycle itself. She writes,

“My conversations with old contemporary Hungarian rural people have strengthened my personal belief, whereas the ordinary daily routine of our earlier generations is permeated deeply by faithfulness to the so-called Happy Woman. Their sense of time is infiltrated by their sense of life supported by and embedded in the living figure of the Happy Woman. When these people speak about the events of their life, they are instinctively connected with female fertility symbolised by the circulating time of nature expressed in feast days of the Happy Woman (who is budding, bearing, reaping) linked with agrarian activities.” (Budáy, 38)

With the centrality of the female deity within Hungarian spirituality, Earth-Mother herself, who both is and presides over the cycles of birth-life-death, it falls upon women in the community to engage in one of the most sacred expressions of grief during funeral rites, the singing of laments that closes and opens the next repetition of the cycle in death. Moreover the role of ‘shaman’ most frequently fell upon women.

As the ethnomusicologist Zoltán Kodály observed, lamentation songs place the expression of authentic grief before artistic technique, and anyone would be expected to sing such a lament during funeral rites if they are kin, regardless of their vocal training. As a folk custom, this music was part of everyone’s life and not specialized as a “profession of singers”. Oftentimes, distinguishing the melodic structure of the song is difficult, if not impossible, for the ethnomusicologist, due to the intensity of the lamentation and expression of grief. The song itself would also be interrupted by outbursts of wailing and much of the music would be improvisational and recitative. (Kodály, 85-94)

Further evidence for “Harangoznak Vecsernyére” being a didactic song about the tradition of lamentation and the spirituality of ancestors and the dead comes from the last line of the song, “Your mother's weeping, don't trust it to another, / This is the last time you mourn for me.” Uti Mishka is here referencing this tradition of lamentation, as when a son has died, it would fall upon the mother and/or wife to engage in the spiritual practice of lamentation. It cannot be “trusted to anyone else.” Display of sincere grief during lamentation was of the utmost importance, and the genuineness of the grief would be scrutinized by the community to keep the practice’s intensity and direction alive. Kodály recounts that “People watch the performance carefully and discuss it afterwards: ‘She wailed beautifully,’ ‘She hasn’t even mourned for him,’ etc. They criticize the mourner if her sincerity is open to doubt, or if she has not come up to expectations” (Kodály, 85). Although Kodály does not go into details about the metaphysical importance of this tradition with respect to the spirit of the dead, it can be surmised that an insincere performance of lamentation would be disastrous spiritually. As will be discussed later, the belief that dead spirits can return to the dwelling place of the living or haunt the land and bring ill-fortune is common among Finno-Ugric peoples, including Hungarians. Improper burials, desecration or failure to engage in proper spiritual rites are believed to preclude the dead from properly moving on, which would lead to them returning. It is not difficult to surmise from this that an insincere performance of lamentation might call back the spirits of the dead and could even invoke a curse.

Ortutay provides us with an example of a funerary song from the Csángós, another Hungarian ethnic group:

“I am too a bridegroom [or a bride]
Ready for to go soon.
Folk come here a-treading
To a woeful wedding.
I was once a flower,
But I won’t bloom ever
Laid at rest in coffin.
In my parents’ garden
I was once a flower,
Rose that won’t bloom ever,
For the Reaper cut me
When a youth unwary
With His net He snared me,
And won’t have me living,
Here I must be leaving” (Ortutay, 634-635)

The lament would be sung during the funeral procession in which the coffin is carried to its burial place. Note that the song, like Uti Miska, is singing from the perspective of the dead, as the deceased person’s spirit. But unlike Uti Miska, it is not telling a story of the death, nor referencing specifics of the death, nor is it conveying a sense of ancestral wisdom. The focus on the funerary song is on lamentation and parting. This presents Death innately. This suggests that Uti Miska in “Harangoznak Vecsernyére” is related to this kind of song, but is of a different kind entirely from those to be actually sung at funeral processions. In this sense, “Harangoznak Vecsernyére” is a lament about death and spiritual matters related to the soul and death but outside of the actual practice. “Harangoznak Vecsernyére” is a form of oral tradition dealing with ancestral memory, a song about the emotional knowledge of death and the procession of death.

Whereas lamentation is the tradition itself, “Harangoznak Vecsernyére” is a song about spiritual matters related to the dead and funerary rites. It is a song about the tradition. In this context, the content of Uti Miska’s words and singing suggest he may not have been formally buried at the right time or even buried at all (the coffin in the lyrics may contain what little could be found of Uti Miska’s remains). He died in the forest, alone, and his body joined the Land where he died, evinced in the line “My rotting body lies in the bush”. This situates the context of the song as tragic, that the birds have given Uti Miska the funerary witness - that his path leads elsewhere (“the new road”) then with his other human kin to their customary Underworld (or perhaps Heaven in post-Christian rural beliefs). It is a song that is functioning as storytelling for the sake of spiritual and emotional understanding and experience.

The sense that Uti Miska’s soul’s path will lead elsewhere because of how he died and his own intentions and feelings is fitting with many Native and pre-Christian ‘pagan’ beliefs about the afterlife. Whereas with Christian beliefs, there are only limited places the soul can travel after death (“heaven”, “hell”, “purgatory”, all related to each other), with many ‘pagan’ and Native beliefs, there are many destinations the soul can have. The soul also may even choose where it goes, choose its reincarnations, in some spiritualities’ afterlives. Unlike Christianity, the afterlife is not a fixed destination in Finno-Ugric beliefs. The act of funerary rites may have some impact on where the soul travels after death. And there are many places it can go, many of which are unknown.

For this reason, it is referred to often as “the life beyond” or “the world(s) beyond”. There is also another element of animism and embeddedness here. It is not that these worlds exist as a “separate other place” from here. It is that these many worlds are embedded within each other in the World. It may be that Uti Miska will go on to become a nonhuman animal in the next life. In such a sense, he may be living in another realm. Many of the funerary folk songs have been Christianized ever since forced conversion to Christianity, but the beliefs and ideas still survive in such traditions. It may be that Christianized villagers would view soul-travelling to another realm other than those “for humans” to be “bad” due to anthropocentrism within Christian spirituality itself. But for Native and ‘pagan’ beliefs, this is not the case. Nevertheless, there is fear and remorse in Uti Miska’s death, that of the unknown, and that of transformation and metamorphosis to other forms of being, which is neither “good” nor “bad” but simply “is”. And all such transformations involve difficulty. It is important here to note that “ancestors” do not merely apply to humans. Rather humans are placed into the context of the living world as a minute part of it. The vast majority of ancestors are nonhuman, animal deities, the life, the land, the more-than-human community of life. Birds are ancestors. Bears are ancestors. All that lives is ancestors. This begets a much larger discussion of “totemism” and nonhuman ancestors, and how this undermines the concept of “human exceptionalism” that is common in “Western post-Christian colonialist societies”. But there is an underlying sense that no one is inherently human. Uti Miska could have been a bird, and he might become a bird in his “life beyond”. Nonhuman life is as much ancestors and kin as humans. In animistic spiritualities, actually there is no such rigid modern distinction as such. The sense that “the nonhuman/animal” is rigidly distinct from “the human” is entirely a modern post-Christian cultural construct. We are all always-already “nonhuman” and “animal”.

Birds are often chthonic spirits in Hungarian and Finno-Ugric beliefs in general, and water fowl, in particular, are messengers who carry spirits to the realm of the dead. In the lyrics of this song, the birds have watched Uti Miska’s death with the indifference that Life continues existing regardless, but there is also this sense of rejoining the Land, that his death is a part of the the cycles of life-death and that the separation between himself and the living world is revealed to be an illusion. The birds watch his death, but they continue to sing gaily as if nothing had happened. (Revesz)

Soul Pluralism, Reincarnation and Uti Miska’s Shadow and Wind-Ghost Spirit

It is common to Finno-Ugric beliefs that there are many kinds of souls in a living being, and understanding this is important to understanding the meaning of the folk song. The most relevant spirit here is a “breath-spirit” that is the vital spirit of the body which is preserved in the Hungarian word “lélek”. The word is very old with etymology traceable to 2500BCE and is found in many other related languages, including Finnish (“löyly”, which means “vapour of the sauna”), Estonian (“leil”, which means “breath” or “life”), Votyak (“lul”, which means “breath” or “soul”), and Vogul and Ostyak (“lil”, which means “breath” or “soul”). (Stefon et al)

In Hungarian, related words to “lélek” suggest further etymological relations: “levegő” means “air” and “lélegezni” means “to breathe.” My mother also informs me that the word “lélek” is also related to the word “élet” meaning “life”.

The “breath-spirit” or “lélek” is a kind of spirit that leaves when the body dies and is no longer an embodied spirit that changes with physical life experiences, once the body is dead. This spirit is the sense of a “body-soul” versus a “free-soul”. The “body-soul” is the vital spirit of the living body itself, the individual. The “free-soul” or “shadow soul” is a soul that moves on to new bodies and realms after death. It might incarnate as another life, such as an animal, or become embodied in other things like the earth, waters, air, and so on.

It is the disembodied lélek, or “body-soul”, of Uti Miska who is talking. It is like a ghost of the vital essence, who that living being was when they were still physically alive. (It is still a living spirit, but not living in the same sense as living animals and embodied beings.) One sense is that the lélek  is released with the last breath the living being takes, expelled from the body when one stops breathing.

There are other kinds of spirits living within the body that go onto other lives and existences. Namely, Finno-Ugric spiritualities, including Hungarian, deal with a concept of a plural soul, in which one does not have a “singular soul” as with Abrahamic faiths but rather is made up of many kinds of souls. In Mansi, for instance there are four or five different kinds of souls (Napolskikh et al, 60). There may be more or less depending on the people’s understanding. ( A living being is actually not “one” but many. The lélek is sometimes said to hover in place above the dead body or to remain with it or near where it died until it is ready to move on and become part of new life, become a vital memory and essence fueling more life. (This carries with it the sense that the vital life force of the “lélek” is embodied and composes other lives through ancestral memory and how the past always shapes and changes those who are living.) Lélek is the individual particulars of the life of that being, their personality, experiences, memories, the physical existence they had (as opposed to their other spirit(s) that may live many lives and be reincarnated - what would the innermost soul(s) or core). Uti Miska’s lélek is present there, echoing in the Land where he died along “the new road” in the woods where he felled the tree, telling his story to those who are listening. (Bodrogi and Diószegi)

But his other soul, sometimes called “a shadow soul”, potentially referred to by the word “íz” in Hungarian—that other soul is the one that reincarnates, his continuity of being. The shadow soul can free itself from the thing to which it belongs when that thing has died. “Íz” is an archaic word that survives in modern Hungarian as meaning “taste” and this meaning might relate to the metaphysics of lélek as well, that the “breath” passes over the tongue. The “breath” is a vaporous and changeable life force, but the “tongue” is like a solid object that interrupts the breath, that shapes the breath, and the breath flows around it. There is a sense that the tongue is cloaked in the breath, and so “íz” is like a soul that wears another soul “lélek”, the body. In contemporary Hungarian, typically “lélek” is used to describe both kinds of souls but is given different adjectives to specify whether it is the body soul or the shadow soul. Like breath passes over the tongue, a physical life passes over the shadow soul. (Hoppál)

Part of the basis of “íz” being the “shadow-soul” in Hungarian is in linguistic relation to the Indigenous Mansi people who are the closest relatives of Hungarians. The word is phonetically and semantically related to a word in Mansi, particularly in the usage of “íz” in uttered archaic curses on the soul that survive into modern Hungarian. Mansi view that men and women have at least four souls. Out of these four souls, one of them is called “is/is-хor”, the shadow-soul or referred to as “the soul going down the river” or “the big soul”. The shaman engages in projecting their “is” which is “free” and can leave the body to journey (and often leaves when people dream). Shamans have the gift of being able to consciously project their “is” and wander through the spirit realm intentionally, and to be able to see the spirits of the shadow world. However, if the “is” soul remains apart from the body too long, it is believed that the body becomes ill and the person can die. (Napolskikh et al, 60-61)

Also worth mentioning is that, for the Mansi, the “is” usually takes the form of a bird. The form of the “is” is, of course, related to the nature of the spirit and the animal that one is (Napolskikh et al, 61-62). In the folk song, Uti Miska mentions that the birds are watching over his body which lays dying in the bush. In Mansi, it is an ill-omen to see one’s own soul, one’s “is”. This is an indication that one will die. So Uti Miska's “big-soul”, his deepest self, might be a bird, and his own soul has left his body as he sees it—the schism of the many spirits that make up the life that eventually leads to the dissolution of the individual life. Uti Miska has already mentioned that the hour was “ill-fated”.

Íz, being able to incarnate in many forms and take many lives, is changeable, transformable. It occupies many “clothings”, wearing a life like wearing a skin. And thus it is also related to the concept of shapeshifting. In related Finno-Ugric spiritualities, the word “íz” is aksi related to the word “ört” and “urt”, which are words for the same shadow soul from Cheremiss and Votiak. The Hungarian version of these terms “íz”, like the Ceremiss and Votiak “ört” and “urt”, is the soul that reincarnates into new lives and bodies and forms of being.

As Holmberg writes, “According to the Votiaks, the “soul” (urt) of the corn can assume the form of a little butterfly, precisely like the soul of a man; and the Cheremiss speak, furthermore, of the “soul” (ört) of the earth, fire, water, etc.” (Holmberg, 13) This term “ört” and its variations across Finno-Ugric languages likely relates to the word “íz” in Hungarian, but this is still being debated in anthropology. This soul can leave, return, and embody different forms. It can take on new lives, dwell within the Living and Dead (who are in many senses one and the same). Objects thought to be “inanimate/nonliving” in “Western post-Christian colonialist societies” are living beings in animistic spiritualities. That is, existence is filled with persons, and human persons are actually a minority. Animals are persons, plants as well, the wind, rocks, rivers, fire, mountains, and so on. They are living persons. They merely take many different forms and natures. So water, a stream, a Land, is alive and is also possessed of a “shadow soul”. (Notably, this is not at all to be confused with psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s settler-colonialist misappropriations of the “shadow self” which has nothing to do with this “shadow soul” and is based entirely around Western academic misinterpretations.)

Between lives, the “íz” might dwell with the bones and dead body, and is said to wander to the roots of the world tree to rest before returning again for another life. This suggests a connection between “lélek” and “íz”, of attachment between the shadow-soul and the body-soul that may lead to a spirit remaining with the dead body or place where they died until they are ready to move on and let go of the connection to the “lélek” which has become part of the Land again to fuel new life.

Among many Finno-Ugric peoples preserving their traditional beliefs, great lengths are taken to prevent the Dead from returning to the living by accidental or intentional call back, or by the will of the spirit of the Dead. This involves engaging in means of leading the spirit astray should they try to find their old dwelling place. Some cultures bury the belongings of the Dead with their bodies so they will not come back looking for them or so the family will not call back the spirit by accidental intent. Occasionally this also involves extreme measures such as the burning of possessions or calling out commands to the spirit of the Dead to inform them that they are Dead and should never return. (Holmberg 17-36) This is further embedded in the sense of Being Alive as a form of continuous transformation and journeying onwards. To be “Truly Dead” is to be unchanging. And this is a kind of curse that results in suffering and deterioration of the living world. The Dead are not really “dead”, but are in metamorphosis, continuing the process of change. It is for their own good and the good of those that survive them, that they do not seek to return to what they were, for then they will not change and continue to become something else.

This also explains the function of the word “íz” as used in archaic Hungarian curses, such as “Tépjen szét az íz!” meaning to “Tear the soul [from the body]” or “Hogy az íz essék a torkába!” meaning “Make the soul[taste] fall into the throat!” - both to consume one’s own tongue but also to consume one’s own soul - essentially to eat one’s own being into pure oblivion. (Bodrogi and Diószegi, “Íz”) In shamanistic practices, this is the sense of the “Ego eating itself”, where by the individual’s detachment from existence and implosion into themselves is brought about by self-consumption and self-destruction. Souls in Finno-Ugric beliefs are not “immaterial, unchanging things”. They too can die and experience a “True Death”, so such curses would not be something to treat lightly. (Kulmar)

Uti Miska’s shadow-soul(íz) has gone elsewhere, perhaps into a new life, or perhaps resting between lives, or it may be in the process of separating and leaving down “the new road” to a new life. The latter seems to be the case, that his shadow is attached to his body-soul which is stuck in place but trying to move on, due to a death that was sudden, a passing that was torturous and filled with aloneness. His body-soul(lélek), his existence as echoes and ancestral memories remains there where he died and lived in the Land, and is speaking to us, telling us his story and providing us with warnings, as ancestral spirits tend to do. His voice is “in the wind”, further emphasized by the connection between “breath” and “body soul”. In many Hungarian rural communities, there is a belief that the Dead continue to walk upon the world in the form of wind. The Csángós say that when there is strong winds blowing, that this is an ill omen from the Dead. The Dead, the “wind of the soul” might also return home in the form of ghostly animals, such as cats, dogs, and others. (Gábor, 16)

Uti Miska is a ghostly voice in the wind, his “lélek” joined with the Land itself in the wind.

With this sense in mind, the lament can be seen as a surviving expression of ancestral memory in the Land, the Land composed of echoes of the Dead, and of the many lelkek or “vital spirits steeped with memories” that make up all of the living world and Land itself, the dirt and mud composed of countless Dead (for the very soil you walk upon is a tomb of unfathomably many Dead, dead animals, plants, fungi, and the Living who dwell within the Dead, subterranean creatures, microorganisms), but also the vital energy that makes up the Living at the same time...the Dead composing the Living. Meanwhile, the more inner soul, the shadow which has lived many lives, is already moving to the “life beyond”, transmigrating. Uti Miska the living being will always dwell in the Land gradually fading into  and being absorbed into all the new life that makes up the Land, yet never truly dead, as the Dead shape the Land itself and all that lives within it. The “true” Uti Miska, who has no name, his experience of being alive, will go onto become something else. Perhaps he will be a bird, or a tree, or a human, or wander off into unknown realms of existence. This “true self” has no name, and their name is not Uti Miska. (Holmberg, 72-82) (Bodrogi and Diószegi, “Lélek”)

It is customary in rural Hungarian funerary rites for a villager to read aloud a speech that has been presented to them by the deceased spirit of the one being buried (and this was possibly done by the village shaman in historic times). As a practice, it survived in folk customs even after forced Christianization. This speech acts as a kind of “farewell” from the spirit of the person to the relatives they have left behind, the spirit of the Dead speaking farewell through the mouth of the living. Uti Miska, offers this kind of speech in the final stanza of the song (and the entire folk song itself may be understood as also taking the form of a funerary farewell) in which he addresses his father to tell him that he is dead and then tells his mother to mourn for him this one last time (“Father open up your gate, / Your beautiful son is brought dead; / Your mother's weeping, don't trust it to another, / This is the last time you mourn for me.”). This sense of closure to mourning, that one should not continue mourning after the final “farewell”, is significant. Once funerary rites have been given, and the spirit sent on their way, there are now a new set of taboos against recalling back the Dead. To continue to mourn, to call back the spirit of the Dead, is, in many ways, to curse oneself and others, because this attachment of will brings the Dead into affecting the Living in ways that can be harmful or damaging to them and the Land. This command from Uti Miska is almost like a kind of ethical instruction in a spiritual matter: do not mourn for the dead once we have moved on.

Uti Miska, as a living spirit and greater Self, his íz, will go on to be incarnated in other lives, and his memory/personality/vital essence, his lélek, continues to live on in the Land itself. It would be a kind of desecration for the spirit of Uti Miska to be mourned beyond this, for there are many forms of existence and life in which they will continue to take, although perhaps no longer Uti Miska. His ancestral memory also lives on in the Land, the wind-ghost of Uti Miska, echoes of his lélek. For the living left behind, it is important not to make his death into a kind of inner Death for those who survive him, who would place mourning before continuing to live their own lives. (Dömötör, 258-259)

The folk song as an oral tradition therefore serves to inform us of a spiritual-emotional worldview, to embed this within us so we may understand this kind of perspective and recognize its significance. And it is deeply efficient at doing so. Look at how many words I have spent attempting to translate this perspective into a “modern academic essay”. The music and poetry itself sensitizes our own being to this understanding through exposure and transformation of our being - the world beyond us is agented and this understanding is a kind of metamorphosis that the living world brings about in ourselves (and music as a living being - music as all the sounds of the world as actors and agents, creating transformations). It is a kind of transformative magic within our being. It is thus that this kind of knowledge is not merely “expressible through discrete statements”, and I feel that I could spend tens of thousands of more words explaining this and still not have done it any justice. It is perhaps something that one either understands or doesn’t.

The breath-spirit(lélek) rejoins the Land to become ancestral memory, while the shadow-spirit(íz) goes on to reincarnate, perhaps to lives of the preference of its spirit. That if one is a bird or a horse spirit, that one’s next life is likely that. Uti Miska’s name, his personality and lived-life, are his lélek, which have become part of the Voice of the Wind. And the nameless being that they are, the “big-soul” íz has gone onto other life.

We recorded this folk song for Left/Folk’s compilation album “Left/Folk II: Resilience as Praxis”. We chose to record it because it conveys a sense of carrying the burden of ancestral pain and memory in the Land and confronts the reality of both loss and of the survival of the old always in the new. This tradition of music making is also dying due to erasure and assimilation. And yet it has survived a very long time and continues to survive in spite of this. Uti Miska’s ghostly voice speaks in the violin in the winds of the Carpathian mountains, wordless but meaningful to those who will listen. The shaker takes on a funerary character and channels his spirit to come forth and speak. As ancestral memories of the more-than-human Land live on, so too do they live on in us and the music we make - echoes resounding forwards through time in songs and expressions kept alive in transformation. 

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