‘Tears of Rejoicing Spirits’

Abstract

Abstract Accounts of Mongol mountain sacrifices (ovoo takhilga) variously focus on transactional offerings that elicit benefits from local spirits and on the patron-like position held by spirits towards those who supplicate them. In contrast this article explores how, in such ceremonies, human–spirit relations are shaped through the enactment of emotions: in this context, happiness. Bringing classic literature on sacrifice into dialogue with recent studies of happiness as a social phenomenon, we argue that the generation of happiness (bayarluulakh; bayasgakh) in local spirits is of great importance in mediating the distance between spirits and their human neighbours. This mediation allows for the shaping of optimal post-sacrificial relations between these two categories of being. Our argument is made through an analysis of ethnographic and linguistic data relating to an ovoo takhilga in a Khalkha area of central Mongolia.

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