Mythological stories of western Buryats: stories about the demons of lower demonology

The article discusses the mythological stories of the Buryat which realize plots with the demon adá of lower demonology associated with children's illness and death. The book material, archival materials stored in the Center of Oriental Manuscripts and Xylographs of the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies of the SB RAS dating back to the fixation in the XIX-mid of the XX centuries and field recordings of the expedition groups of the Buryat Institute for Social Sciences made in the second half of the 20th century are brought in. Also field materials of the author collected in Irkutsk region in 2010-ies are used. There are several basic plots with variations: about the origin / appearance and the proliferation of the adá ; about the struggle of shamans against adá ; about a meeting of men with it and the consequences of this meeting. In the stories of etiological character the action time is not defined or attributed to the distant past; the establishment of reliability is poorly expressed, there are no references to witnesses or contact participants or one's own subjective experience of interacting with the demon; there is no description of the meeting with adá but there is a mythological explanation as to why and how did such beings appeared. The plot of "the shaman casts out of adá " is also quite common. Stories with a similar plot are more concretized and often associated with the names of real shamans and people who lived in a particular place, the occasion is well localized in space and time. Stories about the meeting or contact of ordinary people with adá are most numerous and varied. It is through them that one can trace the transformation of ideas about this demon and methods of methods of struggle against it and reveal the influence of another ethnic tradition etc. The early stories are diverse, variable and voluminous. In later stories some of the motives are lost, plots are more simplified and brief, a typical situation of meeting with the demon is realized. But the structure of the story, the general idea of the mythological character continues to be preserved.