Concepts of rain in the Kalmyks and their ancestors (based on folklore sources)

This article is dedicated to the reconstruction of archaic ideas about the rain the Kalmyk people living at present in the territory of the Lower Volga region have. In the mythology of the Kalmyk people, archaic features typical of both Turkic and Mongolian peoples were intertwined. Meteorological phenomena always caused interest among ancient folk, being a mysterious and supernatural phenomenon. Ancient people tried to give meteorological phenomena a naive explanation from a scientific point of view, but at the same time these explanations were organically integrated into the conceptual picture of the world. The rain as a linguistic and-cultural concept has not been studied, there are only fragmented mentions about this phenomenon concenrning folk superstitions and believes, but there is no full-fledged research on the rain, both in Mongolian, so Turkic mythology. The source for this study is folklore works. For the purposes of comparative comparison, data from Turkic culture is also included. Rain is related functionally to the sky, it can perform two opposite functions: creative and destructive. According to the first role, the rain is life-giving, producing life. Since the rain is the product of the upper world, then it comes as a grace for people, so people tried to get under the rain, especially in the spring, carrying the blessing of the sky, which is expressed in the Kalmyk supersitions. The rain was endowed with the functions of healing, and moreover, it was believed to return the dead from the lower world due to its unique property to penetrate into different, invisible gaps, cracks, which is definitely reflected in the epic “Dzhangar”. But with all these positive functions, the rain could act as a punishment for people, and that idea is based on fears of both an ancient and modern folk of a borderline natural phenomena potentially turning into a natural disaster. Kalmyks believe that rain, moving to the most intense stage, in a thunderstorm, could destroy the man and his farm. For this reason, people tried to appease the sky so that the rain would not turn into a thunderstorm with lightning and thunder.