The article describes and analyses written sources in the Old Mongolian and Tibetan languages and oral recordings made in different regions of Mongolia of spells against child weeping and descriptions of the corresponding rite. The authors conclude that oral and written sources represent various traditions, which often mix due to their typological proximity.

This publication contains translations of a number of traditional stories about demons and spirits collected in the 20th century by the famous Mongolian scholar Ts. Damdinsuren. The translations of the stories are accompanied by a overview of Ts. Damdinsuren’s collection and a commentary on several motifs that are still popular in the Mongolian folklore.

Mongolian local spirits are highly various. The present article considers a separate group of local spirits-hunting spirits. They manifest themselves before people in the nature of animals having but two key features: they are entirely painted white and have only one horn instead of two. In a region, where those beliefs are common, the main features of local spirits are not unique to them alone. They are transferred to other mythological characters, as a result there are some narratives of magic qualities of the white color, of a one-toothed tarbagan and one-eyed fishes as well as an aquatic one horned bull.

This article considers widely popular motive of shaman’s desecration, depriving him of magical power and in some stories even of shaman’s life by performing certain rituals with women trousers. The notion of ritual impurity of women, especially during menstruation or in the postpartum period, served as the basis for granting this type of clothing through metonymic transfer a value of “impurity” and “banefulness” for shamans. The article provides an interesting comparative material showing how that motive is realized in various ethnographic traditions and with what folklore elements it is shaped.

The article focuses on contemporary notions of the Kazakhs of North Kazakhstan on albasty - a demonic character known to many Turkic peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus. The article examines this character’s attributes and functions manifested through prohibitions, teachings, and memorates, mostly associated with the traditional maternity cycle. The Kazakhs believe that albasty try to steal some essential organ from a woman’s body, usually during childbirth. In many Turkic peoples’, traditions this character exists in various guises, but it has a number of stable characteristics and functions considered in detail in the article.

This article analyzes some elements of apotropeic everyday Kazakh tradition. The main attention the author pays to the amulets that are not included in the wide scale rituals of the life circle or of the calendar sets. The research of the author based on his field materials and also data from ethnographical literature.

The article is focused on understanding the process of post-Soviet revitalisation of the Altai shamanism as a form of popular Altai faith reflecting national aspirations of the Altai people. The author analyses various modifications of shamanism revitalised in the last 25 years, peculiarities of the contemporary “shamanistic theology” corresponding in many ways to the traditions of the Turkic peoples, and the conflicting interpretations of contemporary shamanistic leaders, illustrating the impact of different cultural and civilizational factors. Attention is also paid to Burkhanism - a religious syncretic movement that arose in the early 20th century and in the Post-Soviet epoch came to the forefront of disputes between representatives of shamanism and Buddhists.

The article focuses on communicative situations in visionary practices of the contemporary Altaic shamanism, Altaic Evangelical Christianity and Burkhanism (Altaic White faith ). The article presents several levels of structural analysis of “mythological communication”(communication between man and a supernatural being). The first (macro) analysis level is the syntagmatic of rites of various types. The second level of analysis is a typology of participants in mythological communication organized according to the type of the dominant channel of the communication (visual, verbal, actional, material) and to the type of the activity of a man or a spirit. At the third (micro) level of analysis “key communication markers” of Altai visionary practices are considered, the markers, existing for communication participants as important visual signals, such as white objects, the juniper (archin ),parts of the head.

This article is devoted to the analysis of the structure of shamanic rituals in the “Tale of the Nisan Shaman”. In addition, it gives some examples of similar structures both in Siberian folklore and in traditions of other regions.

The article describes an electronic resource representing Bashkir texts recorded during folklore expeditions organized by the Bashkir State University in recent decades. The publication is accompanied by detailed meta-information, an index of word forms, a map and visualizations of quantitative features. The resource itself and the article about it were completed several years ago, and a lot of similar electronic editions built on the same principles have appeared since then.