Omens and Divination

The Göktürks had priests who foretold the future.^[1] The Chinese histories record one divination at a khan’s court, portents before the deaths of three khans, and the signs that the Sui and Tang courts themselves read in the Göktürk lands.^[2]

Priests and diviners

Theophylact Simocatta says that the Göktürks had priests who, in their opinion, foretold what was to come.^[1] The men who purified a Roman embassy with fire in 569 were called exorcisers of ill-omened things. They drove away evil spirits with burning frankincense, bells and drums.^[3] The Sui Shu says that the Göktürks revered spirits and trusted in spirit-mediums, 巫覡.^[4] In the nineteenth century Kirghiz, Khalkha Mongols, Torguts and Uriangkhai practised divination from the burnt shoulder blade of a sheep, shamans and ordinary people alike. The parts of the bone and the cracks in it had names: the cauldron, the black road, the thieves who watch the herd, the death of the sick.^[5] The Altaians had a diviner of their own for it, the yarynchi.^[6] The philology of 1879 counted the entrails and the shoulder blade of sacrificed animals among the common means of divination.^[7]

A divination at Chula Khan’s court

Chula Khan had set up the Sui pretender Yang Zhengdao as king of Sui. He planned to take Bingzhou and set Zhengdao up there.^[8] A divination was made, and the answer was unfavourable. His attendants urged him to give the plan up.^[8]

Chula answered that his forebears had lost their state and survived through the Sui, and that to forget this now would itself be ill-omened.^[8] Chula asked whether the spirits were without knowledge, since the divination was unfavourable. He said that he would decide it himself.^[8]

Then it rained blood for three days. At night the dogs of the realm howled together. When people looked for them, they could not find them.^[8] Chula fell ill. Princess Yicheng gave him a medicine of the five minerals. Soon an abscess broke out, and he died.^[8]

The plan may be tied to Chula’s stay at Bingzhou in the sixth month of 620. The divination would then have been unfavourable, and therefore he only carried off the city’s women and girls.^[9] The Xin Tang Shu places the plan a year later.^[8] The older Jiu Tang Shu says only that Chula died soon after the stay at Bingzhou. It records neither the divination nor the portents.^[10]

Portents before the deaths of khans

In the first month of 587 Ishbara Khan went hunting between the Sui prefectures of Heng and Dai, with the emperor’s leave.^[4] When he came back to the garrison of Zihe, his royal tent had been burnt by fire.^[4] Ishbara was troubled by it. A month later he died.^[4]

In 618 the royal tent of Shibi Khan tore apart of itself.^[8] The Tang emperor Gaozu asked his minister Xiao Yu what it meant.^[8] Xiao Yu recalled that when Emperor Wen of Wei came to Xu, a city gate had fallen without cause, and the emperor had died that year. He asked whether this was a sign of the same kind.^[8] Shibi died of illness the next year, 619, as he was preparing to attack Taiyuan.^[8]

The burnt tent and the torn tent are recorded as signs and their fulfilment. Shibi’s sign was interpreted at the Tang court, from a precedent in Chinese history.

Portents as interpreted by the Chinese courts

The Sui and Tang courts understood the signs in the Göktürk lands as judgements on the khaganate. In the edict with which the Sui emperor answered Ishbara’s invasion, the emperor said that portents had appeared there for nearly twelve years.^[4] Beasts had spoken with human voices, and men with the voices of spirits, foretelling that the Göktürk state would perish.^[11]

Every winter, the edict went on, thunder had struck the ground. In the past year no rain or snow had fallen. The rivers ran dry and the plants were burnt, and half of the people and the beasts died of famine and plague.^[11] The edict called this the anger of Heaven, which had driven the Göktürks under the Sui axe.^[4]

In 628, with Ilig and Töles at war, someone at the Tang court proposed to rebuild the old Long Wall and man the frontier.^[8] The emperor Taizong answered with four signs that the khaganate would fall.^[8] Among the Göktürks, he said, frost had fallen in high summer, five suns had risen together, three moons had shone at once, and a red vapour filled the plains.^[12] They saw these calamities and did not cultivate virtue. This meant, Taizong said, that they did not fear Heaven.^[8]

His other signs were the restless moving of their camps and the death of their herds, the new custom of burying the dead under mounds instead of burning them, and the quarrel between Ilig and Töles.^[8] These portents are known only from the courts that went to war against the khaganate. Each is cited in support of that war.

The Book of Omens

An Old Turkic book of divination survives from a later age.^[13] The Irk Bitig, found at Dunhuang, interprets sixty-five omens, each a combination of three throws of a die.^[14] The copy is dated to 930 or 942 from its colophon. A second places the text in the ninth century.^[15]

The book was written after the Göktürk khaganates had ended. For the Göktürks themselves the sources keep priests who foretold the future, one divination that a khan overruled, and signs that their enemies read.

References

^ a b Theophylact Simocatta; Whitby 1986, vii.8.15, p. 191
^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
^ Menander Protector; Blockley 1985, fr. 10.3, p. 119
^ a b c d e f Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ Potanin 1881, p. 88–90
^ Verbitskii 1893, scan 31
^ Vámbéry 1879, p. 251
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
^ Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 257
^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
^ a b Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 71
^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215; Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 271
^ Tekin 1993, p. 1
^ Tekin 1993, p. 1, 3; 1437; Seçkin 2015, p. 1, 3; 1437
^ Tekin 1993, p. 1–2

Sources

Theophylact Simocatta
Menander Protector
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
Irk Bitig

Literature

Michael Whitby, Mary Whitby (trans.), The History of Theophylact Simocatta (1986)
R. C. Blockley, The History of Menander the Guardsman: Introductory Essay, Text, Translation, and Historiographical Notes (1985)
Liu Mau-tsai, Çin Kaynaklarına Göre Doğu Türkleri (1958, Turkish edition)
Talat Tekin, Irk Bitig: The Book of Omens (1993)
Kuban Seçkin, Irk Bitig: Toplumsal İyi ve Toplumsal Kötünün İnşasında İdeolojik Bir Fal Kitabı (2015)
Grigorii Nikolaevich Potanin, Очерки Северо-западной Монголии. Вып. 2. Материалы этнографические (Ocherki severo-zapadnoi Mongolii, Bd. 2) (1881)
Vasilii Ivanovich Verbitskii, Алтайские инородцы (Altai Foreigners) (1893)
Ármin Vámbéry, Die primitive Cultur des turko-tatarischen Volkes, auf Grund sprachlicher Forschungen erörtert (1879)