Tattooed Mountain Women
Magic Medicine Symbols in Silk, Stone, Wood and Flesh
By Robert Chenciner
Bennett & Bloom (£20)
It is rare indeed these days to find anyone willing to publish a completely new proposition about the origins of the symbols used in carpet and textile designs. In this book, based on extensive field research over many years in the remotest villages of Daghestan, Robert Chenciner and his colleagues examine the last remnants of a system of belief that stretches back over several Millennia, and probably further. Having survived the repressive eras of both the Tsarist and then Soviet rule, this ancient culture of magic symbolism is fast disappearing; the only remaining evidence of it today is to be found on the bodies of old mountain women, and on antique artefacts such as spoon boxes.
What we now call the country of Daghestan is a collection of many ethnic groups with different languages and religions, that straddle the Greater Caucasian Mountain range. The women of the mountain villages in Daghestan used tattoos as a magic-totemic protection against illness, and as a part of the initiation into an adult female society that claims to be descended from the mythical Amazon warriors of the Ancient world. Their animist symbols had both a social and a medicinal purpose. Given the painful process of being tattooed, it was not something that was undertaken on a whim, as it seems to be in current Western culture. Despite the fact that their faiths did not permit the practice, tattoos appear to have been common among Jewish (Tats) and Muslim mountain women of the Caucasus in the past. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that these same astral and animist symbols have been incorporated into the designs found on carpets, headscarfs and the Kaitags of the region. Presumably they were meant to give the owner or user of the rug or textile the same magical protection that was obtained from being tattooed.
A direct example of how this magical symbolism was incorporated into the fabric of Daghestani mountain village society can be seen in the care and design of antique spoon boxes. Spoons that are used in the eating and cooking of a mountain family’s ritual food are stored in hanging boxes adorned with an array of symbols that are connected to the same belief system. The symbols of this deep and underlying animist religious system can be seen in many other aspects of their domestic life and death.
This interesting book is richly illustrated with colour photographs of Daghestan mountain culture and a wide range of artefacts in silk, wool, stone and wood. There are also illustrated 180 drawn tattoos, together with their name and position found on the body, showing this unique and vanishing tradition.
Ed Stott
