Algas genre in Khakass ritual poetry: a functional aspect

Good-wishing was of great importance in the traditional culture of the Khakas. Every traditional event is accompanied by a verbal performance of good wishes. Khakas people believed good wishes to carry faith in the magical power of words, with a potential to improve one’s life, to bring well-being into it. Algas represents a multifunctional phenomenon in Khakass folklore, including lessings, benedictions, incantations, and prayers. The aim of the work was to systematize the good-wishes, to reveal the features of functioning, to generalize the esearch results on the ritual poetry of the Khakasses. The study covers the texts of good-wishes recorded and translated by the outstanding Turkologist N. F. Katanov. They include about 70 unique cultic texts in Beltyr, Sagai and Kachin dialects of the Abakan Tatars recorded in 1878–1892 and are accompanied by a complete ethnographic description of the rituals, the attributes used in the rituals; the actions performed by shamans, and their spells addressed to the deities and pirit-masters of the terrain. The analysis revealed two main hematic variants of the algas genre in the ritual poetry of the Khakas: (1) the texts of shamanic ceremonies performed for a request for help and (2) the thematic ariant including well-wishes, blessings, and parting words. The ritual function is that algas is an integral part of rituals and shamanistic ceremonies, eflecting the specific material and spiritual culture of the Khakasses. The artistic and aesthetic functions are enriching the poetic language of algas by means of artistic expression and syntactic means.