Music, Water and the Soul in the Circassian Rite of Psykheghe

In 1949, an elderly reed-flute player in a small aul in Karachay-Cherkessia recorded a tune whose ritual purpose no one now remembers well enough to explain in full. It is nearly all that survives of Psykheghe, the Circassian rite for finding the drowned.

In the aul of Kosh-Khabl, in the Khabez district of Karachay-Cherkessia, a kamyl player named Nukh Kondokhov sat down in 1949 and played a tune he had probably known his whole life. Kondokhov was born in 1878. The man recording him was the Kabardian writer and folklorist Askerbi Shortanov, and the tape still sits in the phonogram archive of the Institute for Humanitarian Research in Nalchik, catalogued as item No. 86/6. It can be heard accompanying this article. By the time Shortanov reached Kosh-Khabl, the rite that tune belonged to, Псыхэгъэ, Psykheghe, had likely already stopped being performed as a living ritual. What no collector could capture was the thing itself: a procession, a river, a body still missing. What remains is the recording, later notated by Angela Gucheva: the only known audio document of the instrumental naigrysh that once accompanied the Circassian search for a drowned person's soul (Gucheva & Guliyeva, 2017). Everything that follows is an attempt to explain what that tune meant.

Audio 1 — Nukh Kondokhov, kamyl, ritual naigrysh "Psykheghe." Kosh-Khabl, 1949. Fonoteka IGI KBNC RAN, No. 86/6.

The word Псыхэгъэ joins псы, water, with гъын, to weep, giving something close to "lament over the water". The rite it names was addressed to two figures. The first was Псыхо-Гуашэ, Psykho-Guasha, a chthonic goddess pictured as a beautiful woman combing her hair, thought to preside over each river individually, as though every current had its own patron. The second was Псатха, Psatkha, the cosmogonic god responsible for the soul itself. Psykho-Guasha governed the water in which a body might be lost; Psatkha governed the fate of whatever, in a drowned person, did not simply stop when the body did.

Underlying both appeals was a specific belief about timing. After a death by drowning, tradition held that the bond between soul and body did not break at once. It persisted for around fifteen days, during which the soul was thought to remain under the water, circling the place where the body had gone down, unable to settle (Gucheva & Guliyeva, 2017). Psykheghe existed to close that window before it closed on its own, in a way that left the dead unresolved. Once a body was found, the rite became obligatory, performed to reunite it with a soul that might otherwise keep wandering.

A related but separate custom applied to death by falling, from a cliff or a tree. There, before any search for the body could begin, a he-goat or a ram, the sources are explicit that it could not be a she-goat — had to be sacrificed and the "lord of the mountains" asked, formally, for permission to bring the body down. The logic held even where the deity and the terrain did not: the dead could not simply be retrieved. They had to be asked for.

When a body could not be found, Psykheghe followed a sequence of nine stages. It began at home, with the family's first mourning on hearing the news. Relatives and neighbours then gathered and formed a procession, divided into two groups, which moved along the riverbank in silence, accompanied throughout by the ritual naigrysh. The procession made a formal address to Psykho-Guasha, asking for her help in finding the drowned; if that failed, the address turned to Psatkha, asking him to help locate and summon the soul. The good deeds of the dead person were recounted aloud, an open, improvisatory passage rather than a fixed text. The soul was formally called, then "caught" with the help of river spirits. It was placed into a specially prepared vessel, covered with a piece of hide from a sacrificed bull, and bound so it could not escape again. Then the procession returned to the village, solemnly, but with dancing steps, to the sound of the same naigrysh that had accompanied the search, and the rite folded into the standard funeral ceremony, the point at which body and soul were symbolically reunited. Where a body had already been recovered, a simpler seven-part version was used, and the recounting of good deeds and the placing of the soul in its vessel, sections four and seven, could be left out.

Angela Gucheva and Farizat Guliyeva read this structure through a three-part relationship they call a triad. Level A is the камыляпша, the kamylyapsha, the musician performing the ritual address. Level C is the drowned person, on whose behalf the appeal is made. Level B is the deity being petitioned, first Psykho-Guasha, then Psatkha. As the rite proceeds, A and C show a tendency to draw closer together, the musician effectively speaking for and as the dead. B never merges with either. The deity stays apart throughout, addressed but never absorbed, which is presumably the point: a god who blurred into the human parties on either side of a request would be no use to petition.

At the centre of the rite stood the kamyl, an end-blown flute of reed or metal. Tradition credits it with a divinely derived origin and treats it as more than an instrument: it marks the boundary between human ancestors and the deities, the one object in the rite capable of crossing between the two. Where a kamyl was not available, its place could be taken by the shichepshina, the older bowed instrument of Circassian tradition, though the kamyl was clearly what the rite regarded as proper to it. One further participant was required, and it was not human. A rooster travelled with the procession, and its crow during the search was read as confirmation that the tragedy had indeed happened at that spot.

The naigrysh itself was governed by its own rule: once begun, it had to sound until the drowned person was found, however long the search took, and people believed that the place where the melody broke off was the place where the misfortune had occurred. Yet Gucheva and Guliyeva note something else about the tune's character. Over the course of the rite, its connection to the actual business of petitioning the deities seems to recede, so that the appeal to Psykho-Guasha and Psatkha is no longer quite its primary motive. What takes its place is closer to plain expression: the melody carrying the emotional state of the searchers themselves, rather than the words of the address alone.

What survives of all this is remarkably little: two recordings, made twelve years apart, of two different things. Both accompany this article. The first is Kondokhov's 1949 recording from Kosh-Khabl, the only known audio document of the instrumental naigrysh, notated by Gucheva. The second is a vocal recording made in Nalchik in 1961, of Zaramuk Kardangushev, who lived from 1918 to 2008; it is held in the same Nalchik archive, as item No. 46/12. It is the only known recording of the vocal version of the melody, a single unaccompanied line, performed, the authors note, with marked psychological expressiveness, and it carries a subtitle that Gucheva and Guliyeva flag as a genuine puzzle: "Тхьэлъэlу макъамэ", "Melody of address". The word тхьэлъэlу, on its own, means something closer to "festive meal", with no obvious connection to a lament for the drowned. The authors do not resolve this. They suggest, tentatively, that the melody was most likely sung during the procession to let the kamylyapsha catch his breath, but they stop short of claiming this explains the name, and so will this article.

Audio 2 — Zaramuk Kardangushev, vocal melody "Тхьэлъэlу макъамэ." Nalchik, 1961. Fonoteka IGI KBNC RAN, No. 46/12.

What the authors state more plainly is harder to sit with: the original ritual function of the naigrysh is now lost. Nobody currently knows, with confidence, exactly how the tune was used within the rite beyond what the structural record tells us, and its musical properties had never been studied before Gucheva and Guliyeva's own reconstruction, published in 2017. What they were able to establish is that the tune is built from repeated, roughly equal pairs of phrases, in a pattern of (a+a1)+(b+b1)+(c+c1) and so on, with only minor variation between repetitions: a mono-formulaic structure, the same shape stated and restated without much appetite for departure. That, in itself, may hint at function. A melody meant to accompany a search of unpredictable length would need to be sustainable, repeatable, capable of continuing exactly as long as the search did, and no longer.

Psykheghe was not unique to the Circassians, though its specific form was. Among the Abkhaz, a comparable custom called Апстгара, Apstgara, used a wordless ritual song: the person closest to the deceased stood by a wineskin in the river and tried to coax the soul into it, while people on both banks sang to the apkhartsa or a pipe, before the bound soul was carried to the grave with song and dance. Imeretians, in Georgia, took a different approach, casting bread with a silver coin onto the water and marking wherever it stopped and began to spin as the location of the body. Karachays and Balkars played the сыбызгы, the sybyzgy pipe, while searching, believing the music helped propitiate the water patrons they called Suu Anasy, "Mother of the Water"; they searched with the current, where Circassians and Abkhaz searched against it, and they too used a rooster, expected to crow at the site. The Svans, further west in Georgia, had a version again built around a wineskin, the bowed chianuri, and a rooster.

None of these are Psykheghe under another name. They are separate customs, from separate peoples, that happen to converge on a shared intuition: that a drowned soul can be called, caught, and carried, and that music, water and a bird are somehow the right instruments for doing it.

Gucheva and Guliyeva describe Psykheghe itself as sacred in character, but functionally aimed at influencing, even subordinating, the forces of nature that had taken a life. Set against the wider Caucasus pattern, what stands out is not its uniqueness but its precision: the fifteen-day window, the named deities, the specific vessel and hide and binding, still visible seventy years after the rite last had a witness able to explain what it was for. Kondokhov played, and Kardangushev sang; that much the reader can now hear. Why, in the fullest sense, is now a matter of inference. The authors call Psykheghe the last rite in a person's life, and the point at which life and death "touch and intersect as in no other situation" within Circassian tradition. On the evidence of one flute and one voice, that claim is not easy to dispute.

The recordings accompanying this article are reproduced from the phonogram archive (Fonoteka) of the Institute for Humanitarian Research of the Kabardino-Balkarian Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Nalchik: items No. 86/6 and No. 46/12.