The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [99]
Manduhai’s first challenge was to install him as Great Khan in a way that people would view as legitimate. Genghis Khan left precise laws in place prescribing that the Great Khan must be elected at a khuriltai. If the candidate, and there was only one at a time, did not attract representatives of an overwhelming majority of the tribes and clans, then anyone not attending could always deny the legitimacy of the election. Genghis Khan’s descendants had violated the spirit of the law from the start. Khubilai Khan made a mockery of the khuriltai, and Khubilai’s descendants abandoned it entirely. Subsequently, a khan sought legitimacy by being installed in office before the sulde, the horsehair banner of Genghis Khan that usually remained in the area of Burkhan Khaldun. But in the turmoil of Manduul and Bayan Mongke’s battles, it temporarily disappeared or was under the control of someone not sympathetic to Manduhai’s quest.
Without the legitimizing process of the khuriltai or control of the sulde of Genghis Khan, Manduhai had to find another way to make the installation of a new Great Khan both legal and known to everyone. Manduhai needed the support of the people, and to achieve this, she also knew that she herself needed some semblance of spiritual or religious support for what she wished to undertake. Every time Genghis Khan wanted to rally his people to a cause that he thought might be difficult for them to support, he made a very public pilgrimage up the sacred mountain and prayed there until he felt that he had been granted the support.
Manduhai chose to install Batu Mongke at the hitherto seemingly unknown Shrine of Eshi Khatun, the “First Queen.” The shrine, like many others, was little more than a tattered felt tent mounted on a cart and pulled by an ox or camel from one Mongol camp to another and from one sacred site to another. The importance of a nomadic shrine to the people on the steppe far exceeded its humble and worn appearance.
Mongols worshipped male spirits on mountains or rocks piled up like a miniature mountain, called an ovoo; rocks, mountains, and cliffs constituted the bones, and therefore the male element, of the earth. Female spirits were worshipped near bodies of water, which formed the life-giving female parts of the earth, or else in caves, which were the wombs of Mother Earth. In contrast to the stationary ovoo, the ger became a sort of portable cave that allowed worshippers to honor the female spirit wherever she was taken.
Both the male sulde and the female ger had a home territory, but as befitted the needs of a nomadic society, each could be easily transported anywhere it might be needed. When the sulde needed to be moved, a mounted warrior carried it by hand. The ger was always transported on a special ceremonial cart similar to the one normally owned and driven by women. When the tribe moved into a new homeland, their shrine led the way and sanctified the land as the people followed behind.
Some elements of the shrine derived from ancient female Earth Mother worship in Inner Asia, but it also contained elements and possibly relics of Mongolian women such as Alan Goa, from whom all Mongol clans traced descent, and Hoelun, the mother of Genghis Khan. The Shrine of the First Queen may have been one or several of the Eight White Gers erected in honor of Genghis Khan’s queens at Avarga. Between the confiscation of women’s gers by Khubilai Khan and the repression of female shrines by a later form of Buddhism, little information survives about them. Had it not been for the importance of Manduhai’s visit to the Shrine of the First Queen, we would not know that it had existed.
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