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.

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