Why do Bo people on the Tibetan border worship monkey skulls?

Bo people, commonly known as "Barbers", are distributed in the west of Chayu County in China and the east of southern Tibet. It is said that in 19 1 1 year, British and Indian forces began to infiltrate into the Chayu area of China, brutally oppressing the Bo people in the lower reaches of the Chayu River and the Dulai River basin, occupying their land, forcing them to do unpaid hard labor, and even killing them for no reason. Unwilling to endure slavery and oppression, the Bo people went upstream, climbed mountains and mountains, and finally reached Chayu County.

Although Bo people live in Tibet, they are very different from Tibetan customs. The most obvious thing is that Bo people don't worship Tibetan Buddhist temples. People worship nature. Bo people have great admiration for all natural phenomena outside. Because Bo people don't have much contact with other ethnic groups and have strong primitive religious concepts, agricultural production depends on slash and burn, and animal husbandry and hunting rely on bow and arrow shooting. Bo people who live by heaven always have an unspeakable mystery about nature. Humans are not dominated by themselves, but by familiar and unfamiliar mountains and rivers. Among the Gelao people, the sun that can bring them warmth and light is the natural thing that the Gelao people worship most. On the ground, Bo people think that elves are everywhere, and the existence of ghosts determines how much waste soil is mined.

In addition, compared with the sun and the earth, people worship animals and plants more widely, especially the forests where people live, because for them, almost all the means of production and production tools come from forests. Without forests, people can't survive, so their worship of forests is unparalleled; Some ghost trees in the forest have strange shapes and are also the objects of worship by bloggers.

There is a saying that Bo people migrated from the ancient Qiang people. Compared with Bo people's worship of nature, there are many similarities in ancient Qiang people's religious concepts, some of which are unique to these two nationalities. Like Miao people, the ancient Qiang people also believed in animism, and all natural phenomena and objects in nature had supernatural and irresistible power. It is precisely because of the existence of animism religious concept rooted in the ancient Qiang culture, as well as the Miao people's fear of supernatural forces and their weakness and begging in front of natural forces that the ancient Qiang people will avoid the risk of overreaching and let the Miao people survive.

These three people worship the monkey skull very much and think it can ward off evil spirits. So, all three people have monkey skulls. When the three people hold an exorcism activity called "Deya", they will definitely use the monkey skull. Even if they don't, they will use it to ward off evil spirits. The ancient Qiang people also worshipped the monkey totem. When offering sacrifices, people will take the monkey head as their ancestor and offer it in the shrine at home. Although there are many legends about the worship of the monkey head by the Qiang people, there is no doubt that they worship the monkey totem. This kind of worship is quite similar to the monkey skull worship of Bo people. On the one hand, Bo people with obvious traces of primitive religion are influenced by Sino-Tibetan culture, on the other hand, more importantly,

Bo people live in the border area between China and Myanmar. In the surrounding areas, there are also ethnic minorities in China, such as Nu, Dulong, Barrow and Jingpo. There are many ethnic groups in this area. They live in Tibet, Yunnan and Sichuan. Although there is no unified statement that these ethnic groups belong to the same ethnic origin, they have similar cultural traditions. In religious belief, these ethnic groups are generally influenced by Tibetan Buddhism, but for Bo people, these influences do not seem obvious. Bo people's religious beliefs are still in the primitive stage. Because of the pragmatic worship of nature and ghosts and gods, perhaps natural and man-made disasters are more obvious. This ethnic group shows a unique and obviously exclusive belief pattern and state. It is precisely because of the existence of this primitive model that Bo people obtained a certain religious belief foundation from the ancient Qiang people.