Bilyukai
Itelmen · deity · mythic / first times · deity
Bilyukai, whom the eighteenth-century sources also call Pilyachuch, is the thunderer of the Kamchadal (Itelmen) world-picture: a man of very small stature who lives on the clouds with a host of gamul spirits and sends down thunder, lightning and rain, the rainbow being taken for the motley hem of his garment. He wears a coat of wolverine skin, the fur the Kamchadals prized most, and travels riding on birds, especially ptarmigans, whose passenger's tracks people sometimes claimed to find. In the creation account, Tyzhil-Kutkhu made the land animals and set Pilyachuch over them as their herdsman, and later ethnography accordingly describes him as the spirit-master of the animals.
Domains
- thunder lightning and rain
- mastery of the land animals
Powers
- to send thunder, lightning and rain from the clouds
- to command the land animals as their herdsman and master
Relations
- subordinate to: Tyzhil-Kutkhu
Sources
- S. P. Krasheninnikov, Opisanie zemli Kamchatki [Description of the Land of Kamchatka] (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1755), vol. 2, pt. 3.
- G. W. Steller, Beschreibung von dem Lande Kamtschatka (Frankfurt and Leipzig: J. G. Fleischer, 1774); English: Steller's History of Kamchatka, trans. Margritt Engel and Karen Willmore (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2003).
- A. A. Sirina and O. A. Murashko, 'Verovaniia itel'menov' [Beliefs of the Itelmens], in Narody Severo-Vostoka Sibiri, ed. E. P. Bat'ianova and V. A. Turaev (Moscow: Nauka, 2010).