I'm so so so in love with the content you make on this blog, thank you so much for all the effort you put into researching each demon!
Is it possibile to ask for some insights on muu shuwuu?
The obscurity of several demons throughout the SMT series isn't often a point of contention- most demons, barring a few (cough, cough, Arahabaki,) have rather open-and-shut cases, and their origins are easily able to be traced, as are their stories. However, sometimes, it's not that easy, and sometimes the source mythology itself is so obscure it's hard to get a grasp on. We've already seen this with poor ol' Porewit, but another case of this lies in the somewhat off-kilter religion of Tengrism, and, more specifically, a rather bizarre spirit from said religion. Today's Demon of the Day is that creature, one created out of a dead woman who never got to experience love, Muu Shuwuu.
Sources and stories relating to this demon are scant, even for this series- as an obscure monster from an already obscure religion, Mu Shuvuu (also referred to as Moh Shuvuu, Maγu Sibaγu, Moshobo, or Muu Shubuu in several different sources) is a tough nut to crack. Almost all sources about this bird are in different languages, whether it be Japanese, German, or Russian, and as such it'll be hard to get direct quotes for a lot of sources. Given the hellish mixture of a lack of primary/secondary sources, Google Translate having to try its damndest to translate the few articles I can track down, but I've managed to get a general idea of what it's going for thanks to the Internet Archive.
Mentioned within the text 'Demonology, Ritual Principles, and Worship Grimoires,' Muu Shuvuu makes an appearance concretely in English. Thank YHVH. In the text, the Tengri demonness appears listed as an example of an evil spirit from another culture. Her name literally meaning 'evil bird,' the spirit is noted as being dangerous to entire groups of people, though especially so to lonesome travelers or those with soft hearts. Appearing as a kind, lonely young girl, she'd always be hiding her mouth out of fear of revealing her beak...
According to the text, Mongolian principles state that a person has two or three types of souls within them, and Moh Shuvuu is made up of that third kind of soul- the type that can form into a spirit after death. A Muu Shuwuu specifically seems to form from a combination of factors, namely being a young girl who either died without ever experiencing love, died and had their father place a flint into her hand posthumously, or experienced a violent death. This would eventually lead to their spirit growing restless and rising from their corpse, forming into, what else, but a Muu Shuwuu itself. The bird would then go around seeking vengeance for its lack of love, proceeding to seduce men who would approach, or pretend to be a lost little girl in order to get the man to let his guard down. Then, after bringing the man to a safe location, she would proceed to kill him and suck his brain out of his head with her sharp beak. Again, a lot of this is hard to prove confidently, given that I'm mostly working off of wikipedia articles and spotty translations- most sources are exclusively either Japanese or use Cyrillic, which I can't translate due to not having a keyboard for either alphabet- but for the most part, I can glean that she sucks out the brain for sustenance.
I think, and this is based mostly off of speculation from the articles referenced above, that Muu Shuwuu actually isn't a mix of a bird and girl like in SMT- no, apparently she is able to shift between the two forms, the young girl's form being a disguise so she can then slaughter the man later on as a bird. This seems to make Muu Shuwuu less of a harpy and more of, well, a bird! That aside, though, I do have to admit that the design in SMT works very well- to an extent, this is what I wish Hua Po actually looked like, given the bird theming throughout her original story, but I might be asking for a bit much here. Still, if any of you can find any further sources on this demon, I'd happily take them, as I'm not quite satisfied with this simple of a rundown. Regardless, though, I have to thank SMT for making a demon from such an obscure concept, even if that would eventually down the line lead me to a strange, bottomless spiral of research.
Tengrism is fucking weird, man.
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