text:  Erman on the authority of the metropolitan Philophei who lived among the Ostiaks on the Oby that these people had before Christian missionaries ever came among them a belief in the existence of a Supreme Deity of whose nature they had pure and exalted ideas and to whom they affirmed that they never made offerings nor had they represented his form; while to inferior gods and particularly to Oertidk who was a sort of mediator and whose name as it was preserved among the Magyars Oerdig was used by the monks as a designator for the devil they made divers gifts; they performed before his image dances which Erman who visited the Kolushians on the Sitcka declares to be precisely similar to the war-dances of those Americans