Peri

The peri is a female spirit of Turkic folklore, at home at springs, in trees and in lonely country. She belongs to the ethnographic record of the Islamic and the modern period, and to the storytelling that record grew out of.^[1] She does not belong to the sources of the khaganates. No inscription and no book of the Göktürk centuries names her.

The distance between those two statements is the whole question. What is known of the peri comes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is known of Göktürk belief comes from the eighth. A being recorded at the one end cannot be carried to the other without a reason for carrying it.

The word and its Iranian background

The word is Persian. New Persian perî goes back to the Avestan pairikā, a word for a sorceress or a bewitching woman, which Middle Persian gave as parīg.^[2] In the Avesta the pairikā is a hostile creature that comes against fire, water, cattle, plants and earth and has to be driven away.^[2] The Persian peri lost this malign side in time. She merged with the houri of paradise and became a symbol of beauty. The compounds perî-rû and perî-çehre, peri-faced, still describe a lovely face.^[2] The pairikā has also been connected with the Vedic apsaras, female spirits of water and forest.^[2]

Islam has no doctrine of the peri. In the Muslim societies that took the word over she was tied to the jinn. Among the Turks she became in general the beautiful and harmless part of the jinn kind.^[3] The Turkic peoples therefore received the peri from Persian, as a word and as a figure. They received her inside Islamic belief about the jinn.

The first Turkic witnesses

The earliest Turkic text that contains the word is the Kutadgu Bilig, finished at the Karakhanid court in 1069–1070.^[4] In a lament on the vanity of power the poet asks where are those whom death took. He names among them a man whose staff turned into a snake and who crossed the sea, and a just man who ruled over peri, bird and humans, kanı ol peri kuş bu yalŋuk öze.^[5] The man is not named in the verse. The peri stands in it as one of three kinds of subject of a king, beside bird and human.^[5] The Turkish translation of the verses on exorcists, 4361 and 4362, renders an illness yel yeklig ig as an illness of jinn and peri. The word peri, however, does not stand in the Turkic of those lines.^[6]

The eleventh-century dictionary of Mahmud al-Kashgari records a formula for treating sick infants. Babies suffering from demonic possession or the evil eye had their faces fumigated with incense. The healer said ısrık ısrık, which the English translation renders “Be bitten, O jinni!”.^[7] The entry names a jinni. It does not name a peri. The Turkish encyclopedia reads the being addressed as a peri and concludes that the early Turks counted the peri among the invisible beings that harm children.^[3] Whether a peri is meant is open.

Among the Oghuz, the Book of Dede Korkut, preserved in a manuscript of the sixteenth century, tells of the shepherd Sarı Çoban. He meets a peri girl, perrî kızı, and fathers by her the one-eyed Tepegöz. Tepegöz then brings misfortune on the Oghuz.^[8] Here the peri is a being who joins a man and bears a monstrous child. Her name is the Persian one.^[9]

The peri in the shamanic record

Where the peri enters the record, she enters it beside the shaman rather than in a story of her own. The daughters of Ülgen have no separate names in the Altai material. They are called the White Girls, ak kızlar, or kıyan, and they are the peris who inspire the shaman, speaking into his ear during the rite.^[10] The literate bakşı of East Turkestan wrote treatises under the title Peri Han to make his trade defensible before the mullahs. He declared Fatma his patron.^[11]

The peris were also thought to come when called. In one town a stick was set in the water for them to alight on and play. The bakşı watched their reflection in a mirror.^[11]

Among the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs, the bakşı calls on a whole company of helpers. In the prayers of the Kyrgyz and Kazakh bakşı the saints of Mecca and Medina, Khan Genghis, Korkut Ata, Er Davut (David) and Süleyman are invoked in turn. Then the bakşı calls: “Peris lying on Mount Qaf, I have called you, come!”^[12] An exorcism (böy ajsunu) of the same bakşı lists the saints and the prophets and has the line Baymır ulu peri men, which is rendered as being together with the peri, the son of Baymır.^[13] In these texts the peri is one member of a long series of Islamic and older helpers. She stands in a Persian-Islamic frame.

The peri and childbirth

Beliefs about childbirth give the peri a second place in the record. In Anatolian folk belief the spirit albastı, or alkarısı, attacks women in childbed. Where the woman is left alone, peri girls come, take out her liver and go away. This is said to be the albastı pressing her.^[14] In the belief of the Ferghana Uzbeks the albastı is a spirit of its own beside devils, jinn, giants and peris.^[14]

A Soviet ethnographer recorded something near this among the Uzbeks of Khorezm in 1930. His informants counted the albastı among the jinn, and the sarı-ene, the yellow mother, among the peris. The sarı-ene spreads her long yellow hair over the woman in childbed and helps her to be delivered.^[15] He took the sarı-ene for a transformed form of the pre-Islamic Umay.^[15] The identification is the recorder’s own. It rests on a likeness of function, the protection of mothers and children.

The spirits the Göktürk sources name

The spirits the Göktürk-period evidence does name are of another kind. Umay protects the child and stands beside the khan. The sacred earth and water are a power invoked in the inscriptions. Erklig belongs to the later material in his own way.^[16] None of them is a peri, and none of them occupies the place the peri holds in the modern accounts.

A forest spirit of the Volga region, the Arçura, belongs to the same later record.

The name

periOld TurkicKutadgu Bilig
peri hanTurkish
perihonPersian
pairikāAvestan
parīgPahlavi
perîPersian

The word is Persian, and the compound through which it enters the Turkic record is Persian as well. It is perihon, the peri-reader, the man who calls the spirits and speaks for them.^[17] It appears in Turkic as peri han. It is not the name of a spirit but of a man. In parts of East Turkestan the Muslim kam was called the peri han, elsewhere the duahan, the prayer-reader, and at Kurale the bahşı.^[18]

One further name may go back to the same compound. Purhan, which stood in some places for the shaman, may be a worn form of perihon. It has also been derived from the Buddhist burhan. The derivation is not settled.^[17]

The Persian word for angel, perişte, is close to perî in sound.^[2] The Kutadgu Bilig writes the Turkic form as peri.^[5]

Use as evidence

The peri documents how Persian-Islamic spirit lore entered the Turkic world and settled beside the older figures. The record begins in the eleventh century with a verse of the Karakhanid court and a healer’s formula. It continues in the Oghuz tales and is fullest in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of shamans who wrote or spoke in Muslim settings.

The peri is therefore a figure of later Turkic religion, reached through the shamanic record, with a Persian name. The evidence draws no line from her back to the khaganates. What is known of her tells of the Turkic peoples after they met Iran and Islam, and not of the Göktürks. A Turkish study of mythology agrees in a wider sense. It finds no giants and no other beings beyond nature among the Huns, among the Göktürks or in the Oghuz epic. It holds that the beings of the folk tales are partly shared by all the Turkic peoples and partly came from outside.^[19]

References

^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954
^ a b c d e Bozkurt 2007, p. 232
^ a b Bozkurt 2007, p. 232–233
^ Kutadgu Bilig
^ a b c Kutadgu Bilig; Hacib 2015-04-30 (Ausdruck), couplet 4716
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Hacib 2015-04-30 (Ausdruck), couplet 4361–4362
^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 131
^ Erzählüberlieferung Handschrift des 16. Jahrhunderts (Angabe im Dateinamen der Wikisource-Vorlage), p. 232–233; Bozkurt 2007, p. 232–233
^ Erzählüberlieferung Handschrift des 16. Jahrhunderts (Angabe im Dateinamen der Wikisource-Vorlage)
^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 39
^ a b İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 115
^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 139, 142, 149
^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 153–154
^ a b İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 176–177
^ a b Potapov 1996, p. 226
^ Kül Tegin inscription
^ a b İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 92
^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 118
^ Ögel 1995, p. 561

Sources

Literature

Abdülkadir İnan, Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm: Materyaller ve Araştırmalar (2017; first edition 1954)
Uno Harva, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938)
L. P. Potapov (trans. Muvaffak Duranlı), Etnografik verilerin ışığında eski Türklerin tanrısı Umay (1996)
Yusuf Has Hacib; Text after Reşid Rahmeti Arat, Kutadgu Bilig Metni (Webseite „Kutadgu Bilig Dizini“, Ausdruck vom 2015-04-30) (2015-04-30 (Ausdruck))
Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī, Dīwān Lughat al-Turk (1072–1074)
Nebi Bozkurt, Peri (2007)
anonymous (Oghusische Erzählüberlieferung; Dresdner Handschrift), Kitâb-ı Dedem Korkut Alâ Lisan-ı Tâife-i Oğuzân (Dresdner Handschrift, Boy „Basat depe gözi öldürdigi“) (Handschrift des 16. Jahrhunderts (Angabe im Dateinamen der Wikisource-Vorlage))
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) II (1995)