Turkic Mythology

• Alara Water fairy of modern popular retellings of Turkic mythology, said to come from Lake Baikal and to live near water. A small winged girl who takes hatred and greed from human hearts.
• Altaian Creation Story Account of the making of the earth that the Altaians told in the nineteenth century. In Radloff's version a first man dives into the primal water for earth, hides part of it in his mouth and is named Erlik. Verbitskii's version has no dive.
• Arçura Forest spirit of the Chuvash and, as Şüräle, of the Volga Tatars, known from nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklore. A hairy, man-shaped being that leads travellers astray, tickling them to death.
• Asena the She-Wolf (Gök Börü) Ancestor in the Chinese accounts of Göktürk origins, golden head on the standard, name of the khan's guard. In the Göktürks' own writing the wolf is a simile for an army.
• Ay Ata The moon as a male deity of the Turkic peoples, the Moon Father beside the Sun Mother. Xiongnu rulers bowed to it, Göktürks raided as it waxed, Uyghur khagans bore it in their titles.
• Erklig The lord of the dead in Old Turkic Buddhist and Manichaean texts, and an ordinary adjective for power in the older language. Absent from the Göktürk inscriptions.
• Iye The owner-spirits of the Turkic peoples, held to possess a mountain, a water, a hearth, a house or a pass. The word for owner, idi, stands on the Orkhon stones, said of land and water.
• Peri Female spirit of Turkic folklore, known from the ethnographic record of the Islamic and modern period. The name is Persian, and so is the peri-reader who calls her.
• Strava minimal The funeral feast that the Huns held over the tomb of Attila in 453, with great revelry and lamentation. Jordanes gives the word as their own.
• Sword of Mars minimal The ancient sword that a herdsman found and brought to Attila, sacred to the Scythian kings and dedicated to the god of war. Priscus heard the story at Attila's court in 449.
• The three worlds The tiered cosmos of upper, middle and lower world in the reconstructed Turkic religion, set against the two-part cosmos the Göktürk inscriptions actually describe.
• Ülgen and Kayra Khan Sky gods of the Altaians as recorded by Radloff, Verbitskii and Potanin in the nineteenth century. Ülgen is the good creator, Kayra Khan the gracious khan of the highest heaven. The records differ on whether the two are one god, father and son, or a god and an epithet.
• Ulukayın (Turkic World Tree) The tree at the centre of the world in the reconstructed Turkic cosmology. The Göktürk-period sources give one tree only: the tree of the succession contest in the Zhou Shu.
• Umay The goddess of birth and of children. The Kül Tegin inscription names her once, in a comparison to a queen mother; the Tonyukuk inscription names her with Tengri and the sacred Earth-and-Water among the powers that gave victory. She is the only female divine figure in the Göktürk corpus.
• Yada Stone The stone with which Turkic and Mongol weather-workers are said to bring rain, wind, snow and hail. Kashgari saw it put out a fire with summer snow in the eleventh century, and the Altai missionaries and Radloff recorded the yadachi in the nineteenth. The Chinese histories give weather-working men and do not name a stone.
• Yer-Su Spirits The sacred Earth-and-Water of the Göktürk inscriptions. The land itself is a power that speaks beside Tengri, and a possession that can be left without a master.

← All religions