Turkic Mythology

Origins of Earth and Sky

Turkic creation myths begin with water and emptiness. In the Altai traditions recorded by Vasily Radlov and Anokhin, before the earth existed there was only a vast primordial ocean under an endless sky. Tengri — or in some versions his agent Kara-Khan — looked down on the waters and saw a being floating there: Erlik, who would become his adversary. Tengri commanded Erlik to dive beneath the surface and bring up mud. Erlik dove deep and returned with a handful of earth, but hid a portion in his mouth, hoping to create his own world. Tengri spread the honest portion into dry land, and when the stolen mud began to swell in Erlik's cheeks, he spat it out — those gobs became the swamps and bogs, the bad ground. For his deception, Tengri cast Erlik down to the underworld, where he would rule the dead.

This earth-diver myth appears across Turkic and Mongol peoples with remarkable consistency, from the Altai Mountains to the Volga. It establishes the fundamental tension of Turkic cosmology: the sky above is the domain of order and light, the underworld below is the realm of darkness and transgression, and the earth between them is contested ground shaped by both.

The Eternal Blue Sky

Tengri stands alone atop the Turkic cosmos. He is not a god of particular functions — not of war or harvest or love — but of existence itself. The Orkhon inscriptions, carved in the 8th century for the Göktürk khagans Bilge and Kül-tegin, invoke him plainly: "Tengri above ordained it." Political authority, military victory, the fate of nations — all flow from Tengri's will. No mythology is told about Tengri's personal adventures; he does not marry, feast, or quarrel with other gods. He is the sky, and the sky is law.

Beneath Tengri, Umay presides over birth and the protection of children. She appears in the Orkhon inscriptions alongside Tengri and the sacred earth-water spirits (Yer-Sub), marking her as one of the highest beings in the old Turkic hierarchy. Mothers prayed to Umay during childbirth, and the afterbirth was considered Umay's dwelling — to damage it was to endanger the child. Her role parallels that of the hearth fire itself: the warmth at the center of the felt tent that keeps death at bay.

The earth-water spirits, Yer-Sub, completed the divine hierarchy. The Orkhon inscriptions name them alongside Tengri and Umay as powers that govern the Turkic world. Every mountain, river, spring, and old tree could be the seat of a yer-su spirit, and each required acknowledgment — libations of kumiss poured on the ground, words spoken before crossing a river or climbing a pass. The land was not scenery; it was populated.

The Wolf and the Mountain

The origin myth of the Göktürk ruling clan, the Ashina, survives in Chinese dynastic histories — the Zhoushu and the Suishu. The story varies in detail but centers on a boy, the last survivor of a slaughtered tribe, rescued and raised by a she-wolf. The wolf bears ten sons, and from one of them the Ashina descend. The wolf remains a totemic ancestor throughout Turkic culture: wolf-head banners flew over Göktürk armies, and the wolf's howl was an omen.

A second origin narrative, the Ergenekon legend, tells of a defeated Turkic people trapped in a mountain-ringed valley. For generations they multiply inside Ergenekon until a blacksmith melts through the iron mountainside and they pour out onto the steppe again. The story encodes memory of captivity and resurgence, and the melting of the iron mountain was commemorated in metalworking rituals. Some scholars connect it to the broader Turkic reverence for smithcraft — the blacksmith, like the shaman, works with fire and transformation.

The Shaman's Drum

The kam — the Turkic shaman — occupied a role unlike any priest or prophet. The kam did not represent the gods or interpret scripture; the kam traveled. Using a hide drum as a spirit-horse, the shaman entered ecstatic trance and rode between the layers of the cosmos. Drumbeats drove the journey upward through the heavens to Bai-Ülgen's realm or downward through the dark levels to Erlik's domain.

Altai shamanic séances (kamlanie), documented by Radlov, Potapov, and Anokhin, followed a consistent pattern. The shaman donned a costume hung with metal pendants representing spirit helpers — birds, animals, ancestral souls. The drum was heated over the fire to tighten its skin. Then the shaman began to drum, chant, and call the spirits. The séance could last hours. Onlookers watched the shaman's body jerk and sway as the spirit-journey progressed, and the shaman narrated the journey aloud — crossing rivers of the dead, arguing with underworld gatekeepers, pleading with Bai-Ülgen for a soul's return.

Shamanic initiation was not chosen. The spirits chose the kam, often through an illness or visionary crisis. The initiate experienced a dismemberment vision: spirits tore the body apart, boiled the flesh from the bones, then reassembled it with new organs — eyes that could see spirits, ears that could hear across worlds. Only after this ordeal could the shaman practice. The unwilling shaman who refused the calling risked madness or death.

Dede Korkut and the Oghuz Cycle

The Book of Dede Korkut preserves the heroic mythology of the Oghuz Turks in twelve interconnected stories. Compiled in written form around the 15th century, the tales draw on much older oral tradition. Dede Korkut himself is the wise bard and seer who names children, counsels warriors, and plays the kopuz at the margins of each tale.

The Oghuz stories are not cosmic in scale — they unfold in a world of feuding clans, raiding parties, and marriages won through combat. The most vivid tale pits the warrior Basat against Tepegöz, a one-eyed giant born from a shepherd's forbidden encounter with a peri spirit at a spring. Tepegöz grows to monstrous size, terrorizes the Oghuz camps, and demands human tribute. Basat enters the giant's cave, blinds his single eye with a spit heated red in the fire, and escapes disguised among the sheep — the same trick Odysseus played on Polyphemus, separated by thousands of miles of oral tradition. Then Basat takes up Tepegöz's own magic sword, the only blade that can pierce the giant's skin, and cuts him down.

Elsewhere, Beyrek disappears for sixteen years and returns to find his bride about to marry another. Kan Turalı must defeat a lion, a bull, and a dragon to win the warrior-maiden Selcen Hatun. The world of Dede Korkut is one where honor is everything, women fight alongside men, and the worst fate is not death but shame.

Er Töshtük and the Underworld Journey

The Kyrgyz epic of Er Töshtük tells of a hero who descends to the underworld to rescue his soul. After falling into a chasm, Töshtük travels through a series of subterranean realms populated by demons, serpent-kings, and chained giants. He wins allies through courage and cunning, frees a great bird's nestlings from a dragon, and is carried back to the surface on the bird's wings — feeding it meat from his own thigh when supplies run out.

Er Töshtük maps the Turkic underworld in narrative form. The journey downward is layered: each level has its own ruler, its own dangers, its own logic. The hero does not conquer the underworld; he navigates it, makes alliances with its inhabitants, and earns his return. The story encodes the shaman's own spirit journey in heroic terms.

Manas and the Kyrgyz Epics

The Epic of Manas, performed by specialist bards called manaschi, centers on the hero Manas and his campaign to unite the scattered Kyrgyz tribes against invaders from the east. Manas is the long-awaited son of the chieftain Jakıp, whose people live in exile. From childhood he displays superhuman strength and a temper to match. He gathers forty companions — the kırk çoro, each a warrior of renown — and leads the Kyrgyz in a series of battles to reclaim their homeland.

The epic belongs as much to Manas's wife Kanıkey as to Manas himself. When Manas falls in battle, betrayed by jealous kinsmen, Kanıkey holds the confederation together, hiding their infant son Semetey among strangers until he is old enough to fight for his inheritance. The cycle continues through Semetey and his son Seytek, three generations carrying the weight of Kyrgyz survival. In the longest recorded versions, the trilogy runs to hundreds of thousands of lines, performed over days by manaschi who claim the words come to them in dreams sent by Manas's own spirit.

Where the Dede Korkut stories are episodes — sharp, self-contained — the Manas cycle is a world. Loyalty to companions matters above all, the horse is partner in war and peace, and hospitality is sacred law. Shamanic elements thread through the narrative: spirits intervene in battles, dreams carry prophecy, and the dead do not stay gone.

Living with the Spirits

Turkic religious practice was woven into daily life rather than confined to temples or festivals. The yurt's central fire was sacred — pouring water on it or stepping over it brought misfortune. When moving camp, families made offerings to the spirits of the place they were leaving and the place they were entering. Horse sacrifice marked funerals and great occasions; the horse's hide was hung on poles so its spirit could carry the dead to the next world.

Ancestor spirits (arvakh) remained present and powerful. They could protect or punish their descendants. Clan burial grounds were sacred sites, and disturbing them was one of the gravest transgressions. The felt idol (tös or ongon), kept in the yurt, housed a protective ancestor spirit and received regular offerings of fat and kumiss.

The animal world mirrored the cosmic layers. Eagles and swans belonged to the sky and Tengri; bears guarded the mountain forests of the middle world; snakes moved through cracks in the earth toward Erlik's domain. The Irk Bitig, a 9th-century divination text found at Dunhuang, assigns animal spirits to cycles of time, each carrying its own omens — the same vertical logic of the cosmos applied to the calendar.

From Steppe to Scripture

The conversion of Turkic peoples to Islam, Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Christianity unfolded over centuries and was never total. The Uyghur Khaganate adopted Manichaeism in 762 CE. The Karakhanids converted to Islam in the 10th century. The Volga Bulgars accepted Islam even earlier. But in each case, older layers of belief persisted beneath the new faith.

Mahmud al-Kashgari, compiling his Diwan Lughat al-Turk in 1072–74, recorded Turkic proverbs, poetry, and mythological references even as he wrote for an Islamic audience. Folk Islam across Central Asia absorbed Tengriist elements: saints replaced spirits at sacred springs, the ovoo cairn became a mazār shrine, and shamanic healing practices continued under the name of Sufi rites.

In Siberia — among the Altai, Khakas, Tuvan, and Yakut peoples — shamanic practice survived into the 20th century, documented by Russian and European ethnographers. Radlov, Potapov, Diószegi, and others recorded séances, myths, and ritual practices that preserved the old cosmology largely intact. Today, Tengrism revival movements in Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia seek to reconstruct these traditions as living practice.

The Three Worlds

The Turkic cosmos stacks three worlds on a vertical axis. The upper world belongs to Tengri, the sky spirits, and the celestial beings. The middle world is the earth where humans, animals, and nature spirits share the land. The lower world belongs to Erlik and the dead. A cosmic tree — the Bai Terek (Great Poplar) or Bai Kayın (Great Birch) in Altai traditions — roots in the underworld, rises through the earth, and stretches its crown into the heavens. Some traditions describe an iron pillar or stake (Temir Kazık) that pins the sky to the earth at the pole star, around which the heavens revolve.

The shaman's drum maps this cosmos in miniature. The drum's face, divided into upper and lower halves by a horizontal line, depicts the sky world above and the underworld below, with figures of spirits, animals, and celestial bodies arranged according to their cosmic position. The drumstick is the whip that drives the drum-horse between worlds. When the shaman drums, the vertical axis opens and the boundaries between layers become passable.

In Altai tradition, a person carries multiple souls: the kut, a vital force bestowed by Tengri; the süne, a shadow-soul that wanders during dreams; and the tyn, the breath-soul. Illness means one of these has strayed or been seized by spirits. The shaman's task is to determine which soul is missing and where it has gone — chasing the süne through the upper heavens if it has wandered skyward, or descending to Erlik's domain to bargain for a kut that his servants have dragged below.

The Upper World

Tengri's sky is not a single heaven but a series of layers — different traditions count seven, nine, or sixteen. Bai-Ülgen, the benevolent sky deity of Altai tradition, dwells in the uppermost heaven, enthroned behind golden doors. The sun and moon reside in the upper layers, as do the spirits of the unborn — souls waiting to descend into human bodies. The Milky Way stretches across the sky as a seam or pathway; some traditions call it the Sky's Road or the Bird's Path.

Stars are not merely points of light but spiritual beings or the campfires of sky-dwellers. The pole star, Temir Kazık (the Iron Stake), holds the sky in place while all other stars revolve around it like tethered horses. The constellation of the Great Bear is often imagined as seven khans or seven wolves. Celestial phenomena — eclipses, comets, unusual clouds — were read as messages from the upper world, expressions of Tengri's will or warnings of imbalance. To reach Bai-Ülgen, the shaman ascends through each layer in sequence, climbing a notched birch pole — the tapty — where each notch marks a new heaven and a new set of guardians to negotiate past.

The Middle World

The earth is alive. Yer-su spirits inhabit every feature of the landscape, and humans share the middle world with these powers as neighbors. Certain mountains are especially sacred — Altai peoples considered the Altai range itself a living spiritual being, and the Khangai mountains held similar status for the Göktürks. Water sources demand reverence; polluting a spring offends its spirit, and rivers mark boundaries between spirit territories.

The middle world's defining feature is permeability. The cosmic tree roots here, connecting it to the realms above and below. Caves, deep springs, and river sources are points where the lower world seeps through. Mountain peaks touch the upper world. The shaman's ritual birch pole, planted at the center of a ceremony, replicates the cosmic tree in miniature — a temporary opening between layers driven into the ground of the middle world.

The Lower World

Erlik's realm lies beneath the earth, accessed through cracks, caves, deep waters, or the roots of the cosmic tree. The underworld has its own layered geography — Erlik sits at the deepest level, enthroned in a palace of iron or black stone. His servants (Erlik's sons and daughters, or various demon-spirits called körmös) roam the underworld and sometimes the middle world, bringing disease and misfortune to the living.

The dead travel to the lower world along dark rivers or through narrow passages. In some traditions, the deceased must cross a bridge — those who lived well cross safely, while the wicked fall into an abyss. The shaman who journeys to the lower world to rescue a captured soul follows these same paths, confronting Erlik's gatekeepers with offerings of sacrificed animals, particularly the horse. The horse's spirit carries both shaman and rescued soul back to the surface.

The underworld is not purely a place of punishment. It is the realm of origins as well as endings — the earth-diver myth places the raw material of creation beneath the primordial waters, in what becomes Erlik's domain. Seeds germinate in darkness before rising. Death feeds new life. The lower world holds necessary power, dangerous but not wholly evil, and the shaman's ability to travel there and return is what makes the three-layered cosmos a functioning whole.

Sacred Geography

Specific landscape features anchor the cosmology in lived terrain. Mountains function as earthly replicas of the cosmic axis — their peaks touch the upper world, their roots reach the lower. The ovoo cairns built at mountain passes are offerings to the spirits of that threshold, the point where one territory's spirits end and another's begin. River confluences, unusual rock formations, and old-growth trees also mark places where the cosmic layers feel close to the surface.

The cardinal directions carry cosmological meaning. East, where the sun rises, is the direction of life and Tengri's favor — yurt doors traditionally face east or south. West and north associate with darkness and the underworld. The interior of the yurt itself is a microcosm: the fire at the center is the axis, the smoke hole above opens toward Tengri, and the spatial arrangement of family members, guests, and objects follows cosmic order.