Erlik- Turkic GodDeity"Lord of the Underworld"

The Mud in His Mouth

Before the earth existed, there was only water. Radloff recorded the Altai creation myth: Bay Ülgen, the sky god, floated on the endless surface and fashioned a companion. This was Erlik, the first created being, and he was clever and ambitious.

Ülgen needed earth. He sent Erlik diving beneath the primordial water to bring up mud from the bottom. Erlik dove and returned with a fistful. But he had hidden a second portion in his mouth, intending to shape a world of his own. Ülgen spread the mud on the water's surface and it began to expand into flat, smooth land. The mud in Erlik's mouth swelled too. It choked him. He spat it out, and from those stolen fragments the mountains heaved up and the marshes spread. Everything rough and dangerous in the world came from what Erlik could not swallow.

Anokhin's accounts add that Erlik did not stop at theft. He tried to create living beings of his own, shaping creatures to rival Ülgen's work. What he made came out twisted and hostile. Ülgen destroyed Erlik's creations and cast their maker beneath the earth. The sky belonged to Ülgen. The sunless world below belonged to Erlik. Neither would cross into the other's domain again.

The Iron Palace

Erlik built his kingdom in the dark. Anokhin's ethnographic materials describe the underworld as a place reached by descending through layers of earth and crossing nine rivers. At the center stands Erlik's palace, forged entirely of iron: iron walls, iron throne, iron gates. He holds court there like a khan, demanding tribute from the living and receiving the dead who are brought to him.

The realm is not empty. Anokhin describes pastures and settlements in perpetual twilight, where the dead live as shadows and the livestock are the ghosts of animals sacrificed at funerals. Erlik presides over all of it. He is not a torturer. He is a king, and the dead are his subjects.

His household includes nine sons, the Körmöses, each sent to the surface to carry out their father's will. When illness struck a family or a healthy person dropped dead without warning, one of Erlik's sons had come to claim a soul. He also had daughters, and they were worse in their own way. They appeared to shamans during the descent to the underworld, offering drink and pleasure. A shaman who accepted was trapped below forever.

The Descent

When a person sickened and the family believed Erlik had seized their soul, they sent for a shaman. Radloff and Anokhin both documented what followed. The shaman dressed in ritual garments hung with iron pendants that clinked as he moved. He took up his drum and began to beat it. The trance came.

The journey was narrated aloud for everyone gathered in the tent. The shaman described each stage: passing through layers of earth, crossing the nine rivers, meeting Erlik's sons who blocked the path and his daughters who tried to turn him aside. At each obstacle the shaman used cunning or called on spirit allies to press forward. The community listened and knew exactly where their shaman was.

When the shaman reached the iron palace, he stood before Erlik and bargained. He offered the spiritual essence of sacrificed animals. He argued. He flattered the lord of the dead. Sometimes Erlik released the soul and the shaman brought it back, climbing out of trance to the sound of his own drum, the sick person's color already returning. Sometimes Erlik's price was too high, and the shaman returned empty-handed. Sometimes the shaman did not return at all. His own soul had been seized in place of the one he came to save.

Blood for the Dead

Erlik's hunger did not wait for illness. The living sacrificed to him regularly, not out of devotion but obligation. Anokhin recorded that the preferred offering was a black bull, slaughtered at night while offerings to Ülgen were made by day. The blood flowed into the earth rather than being raised toward the sky. Everything about the ritual pointed downward.

Erlik's altar stood to the north or west of the settlement, the directions of darkness and death. Ülgen's faced south or east, toward the sun. Every camp was built between these two poles. The Altai Turks understood that Erlik could not be defeated or ignored. He could only be fed, and a family that forgot to feed him would learn the cost when his sons came calling.