Körmös- Turkic GroupCollective"Spirits of the Underworld"
Also known as: Körmöz, Kermez, Kormoz, Kermes, and Kormos
Titles & Epithets
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Description
They rise unseen from Erlik's dark realm to seize the soul through a crack in the body's defenses. Fever, madness, wasting illness: each signals that a körmös has taken hold, and only the shaman's drum-driven descent into the underworld can wrestle it back.
Mythology & Lore
The Seizure
A person sickens without warning. Fever comes. Or madness. Or a slow wasting that no herb can stop. In Altai understanding, the cause is the same: a körmös has risen from Erlik's underworld and taken the victim's soul. Without the soul, the body fails.
The körmös move by stealth. They find the vulnerable, those whose defenses have cracked through transgression or misfortune, and carry the captured soul down to the lower world. Radloff, Anokhin, and Potapov all recorded the same understanding across different Altai communities: the soul is gone, and without intervention the person dies.
The Descent
The shaman reverses direction. Where the ascent to Ülgen goes up through the birch notches, the healing ceremony goes down. The kam beats the drum, enters trance, and descends through the layers of the underworld to find the stolen soul.
He may offer a substitute: an animal's soul traded to Erlik in place of the human one. He may fight the körmös directly, matching his initiatory spirits against the servants of the dead. The outcome is not certain. The ethnographic accounts record both successes and failures. The powers below are real, and the shaman does not always win.
Relationships
- Serves