Sons of Erlik- Turkic GroupCollective"Servants of Erlik"

Agents of the Underworld

In Altai shamanic tradition, the Sons of Erlik serve as their father's chief emissaries to the surface world. Erlik, lord of the underworld, dispatches them to bring disease, misfortune, and death upon mortals. Each son governs a particular sphere of affliction or a specific mode of tormenting the living. When illness strikes a household, the shaman's first task is to determine which of Erlik's sons has seized the victim's soul, for the healing ritual must be directed at the correct spirit to succeed.

Anokhin's ethnographic fieldwork among the Altai peoples in the early twentieth century records the names and functions of individual sons, though the roster varies between communities. Some traditions count seven sons, others nine, reflecting the diversity of shamanic practice across the Turkic-speaking peoples of southern Siberia. Despite these variations, the sons share a consistent role: they are the instruments of Erlik's will in the world above, carrying out his commands to harvest souls and punish those who neglect proper offerings to the underworld powers.

Radloff's earlier transcriptions of Altai oral literature similarly document these spirits as named figures in shamanic invocations, each addressed individually during ritual prayers. The specificity of these invocations underscores the sons' importance in the lived practice of Altai religion, where they were not abstract demons but particular beings with known habits and vulnerabilities that a skilled shaman could exploit.

The Shamanic Séance

The Sons of Erlik occupy a central place in the kamlanie, the shamanic séance performed to heal the sick or guide the recently dead. When a shaman undertakes the perilous descent to Erlik's underworld realm to retrieve a stolen soul, the sons serve as gatekeepers and adversaries along the journey's stages. The shaman must offer sacrifices to appease them and gain passage, typically presenting the spirit of a ritually slaughtered animal as a substitute for the human soul they have claimed.

Radloff's transcriptions of shamanic prayers preserve the formulaic language shamans used when addressing the sons during these descents, bargaining and flattering in turn, offering fermented mare's milk and the smoke of juniper alongside the animal sacrifice. In some traditions the sons also function as intermediaries: a shaman may call upon a particular son to intercede with Erlik on behalf of a dying person, offering a ransom in exchange for the patient's release. This negotiation between shaman and spirit forms the dramatic core of many healing rituals, performed before the gathered community as the shaman enters trance, drums pounding, voice shifting between his own words and the voices of the spirits he encounters on the road to the land of the dead.