Tamag- Turkic LocationLocation · Realm"The Lower World"

The Iron Realm Below

In Altai Turkic cosmology, the world is divided into three vertical layers connected by a cosmic axis. Below the middle world of the living lies the underworld, a dark realm of the dead ruled by Erlik Khan from a palace of iron. Tamag sits at the base of the cosmic structure, a sunless domain where rivers run black and no light penetrates. Erlik presides from his iron throne, attended by his sons and servants who carry out his will in the world above, seizing the souls of the dying and dragging them down to his domain.

The geography of the underworld as described in Altai shamanic invocations is a distorted mirror of the living world. There are rivers and mountains, but twisted and dark. A black watercourse must be crossed by the dead on their journey inward. Erlik's iron palace stands at the center, surrounded by his retinue of underworld spirits. The souls brought there serve Erlik, and their fate depends on the reckoning he makes of their earthly lives.

The concept appears in Old Turkic inscriptional literature under the form tamu, demonstrating the antiquity of the belief. The Irk Bitig (Book of Omens), a ninth-century manuscript from Dunhuang, references the underworld in the context of fortune-telling, linking it to inauspicious outcomes.

Shamanic Descent

The underworld holds particular significance in Altai shamanic practice. When illness was attributed to soul-loss, the seizure of a living person's soul by Erlik's servants, the shaman (kam) undertook a dangerous ritual journey to negotiate its return. Anokhin's field observations among the Altai Turks in the early twentieth century document these rites in detail: the kam would enter trance, descend symbolically through the layers of the earth, navigate the perils of the underworld landscape, and confront Erlik or his sons to bargain for the stolen soul.

These descent rituals were among the most dramatic and dangerous performances in the shamanic repertoire. The kam risked spiritual death in attempting the journey, and the community gathered to witness and support the ritual through the night. Radloff's earlier collections from the nineteenth century preserve the liturgical texts, lengthy invocations and songs that guided the shaman's path through each stage of the descent, naming the landmarks and dangers of the underworld geography. The continuity from the Old Turkic inscriptional evidence through to the living shamanic traditions recorded by Radloff and Anokhin speaks to the centrality of the underworld concept in Turkic religious thought across more than a millennium.