Erlik

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Below the layered floors of the world, in a place where the rivers run black and the sun does not reach, there sits a sovereign at a throne, and before him pass the souls of every person who has ever died. He has nine sons and nine daughters to do his errands among the living, and the errands they carry are fevers and wasting and the breaking of bones. The benevolent maker of the bright upper world has no power to call back what this lord has claimed. Only one figure can go down to argue with him, and that figure is the shaman.

This is Erlik — also written Erlig, and addressed with the title of a ruler as Erlik Khan. Across the Altai mountains, the Sayan, the basins of the Turkic-speaking peoples of southern Siberia, and the felt-tent world of the Mongols, he is the master of the lower world: lord of the dead, judge over the souls that descend, and the source from which sickness is sent up into the world of the living. He is the dark pole of a cosmos whose bright pole is the creator Ülgen, and between the two the whole moral architecture of the world is strung.

Genealogy: the first being cast below

The name carries its office. Scholars of the Old Turkic vocabulary derive Erlik from erklig, an attributive form meaning “mighty,” “powerful,” “having dominion” — the Mighty One, named not for cruelty but for sovereignty. A second line of explanation, also current, reads the first syllable as er or yer, “earth,” and places the god in the earth’s depths where he dwells. Both senses suit a king of the underworld, and the tradition has never been obliged to choose between them.

The earliest layer of attestation reaches back to the eighth-century runic monuments of the Orkhon valley, where the inscriptions of the Turkic khaganate name the powers of heaven and earth. That Erlik as a developed underworld sovereign stands behind those texts is part of the scholarly reconstruction rather than something the stones spell out plainly — what the inscriptions attest with certainty is the pairing of Tengri the sky and the yer-sub, the earth-and-water powers below. The figure who governs the world beneath the living, however he was named in the eighth century, has a long ancestry, and by the time the steppe and the taiga were described in detail by travelers and ethnographers he had a fully drawn face. (The fullest early record of Altai religion is Wilhelm Radloff’s Aus Sibirien of 1884, gathered on his expeditions of the 1860s and 1870s; nearly everything written since rests on that bed and on the work of the ethnographers who followed.)

In the creation lore of the Altai peoples, Erlik is no late intruder into a finished world. He is there at the beginning. The accounts vary from valley to valley, but the shape is constant. In the earth-diver story — the motif, shared across the northern world, in which the first solid ground is fetched up from beneath a primordial sea — Erlik is the first being who dives into the waters at the maker’s command to bring up the soil from which the earth will be shaped. He brings it. But he hides a fragment of it in his mouth, meaning to make a world of his own, and the stolen earth swells and chokes him until he must spit it out. According to the Encyclopedia of Religion, what he spat became the rough places of the world — the swamps and the stony ground — so that even the marred surface of the earth bears the print of his overreaching.

For the presumption he is cast down. In the most widely recorded version he sets himself up as the maker’s equal, claims a share of the divine for himself, and is hurled out of the bright realm with the spirits who took his side; they fall together into the world below. He is sealed away — in one telling, behind a prison wall at the ninth layer of the earth — and there he becomes what he will remain: the ruler of the lower world, sovereign of the place to which the dead descend. He is, in many Altai accounts, the brother of Ülgen, the two of them the first beings, the one rising to the golden house above the sixteen heavens and the other sinking to the dark palace below. The bright maker keeps the world of light and the living. Erlik keeps everything beneath.

The court of Erlik Khan, an iron-walled city of judgment; Mongolian painting, c. 1800. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Teaching: the king who takes, judges, and sends

Erlik’s office is threefold, and the three offices are one. He takes the life, he judges what follows it, and from his realm he sends the sicknesses that thin the ranks of the living and drive them toward him.

His house is described with the particularity of a real place. In the Khakas tradition it is a palace in the deepest underworld built of copper, its furniture of gold; in the Altai descent-songs the shaman who travels there crosses a mountain of iron and passes a bridge no wider than a hair, beneath which the souls of sinners are seen drowning. The realm is layered, like the heavens above it, and Erlik sits at its bottom. To it come the dead. There he weighs them — a judge in the literal sense, assessing the soul on the deeds of its life and assigning its lot. The unworthy he binds with iron chains and gives over to torment; the ledger of a person’s white deeds and black deeds is read out before the throne. This is not the indifferent gray house of some other underworlds. It is a court, and Erlik presides over it.

The sickness comes from below. Erlik has nine sons, the Karaoghlanlar, and nine daughters, the Karakızlar — black sons and black daughters — and these are his messengers into the upper world. Plague, fever, the wasting illnesses, the sudden collapse of a strong man: these are not accidents of the body but errands, dispatched from the iron palace, the lord of the dead reaching up to draw a soul down before its road is run. When a person sickens past the ordinary remedies, the cause is understood to lie below, and the cure must be sought below as well. To get free of a disease, or to spare a household, offerings are made to Erlik — and this is the hinge of the whole system, the point at which the office of the dark king meets the vocation of the living specialist who alone can treat with him.

That specialist is the shaman — the kam of the Altai, and in the lower-world work especially the “black” shaman, the one whose road runs down rather than up. The distinction matters within the tradition: the calling has two roads, and not every shaman travels both. The white shaman’s road runs to the bright maker above, the realm of light and increase; the black shaman’s road runs to Erlik, into the dark where the dead and the diseases come from. The two are not good and evil in the missionary sense — both are necessary, both are dangerous, and the descent to the lord of the dead is reckoned the harder and more perilous journey precisely because of where it ends and with whom it must treat. The descent is the central drama of the office, and the ethnographic record of it is detailed enough that Mircea Eliade, drawing on Radloff and Anokhin, could reconstruct the Altai journey stage by stage in his Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. The shaman rides — his drum becomes his mount, his horse, the soul of a sacrificed animal — southward and downward, climbing the iron mountain, finding the hole that leads below, crossing the hair-thin bridge above the drowning dead, descending through the layers until he stands at last before Erlik’s seat.

There he does what no ordinary person can do: he bargains. He brings drink and offering — in the great Altai rite the spirit of a sacrificed horse, and libations of fermented mare’s milk, kumys. He flatters the terrible king, endures his roaring, and pleads his case. A soul has been stolen, carried below before its time, and the shaman has come to ransom it back; or a sickness has been sent into a house, and the shaman has come to turn it aside, to win from Erlik a remission, a stay. The audience is never certain. Erlik may refuse, may demand more, may send the petitioner back with nothing. But the bargain is real within this world: the lord of the dead can be moved, by power and by gift, to loosen his hold, and the shaman is the one being who can carry the offer down and the answer back. Everything the office is for converges on that throne.

Yama Dharmaraja, the protector and judge of the dead, with Tsongkhapa above; 19th-century Mongolian thangka. Public domain (Rubin Museum of Art), via Wikimedia Commons.

Reception: the Buddhist face and the long persistence

When Tibetan Buddhism in its Gelug form spread across Mongolia and the Buryat lands from the sixteenth century onward, it did not erase the lord of the dead. It gave him a new face and kept his office intact. The Indo-Tibetan judge of the dead — Yama, in Tibetan Shinje, the Dharmaraja or “king of the law” — slid into the place Erlik already held, and the two became one figure under a doubled name. In Mongolian Buddhism he is Erlik Nomun Khan, “Erlik, king of the doctrine”; among the Kalmyks, Erlik Nomin-khan; and in the monasteries he is also Choijoo (Tshoijoo), the wrathful protector of the faith. The Face Music ethnographic record describes him in his Buddhist office as the God of Law and Defender of the Faith, the one who distinguishes good from evil and truth from untruth and sorts the dead accordingly — which is, precisely, the office Erlik had held all along. The thangka painters gave him a bull’s head and a wreath of skulls and set him weighing souls with a mirror and a count of white and black pebbles. The borrowed iconography was Indo-Tibetan. The work was the same.

Nowhere did the layering show more vividly than in the tsam, the masked sacred dance of the Mongolian monasteries. The most widespread form, the tsam of Erleg Nomun Khan — sometimes called the Jakhar tsam, the “Dance of the Iron Palace” — placed the lord of the dead at its center, a towering masked figure presiding over the ritual expulsion of evil. The record of the dance notes that it was first performed on a stage at Ikh Khüree, the monastic capital that would become Ulaanbaatar, in 1811, and was repeated there year after year — by one count some 127 times — until it was forbidden in 1937, in the years when the Mongolian state, under Soviet pressure, was closing the monasteries and the old cult together. The dance went silent. So, for two generations, did much of the open practice of both the lamas and the shamans, and the men who had carried the descent to Erlik in their bodies were among those scattered, silenced, or killed.

The office outlived the silence. The shamanic traditions of the Sakha in the far north, of the Tuvans and the Altai peoples, of the Buryats around Lake Baikal, carried the lord of the lower world through the decades of suppression in memory and in muted practice, and since 1990 the tsam has been danced again and the shamans’ work resumed in the open. Across this whole world Erlik holds a single structural place: he is the necessary destination. Without a sovereign of the dead there is no court for the soul to face, no realm to which sickness can be traced, no throne for the shaman to descend to. The bright maker above gives and orders; the dark king below takes and judges; the shaman travels between them. Remove the lower throne and the descent becomes a journey to nowhere and the calling loses half its meaning.

Much of what can be said of Erlik comes filtered through a particular kind of record, and the distance is worth keeping in view. The oldest steppe religion is known mainly from inscriptions and from the chronicles of outsiders. The living shamanism, and with it the detailed accounts of the descent to the lord of the dead, was written down largely by nineteenth- and twentieth-century travelers and ethnographers — Radloff foremost, and after him the Russian and Soviet field-workers who recorded the Altai rites before they were suppressed. The descent-songs and the picture of the iron palace come to us through their notebooks, and they were observing a tradition already in contact with Buddhism and already under pressure. What the songs describe was real within the world that sang them; that it reaches us through the ear of the foreign observer is a fact about the record, not about the god.

It is worth marking what Erlik is not. The travelers and missionaries who first described him reached for the only category their own world offered and called him a devil, a demon, the satanic opposite of a good god — and the dualism of bright maker and dark sovereign made the translation easy. But the comparison distorts more than it reveals. Erlik is not a rebel against a moral order; he is part of the order, the half of it that handles death and judgment and the limit of life. His underworld is not a place of punishment for the world’s wickedness but the destination of everyone, weighed there and assigned a lot. He resembles the other sovereigns of the dead in the world’s religions — the keeper of the Norse death-realm, Hel; the Mesopotamian queen of the great-below, Ereshkigal — far more than he resembles the adversary of the missionary imagination. He is a king, in a kingdom every living thing will one day enter, and the shaman’s whole art is the knowledge of how to go there and come back.

An Altai shaman with his drum, photographed by Sergei Ivanovich Borisov, c. 1908–1914. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There is an old logic in placing a king at the bottom of the world. A power that takes every life and weighs every soul is not a flaw in creation to be wished away; it is the floor the whole structure stands on. The Altai and the Mongols built their cosmos with that floor in place and gave it a sovereign with sons to run his errands, a copper palace, and a court — and they kept, in the shaman, a single human being trained to walk down the iron mountain and stand before the throne and ask.

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