Ülgen

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In the high Altai, where the Katun runs green out of the glaciers and the larch forest gives way to bare rock, the sky is not a roof but a country. It rises in floors, one above another, the stars and the moon and the sun set into its lower stories like lamps in a great house, and at the top of it — past the layers no living foot can climb — stands a golden dwelling. The being who lives there made the world. He is Ülgen, the white lord of the upper world, and everything that is good comes down from his height: the light, the warmth, the grass that fattens the herds, the children that are born whole. Below him, in the dark under the earth, sits his brother, who wanted to be his equal and was cast down. Between the two of them the Altai cosmos finds its poles.

The shaper above the waters

The name is given in the records as Ülgen, Ülgan, or with the honorific prefix, Bai-Ülgen — the Old Turkic bay, “rich” or “venerable,” joined to a word the ethnographers render as “magnificent” or “great.” He is, in the language of the Encyclopedia of Religion, the creator who made earth, heaven, and all living beings, and who governs the weather and the turning of the stars. In the cosmology recorded among the southern Altai peoples he does not stand quite alone at the summit: the supreme principle is sometimes named Tengere Kayra Khan, the “merciful heaven-khan,” and Ülgen is his work and his deputy, the maker who actually does the shaping. But it is Ülgen whom the herdsmen address, Ülgen to whom the horse is offered, Ülgen before whom the shaman finally stands. He is the god a person could reach.

The world he made began as water. In the Altai creation accounts set down by nineteenth-century travelers and ethnographers, there was at first only the sea, with no land anywhere upon it, and the creator moving over the face of it. The earth had to be brought up from the bottom — and here the Altai story joins one of the oldest patterns in the religious imagination of northern Eurasia and the Americas, the earth-diver, in which the world is not spoken or hammered into being but fetched, dredged in a beakful or a handful from beneath a primordial flood. In the version the philologist Wilhelm Radloff (Vasily Radlov) gathered, a duck dives into the water and surfaces with a fleck of mud in its bill, and from that single mouthful the creator spreads the dry land out upon the sea, broad enough to lie down on and rest.

In a darker telling, the diver is not a bird but the being who would become Erlik. Sent down by the creator to bring up the soil, he carries the command out — but keeps a little of the mud hidden in his own mouth, meaning to make a private world of his own. The hidden earth begins to swell and choke him; he is forced to spit it out, and where the stolen soil falls it becomes the marshes and the rough, broken country. For the theft and the ambition the creator drives him down, names him Erlik, and shuts him in the lowest of the underworld’s floors. From that single act the Altai world receives its fundamental shape: a brother above and a brother below, the smooth good land and the bog, the upper light and the lower dark, set against each other for good.

This is the differentiation that matters most for understanding Ülgen, and it is easy to blur. He is not the same as Tengri. Tengri — Köke Möngke Tengri, the Eternal Blue Heaven of the broad steppe — is the impersonal Sky itself, the vast cold canopy that mandates the rule of khans and is praised rather than depicted, a power without a face or a house. Ülgen is the opposite kind of god: a personal creator, lodged in a particular Altai cosmos, with a golden dwelling at a countable height, with sons and daughters, with a brother and a quarrel, with a story that has a before and an after. Some accounts let the two slide toward each other, treating Ülgen as the high sky-god under a different name or as Tengri’s benevolent intermediary; Mircea Eliade noted exactly this drift toward identity in the Altai sacrifices. But the working distinction holds: Tengri is the Heaven the whole grassland looks up into, while Ülgen is the maker a single people can name, address, and visit.

The source of the good, and the road to him

What flows down from Ülgen is the good as the Altai herdsman would count it. He is the lord of light and of the sun’s warmth; the increase of the flocks and the herds is in his gift; the rain that greens the high pasture is his. The thunder is said to be his — the heavy sound rolling across the peaks reckoned as a sign of his presence — and the rainbow is described as his bridge, the bright arch by which the upper and the lower are for a moment joined. He keeps, in the records, a household of children: seven sons, ranked as pure spirits with offices over horses, prosperity, and the rest of the goods of life, and a number of daughters who are named as the sources of the shaman’s inspiration. He is, throughout, a god of abundance and of order rather than of terror. The terror belongs to his brother.

The two of them divide the world cleanly. Where Ülgen is white, the upper, the giver, Erlik is black, the lower, the taker; one sends the warmth and the increase, the other sends sickness, drought, and death, and claims the souls that fall to him. This is not the opposition of a good god and an evil one in the later moral sense, a power to be defeated and abolished. Erlik is a brother, made by the same hand, lodged by right in his own half of the cosmos; the dark is needed for the floor of the world to stand on, and the dead go to him as surely as the living look up to Ülgen. The two are the poles of a single order, not the two armies of a war — and the herdsman’s religious life runs between them, the offerings sent up to the bright lord of the heights, the placating gifts sent down to the lord of the depths who must not be angered. To picture Ülgen rightly is to picture him not as a sole god but as one end of an axis: the good direction in a cosmos that has a good direction and a bad one built into its very shape.

And he is far. His dwelling, the Encyclopedia of Religion records, sits above the stars, the sun, and the moon — in some accountings on the sixteenth floor of the sky, in a golden house with a golden throne. No prayer simply rises to such a height of its own weight. To reach Ülgen is the work of a specialist, the kam — the Altai shaman, the figure the wider literature calls by the borrowed Tungus word — and the rite by which he does it is one of the most fully recorded ceremonies in the whole ethnographic record of Inner Asia.

It is not undertaken often. The great offering to Ülgen, in the account Radloff preserved, was made once in every third, sixth, ninth, or twelfth year, and at its center stood a horse — a pale or light-colored beast, chosen and consecrated, whose soul the kam would ride up the layered sky. The horse is the right gift for this god and this journey. It is the wealth of the steppe and the high valleys, the animal whose increase Ülgen himself sends, and the creature that can carry a rider across a distance no man could walk; to give it to the upper world and then to ride its freed soul upward is to send the best of the herd ahead and to follow on its back. In the courtyard a young birch was set up, stripped of its lower branches, its crown thrust out through the smoke-hole of the dwelling and its trunk notched with a row of steps. The notches were the heavens. The kam, drumming, naming the spirits, calling out, climbed the birch step by step — and each step was a story of the sky ascended, the soul of the horse carrying him from floor to floor.

What the ascent is, told from inside the frame, is a true journey. The kam does not pretend to climb; his soul leaves and goes up. At one of the lower heavens he is met by Yayık, a servant-spirit of Ülgen, who tells him whether the offering has been accepted and whether the road above is open. Higher, the air thins and the going hardens; the records describe the kam halting at each level, panting, reporting aloud to the watching people what he sees — the obstacles, the brightness, the spirits of each floor — until at last, near the top, he comes before Ülgen himself. There he makes the people’s case: he asks for the blessing, for the increase of the herds and the health of the household, and he brings back word — a forecast of the season to come, the harvest, the weather, the dangers ahead. Then the soul descends, the kam returns to his body, and the rite is over. (Such ceremonies are recorded here at the distance of ethnography; they are described, never instructed.) The shape of it is unmistakable: where the worship of the impersonal Heaven is a matter of address and sacrifice from below, the worship of Ülgen is a visit, a vertical pilgrimage through a built cosmos to a god who can be stood before and asked.

An Altai shaman (kam) with the ceremonial drum, photographed by Sergei Ivanovich Borisov, c. 1908–1911. Public domain (published before 1931). Via Wikimedia Commons.

The instrument that carries the journey is the drum. Its single membrane is, in the Altai understanding, a kind of map and a kind of mount at once — its painted face a diagram of the cosmos the kam will travel, its sound the beating of the steed’s hooves up the floors of the sky. The diviner’s work of reading the season, the spirit-flight of the soul out of the body and back, and the act of divination that brings home the forecast are, in this rite, a single continuous motion: the climb to Ülgen is the asking and is the answer.

Mount Belukha and the Akkem glacier, Altai Republic. Photograph by Ondřej Žváček, CC BY-SA 3.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The record and the afterlife

Almost everything described above survives because outsiders wrote it down. The living religion of the Altai left no scripture of its own; what is known of Ülgen and his rite comes from the long shelf of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century observers who traveled into the mountains and recorded what they heard and saw. Wilhelm Radloff, the great Turkologist, set down the horse-sacrifice and the shaman’s ascent in detail in the second half of the nineteenth century, and his account became the version most often quoted afterward. The missionary-philologist Vasily Verbitsky, who lived among the Altai peoples for decades, published his Altaiskie inorodtsy (“The Altai natives”) in 1893, recording the offerings made to Ülgen. The composer and ethnographer Andrey Anokhin, who first went into the Altai around 1910 and gathered hundreds of songs and a body of ritual material, published his foundational Materials on the Shamanism of the Altaians in 1924 — a study, surveyed in the record of his life and work, that remains a primary source for the Altai pantheon and the structure of the ascent. It was largely through this accumulated record, and Eliade’s later synthesis of it in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, that the Altai shaman came to stand in the comparative literature as something like the type-case of the practice — the figure whose journey through the layered sky furnished the model for an entire theory of ecstatic flight.

That record was hard-won and, in places, a record of loss. The same ethnographic detail that preserves the rite also marks the source-distance built into it: this is a faith reported by travelers, missionaries, and folklorists, and the angle of each shaped what was written. The twentieth century pressed harder still. Under Soviet rule the Altai kam, like shamans across Siberia, came under sustained pressure — the offerings discouraged, the practitioners harassed and in cases worse, the open conduct of the cult driven from sight during the decades of antireligious campaigning and collectivization. The tradition narrowed, but it did not end. Since the 1990s the religious life of the Altai has revived openly, and Ülgen has a place in it; his name also runs through the homegrown Altai movement of the early twentieth century, Ak Jang or “the white faith,” which drew on the old upper-world figures while reshaping their meaning.

Altai people, photographed by Sergei Ivanovich Borisov, 1911. Public domain (published before 1931). Via Wikimedia Commons.

Within the broader Turkic and Mongol religious world, Ülgen takes his place beside a small company of high powers — the impersonal sky of Tengri; Umai, the goddess who guards the newborn and the placenta, attested with Tengri on the eighth-century Orkhon stelae; Erlik, his own cast-down brother and the judge of the dead, whose face the later Buddhist layering over the steppe would partly merge with Yama, the underworld king of the Indian and Tibetan tradition. Among these, Ülgen keeps a particular and unmistakable office. The peoples who carried versions of these figures — the Buryats of the Baikal country, the Sakha of the far north with their own bright Aiyy above and dark abaahy below — drew the same fundamental line he draws, the upper light against the lower dark. But where Tengri is the Heaven that orders empires and never comes down, Ülgen is the maker who can be climbed to: the white god at the top of the floored sky who fashioned the land from a beakful of mud, who sends the warmth and the increase, and who waits at the end of the kam’s long ascent to be asked.

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