Umai

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A buried thing keeps a child alive. When a Turkic woman of the old Altai gave birth, the cord was cut and the afterbirth carried to the hearth-corner of the dwelling and set into the earth, near where the cradle would stand. It was not discarded. It was housed. The belief that moved the rite was exact: the same power that had wrapped and fed the unborn did not finish its work at the cutting, and it would go on guarding the newborn so long as a small amulet hung beside the cradle. That power, and that buried thing, carried one name. The word meant placenta, afterbirth, the caul — and it was also the name of a goddess. She is Umai.

The doubling is not a coincidence to be explained away; it is the whole of her. Where other divine mothers stand at one remove from birth, presiding over it, Umai is named for the organ of it. She is the membrane and she is the mother, the thing that comes away in the birthing and the keeper who follows the child out of the dark. To say her name is to name the moment a person enters the world.

The name and the placenta

The Old Turkic root umāy meant the placenta, the afterbirth — the same word, in Mongolian umai, gives the womb or uterus (Umay, Wikipedia). The goddess took her name from it, or shares its root with it, so that the office and the etymon are one. This is not a deity to whom childbirth was later assigned. The connection runs in the language itself, from the first attestation forward.

From that root everything in her follows. Because she is the afterbirth, she is bound to the instant of delivery; because she is bound to the delivery, she is the protector of the newly born; because she is the protector of the born, she becomes the keeper of fertility and of increase, the one who grants the child in the first place. The Turkic peoples called her Umai-ana — mother Umai — and the shaman, the kam, was invoked at a hard birth to call her near. Among the Altai-Sayan Turks and the Mongols alike, the placenta and the umbilical cord under the name Umai (also Mai, Ymai, Omai) were never alien things to be cast off, but the visible trace of a present goddess.

She wears the sun. In the living tradition she is Sarı Kız, the Yellow Maiden, her color the yellow of light, and she is figured with sixty golden tresses that fall like the rays of the sun. The brightness is of a piece with her work: she is the warmth that comes to the cradle, and from her, in one Khakas account, the very essence of fire — Od Ana, the fire-mother — was born. To keep a child is to keep a small fire burning, and Umai is the source of both.

The line that runs from goddess to fire is not ornament. In the dwelling of the steppe and the taiga the hearth is the center, the place where the family’s warmth and its luck are gathered, and to make Umai the mother of fire is to plant her at the heart of the household. The buried cord lay near the hearth for the same reason. Where the fire is, the goddess is; where the goddess is, the child is kept. The single yurt, in this reckoning, is a small cosmos with a warm divine presence at its middle, and that presence is hers.

The Kül Tigin monument in the Orkhon Valley, Mongolia. The eighth-century runiform text names Tengri and likens the ruler’s mother to the goddess Umai. Photograph by Betta27, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).

The stones of the Orkhon

What lifts Umai out of folk memory and sets her among the named powers of a state religion is stone. In the early eighth century the Göktürks raised memorial steles in the Orkhon Valley of present-day Mongolia for the brothers Bilge Kagan and the commander Kül Tigin, and again for the counselor Tonyukuk — the oldest substantial texts in any Turkic language, carved in the Old Turkic runiform script. These are the documentary bedrock of the early steppe sky-cult, and on them, beside the great heaven-god, one goddess is named. Her name is Umai.

The Kül Tigin inscription, raised about 732, sets the ruler’s mother in her likeness — Umay teg ögüm katun, “my mother the Khatun, like Umai.” The line is small and it is enormous. A khatun, the wife or mother of the kagan, is compared not to any power but to this one; the highest woman of the ruling house is measured against the mother-goddess, and the imperial succession itself is placed under her care. In the religion of the steppe, the kagan held his mandate from Tengri, the Eternal Sky, who ordered the world and raised up the ruling line; that the same inscriptions reach for Umai to dignify the kagan’s own mother is the clearest sign of where she stood. She is the female power at the head of the divine world, the mother set beside the heaven-father.

The Tonyukuk inscription shows her second face. There she appears not at the cradle but on the field. The text names the powers that granted the Turks their victory: Tengri, Umai, and the holy Yer-Sub — the sacred Earth-and-Water — together struck the enemy and gave the day to the Turkic forces. The goddess of the afterbirth is also a goddess of the battle. The same care that keeps a newborn breathing keeps a warrior alive in the press of an enemy host, and keeps the fortune of the whole people from running out. This is the breadth of her: from the first breath of an infant to the survival of a fighting man, one continuous protection, a dual office that scholars of the early Turks read as the core of her cult. The mother and the war-helper are not two goddesses awkwardly joined. They are one keeper of life across its whole arc — the giving of it, the guarding of it, the holding of it against death.

The Orkhon attestation belongs to the firmest register of what can be known of this religion. The steles are dated, their text is read, and the goddess is on them. Much else of the steppe sky-cult comes to us at one remove — through the chronicles of outsiders, or reconstructed from the living traditions by later ethnographers — but the eighth-century naming of Umai beside Tengri is direct testimony in the Turks’ own hand.

The keeper of the threshold

Inside the frame of the tradition, Umai’s work is precise and tender, and it turns on a threshold. She stands at the place where a soul enters the world and, sometimes, at the place where a small soul leaves it.

A sleeping infant’s face is her sign. When the child smiles in its sleep, Umai is present, bending near; when it cries or sickens, she has drawn away, and her absence is the danger. The fever, the unease, the failing — these were read as her departure, and the rites of the cradle were rites to keep her from going. Women tied small cradle-shaped tokens to ask her for a child, and once the child was born, the buried cord and the amulet beside the cradle held her there. The amulet was made when the newborn was first laid in the cradle, with the kam called to invite the goddess, and it was taken down only when the child outgrew the cradle and no longer needed her at that nearness. Her guardianship had a season, fitted to the most fragile years.

And because she governs the threshold, she governs both its sides. Umai protects and tends the living child; she also, in the belief, may separate the soul from the body of the dead, and most of all from the dead who are young. The goddess who carries the child into the world is the one who can carry it out — the same hands at both doors. There is nothing cruel in this within the frame; it is the logic of a power bound to the membrane between being and not-being. She presides over the passage, whichever way it runs.

The cradle-rite spells out the bargain. The amulet beside the child was no ornament but a residence: a place prepared so that the goddess, having entered the world with the infant, would have reason to stay near it. The umbilical cord buried by the hearth was the anchor, the bodily token that bound her to this particular child in this particular dwelling. The kam who was called at the first laying-down did not command the goddess; he invited her, opened the way, named the child to her. When the years of greatest danger had passed and the child no longer slept in the cradle, the amulet came down and the arrangement was let go, the goddess released from her watch over a body that no longer needed her at that nearness. The whole structure is one of hospitality more than of worship — a power lodged, fed, and at last thanked and freed. It treats the divine not as a remote sovereign to be placated but as a guest in the house, the most important guest, the one whose staying or going is the difference between a living child and a lost one.

This is what distinguishes her from a generic earth-mother or fertility figure. Her domain is not the broad fecundity of fields and herds in the abstract — though increase and luck and sustenance fall under her — but the specific, perilous, fire-warm threshold of an individual life beginning. She is local to the cradle. The whole grand machinery of the steppe cosmos, the Eternal Sky and its mandate, the layered world the shaman travels, narrows here to one sleeping face and the question of whether the goddess is still beside it.

An Altai shaman with the frame-drum, photographed by Sergei Ivanovich Borisov, c. 1908–1914. Among the Altai-Sayan Turks the kam was called to the cradle to invoke Umai. Public domain (PD-Russia-expired, via Wikimedia Commons).

Beside the heaven-father

Umai does not stand alone, and her standing is best read against the god she accompanies. In the genealogy of the Turkic powers she is named the spouse of Tengri, the omnipresent sky. Tengri is the vast, impersonal Eternal Sky, the orderer and the source of the kagan’s right to rule; Umai is the warm and particular mother who attends the single birth. Sky-father and earth-near mother, the high mandate and the close keeping — between them they hold the two ends of the world the steppe inhabited.

She belongs to a populated cosmos. Among the Altai Turks the upper world has its own creator-shaper, Ülgen, reached by the shaman’s ascent; the underworld and its lord, Erlik, receive the dead and send sickness; the sacred Yer-Sub, the Earth-and-Water that fought beside Tengri and Umai at Tonyukuk’s battle, holds the powers of land and stream. Umai is not the whole of this world but its mother-pole, the female divinity who, with Tengri, sits at the head of it. The pairing is the point. A religion centered on the sky still needed a keeper for the moment the sky’s children are born, and she is that keeper.

The shaping of this divine world is known unevenly. The eighth-century steles give the bare, certain fact of Umai’s high place and her battle-aid; the fuller portrait of her cradle-work, her sun-yellow hair, her sixty golden tresses, her tie to the fire-mother, comes from the later traditions of the Altai-Sayan peoples as these were lived and as travelers and scholars set them down. The exact pre-Buddhist contents of the early “Tengrism” — how much is unbroken continuity from the Göktürk centuries and how much is reconstruction from the living present — is a matter scholars weigh and contest. Umai’s antiquity, though, is not in doubt. She is on the stones.

The mother who stayed

Most of the named powers of the old steppe faded or were folded into other faiths. Umai did neither. She is among the living deities of the Turkic world, carried unbroken from the runiform inscriptions into the speech and practice of the present.

Among the Turkic peoples of the Altai and the Sayan — the Altai, the Khakas, the Tuvans and their neighbors — she remains the spirit of children and of mothers, named Ymai, May-ene, “Mother May.” The Khakas hold her especially dear. The Kyrgyz keep her as Umay ene, the protectress not only of children but of the whole community, and the Kazakhs and Uzbeks and the Turks of Anatolia keep cognate forms of her name — Umai ana, Umay ona, Umay Ana. Where the early Turkic religion spread, her name went with it, and where the people remain, she remains. The buried cord, the cradle-amulet, the invocation at a hard birth: these were not relics by the time the ethnographers found them but practices, and among living Turkic communities the figure of the mother-goddess endures.

This survival has weathered hard centuries. The shamanic and sky-centered traditions of Inner Asia were pressed under Soviet anti-religious policy in the twentieth century, the rites discouraged and the practitioners persecuted; after 1990 much of the open practice returned, and the older religion has been claimed again, in the Altai and across the Turkic lands, as a living inheritance. Through suppression and revival both, the cradle held. A goddess so close to the irreducible fact of birth is not easily put down, because the thing she is named for — the membrane, the cord, the first breath — happens in every generation, in every dwelling, whatever the state permits.

The endurance owes something to her placement, too. A high god of an imperial cult depends on the empire; when the Göktürk and later steppe states broke, the grand sky-mandate that authorized kagans had less to hold it. But a goddess of the cradle depends on the cradle, and the cradle did not break. Her cult was carried not chiefly by priests of a court but by mothers and by the kam who came to a hard birth, lodged in the most durable institution there is, the bearing and keeping of children. That is why she outlasted the political religion she once stood beside. The mandate of heaven needs a throne; the keeping of a newborn needs only a newborn.

Set among the great mother-figures of the world’s religions, Umai keeps her own shape. She is not the all-mother of an abstract earth but the goddess of one fierce particular: the placenta in the hand, the child in the cradle, the warrior on the field, the single thread of a life held against breaking. The Turks who raised the Orkhon stones wrote her name beside the Eternal Sky’s because they reckoned her among the powers that decide whether a people goes on. They were measuring the highest woman of their house against her. Twelve centuries later, a mother in the Altai still calls her to a sleeping child, and reads in its smile that she has come.

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