Ak Ana

Also Known As: Turkish form; the Altai form is Ak-Ene, also written Ak Ene or Ag Ene; ak means white and ana or ene means mother, so the name reads White Mother
Region/Culture: Northern Asia/Siberia
Mythos: Turkish Mythology, Siberian/Arctic Peoples’ Mythologies
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She lives inside the primordial water before the earth exists and holds the one piece of knowledge the creator lacks, the words that make creation work.
Role in Mythos: In the Altai creation myth she rises to the surface, tells the high god Ülgen how to speak the world into being, and sinks away for good.
Relation to Humans: She never deals with people directly, since in her only scene there are no people yet. Every human being in the Altai account exists because of the instruction she gave, which is why Turkish folklorists read her as the first mother figure of the tradition.

There is no shore, because there is no land for a shore to belong to. There is no sky either, only water, flat and dark and endless, and above it the god Ülgen, who wants to make something and does not yet know how. Then the surface breaks. A woman who lives down there in the cold shows herself on the water and speaks to him.

That is almost the whole of Ak Ana, and it has been enough to keep her in the record. She belongs to the creation myth of the Altai, the Turkic-speaking peoples of the mountains where Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan meet, and she appears in exactly one scene of it. In the Russian encyclopedia Myths of the Peoples of the World, the folklorist Sergei Neklyudov summarises the Altai record in a single line: Ülgen, taught by the White Mother who dwells in the world ocean, creates the earth and the sky. The historian Bahaeddin Ögel later retold the scene in Turkish in his survey Türk Mitolojisi, and that rendering is how most Turkish readers have met her since.

What she tells him is a rule of speech. If you want to create, say “I have made it, it is done,” and say nothing else. And while you are creating, never say “I made it, and it did not come to be.” Having said it, she dives back into the sea and vanishes, and the telling adds plainly that she was never known again. The water closes over the place where she was. Ülgen does as he is told. He calls for the earth and it is there; he calls for the sky and it is there.

The rest of the myth runs without her. In the Altai versions, the earth has to be brought up from the bottom of the water, and the one who dives for it is Erlik, later lord of the underworld. He fetches a handful for Ülgen and hides a second handful in his mouth, meaning to make a world of his own in secret. The mud swells, he nearly chokes, and he is forced to spit it out. That theft is where the long quarrel between Erlik and the creator begins. It is a big, well-loved story, told across Siberia and far beyond, and the White Mother is missing from some versions of it. When the Turkologist Wilhelm Radloff printed an Altai creation tale in 1866, the god and the first man fly over the water as two black geese, a stone rises out of the sea for the man to sit on, and no woman comes up out of the deep at all. She survives in some tellings and not in others, and nobody recorded why.

Almost nothing else about her was ever written down. No source says where she came from, whether she was born or simply always in the water, what she looked like, or where she went. She has no known temple, feast day or prayer. She never meets a human being. The whole of her record is one appearance and one speech.

Scholars have still found a great deal to say about that one speech. In a 2022 article in the folklore journal Motif Akademi Halkbilimi Dergisi, Harun Akçam and Serkan Köse read her as a female spirit and as a trace of an older layer of Turkic belief in which the power to create belonged to a mythic mother rather than to a sky father. On their reading the myth splits the work between the two: Ülgen is the one who creates, but the knowledge that makes creating possible comes from her. They go on to argue that this mother figure slowly turned, over centuries of storytelling, into the Earth Mother of later Turkic folklore, and into the protective mistress of the land who appears in Altai heroic epic. That is an interpretation, and they present it as one. The myth itself only shows a woman who knows something a god does not.

A fuller portrait of Ak Ana now circulates in modern popular books and on websites: a goddess of water, life and fertility, the wife or daughter of the sky god Kayra, worshipped as far away as the Khanty and Mansi of western Siberia. None of that is in the recorded myth. It is a later elaboration built around a figure whose original record fits in a paragraph, and it should be read as modern writing rather than as ancient belief.

Her power, such as it is, is knowledge. She knows the words that make a thing real, and she knows the words that would unmake it. In this myth creation is a matter of confidence: the world holds because the god declares it finished and never admits a failure out loud. Ak Ana is the one who understood that before he did.

Her limit is that she gives the secret away and keeps nothing for herself. She does not create anything in the telling, she does not stay to see what is made, and she does not return. The god whose world it becomes had to be told how to begin, and the one who told him disappeared into the dark water without a word of thanks recorded.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ak Ana in Turkic mythology?

Ak Ana, known in the Altai as Ak-Ene, is the White Mother of the Altai creation myth. She lives in the primordial water before the earth exists, rises to the surface, and tells the high god Ülgen how to create the world. She then sinks back into the water and is never seen again.

What did Ak Ana tell Ülgen?

Ak Ana told Ülgen that if he wanted to create, he should say “I have made it, it is done” and nothing else. She warned him never to say “I made it, and it did not come to be” while creating. Ülgen followed her instruction and called the earth and the sky into being.

Is Ak Ana a creator goddess?

Ak Ana does not create anything herself in the recorded myth; Ülgen does the creating. She supplies the knowledge that makes creation possible. Folklorists Harun Akçam and Serkan Köse read her as the trace of an older mother figure who once held the creative power in Turkic belief.

Is Ak Ana the wife of Kayra?

The recorded Altai creation myth does not make Ak Ana the wife or daughter of Kayra. That relationship, along with her popular description as a goddess of water and fertility, comes from modern popular writing. The recorded myth gives her only one appearance and one speech.

What happened to Ak Ana after creation?

Ak Ana dives back into the sea straight after speaking to Ülgen and vanishes. The telling states that she was never known again. No source records where she went, where she came from, or what she looked like.