Bai-Ülgen

The birch stands inside the yurt with its lower branches stripped and its top pushed out through the smoke hole, a flag tied at the crown. Nine notches have been cut into the trunk. Outside, in the meadow, a light-coloured horse is held by a man who has been given a title for the night: head-holder. The shaman shakes a birch branch across the animal’s back to drive its soul loose, then shakes the same branch over the man, because the man’s soul is going too. Everyone in the yurt knows what the notches are for. They are heavens, and the shaman is going to climb them.

At the top, past the last one anybody has managed to reach, sits Bai-Ülgen. He is the highest god of the Turkic peoples of the Altai and Sayan mountains, and the shaman’s whole night of drumming, whinnying and goose-cackling exists to put a question in front of him: was the horse accepted, and what is coming.

He is not a god who lends himself to portraiture. The Altai record gives him a long beard and old age and very little else, which puts him in the company of the White Old Man, that grandfatherly fertility spirit who turns up across Mongolia and southern Siberia looking like somebody’s grandfather with a staff. Everything else about him is architecture and distance. He lives in a house on the top of the cosmic mountain, in the middle of heaven, above the stars and the sun and the moon. In one reckoning he sits on the sixteenth layer of the sky, one below Tengere Kaira Khan, the gracious khan of heaven, whose first son he sometimes is and whose job he has otherwise quietly taken over. Gods, like people, get promoted.

The world begins with him on water. Before there was earth there was only the primeval ocean, and above it two ducks: Ülgen and the first man. One of them dives, brings up mud from the sea floor, and the earth is spread out on the surface of the water. The same mud, in other tellings, is what the first human is made of. Then the first man decides he would like to be Ülgen’s equal, and Ülgen throws him down into the lower world and gives him a new name. Erlik, master of the dead and of the evil spirits, is a god’s failed apprentice.

Some of what got written down carries other people’s fingerprints. In one version Ülgen makes the first woman out of two ribs taken from one of the first seven men, and a snake persuades her to eat from a forbidden tree, which is not a story the Altai were telling before Russian Orthodox missionaries arrived in their valleys. Buddhism left marks too. A second man, Mangdyshirä, is the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī under a Turkic spelling, and he keeps the three great fish that carry the earth on a leash tied to heaven; a third, Maitärä, is the Buddha Maitreya, left in charge of watching over people while Ülgen stays home. The god survived every one of these visitors. He simply absorbed them.

He has a wife, servants, and a large family whose members are still overhead. His sons are the seven stars of Jeti Kan, the constellation the rest of the world calls the Big Dipper, and many of them are the ancestral spirits of Altai clans, so that a man could look up and point at his own lineage. His daughters are the Ak Kystar, the White Girls, scattered in the Pleiades. In the Buriat lands to the east the name goes through a stranger change: there Ülgen is a woman, Mother Ülgen, and she is not the sky at all but the wide earth.

Reaching him takes two nights. The horse is killed by breaking its backbone so that no blood touches the offerings, its hide and bones are hung on a long pole, and the meat is eaten. Then the shaman puts on his costume, calls his spirits into the drum one by one until it grows heavy in his hand, and starts up the birch. Each notch is a sky. He describes the ground splitting behind him, imitates thunder, rides a goose when the horse’s soul tires. He stops in the third heaven to report on the weather and the coming misfortunes. In the fifth he talks with Yayutši, who tells him secrets, some of which he says aloud and some of which he only mutters. He bows to the moon in the sixth and the sun in the seventh. In the sixth heaven, somewhere between the moon and the future of the harvest, there is a hare hunt, and the yurt laughs.

Then the climbing stops, at nine notches or twelve or wherever the shaman’s strength gives out, and he speaks to the god without any of the swagger: prince to whom three ladders lead, blue sky unattainable, thou didst create all men, do not condemn my sins, do not give us into the hand of Körmös. Bai-Ülgen answers. He says whether the horse was accepted, what the harvest will do, and what he wants next. The shaman falls down, and someone takes the drum out of his hands, and he lies there like a man asleep until he sits up and greets the room as though he has been away a long time.

His powers are the plain ones of a creator: he made the world and the people in it, he holds the upper sky and the good spirits, and between him and Erlik the fate of everyone in the middle world is decided. His limits are just as plain. He does not come down. He does not destroy Erlik, who keeps his kingdom and receives sacrifices of his own. He can only be reached by one person in the community, on one night, up a tree, and only as high as that person can go. Whether anyone still climbs for him is not certain. But on the Altai today, at a new moon, milk is sprinkled into the air by practitioners of the White Faith with their requests addressed to Altai Eezi, to the Three Kurbustan, and to Ülgen, whose sons are still in the Big Dipper and whose daughters are still in the Pleiades.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bai-Ülgen?

Bai-Ülgen, usually just called Ülgen, is the supreme god of the Turkic peoples of the Altai and Sayan mountains in southern Siberia. He created the earth, the heavens and all living beings, and he rules the upper world, the realm of light, along with the good spirits. His name means roughly “rich Ülgen.”

What is the difference between Bai-Ülgen and Erlik?

Bai-Ülgen holds the upper world and Erlik Khan holds the lower one, and between them they decide the fate of humans living in the middle world. In the Altai creation story Erlik is the first man, who tried to make himself Ülgen’s equal and was cast down and renamed. Both of them receive sacrifices.

Where does Bai-Ülgen live?

He lives in a house at the top of the cosmic mountain, in the middle of heaven, above the stars, the sun and the moon. He is often placed on the sixteenth layer of the sky, one level below Tengere Kaira Khan. Ordinary people cannot reach him; a shaman can, and only as far up as his own power allows.

How did the Altai shamans contact Bai-Ülgen?

Through the horse sacrifice, a ceremony lasting two or three nights that Wilhelm Radloff recorded in the nineteenth century. A light-coloured horse was killed without spilling its blood, and the shaman then climbed the notches cut into a birch trunk inside the yurt, each notch a layer of heaven, until he stood before Bai-Ülgen and learned whether the offering had been accepted and what the coming season would bring.

What did Bai-Ülgen look like?

The sources describe him only as an old man with a long beard, which identifies him with the White Old Man known across Mongolia and southern Siberia. No account gives him a face, a weapon or a costume. What the tradition describes in detail is not his body but his house, his mountain and the sixteen layers of sky between him and the ground.

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