Esege Malan

Also Known As: Buryat Эсэгэ Малаан баабай, “Father Bald Sky”, figuratively “Father Clear Sky”; also Esege Malaan Tengri, Esege Malan baabai; called Delquen Sagan Burkan, the World White God, in Jeremiah Curtin’s Baikal record
Region/Culture: Northern Asia/Siberia
Mythos: Mongolian Mythology, Siberian/Arctic Peoples’ Mythologies
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He squeezed the sun and the moon out of a wet handful of earth, then handed the running of the world to his sons and largely stopped interfering.
Role in Mythos: He is the sky itself understood as a father, head of the ninety-nine celestials and the ancestor from whom the Buryat mountain gods descend.
Relation to Humans: Herders ask him for land, cattle, grass and health, and the mountain khats who actually answer such prayers hold their power by his blessing. He is close enough to the Buryat imagination to be told about as a slightly careless old man, and remote enough that the old cult made no image of him at all.

An old man sits by the fire in a house above the sky, smoking, and a swallow comes down the smoke hole to rob him. It has been sent for fire, because the people below are eating their meat raw and freezing through the winter. The bird takes a spark in its beak. The old man sees, grabs the tongs, swings, and misses everything except the tail, which splits in two and has stayed that way since. The swallow got the fire down anyway.

That old man is Esege Malan, and the story is characteristic in a way the Buryats seem to have enjoyed. He is the highest being in the sky over Lake Baikal, and he is also the one who fumbles the tongs.

The name is a description that hardened into a person. Esege is father. Malaan is bald, so the whole thing reads as Father Bald Head, which sounds like an insult until you know that in Buryat speech a bald head is a wise one, malaan tolgoiton being what people called the experienced old men whose judgement was worth having. Applied to the sky, bald means empty of cloud. He is the clear daytime sky, addressed as a father, and the scholar Bair Dugarov traces him back through that meaning to the older and vaguer Mongolian Blue Eternal Sky, of which he became the son as the sky acquired a face. T. M. Mikhailov argued that the personification came late, that the sky was simply male and life-giving, and therefore father, before anyone imagined a man in it. Some Buryats went further in the other direction and said he had been a man once, raised to heaven for his good deeds.

At the beginning there was nothing to see and nothing to hear, and there was Esege Malan and his wife Ehe Yuuren. He picked up a handful of earth, squeezed the moisture out of it, and made the sun from the water that ran out. He made the moon the same way. Then he made every living thing and every plant, and split the world into east and west and gave it to the higher gods to keep in order. The cult texts almost never mention him without her. She is called tengri in her own right, a title the chants hand to no other god’s wife, and one telling makes her his mother rather than his consort.

His house stands south of an unfading hillock and a lake that never ices over. Between them grows the Mother Yellow Tree, its crown marked with the signs of the stars, flowering on the right into a quiver of arrows and on the left into a thimble full of needles. East of the tree a hair rope is stretched with foals tied along it. A shaman’s hitching post is driven into the ground beside it and a drum and beater hang at the roots. No one ever painted him. Images were made freely of his lesser spirits, of their wives and their eldest children, and the felt ongons in a Buryat house held tin figures of shamans and virgin sisters and a small tin infant to encourage a real one, but the Highest Being got no likeness at all.

His children are the working half of the family. Nine sons came down to look at the world their father had made, ate earthly food, were made unclean by it, and were told by their strict father that they could stay. They chose the peaks of the Sayans and became the ninety western khats under Khan Shargai-noyon, the gods who actually take part in human lives. One of them is Bukha-noyon, the blue bull, ancestor of the Buryats. Another son, or grandson, is the fire in the hearth. Another is Solbon of the morning star, who in one account herds his father’s sheep, and to whom a herder wanting cattle sacrifices a ram at dawn and dances three nights until daybreak. There are nine daughters as well, and their work is women’s work: sewing, cutting, knitting, the rolling of felt.

The daughters cost him the sun and the moon. Mother Earth came up on a visit, and when it ended she asked for them, and he gave them gladly before discovering that he had no idea how to get them down to her. A thousand gods were assembled and none of them knew either. So he sent for Esh the hedgehog, who was footless and hairy and very wise and hated being looked at. His daughters, who liked to come down to the sea, take their clothes off and swim as swans, had been warned not to laugh. They laughed. Esh walked out without a word and went home cursing everything he passed, which is why the rope never leaves the ox’s nose and the saddle never leaves the horse’s back, and then, talking to himself with two invisible spirits listening at his shoulder, he gave away the answer: ask her for the shimmer of hot summer air and the echo, and see how she likes carrying them. Esege Malan did exactly that. Neither of them could deliver, so the sun and moon belong to the earth but hang in the sky, and the heat-shimmer and the echo belong to him and stay down here.

The hedgehog is required a second time, and the second time the stakes are higher. Esege Malan’s nine sons had quarrelled over the succession, four against four, until the fifth and strongest sent the elder four down beyond the frozen sea, where out of spite they bred mangathais, flying serpents that swallowed people, and enormous savage dogs. The earth filled with them for thousands of years. Esege Malan, retired by then, had walled the sky around with a fortress, and one day found a breach in it. He convened one celestial from each of the ninety-nine provinces of heaven and they debated and got nowhere. Esh, overheard muttering at home, explained it in a sentence: the people had prayed, and bled, and finally wept, and their tears had risen up and eaten the wall. His grandson Gesir Bogdo was sent down as a bird and flew three years without landing, because the smell of the dead was too much. Flies were sent to make maggots, the maggots cleaned the world, and the bird came to ground on a broad steppe, turned into a blue bull and bellowed a challenge. A pied bull came out to meet him and threw him clear over the Altai. The blue bull turned to stone where he fell, the pied bull broke a horn against him and swore to hate all horned cattle for ever, and the stone bull is still standing there.

What he gives is plain enough. Land, cattle, grass, health, and the fifty-five celestials of the west who came out of the first of his three spirits, eighteen of whose children ride grey horses across the sky and make the thunder. What he does not give is attention. He has the marks of a god who has withdrawn, too old and too high to be bothered, leaving the mountain khats to do the work, and the myths say so with some affection and no reverence at all. He could not manage his own sons. He gave away the sun and the moon without knowing how to hand them over. When the first shaman Buheli Hara defied him and got a Buryat couple a son, Esege Malan carried the child’s soul off to heaven, and the shaman turned into a wasp, flew up, and stung him on the forehead until he dropped it. He took it back. Then he made the shaman dance on a flat black stone until he sank into it, and Buryat shamanism is said to have been weakening ever since, in step with how far the man has gone down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Esege Malan?

Esege Malan is the supreme sky god of the Buryats, the Mongolic people of the Lake Baikal region of southern Siberia. His name means Father Bald Sky, in the sense of a sky without cloud. He heads the ninety-nine celestials and is treated in the myths as both creator of the world and the elderly, sometimes careless father of the gods who run it.

What did Esege Malan create?

Esege Malan made the sun and the moon by squeezing the moisture out of a handful of earth and forming them from the water. He then made all living things and plants, and divided the world into east and west, giving it to the higher gods to keep in order. In some accounts he and his wife Ehe Yuuren also raised the land out of the water and made the first man.

Why is Esege Malan called bald?

The word malaan means bald, and in Buryat usage a bald head was a byword for a wise and experienced one. Applied to the sky it means cloudless, so the name works as both Father Bald Head and Father Clear Sky. Scholars link the word to Milian tengri, a deity named in medieval Mongol sacrificial texts, whose name has also been read as smooth.

Who are Esege Malan’s children?

Esege Malan has nine sons and nine daughters. The sons came down to earth, were made unclean by eating earthly food, and settled permanently in the Sayan Mountains as the western khats, the mountain gods who actually answer prayers; among them are Khan Shargai-noyon and Bukha-noyon, the blue bull ancestor of the Buryats. The daughters patronise women and women’s crafts, and in the Ekhirit-Bulagat stories they come down to swim in the sea as swans.

Is Esege Malan the same as Tengri?

No. Tengri is the general Turkic and Mongolic sky, worshipped across the steppe, while Esege Malan is the specifically Buryat development of that idea into a named father god with a wife, a palace and eighteen children. Buryat texts place him below the older Blue Eternal Sky and describe him as its son, so the two are stages of one tradition rather than the same figure.