Gün Ana

Also Known As: Turkish; Kazakh Kün Ana, Kyrgyz Kün Ene; the words mean simply “Sun Mother”
Region/Culture: Northern Asia/Siberia
Mythos: Turkish Mythology, Siberian/Arctic Peoples’ Mythologies
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: The sun itself, seated on the seventh level of the sky and outranking the moon on the sixth.
Role in Mythos: She stands in the heavens for the khatun, the ruling woman, as the moon stands for the khagan.
Relation to Humans: Nothing in the record has her speak to a person, punish one, or answer one. The relationship attributed to her is entirely a matter of rank and of the sun’s ordinary gifts of warmth and growth.

The seat is described with unusual precision. The moon on the sixth floor of the sky, the sun on the seventh, above it, and the gap between them is not astronomy. It is protocol. The sentence that puts Gün Ana up there was written by Ziya Gökalp, the sociologist who did more than anyone else to hand the young Turkish Republic a usable past, and it sits in the second volume of his Türk Medeniyeti Tarihi, on page 211 of the 1974 Istanbul printing. According to the old Turkish conception, he wrote, the khagan and his khatun were the children of sky and earth; Sun Mother and Moon Father were their representatives up in the sky; Ay Ata, standing in for the khagan, held the sixth level, and Gün Ana, standing in for the khatun, held the seventh, higher. Almost everything now circulating in English about a Turkic sun goddess of life, fertility, warmth and health, patroness of orphans, grows out of that one paragraph.

Gökalp died in 1924. He was building a case about the standing of women in pre-Islamic Turkic society, and the passage has been quoted admiringly ever since, most often by people building the same case. It is a good paragraph. It is not a field note.

The field notes exist, and they say something else. When Russian and Polish ethnographers worked among the Yakut in the late nineteenth century they found a sky crowded with lords and no sun mother anywhere in it. The greatest of the benevolent gods there was Ürüng Aiyy Toyon, the White Lord, maker of the earth and of man. Troshchanski argued that he had once been the sun itself, carried north out of the steppe, and that when the Yakut settled into a country where the sun is a rumour for months at a time they kept the old name for their chief white god and handed the sun a new one. Kün-Toyon. Sun-Lord. Among the Turkic peoples generally, he wrote, the sun is the father of light.

Further south in the Altai, in the material Verbitsky gathered, the sun and moon are propitiated in the same breath as the mountains, the rivers and the forest, and even then the offering does not go to the sun. It goes to its eezi, its owner, the spirit that holds it the way a herdsman holds a herd. Nobody in those pages addresses the sun as anyone’s mother. And the sky in that same record has seventeen floors above the earth for the good spirits, with seven or nine beneath it for the bad. Seventeen. Gökalp’s tidy staircase of six and seven will not fit on it.

Among the Buryat, close neighbours to the Altai Turks and studied alongside them, the surviving prayers ask the sky for very domestic things: shade at the hot middle of the day, food in the mouth, light through the doorway of the tent and a sight of the sun through the smoke hole. In most of their tales the sun is male and takes a wife. When it goes out, a Balagansk shaman explained, it has been swallowed by the alkha, a monster that is all head, with no trunk and no limbs. The sun cries out to be saved, and the whole camp starts shouting and banging to frighten the thing into letting go. That is as close as the older record comes to a story about the sun, and the sun in it is a victim rather than a queen.

None of this makes the Turkic world short of goddesses. Umay is named on the Kül Tigin stone in the eighth century, in a line comparing the khagan’s mother to her, and she has been a protector of women and infants ever since, which is roughly twelve hundred years of documented career. Gün Ana has a century, and one paragraph.

Her powers are borrowed whole from the sun and are exactly what anyone would guess: warmth, ripening, health, the guarantee that the year keeps turning. Her weaknesses are the weaknesses of her paperwork. She has no parents and no birth. She has no death. She has no quarrel with anyone, no journey, no theft, no rescue, not one tale in which she does a single thing. Take away the sentence about the sixth and seventh floors and no figure remains, only the two ordinary words that make up her name.

Those words are real, and they travel well. Kazakh Kün Ana, Kyrgyz Kün Ene, Turkish Gün Ana, and the reference works list the spellings one under another as though each were a separate national goddess. What the list actually demonstrates is that closely related languages have closely related words for the sun and for a mother. Whether anyone ever knelt to her is a separate question, and the men who were out there with notebooks in the nineteenth century wrote down a Sun-Lord.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Gün Ana in Turkic mythology?

Gün Ana is the sun, described as a mother and treated as a goddess in modern accounts of Turkic mythology. The description that established her comes from the Turkish sociologist Ziya Gökalp, who placed her on the seventh level of the sky as the heavenly counterpart of the khatun, the ruling woman, with the moon god Ay Ata one level below her.

Is Gün Ana an ancient goddess?

The name is made of two ordinary Turkic words for sun and mother, but Gün Ana as a named goddess with a fixed seat in the sky traces to Ziya Gökalp’s Türk Medeniyeti Tarihi rather than to any ancient text or field collection. Nineteenth-century ethnographers among the Yakut and Altai peoples recorded the sun as masculine or as a spirit approached through its owner, not as a mother.

What is the difference between Gün Ana and Umay?

Umay is attested by name in the eighth-century Kül Tigin inscription and has a long documented history as a protector of women and children. Gün Ana appears in modern writing on Turkic mythology and has no comparable early attestation, no myths of her own, and no recorded cult.

What did the Yakut call the sun?

The Yakut called the sun Kün-Toyon, meaning Sun-Lord, a masculine title. Their chief benevolent god was Ürüng Aiyy Toyon, the White Lord, whom at least one nineteenth-century writer believed had originally been a solar deity brought north from the steppe.

Does Gün Ana have any myths?

No story is recorded in which Gün Ana acts. She has no birth, no death, no family beyond her pairing with Ay Ata, and no encounter with a human being; the entire account of her consists of her rank and her position in the sky.