Gün Ana

Winter dawn in the Altai. The frost on the felt has a grain to it like coarse sugar, the cold has weight, and the first thing the light touches is the smoke hole. In a tale the Altai Tatars told, that light has an address. It lives on the seventh floor of the sky, and it is a mother. The moon lives one floor below, and he is an old man.

The tale was collected in the nineteenth century by the missionary Vasily Verbitsky and by the Turkologist Wilhelm Radloff, whose Altai texts remain the foundation of everything anybody knows about the religion of the southern Siberian Turks. Uno Holmberg relayed it in 1927 in his survey of Siberian mythology, in a chapter on how these peoples pictured the world: the sky in layers, hemisphere above hemisphere, usually three or seven or nine of them. Most commonly seven. Holmberg thought the number was borrowed, probably from the old Babylonian sky with its sun and moon and five wandering planets stacked one above another, and he noted, with some care, that the people telling him about the storeys could not explain what any given storey signified. They knew the shape of the building. They had lost the floor plan.

What stayed with them was the family. Across the north the sun is female and the moon is male, and the language keeps saying so long after the theology has gone quiet. In Ostiak poetry on the Ob the two are simply the Sun mother and the Moon old man. Among the Cheremiss and the Votiaks, farming peoples with a real stake in the weather, the Sun mother got white animals killed for her when a drought burned the grass off the pasture. Those are Finno-Ugric neighbours, not Turks, and the difference matters. Among the Turkic Altaians, the Sun mother has no altar. She has a floor number.

She has no cult and no story.

That is the honest state of the record, and it is worth saying plainly before the rest of it arrives, because the rest of it arrives with a great deal of confidence. Nowhere in the Altai material does she act. She has no adversary, no descent, no rescue, no seduction, no war. The Orkhon inscriptions, the oldest Turkic writing there is, honour the sky god and Umay and the sacred lands and waters, and no sun goddess stands among them. Her names are not really names. Gün, kün, güneş and the old word yaşık are all just the sun, with mother stuck on the end, in a language that does not otherwise trouble itself with gender.

The goddess proper was built in Istanbul.

In the autumn of 1924, on Büyükada, in a house looking at the sea, a dying man was correcting proofs. Ziya Gökalp was the chief theorist of Turkish nationalism, a sociologist who had read his Durkheim closely, and the book on his desk was a history of Turkish civilization commissioned as a textbook for the upper years of secondary school. He did not finish it. He wrote to Ankara that he was dying without having got it printed, and he died in the last week of October; the book came out the following year. In it, the Altai detail about the sixth and seventh storeys has become a diagram of the state. The khagan and his consort, he writes, were the children of the sky and the earth, and the Sun mother and the Moon father were their representatives in the heavens: the moon, standing for the khagan, on the sixth floor, and the sun, standing for the queen, higher, on the seventh. A folktale about where the lights live had been turned into a constitutional arrangement, and the state was going to teach it to schoolchildren.

Everything since has been elaboration. In 2011 a self-published Turkish dictionary of myth, Deniz Karakurt’s Türk Söylence Sözlüğü, gave her the full entry: Kün Ana, Güneş Ana, Yaşık Ana, seated in the seventh heaven, the first great grandmother of humanity, goddess of life and warmth and health, patroness of the unfortunate and of orphans, wife of Ay Ata the moon. From there she went everywhere. A 2013 article in a Turkish theology faculty journal describes her in exactly those words and footnotes the dictionary, adding the passage from Gökalp underneath as confirmation. The loop closes neatly and the reader is none the wiser: a folk tale becomes a nationalist textbook, the textbook becomes a dictionary entry, the dictionary entry becomes a citation, and the citation is offered as evidence of ancient belief.

The neo-Tengrist movements of the 1990s and after, mapped by Marlène Laruelle across Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tatarstan, supplied the last thing missing, which was worshippers. Tengrism as they preach it is monotheist, ecological, without clergy or dogma or scripture, and heavily national. It needed a pantheon to go with the sky god, and the reconstructed pantheon was sitting there ready. Somebody eventually fixed her feast at the summer solstice.

Her powers, in the modern telling, are the powers of the sun with a face put on them: she warms, she ripens, she heals, she keeps the milk coming and the children living, and her rays run down like threads to every growing thing. Her limits are more interesting. She cannot be found in the eighth-century inscriptions. She cannot be found doing anything in the nineteenth-century songs. She survives entirely on the strength of other people’s certainty, and if the certainty were withdrawn she would go back to being what she was in the tale, which is the sun, seen at dawn, by someone cold.

Both things are true at once, and the temptation is to pick one. The Altai storyteller who put a mother on the seventh floor was not inventing her. The men who gave her a husband, a feast day and an orphanage were.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Gün Ana?

Gün Ana, the Sun Mother, is the sun personified as female in Turkic tradition, known also as Kün Ana, Güneş Ana and Yaşık Ana. In an Altai tale recorded in the nineteenth century she lives in the seventh storey of the sky, with the Moon old man in the sixth. The elaborate goddess of life, fertility and health who appears in most modern accounts was largely assembled in the twentieth century.

Is Gün Ana an ancient Turkic goddess?

Only partly. The habit of calling the sun “mother” and the moon “father” is genuinely old and widespread across Siberia, and the Altai material does place her above the moon in the layered sky. But there is no ancient cult, no myth in which she acts, and no mention of her in the Orkhon inscriptions, which name the sky god Tengri and Umay. Her biography as a named goddess comes from Ziya Gökalp’s 1925 history of Turkish civilization and from a self-published dictionary of Turkish myth published in 2011.

Who is Gün Ana’s husband?

The modern accounts pair her with Ay Ata, the Moon Father, and place him one storey below her in the sky. This ranking comes from Ziya Gökalp, who read the two lights as the heavenly representatives of the khagan and his consort, with the moon standing for the ruler and the sun for his queen.

What does Gün Ana look like?

No source describes her. She has no attested face, body, chariot or crown of rays, and the entries that give her one are inventing it. What the record supplies instead is a direction and a position: the east at sunrise, and the highest floor of a seven-storeyed sky.

Why is Gün Ana associated with orphans?

The patronage of orphans and of the unfortunate comes from the modern Turkish mythological dictionaries rather than from any early source, and from there it has spread into popular and even academic writing. It fits the logic of a sun that is imagined as a mother, feeding whatever has nobody else to feed it, but it is a recent addition rather than an old belief.

Related Entries

Ay Ata, Tengri, Bai-Ülgen, Erlik, Umay, Od Ana, Asena, Tulpar, Yelbeghen, Abaasy, Num, Esege Malan, Amaterasu, Surya, Helios