Umay

Also Known As: also Umai, Ymai, Imay; Old Turkic 𐰆𐰢𐰖; Kyrgyz Umay ene, Kazakh Umai ana, Uzbek Umay ona, Turkish Umay Ana; from Old Turkic umay, “placenta, afterbirth”
Region/Culture: Central Asia
Mythos: Turkish Mythology, Siberian/Arctic Peoples’ Mythologies
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She holds custody of the souls of children, keeping the unborn, guarding the newly born, and carrying the dead ones upward.
Role in Mythos: Umay is the protector of mothers and small children, named in the eighth-century Turkic inscriptions beside the sky god and the sacred earth.
Relation to Humans: Households kept her close through amulets, cradle objects and the dried umbilical cord, and read a baby’s moods as reports on whether she was still in the room. When she withdrew, a child sickened, and a shaman was hired to call her back.

A leather pouch the size of a plum hangs from the hood of a cradle somewhere in the Sayan foothills, stiff with cold and smelling faintly of woodsmoke. Inside it is a dried umbilical cord. The pouch is not a keepsake. It is an address, and while its occupant stays home the child in the cradle keeps breathing.

Her name is the thing in the pouch. In Old Turkic, umay meant the placenta, the afterbirth, the second delivery that follows the first. When Mahmud al-Kashgari compiled the first great dictionary of the Turkic languages in Baghdad in the early 1070s, he glossed the word in exactly that flat anatomical way, then gave the game away by recording a proverb alongside it: serve the umay and you will get a son. A word for tissue had a cult attached to it, and the cult was already old.

It was old enough to be carved in stone three centuries before Kashgari picked up his pen. On the monument raised in the Orkhon valley for the Turkic prince Kül Tegin around 732, a royal mother is praised with the phrase Umay teg ögüm katun kutıŋa, under the good fortune of my mother the katun, who is like Umay. The comparison is doing serious work. A khagan stood in for the sky; his wife stood in for Umay, and the babies she produced were the empire’s continuation clause. About a decade earlier, on the pillars of the old statesman Bilge Tonyukuk, she turns up in something closer to a battlefield dispatch: Tengri, Umay and the sacred Yer-Sub gave us the victory. The goddess of the nursery is listed among the reasons an army won.

Then the record goes quiet for roughly a thousand years.

What the stones never do is describe her. No face, no stature, no parents, no husband, no episode in which she does anything at all. Denis Sinor, setting out what can actually be established, got as far as female and benevolent and had to stop. The golden-haired sun maiden with sixty shining braids who now presides over popular accounts of the Turkic pantheon, wife of the sky, mother of the hearth fire, is recent furniture, assembled mostly in the twentieth century by writers who wanted the old religion to come with a tidy family tree. The eighth century offers a name in a short list of powers and nothing more.

Where she did survive was in the nursery, and there she turned out to be stranger than any pantheon chart. Among the Sagay, Shor and Beltir of the upper Yenisei, umai was not a goddess standing outside the child but the child’s own soul, resident from the first breath and lasting until the boy or girl could walk steadily and speak in whole sentences. A sleeping baby who smiled had her in the room. A baby who screamed for no reason had lost her, and if she stayed away the child sickened, at which point a shaman was paid to go and fetch her, calling to her through the flames of the hearth.

The same skill ran in reverse, and the reverse was ugly. A shaman could be engaged to perform Umay tutargha, the taking hold of the umai: lifting the soul out of a healthy infant and setting it into a dying one, or into the womb of a woman who had failed to conceive. The recipient might live. The donor died. Whole families of the Sayano-Altai lived with the knowledge that their child’s soul was portable and that somebody else’s grief could reach it.

Her presence in a Khakas house was therefore something you could pick up. The word Umai covered a whole shelf of objects: a bow and arrow the length of a finger, a spindle, a cowrie shell traded up from the south, a brass button, the navel cord itself, the choice depending on whether the baby was a boy or a girl. Beside them stood the tös’, figures whittled from wood or folded out of birch bark and cloth, made and charged by shamans and then fed. Prayers went to them and to the spirit of the fire together, ritual food was set out, and the figures were smeared with sacrificial broth until the surfaces went dark and tacky. There was also a Hara Umai, a Black Umai, the malignant twin of the household protector, kept and handled in the same rites. The ceremony that celebrated a birth had a compartment built into it for the force that takes babies away.

The souls she had not yet issued were said to be kept on a mountain, Ymay-tas, described as her house, invisible to ordinary people and stocked with children waiting their turn. Further west her portfolio widened. Kyrgyz Umay ene guards children, guards the Kyrgyz, and is asked for luck, food and increase, a fertility goddess quietly promoted to a general patron. Kazakh Umai ana, Uzbek Umay ona and Turkish Umay Ana carry the same name through the same territory. Among Tunguz neighbours who took the spirit over, even her sex came loose: Umai there could be male, female, or neither, functioning less as a mother than as a guardian angel assigned to the very small.

Sinor noticed that umai is also the ordinary Mongol word for womb, and argued that the Turks may have received both the word and the spirit from Mongol neighbours rather than the other way round. He hedged it himself in print, unable to decide between borrowing and a shared inheritance older than either people.

Her powers all run along one thread. She keeps unborn souls in reserve and issues them; she guards the child she has been given; she carries dead children up rather than leaving them to the underworld; she confers fortune on a household, on a dynasty, occasionally on an army. Her limits run along the same thread. She can simply leave, without malice and without warning, and a screaming infant is the only notice given. She can be caught and redirected by anyone with the technique, which makes the greatest protector of children in the Turkic world also the most easily weaponised. She has a black double who wants the opposite thing. And she has no story: no death, no marriage, no quarrel with another god, no adventure a storyteller could stretch across an evening. What survives of her is a pouch, a spindle, a bow the length of a finger, and the ordinary word for what a woman delivers after her child.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Umay in Turkic mythology?

Umay is the Turkic goddess of birth and the protector of mothers and small children. She is first attested in the eighth-century Old Turkic inscriptions of Mongolia, where she is named alongside the sky god Tengri and the sacred earth-and-water, Yer-Sub. Her cult survived longest among the Turkic peoples of the Sayan and Altai regions of southern Siberia.

What does the name Umay mean?

Umay is the Old Turkic word for the placenta or afterbirth. Mahmud al-Kashgari’s Turkic dictionary of the 1070s records that anatomical sense and also preserves the proverb that whoever serves the umay will get a son, showing the word already carried a religious meaning. The same form means womb in Mongolian.

Is Umay the wife of Tengri?

No source from the Turkic inscriptions makes Umay the wife of Tengri or gives her any family at all. The eighth-century stones name her as a power and say nothing about her appearance, parentage or marriage. The image of Umay as Tengri’s consort, a golden-haired sun maiden with sixty braids, was largely assembled in the twentieth century rather than inherited from the old religion.

What happens when Umay leaves a child?

Among the Sagay, Shor and Beltir of the upper Yenisei, a baby’s unexplained crying meant Umay had gone, and a prolonged absence meant the child would sicken. Families paid a shaman to call her back through the hearth fire. A sleeping baby’s smile was the sign that she had returned or never left.

Could Umay be stolen?

Yes. A shaman could perform a rite called Umay tutargha, taking hold of the umai, which lifted the soul out of a healthy infant and transferred it into a seriously ill child or into the womb of a woman who could not conceive. The recipient might survive the transfer. The child the soul was taken from was expected to die.