Yelbeghen

The dogs go first. Someone sets them barking, and then people are out between the tents with copper pots and iron ladles, hammering until the racket climbs the valley walls, because the moon has gone the colour of old blood and everyone knows what that means. Yelbeghen has it in his mouth again. The noise is not aimed at the monster. It is aimed at the sky, so that heaven will hear and make him let go.

Across Turkic Siberia this creature keeps changing his name and almost nothing else. The Altai call him Celbegen, Elbegen or Celven, the Khakas Chilbigen, the Tuvans Celbege, and elsewhere he answers to Yel Moos and Kara Moos, that first syllable carrying wind and evil spirit at once. Vasily Verbitsky, compiling his Altai dictionary in the nineteenth century, gave him four flat lines: a fabulous cannibal, with one head or three or seven or twelve, black or yellow, living on land and in the sea. A modern Altai dictionary is shorter still. A many-headed monster who appears in tales.

Seven is the number that sticks. In the epic of Alip Manash he arrives with fourteen eyes bulging, seven mouths open, seven caps knocked off his heads and seven braids of hair flying loose. Elsewhere he has sixty-six teeth, a black scalp crawling with lice, a beard, or nine beards, and a mole on his head the size of a three-year-old sheep. His blood stinks. When a woman from the middle world walks into his hall, his wife smells her before she sees her and asks what country she has come from, since her tongue is wrong and so is her scent.

The heads are not decoration, and the stories are unusually interested in what he does with them. One tale explains that he began with only three, and three were not enough: one head to work out where the next meal was coming from, one for talking, one for weeping or laughing. He had no head to sing with. So he took the complaint to heaven, and was turned away on the grounds that no creature called Celbegen appeared anywhere in the holy book. Then he went down to Erlik, lord of the underworld, who was still sour about a stolen pipe but came round. The creature had done wrong, Erlik allowed, yet he resembles us, and he feeds on meat as we do. Four more heads were granted. In one of the epics the arithmetic runs the other way, and a seven-headed Yelbeghen can only manage three songs at once because one head is busy on the kopuz, one is talking, one is playing the flute and one is complaining. A seventy-headed relative arrives shouting, screaming, weeping and moaning in seventy registers at the same time.

He belongs to Erlik, and the furniture of the tales keeps saying so. His halls are copper and bronze, and copper is the underworld’s metal; one story sets him in a copper fortress in the seven-valleyed Altai long before there were any people in it. In another, a traveller comes down off a black mountain and finds that the plain he took for a scrap of felt has no end to it, the forest he took for a comb has no bottom, and the tent he took for the size of a heart is a stone palace with ninety faces. Inside is his wife, Altin Targa, who carries sixty-six monstrous heads of her own and offers a guest a stew of snake, frog, lice and vinegar out of a four-handled bronze cauldron. The guest declines, on the grounds that the cook makes her bowls from human skulls and drinks blood instead of water.

His method with people is direct. A herdsman named Konchibay took his animals down to water and they shied; floating in the shallows was a horse’s liver. He hooked it, slung it behind him, rode on, heard something, turned, and Yelbeghen was sitting on the hook where the liver had been. Offered livestock as ransom, the monster refused. He did not eat animals. Human flesh was tasty, this man’s especially, and he would begin with the son, who should be waiting for him that evening.

The moon put a stop to it. In the Altai legends people complained until the moon came down to the earth, took Yelbeghen, and carried him back up, and he has lived there ever since along with the little black kettle he used to boil people in. Among the Teleut, the Altai and the Khakas he snatched at a bush on the way up and would not let go, which is why the full moon is marked. One version catches him in the ordinary act of fetching water, yoke across the shoulders and pails swinging. In another he came back down when a child pointed at the full moon, a thing children were forbidden to do, and carried the child off with him, so that the pair of them can be seen up there whenever the moon is round.

From that distance he still reaches down. Some accounts have him covering the moon’s eyes during an eclipse, others have him swallowing her outright, and others have him eating her away from full to nothing, month after month, meaning to finish the job and come back for the living. The new moon is the moon winning. When she is thin and new the evil spirits go quiet, the disasters thin out, and the earth is left in peace for a while.

He can be more or less anything he chooses: a liver in a river, an old man at a door, a single head one moment and seven the next when his temper goes. He is enormously strong, he commands soldiers, and he owns a country that is neither the earth nor the underworld but some third place with seven-headed bulls grazing in it. He is also stupid. In nearly every story he loses, and he rarely loses to a warrior. A fox tricks him out of a meal. A beaver outthinks him. A hero with the right object in his hand or the right lie on his tongue finishes him in an afternoon. When Alip Manash finally meets him, the greatest ogre in the Altai takes a flick of one finger to the neck, and all seven heads roll away into the grass.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Yelbeghen?

Yelbeghen is a many-headed, man-eating ogre from the mythology of the Turkic peoples of southern Siberia, best known among the Altai, who call him Celbegen. He appears in their heroic epics, folk tales and legends as a servant of Erlik, the lord of the underworld. He is usually seven-headed, black, hairy and enormously strong, and he prefers human flesh to any other food.

Why is Yelbeghen blamed for eclipses?

Altai tradition holds that the moon carried Yelbeghen away from the earth and that he has lived on her ever since, which is why a lunar eclipse was explained as Yelbeghen swallowing the moon or covering her eyes. When an eclipse began, people set the dogs barking and beat pots and pans to send the noise upward so that he would be forced to let go. A related belief has him eating the moon away from full to new each month, with the new moon marking the moon’s victory over him.

How many heads does Yelbeghen have?

Seven is the usual number, and the tales also give him three, nine, seventy and seventy-seven. One story explains the seven: he started with three, one for finding food, one for speaking and one for weeping or laughing, and Erlik granted him four more. The heads work independently, so a seven-headed Yelbeghen can play an instrument, talk, play a flute and complain all at once.

How is Yelbeghen defeated?

He is mortal and he loses almost every time, usually to cleverness rather than to force. A fox and a beaver each outwit him in Altai folk tales, and heroes beat him with magic objects, trickery, shape-shifting or plain strength. In the epic of Alip Manash the hero flicks his neck with one finger and all seven heads roll off.

Where does Yelbeghen live?

Before the moon took him he lived far from human settlement, in a copper fortress, a ninety-sided stone palace in a black forest, or a stone hall at the head of seven rivers. Some Altai epics place his country in a third world that is neither the earth nor the underworld. He shares it with a wife, Altin Targa, and in various tales with sons and daughters who eat as he does.

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