The Abasy (Abaahy) are the malevolent demons of the lower world in the mythology of the Yakut (Sakha) and Siberian Turkic peoples: monstrous, often one-eyed or one-armed beings that dwell in the dark underworld, bring sickness, madness, death, and misfortune to humankind, are linked to the theft of souls, and against whom the shamans wage their spirit-battles.
The Demons of the Lower World
The Abasy are the evil spirits and demons of the lower world in the mythology of the Sakha (Yakut) people of Siberia. Their name is sometimes rendered Abaahy, and across the closely related folk traditions of neighboring Siberian Turkic peoples similar demonic classes appear under cognate or parallel names, all inhabiting the same conceptual space: a dark, hostile underworld set against the bright world of the sky-gods above.
In the threefold cosmos of Sakha belief, the universe is divided into an upper world of the good gods, called the Ayıy, a middle world inhabited by humankind, and a lower or under-world of dark powers. It is this under-world that the Abasy call home, and in some tellings of the mythology it is ruled over by the god Ulu Toyon. The Abasy are the denizens of that realm, and they stand as the malevolent counterparts to the benevolent celestial deities who watch over the world from above.
A Cosmos Cut in Two
This tripartite structure — Upper World, Middle World, Under World — is the scaffolding on which the whole of Sakha cosmology is built, and the Abasy occupy its lowest, darkest tier. Where the Ayıy send blessings, fertility, and order down into the middle world, the Abasy push upward from below, seeking to disrupt, corrupt, and afflict. The relationship between the two camps is neither static nor distant: Sakha epic tradition imagines an ongoing contest, played out across the human world, between the forces of the Upper World and the forces of the Under World, with humankind and its fate frequently caught in the middle.
This dualism is not unique to the Sakha alone. It echoes a broader pattern found among many Siberian and Central Asian Turkic peoples, in which life-giving, protective figures are set against destructive, hostile ones. The great mother-goddess Umay, who watches over pregnant women and infants, and the hearth-spirit Od-Ana, honored in the fire of every home, both belong to this benevolent side of the ledger. The Abasy belong emphatically to the other side, alongside other feared and liminal beings of Turkic folklore such as the childbirth-demon Albys and the marsh-dwelling serpent known as Sazagan.
Bodies Thrown Out of Symmetry
The Abasy are imagined in vivid, unsettling physical terms. In the epic poetry that preserves their descriptions, they are often characterized as one-eyed or one-armed, their proportions thrown deliberately out of human symmetry so that even at a glance they mark themselves as unnatural. This asymmetry recurs across the tradition as a kind of shorthand for monstrousness — a body built wrong, and therefore a being that does not belong to the ordered world of the living.
This maimed, off-kilter imagery sets the Abasy apart from the more human-shaped spirits of the middle and upper worlds. Where a being like the water-spirit Su-Iyesi might appear as an old man or woman living quietly beneath a river's surface, or where Umay might be pictured as a golden-haired, winged woman bathed in sunlight, the Abasy are given bodies that read as disordered and frightening to look upon. Their disfigurement is not incidental; in the moral grammar of the mythology, the Abasy's crooked, partial bodies mirror the disorder and disease they are believed to cause.
Bringers of Plague and Madness
The harm the Abasy inflict on the middle world is described in concrete and dreaded terms. They are said to bring disease, plague, madness, and misfortune to humankind, rising up out of the under-world to afflict the living. Illness, in this framework, is rarely just a physical event; it is frequently understood as an intrusion, the mark of a hostile spirit's touch or presence, and the Abasy are named again and again as the source of such affliction.
Beyond sickness of the body, the Abasy are also blamed for sickness of the mind — madness and derangement that could seize a person without warning. And beyond both of these lies one of their most feared associations: cases of illness attributed to the theft of a person's soul. It is this soul-theft, above all, that explains why the Abasy loom so large in Sakha belief as a cause worth naming, worth fearing, and worth fighting — and why the shaman's healing work so often centered on confronting an Abasy directly.
Possession and Torment
The Abasy's harm to humankind is not limited to disease alone; they are also described as possessing and tormenting people directly. A person afflicted by an Abasy might be understood to be inhabited by the spirit itself, their suffering a direct consequence of the demon's presence within or around them. This idea of possession sits alongside soul-theft as one of the primary ways the Abasy were understood to act upon human lives, and together the two motifs — a soul carried off, or a demon settled in — form the core of what made illness among the Sakha a matter not just for the body but for the spirit world entirely.
Heroes of the Olonkho Against the Fiends
The Abasy do not appear only as invisible causes of illness; they are also vivid antagonists in the Sakha heroic epic tradition known as the Olonkho. Within these epic poems, the Abasy are described in the same monstrous terms — often one-eyed or one-armed — as they battle the heroic protagonists, the bogatyrs, who are themselves sent forth by the Ayıy gods to confront them. These epic confrontations dramatize, on a grand and legendary scale, the same conflict that plays out quietly and constantly in ordinary life: the struggle between the order and protection offered by the Upper World and the chaos embodied by the Under World.
In the Olonkho, the bogatyr's battle against an Abasy is rarely a simple contest of strength alone. It carries the weight of cosmological consequence — a hero's victory reaffirms the boundary between the worlds and protects the human realm from the Under World's encroachment, while a hero's failure would let the disorder of the Abasy spill further into the Middle World. These epic tales, passed down and performed within Sakha oral tradition, preserve and transmit the deeper cosmological structure that also underlies everyday belief and practice.
The Shaman's Adversary
Among the living, it fell to the shaman, known in Sakha tradition as the oyuun, to confront the Abasy directly. Shamans were believed to be able to communicate with, appease, or battle these spirits, especially in cases where illness was attributed to spirit possession or to the theft of a soul by an Abasy. This role placed the shaman at the very center of communal life in matters of health and misfortune, since sickness that could not be explained or cured by ordinary means was understood to require spiritual, rather than purely physical, intervention.
A healing ritual conducted against an Abasy's influence was, in effect, a journey into contested territory. The shaman was believed to enter a trance state and travel to the spirit-worlds themselves, crossing the same boundary between Middle World and Under World that separates humankind from the Abasy's domain. There, the shaman's task might be to locate a stolen soul, to negotiate its return, or to confront the offending demon directly. This work mirrored, on an intimate and individual scale, the same grand contests fought by the bogatyrs of the Olonkho — the shaman as a lone champion standing between one afflicted person and the hostile power of the lower world.
Ransom, Rescue, and Return
Central to the shaman's confrontation with the Abasy was the idea that a stolen soul could, under the right circumstances, be recovered. The shaman's trance-journey was understood as an active undertaking on behalf of the sick or afflicted person, with the aim of retrieving the soul the Abasy had taken and returning it to its rightful place within the living body. Only once the soul was restored could the person's health be expected to return as well.
This motif of a spiritual practitioner retrieving something stolen by a hostile demon has close parallels elsewhere in Turkic folk belief. Among Kazakh and Kyrgyz traditions, for instance, the childbirth-demon Albys is said to steal or hide a laboring woman's vital organs, and finding and returning what she has taken is described as necessary to save the mother's life. The underlying logic in both cases is the same: a malevolent spirit takes something essential from a person, and only a specialized intervention — whether shamanic journey or ritual search — can set matters right again.
The Under World as a Realm, Not Merely a Symbol
It is worth dwelling on how concretely the Sakha under-world, home to the Abasy, was conceived. This was not treated as an abstract metaphor for misfortune but as an actual realm — ruled, in some tellings, by the god Ulu Toyon — with its own geography and its own population of hostile beings, standing in direct structural opposition to the Upper World of the Ayıy. The Abasy's asymmetrical bodies, their missing eyes and limbs, and their association with stolen souls all belong to this larger, coherent picture of a lower world imagined in as much detail and with as much conviction as the upper one.
This kind of richly populated cosmology, in which unseen realms are inhabited by specific, named classes of beings with distinct habits and domains, runs throughout Turkic and Siberian Turkic belief more broadly. The concept of owner-spirits, or iyesi/ichchi, which governs beings such as the fire-guardian Od-Ana and the water-spirit Su-Iyesi, reflects the same impulse to map the unseen world in granular, populated terms — an impulse that, on its darker side, produces the maimed, monstrous ranks of the Abasy.
Recorded from Living Tradition
What is known today of the Abasy comes primarily from the careful ethnographic fieldwork conducted among the Sakha (Yakut) people, chiefly by Russian and Soviet ethnographers who documented Siberian Turkic belief systems across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This fieldwork captured not only the descriptions of the Abasy themselves but the surrounding cosmological framework — the Upper and Under Worlds, the Ayıy and their opposition to the Abasy, and the epic tradition of the Olonkho in which these demons play so vivid a role.
These are not relics of a vanished worldview but elements of a living tradition, still carried by Sakha communities and by scholars and storytellers who continue to study, perform, and transmit the Olonkho and its surrounding beliefs. The figure of the Abasy, fearsome as it is, belongs to a still-living body of knowledge about how the world is ordered, how illness and misfortune are understood, and how a community protects itself through the mediating work of its shamans.
A Dark Mirror to a Wider World of Spirits
Set against the fuller landscape of Turkic mythology, the Abasy take their place as the clearest embodiment of the malevolent, death-dealing pole of a broader dualistic worldview. Where Umay guards the newborn and the mother, where Od-Ana warms and protects the hearth, and where Su-Iyesi watches over safe passage across water, the Abasy represent everything those figures work against: disease in place of health, madness in place of clarity, soul-theft in place of protection, and the cold dark of the under-world in place of the sky-gods' light.
Understood this way, the Abasy are not simply monsters invented to frighten but a structural counterweight within a coherent cosmological system — one that gives shape to why illness strikes, why shamans were needed, and why the heroic tales of the Olonkho carry such enduring weight within Sakha cultural memory. Their missing eyes and mismatched limbs are the visible sign of an entire under-world pressing up against the world of the living, held back only by the vigilance of the gods above and the courage of the shamans and epic heroes below.