Umay (Umai, Ymai) is a great mother-goddess of Turkic and Mongol mythology: the goddess of fertility, childbirth, mothers, infants, and the womb, protectress of children and of women in labour, a benevolent deity whose iconography and folklore link her to the sun and to light-giving warmth. She is named alongside Tengri, the eternal sky, and Yer-Sub, the earth-and-water spirits, in the eighth-century Orkhon inscriptions, one of the oldest attested figures in Turkic religion.
The Mother of the Turks
Umay is a mother-goddess of the Turkic and Mongolic peoples — the divine protector of fertility, birth, and the safety of children, honoured across the Turkic world from the ancient Orkhon inscriptions to the living folk-belief of the Altai, Siberia, Central Asia, and beyond. Her name is connected to the womb or the placenta, a root shared across several Turkic and Mongolic languages, and this etymology is telling: Umay is not an abstract principle of fertility but the very substance of birth itself, the membrane between the unborn child and the world, made divine. To invoke Umay was to invoke the birth-moment directly — the goddess and the biological fact of coming into life were, in the old Turkic imagination, nearly the same thing.
Carved Into Stone: Umay of the Orkhon Inscriptions
Umay's antiquity is unusually well documented among Turkic deities, because she is named in stone. The eighth-century Orkhon inscriptions — the monumental Old Turkic memorial texts raised for Kul Tigin and his brother Bilge Khagan, rulers of the Second Turkic Khaganate — invoke Umay alongside Tengri, the eternal sky, and Yer-Sub, the earth-and-water spirits, as one of the small company of powers a khagan called upon by name. She appears there specifically in connection with the khagan's mother and the royal household, watching over the continuity of the ruling line. This is a rare thing: most Turkic spirits survive only in the ethnographic record of much later centuries, described by outside observers long after the old state religion had faded. Umay, by contrast, is attested in the Turks' own words, carved by their own hand, at the height of their own political power.
Guardian of Royal Legitimacy
Umay's presence in the Orkhon texts alongside Tengri and Yer-Sub is invoked specifically in connection with the khagan's mother and the royal family, suggesting a link between the goddess and the legitimacy of rulership. A khaganate's continuity rested on its line of mothers and heirs, and Umay's invocation alongside the state's other named powers suggests she was called upon as a guarantor of that succession. In protecting the khagan's mother, she was, in a sense, protecting the state itself — its future rulers, its continuity, its right to exist. This is fertility mythology operating at the scale of a nation rather than a household, and it marks Umay as a goddess whose domain reached from the birthing cushion of a common woman to the royal household.
The Guardian at the Cradle
Among the Siberian Turkic peoples — the Altai, the Khakas, the Tuvans — the memory of Umay persisted long after the khaganates had fallen, taking on a more intimate, domestic character. Here she is described not as a distant state-goddess but as a spirit who attaches herself directly to a newborn's cradle, remaining close to the child through its most vulnerable early months. She is the presence felt hovering near a sleeping infant, the reason a cradle is treated with such careful respect, the unseen figure credited when a sickly child recovers or a difficult birth resolves safely. Her guardianship is understood to last only through infancy: once a child can walk and speak for itself, tradition holds that Umay may depart, her most essential work done, the child now sufficiently of the world to no longer need her constant closeness. This threshold — the passage from complete dependency to the first steps of independence — is treated as sacred in its own right, marked in Altai and Siberian custom as the moment a life truly begins to belong to itself.
A Winged Woman of Gold and Light
Where Umay is given form at all, the images agree on a few things: she is sometimes winged, and she is often golden. Central Asian shamanic tradition sometimes pictures her as a golden-haired woman, her presence bound up with sunlight and light-symbolism, so that her domain over birth and her association with the sun become aspects of a single idea — Umay as a source of warmth and vitality, whether in a womb, a cradle, or the sky itself. The image of wings suggests a being who moves easily between realms, descending toward the human world to watch over a birth and withdrawing again once her task is complete. This combination of flight, gold, and sun-association gives Umay an iconographic register closer to a celestial visitor than an earthbound household spirit, distinguishing her from many of the more localized nature-owner spirits of the wider Turkic-Siberian cosmos.
The Goddess Beside Tengri
Umay is invoked alongside Tengri, the eternal sky, in the same Orkhon inscriptions that name the khagan's protectors. Where Tengri is associated with the celestial, overarching sky, Umay's domain is birth and the protection of mothers and infants — the process by which life is delivered into bodies and kept safe in its first fragile days. Tengri's grant of fate and fortune from above is a separate power from Umay's watch over the womb and the cradle, and the two are named together in the inscriptions without the surviving text specifying a rank or hierarchy between them. This pairing of a sky-god with a great mother-goddess is a structure recognisable across many ancient religious systems, and in the Turkic case it appears already in the earliest surviving texts, suggesting Umay's veneration is not a later folk elaboration but an ancient and foundational feature of Turkic belief.
A Household Guarded by Owner-Spirits
Umay's world was never occupied by her alone. The broader Turkic-Siberian cosmos, as recorded by generations of ethnographers among the Sakha, Altai, and Khakas peoples, is populated by a whole system of iyesi or ichchi — owner-spirits, each presiding over a particular domain of the natural or domestic world. The hearth had its own guardian in Od-Ana, or Ot-Ana, "Mother Fire," honoured among the Altai and the Yakut with small offerings of fat, milk, or food cast into the flames before a meal, a gesture of respect toward a fire understood to be a living, sentient presence rather than mere combustion. To insult the hearth, to spit into it or step carelessly over it, was to risk Od-Ana's anger; among the Sakha a closely related figure, Ot Ichchite, the "owner of fire," reflects the same underlying animistic logic by another name. Rivers, lakes, and springs had their own owner in Su-Iyesi, imagined as an old man or woman dwelling beneath the water's surface, to whom travelers and fishermen offered bread, coins, or milk before crossing or casting a line, hoping to secure safe passage and a good catch. Among the Tatars and Bashkirs this water-spirit could also appear as Su Anasy, the "Water Mother," a beautiful long-haired woman capable of luring the unwary — children especially — down into the depths, a figure that echoes the rusalka legends told much further west. Umay's guardianship of the cradle belongs to this same web of owner-spirits, each minding its own corner of a world understood to be watched over, tended, and occasionally provoked at every turn.
The Threat at the Bedside: Albys
If Umay represents the protective force drawn toward a birth, Albys — known across the Turkic world as Albasty or Albastı, in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, and Anatolian Turkish tradition alike — represents the opposing danger that a birth invites. Albys is a malevolent female spirit believed to attack women specifically during labour, blamed for postpartum complications and maternal death. She is described with long, disheveled hair and, in many tellings, with pendulous breasts thrown back over her shoulders, sometimes given hooved or animal-like feet that mark her as something other than fully human. In some Kazakh and Kyrgyz accounts her attack takes a strikingly specific form: she is said to steal or hide the labouring woman's lungs or liver, and the only way to save the mother is for a healer to locate and restore the hidden organ — a motif ethnographers have traced through Central Asian shamanic healing practice. Protective custom answered her directly: iron objects, red thread, and amulets were placed near a birthing woman as wards against Albys's approach, iron in particular carrying a long history across many folk traditions as a substance hostile to spirits. Notably, the name Albastı is cognate with figures found well beyond the Turkic world — the Azerbaijani Al, the Persian Al — pointing to a shared Central Asian and Near Eastern demonological inheritance around the dangers of childbirth, a motif old and widespread enough to have crossed language families while keeping its essential shape.
The Underworld of the Abaasy
In Yakut, or Sakha, cosmology, the universe is arranged in three tiers: an Upper World inhabited by the benevolent celestial Aiyy spirits, a Middle World where humans live, and a Lower or Under World ruled, in some tellings, by the god Ulu Toyon and populated by the Abaasy — a class of hostile spirits blamed for disease, misfortune, and death. The great Sakha heroic epic tradition, the Olonkho, gives the Abaasy vivid and unsettling shape: they appear as monstrous beings, often one-eyed or one-armed, locked in combat with heroic bogatyrs sent down by the Aiyy to defend the Middle World on their behalf. This is myth doing double duty as cosmology and as narrative entertainment, casting the eternal struggle between order and misfortune as an ongoing epic war fought out across three worlds. When illness struck a Sakha community and was attributed to spirit possession or the theft of a soul, it was the oyuun — the shaman — who was called upon to journey into contact with the Abaasy, whether to negotiate, appease, or do battle with them on the sufferer's behalf. Umay's careful, hovering protection of the newborn cradle takes on its full meaning against this backdrop: an infant was never simply vulnerable to accident or illness in the old Turkic-Siberian worldview, but exposed, in its first fragile days, to a cosmos genuinely contested between benevolent Aiyy-aligned powers and the hostile forces of the Under World.
Serpent of the Marshes: Sazagan
Not every dangerous figure in the Turkic imagination belonged to the underworld proper. Sazagan, found particularly in Kazakh and wider Central Asian folklore, is a serpent- or dragon-like creature, sometimes described as a giant snake or lizard-like monster dwelling in water or earth. Its name is thought to relate to "saz," meaning marsh or swamp in several Turkic languages, tying the creature etymologically to the reed-beds and riverbanks it was said to haunt. In some tellings Sazagan appears as a guardian of these liminal, half-drowned places rather than a purely predatory monster — a reminder that in Turkic folk cosmology, danger and guardianship were often two faces of the same figure, and that marshes, rivers, and other in-between landscapes were treated as thresholds requiring their own kind of respect and caution.
A Dualistic Cosmos: Life-Givers and Their Counterparts
Taken together, these figures sketch the underlying architecture of Turkic-Siberian belief. Umay, Od-Ana, and Su-Iyesi represent the benevolent, tutelary powers bound to the great life-giving domains — birth, fire, and water — each one a guardian to be respected, honoured with small offerings, and never taken for granted. Albys, the Abaasy, and Sazagan represent their liminal or outright malevolent counterparts, tied instead to death, disease, and monstrous danger, forces to be warded off with iron, red thread, careful ritual, and the intervention of a shaman when prevention failed. This is the Aiyy-Abaasy structure at the heart of Sakha cosmology extended outward into a broader pattern found across the Siberian and Central Asian Turkic world: a universe understood as continuously, actively contested, in which every stage of human life — birth above all — was a small battlefield between forces that nurtured and forces that threatened.
An Ancient Belief Preserved by Living Memory
Much of what is known about Umay and her companions survives through two very different kinds of record. Umay herself is unusually fortunate in having an eighth-century primary source: her own name, carved by Turkic hands into the Orkhon monuments at the height of the Second Turkic Khaganate. The rest of this cosmology — the iyesi spirit-owners, the Abaasy of the Sakha underworld, the household rites paid to Od-Ana, the wards set against Albys — comes down mainly through the patient fieldwork of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographers, many of them Russian and Soviet scholars working directly among the Sakha, Altai, and Khakas peoples. That this body of belief persisted in living practice long enough to be recorded in such detail is itself remarkable: household hearth offerings, cradle customs, protective amulets against childbirth spirits, and the Olonkho epic tradition were not antiquarian curiosities revived from old texts but ongoing, lived observances, carried forward by communities who continued to honour Umay and her fellow spirits as present and real. In that sense Umay's story spans the full distance of Turkic history — from a stone inscription raised for a khagan's mother in the eighth century to a grandmother's cradle-side care recorded by a field ethnographer more than a thousand years later, the goddess's essential character, watchful, maternal, golden-lit, remaining recognisably the same across the whole of that span.