Ulgen

Ulgen, honoured with the title Bai-Ulgen, "rich Ulgen" or "great Ulgen", is the principal benevolent sky deity of Altai Turkic shamanism, credited in South Siberian creation narratives with shaping the visible world and standing as the source of light, order and goodness against Erlik's rule of the underworld below. Ulgen occupies a central place in the Altai shaman's ecstatic practice specifically because he is understood to dwell at the highest of several successive sky levels, and Siberian ethnographic accounts describe the shaman's ritual seance as a literal ascent, level by level, often dramatised through climbing a birch pole or tree notched to represent each stage of the sky, culminating in a direct address to Ulgen at the top on behalf of the community, most often to request good fortune, healthy livestock or the recovery of a sick person's soul. This vertical cosmology, sky above organised in ascending tiers with Ulgen at its summit and an underworld below organised in descending tiers with Erlik at its depth, is one of the clearest and best documented instances anywhere of the layered cosmic map many scholars consider a defining structural feature of Siberian and Inner Asian shamanism generally.

Comparative scholarship on Inner Asian religion generally treats Ulgen as closely related to, though not simply identical with, the more widely attested Tengri of the broader Turkic and Mongolic steppe tradition, reflecting how a shared underlying sky-god concept could develop locally distinct names, emphases and ritual practices among specific peoples, in this case the Altai and neighbouring South Siberian Turkic groups, without becoming a wholly different figure. Where Tengri appears chiefly in the political and imperial register, granting kingship to khans across a vast steppe empire, Ulgen appears chiefly in the intimate, local register of the shaman's own ecstatic practice on behalf of a specific community, and Eliade's survey of shamanism treats this difference in register, imperial sky god versus shaman's sky god, as a genuinely useful way to see how one broad Inner Asian sky-worship tradition took different practical shapes depending on the social structure, whether steppe empire or smaller Siberian hunting and herding community, that carried it forward.