Umai and the Powers of Earth and Water

Tengri, the sky recognized across Turkic and Mongol tradition as a supreme power, is not the only figure the historical record preserves. The Orkhon inscriptions, the eighth century Old Turkic royal inscriptions from Mongolia that are among the earliest written sources for this whole tradition, also name Umai, a feminine deity associated with the womb, with birth, and with the protection of infants, invoked in one well known phrase as a power under whose auspices a ruling mother stands. Alongside Umai, the same inscriptions name the sacred earth and water of the homeland itself as an active power that acts on behalf of the people who belong to it, not simply as a backdrop to their lives. Taken together these figures describe what the tradition actually looked like in practice, as distinct from later simplified summaries of it: a supreme sky addressed rarely and from a considerable formal height, and beneath that a dense, constantly consulted field of more immediate powers, springs, mountains, rivers and the ancestors belonging to a particular lineage, addressed far more often than Tengri himself in the ordinary texture of daily and seasonal life. Later observers who approached the tradition mainly through royal inscriptions and formal court religion have sometimes overstated Tengri's centrality relative to Umai and the earth and water powers, projecting the structure of the state cult onto the wider practice of ordinary people, who very often engaged the closer powers far more directly.

The practical expression of this tradition is a specific, recognizable set of small ritual acts rather than a single formal liturgy: the tying of a strip of cloth at a mountain pass or beside a spring, the pouring out of the first portion of a drink as an offering to the sky above and to the ground underfoot, and the deliberate building up of a cairn of stones at a high place, each stone added by a passing traveler. These acts, tied to Umai and to the sacred earth and water rather than to Tengri directly, have continued across Central Asia and Siberia in documented form through the long centuries in which Buddhism and then Islam became the dominant organized religions of the region, and they continued as well through the officially atheist Soviet period, when organized religious institutions faced direct state suppression but small, undramatic acts at a pass or a spring were far harder for any state to police or even to notice. Modern popular accounts that reduce this whole tradition to a single sky god miss most of what actually constituted it historically, since the earth and water powers, and Umai specifically, were what people were most often actually dealing with in the ordinary run of their lives, far more than Tengri.