Erlik Khan: The Lord of the Lower World

He was not always here.

In the oldest Altaic myths — the ones where Ülgen the sky deity creates the world from water with the help of a diver-bird — Erlik is there at the beginning. He is sometimes the diver himself, the one who brings up the clay from the bottom of the primordial sea that the sky god uses to make the earth. Other versions say he was created as Ülgen’s helper, his equal, his brother even.

Something went wrong between them.

The myths are not consistent about what. Jealousy, perhaps. Erlik wanted the position of supreme deity and attempted to take it. Or Erlik made humans differently than Ülgen intended, giving them a capacity for deception that the sky god had not sanctioned. Or it was simpler: Erlik went down, and down is where he stayed, and the gulf between up and down became the gulf between opposing cosmic principles.

Now he sits in the ninth level of the underworld on a throne made from black stone, surrounded by his seven sons — each one ruling one of the upper underworld levels, processing the dead as they arrive — and his court of helpers, and the accumulated dead of all time, who fill his territory the way water fills a deep basin. He is old. He has been receiving the dead since the first human died, which is the earliest memory anyone in the tradition has. He is not cruel, exactly — cruelty would require investment in individual suffering that he is too vast and too old to feel. He is cold, and patient, and absolutely immovable on questions of territory. What enters the underworld is his.

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The shaman who comes to petition him must observe the protocol.

The approach is formal. You come with offerings — spirit-tobacco, the aroma of food, the attention that the living can give and the dead cannot provide. You address him by title, which is elaborate: Lord of the Lower World, Owner of the Dark Waters, Great Khan Beneath. You state your purpose without deception, because Erlik has received every lie that has ever been told since the first human tried to bargain their way out of death, and he can smell them.

The shaman who comes for a soul comes knowing that Erlik’s claim is not illegitimate. The soul fled downward because something in it was already oriented toward death — illness, despair, the accumulated weight of unfinished business with the dead. Erlik received it in good faith. The shaman is asking for a return of property that was lawfully acquired.

This requires payment.

The payment is negotiated. Sometimes it is a substitute effigy — an animal, a doll, a representation of the soul that Erlik accepts as a stand-in. Sometimes it is a portion of the shaman’s own spirit-substance, a loan against the shaman’s own eventual arrival. Sometimes Erlik simply enjoys the visit — the shamans are the only living beings who come to him voluntarily, and there is a mutual respect between the shaman and the lord of the dead that has no parallel elsewhere in the cosmology.

Erlik releases the soul. He always does, in the end, when the protocol is correct and the payment is genuine. He is not trying to keep what is not ready to be kept. He is not evil, in the Siberian framework — the word doesn’t quite apply. He is the necessary counterweight to the sky’s creative impulse. Without him, things would never end.

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The dead in Erlik’s country are not suffering.

This is the part that surprises outsiders who expect a Hell. The Siberian underworld is not a place of punishment. It is a country that mirrors the upper world — the same landscape, the same social structures, the same occupations — but inverted, colder, governed by rules the living don’t know. The dead hunt. The dead tend their spirit-herds. The dead practice the skills they had when alive, now in service of the underworld economy.

After a time — which varies by tradition but is generally measured in generations — the dead are ready to return to the surface world. The soul makes its way back through the World Tree’s roots and is born again into a new human body. Erlik supervises this process too, because it passes through his territory.

The shamans say he does not relish his role. He performs it because someone must.

The sky can only create if something exists to receive the end of things. Erlik is that receiving. He is the cold at the bottom of everything, the dark that defines the light by contrast, the patient governance that keeps the dead from wandering back before they are ready.

He sits. He waits. He accepts what comes.

Everything comes eventually.