Guardian of Mothers and Children

Umay appears alongside Tengri in the Orkhon inscriptions and in later Turkic folk tradition as a goddess of fertility, childbirth and the protection of infants, invoked by mothers and midwives across the historical Turkic steppe world and surviving into the folk practice of several modern Turkic-speaking peoples, including Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Altai communities, where variations of her name and function persist in birth-related custom and belief. She is generally described in the comparative scholarship on Tengrism as occupying a position beneath Tengri in the steppe cosmological hierarchy, a female principle of nurture and earthly fertility complementing Tengri's remote, sky-based sovereignty, and some reconstructions pair her specifically with Yer-Sug, the combined earth-and-water spirit, as the steppe pantheon's two great subordinate powers governing the fertile, inhabited world beneath the eternal sky. Her cult is one of the better preserved elements of pre-Islamic Turkic religion specifically because it operated at the intimate, domestic level of childbirth and household protection, a sphere later monotheistic conversion was often slower to fully displace than state-level sky worship.