The threshold as a cosmic gate: household spirits and mythological thought among the Turkic peoples of Siberia

This study examines the ontological relationship between human communities and the dwelling through the figure of the threshold spirit (ejik eezi) and the household spirits associated with it in Southern Siberia. The dwelling is treated not merely as physical shelter but as the architectural expression of an effort to convert an undifferentiated exterior into an ordered interior. Working from nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnography, the article first establishes a comparative frame drawn from British, Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Tungusic and Mongolic household-spirit traditions, and then examines the Siberian Turkic material in detail. Two conceptions are distinguished: a localised guardian of the doorway, propitiated through offerings of blood and milk, and the mediating figure of Yayık/Cayık, who links the shaman to the deity Ülgen. The article argues that these belong to different registers of a single cosmological system rather than to successive historical strata, and that the threshold operates as the site at which the relation between the household and the wider spirit hierarchy – including the underworld domain of Erlik and the figure of the bear – is continually renegotiated. Threshold avoidances persisting in contemporary practice are accordingly interpreted as the behavioural residue of this spatial ontology rather than as isolated superstition.