76 CHAPTER 1
water (water springs). Already G. Fehér established that the caves of Madara
were used as part of the ancestor cult in the religious ritualism of the Bulgars.255
Movses Kalankatvatsi mentions a similar cult in the Kingdom of the Huns
in Dagestan in the late seventh century.256 For the Turks, and later for the
Uyghurs, the sacred mountain was Otuken, “regarded as the patron spirit of the
khagan family”.257 In Turkic beliefs, Otuken was inseparable from the supreme
female deity.258 This notion apparently stems from the time of ancient Turan,
when the mountains of Kanha were the religious center of the Turanians and
part of the Aredvi Sura Anahita cult.259 Such continuity is natural, especially
given the importance of the scared mountain as a cosmic axis, equivalent to
the tree of life, the river and fire (all symbols that connect worlds), all of which
represent the Great Goddess on a mythological level.260 Not coincidentally,
according to the Turkic legend the she-wolf gave birth to her ten sons in a
mountain cave, and Scythes (the ancestor of the Scythians) was born in a cave
after Heracles/Targitaus lay with the Serpent-Legged Goddess.261 In Dagestan,
the cave incorporates the ideas of kingship and of religious teachings. A leg-
end was recorded in the seventeenth century about the mound of Qurhuda
(a preacher of Islam), revered in Derbent and situated in a cave where it was
guarded by an old woman. The same mound contained the sword of the propa-
gator of Islam, Maslamah. According to Iu. Karpov, these beliefs are remnants
255 Féher 1997 (originally 1939), 45–46. See also Ovcharov 1997, 38–49.
256 Kliashtornyi and Sultanov 2000, 162–163; Kliashtornyi 2000, 123.
257 Stepanov 2005a, 116.
258 Potapov 1973, 283.
259 Vainberg 1990, 203–204.
260 The same symbolic link can be traced by interpreting Bulgarian ideas and monuments
in Danube Bulgaria or Khazaria. See Mollov 1997, 33 with n. 12; Vitlianov 1997, 337–353;
Georgieva 1993, 42–43; Aksenov 2002, 11–12 and 2004c, 208. These mythological notions
are extremely ancient. Examining the common traits in the ideology of “the Island world
of the Aegean” and “the landlocked plains of northern India”, Campbell 2005, 75 notes
“the occurrence in both of a goddess who is both benign (as cow) and terrible (as lion-
ess), associated with the growth, nourishment and death of all beings, and, in particular,
Vegetation; symbolized in all her aspects by a cosmic tree of life, which is equally of death;
and whose male associate is a god whose animal is the bull and token the trident (!), with
whom, furthermore, the waning and waxing of the moon is linked, in a context showing
numerous vestiges of a tradition of ritual regicide”(!). In his view, “the two mythologies
are clearly extensions of a single system, of which the matrix was the nuclear Near East;
the period of diffusion preceded that of the rise of the great Bronze Age Sumero-Egyptian
kingly states; and the motive force of the vast expansion was commercial: the exploita-
tion of raw materials, and trade”.
261 Kliashtornyi 1964, 104; Raevskii 1977, 21–22.