and the Borrowed Face She Wears Today
“For forty days the mother is not left alone. The lamp is not put out. A red ribbon is bound about her head, and a needle waits beneath her pillow. Somewhere near the water, the one who is also called red is waiting too.”
An Archival Chronicle Prepared for the Discerning Collector
Compiled by the Archivist of the Unseen
Contents
I. The Fortieth Night
II. A Note on a Living Tradition
III. Red, Fire, Mother: The Problem of the Name
IV. Field Study — The Borrowed Face
V. The Alkarısı of Anatolia
VI. Albasty on the Steppe
VII. The Āl of Iran and the Caucasus
VIII. Red Against Red: The Logic of Protection
IX. The Fever Behind the Figure
X. An Archival Aside: On Copying
XI. Field Study — The Ledger of the Attested, the Contested, and the Borrowed
XII. The Lamp Left Burning
Bibliography
I. The Fortieth Night
A village in the Anatolian interior, some generations ago. A woman has given birth, and the house has rearranged itself around her. She is not to be left alone, not for an hour, not for forty days. An oil lamp burns through every night. Beneath her pillow lies a knife, or a pair of scissors, with a needle driven into it. A Qur’an rests near her head, and an onion and a head of garlic have been set where she can see them. Around her brow, and around the rail of the infant’s cradle, someone has tied a strip of red cloth.
Out in the stable, the horses are restless. In the morning one of them will be found lathered and trembling, its mane twisted into tight, small braids that no one in the household made. The older women will look at one another and say nothing, or say a single word, and the word will be al.
Down by the stream at the edge of the village, among the reeds, something is said to wait. It wants the new mother’s liver. If it can tear it from her and carry it to the water and dip it there, she will die, and nothing anyone does afterward will save her.
This is the Alkarısı, the “al woman,” known in different places as Al Ana, Albastı, Albasty, Almasty, and, across the border in Iran and Armenia, simply as the āl. She is one of the most widely distributed demons of the Old World, feared by mothers from the Anatolian plateau to the Kazakh steppe, from the mountains of Armenia to the valleys of Tajikistan. She belongs to no single people and no single religion. She is attested among Muslims, Christians, and those who kept older beliefs, among Turkic, Iranian, Armenian, Georgian, and Caucasian speakers alike.
She also wears, in the description of her that most readers now meet first, a face that is not her own. A widely copied account of Al Ana, with her enormous breasts used for washing clothes, her red hat with a fern twig, and her catalog of deformed changeling children, was lifted nearly word for word from the folklore of a Polish forest demon called the dziwożona. The demon of the Turkic childbed has been dressed, in the modern record, in the clothes of a Slavic one.
This field study separates the two. It sets out what the scholarship on the al actually records, across four great regions, and it lays the borrowed description beside its source so that the attentive keeper of curiosities may see exactly where one demon ends and the other begins.
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II. A Note on a Living Tradition
The belief in the al is not a closed chapter. Across Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, Armenia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, the al, under its many names, remains a living part of folk memory, and in some places of active practice. The forty-day period of rest and protection after childbirth, known in Turkish as the lohusalık, is still widely observed in many families. The red ribbon tied to a new mother or to a cradle remains a familiar custom in parts of Anatolia, even where the person tying it would no longer say that it keeps a demon away. Turkish ethnographers continue to record al narratives from living informants, and in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan the albasty remains a recognized figure of folk belief.
These are traditions belonging to living communities, held by grandmothers and midwives, carried in prayers and household customs. They are treated here as such. Nothing in this study is meant to mock the families who still tie the red ribbon, or to suggest that the fear behind the al was foolish. As later sections will show, that fear was attached to one of the most real dangers in human life.
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III. Red, Fire, Mother: The Problem of the Name
The name Al Ana is usually explained as a Turkic compound. Ana means “mother.” Al is commonly glossed as “red,” and in some treatments is extended to mean fire or evil. Al Ana would then be “the Red Mother,” and the Turkish Alkarısı “the Red Woman” or “the al woman.” The Central Asian form Albastı or Albasty is often explained as al plus bas-, a Turkic verb meaning “to press”: the red one who presses down. That reading fits one of the demon’s best-attested behaviors, sitting upon the chest of a sleeper or a new mother.
It would be pleasant if the matter ended there. It does not. The etymology of al is one of the long-running disputes of Eurasian folklore studies, and at least three origins have been seriously proposed.
The Turkic Case
Most Turkish scholars treat the al as an inheritance of the old Turkic belief world, a member of the large company of spirits and household beings that accompanied Turkic peoples across the steppe. On this view the name is native Turkic, the demon is ancient among Turkic speakers, and its appearance among Iranians and Armenians is the result of contact. In Turkish, al is indeed a common word for a bright red, and the association of the demon with red clothing, red faces, and red protective cloth gives the explanation obvious appeal.
The Iranian Case
The Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on the āl, by Ahmad Shamlu and James R. Russell, derives the name from an Iranian word for red, and is explicit that it does not derive from the Babylonian ālu, a class of demon. The scholar Garnik Asatrian, in an article titled “Āl Reconsidered,” revisited the question with attention to the Iranian and Armenian material. Edina Dallos, in her survey of the albasty among Turkic peoples, notes that the etymology has no accepted answer, and lists proposals that include Turkic al “red,” Turkic al “front,” Turkic alp “heroic,” and an Iranian origin.
The Mesopotamian Case
A third line of argument looks further back. Ancient Mesopotamia knew a terrible demoness, Lamaštu, who attacked pregnant women and infants, and against whom amulets were hung in the birthing room. Some scholars have connected the Central Asian name almasty to Lamaštu, though Dallos argues that the initial a- of the Turkic form cannot be explained as a natural Turkic development. The Romanian scholar Luminița Munteanu has argued that the Turkish alkarısı is best understood as a late descendant of Mesopotamian demonology, transmitted in part through Jewish reinterpretations that produced the medieval figure of Lilith.
A 2023 study by Hasmik Galstyan and Hayk Hakobyan, examining the al across the North and South Caucasus, reviews all three proposals, Iranian, Turkic, and Mesopotamian, and concludes that the al either took shape in the Caucasus itself or reached the North Caucasus through Armenian and Georgian intermediaries.
The Archivist does not presume to settle a question that specialists in several languages have not settled. The honest summary is this: the al is very old, it is shared across language families, it stands in a long Near Eastern lineage of demons who prey on mothers and newborns, and its name may be Turkic, Iranian, or something older that both inherited. The popular statement that Al Ana “means the Red Mother in Old Turkic” is one defensible reading, not a settled fact.
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IV. Field Study — The Borrowed Face
The description of Al Ana that now circulates most widely in English, and that appears in the English-language Wikipedia entry under her name, runs as follows in substance. She is an ugly old woman with a hairy body, long straight hair, and breasts so huge that she uses them to wash her clothes. She wears a red hat with a fern twig attached. She steals newborn babies and replaces them with her own children, changelings, who may be recognized by a disproportionate body, a huge abdomen, an unusually small or large head, a hump, thin arms and legs, a hairy body, long claws, and teeth that come in too early. The changeling is spiteful, afraid of its mother, noisy, sleepless, and gluttonous; if it survives to adulthood, it gibbers instead of speaking and mistrusts people. To protect the child, a mother must tie a red ribbon on its hand, put a red hat on its head, shield its face from the moonlight, never wash its nappies after sunset, and never turn her head away while it sleeps. The women most likely to become such demons after death are midwives, old maids, unmarried mothers, women who die pregnant, and abandoned children born out of wedlock.
Every one of those details, nearly sentence by sentence and in the same order, appears in the English-language Wikipedia article on the dziwożona, a demon of Polish and wider West Slavic folklore. The dziwożona, whose name means something like “wild woman” or “strange wife,” is a forest and water spirit of the Polish mountains and countryside, closely related to the boginka and the mamuna. In that article the appearance is attributed to the nineteenth-century Polish collector Lucjan Siemieński and his Podania i legendy polskie, ruskie i litewskie; the protective customs are attributed to Polish ethnographic sources; and two of the details, the nappies washed after sunset and the adult changeling who gibbers, are flagged even there as lacking citations.
The Points of Correspondence
The correspondence is not a matter of general resemblance, which would be unremarkable, since demons who steal infants are found across Europe and Asia. It is a matter of identical phrasing and identical sequence. The breasts that wash clothes, the red hat with its fern twig, the hump and the premature teeth, the fear of its mother, the gibbering adult, the moonlight on the child’s face, the nappies after sunset, the head that must not turn away, the midwives and old maids and unmarried mothers: the list is the dziwożona’s list. Only one clause has been added. Where the Polish material instructs the mother to tie a red ribbon on the child’s hand, the Al Ana text adds that this custom is still preserved in some regions of Anatolia, though without its original meaning.
The Fern as a Witness
Some details betray their origin on their own. The fern carries a heavy charge in Slavic folklore, where the legendary fern flower blooms on the night of Kupala and grants hidden knowledge or treasure to the one who finds it. A fern twig in a demon’s cap is a natural ornament for a spirit of the Polish woods. It has no comparable place in the Anatolian descriptions of the al, which dress her in red garments, give her a red face, and sometimes a basket or a bag carried over the shoulder.
The list of those who become the demon after death is equally telling. The dziwożona, like many Slavic spirits, is understood as a restless dead woman, often one who died in childbirth or who lived outside the approved order of marriage. The Turkic and Iranian al, by contrast, is not typically described as a dead human being at all. She is a being of another kind: a jinn, a fairy, a demon, in Iranian lore even the fiery first consort of Adam, made of a substance that earth-born man could not share. The transformation of midwives and old maids into al is a Slavic idea attached to a Turkic name.
What the Borrowing Did Not Take
It should be said, in fairness, that not everything in the circulating Al Ana entry is borrowed. The statement that she lives in thickets near rivers, streams, and lakes is attributed to a Turkish mythological dictionary by Celal Beydili, and it agrees with the central Anatolian and steppe tradition that the al must reach water to complete her killing. The idea that she may take an infant and leave something else in its place is also supported in the wider al tradition, where newborns may be stolen within the first forty days and replaced. The red ribbon, too, is a genuine Anatolian custom, as the next section shows, which may be why the Polish list seemed, to whoever first combined them, to fit.
But the vivid particulars, the details that make the circulating Al Ana memorable, are the dziwożona’s. A reader who quotes them as Turkic folklore is quoting Polish folklore under a Turkic name. The Archivist records this not to scold whoever first made the error, which may have been a well-meant attempt to fill a thin article with comparative material, but because the error has since been copied into blogs, games, and bestiaries as though it were the heart of the Turkic tradition. It is not. The heart of that tradition lies elsewhere, and it is stranger.
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V. The Alkarısı of Anatolia
In the Turkish record the demon goes by many names, among them al, alanası, alkızı, alkarı, albası, albıs, and alkarısı. She is thought of variously as a jinn, a fairy, a giant, or a devil. She is most often imagined as an old and very ugly woman dressed in red, though some accounts allow that beautiful ones exist, and that a man who manages to capture one may even marry her.
The Forty Days
The Alkarısı is above all a demon of the lohusa, the woman who has recently given birth. Her season is the forty days following delivery. During that time the mother and the newborn are considered open and vulnerable, and the al is said to come for them. She sits upon the mother’s chest. She reaches into her and draws out the liver, and in some accounts the lungs, kidneys, or heart as well. Then she runs for water. If she can dip the stolen organ into a stream or a spring before she is stopped, the woman dies. The illness that follows an attack carries the demon’s own name: albastı is a Turkish folk term for the fever that strikes a mother after childbirth.
The detail of the water is consistent across a vast area, and it gives the al her geography. She haunts riverbanks and reed beds and springs, because water is where her work is finished. To keep her from water is to keep the mother alive.
The Two Kinds
Anatolian tradition sometimes distinguishes two kinds of al. The first does not kill. She troubles households and especially horses, riding them through the night in the stables so that they are found in the morning sweating and exhausted, their manes and tails knotted into small braids. The second is the true danger, the one who attacks mothers and infants and is said to relish livers, hearts, and kidneys. The braided mane is one of the most widespread signs of night visitation in Eurasian folklore, and the al shares it with the house spirits and night-riders of many other peoples.
The Captured Al
One of the most distinctive elements of the Anatolian tradition is the belief that the al can be caught. Accounts describe smearing pitch or a sticky gum on a horse’s back so that the night-rider is trapped, or stabbing the demon with a needle or an awl. Iron pins her to the human world. Once captured, she is forced into human form and made to serve the household that caught her. In some accounts that household then becomes ocaklı, a family carrying an inherited power, whose members are thereafter called upon to heal those whom the al has attacked. The demon’s defeat becomes a family’s gift.
Here the folklore of the al touches the social structure of the village. The ocak, literally a hearth, is a lineage believed to hold a particular healing virtue, passed down through generations. The story of the captured al explains why one family, and not another, can cure the red fever.
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VI. Albasty on the Steppe
Eastward, among the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Bashkir, Uzbek, and other Turkic peoples of the steppe and Central Asia, the demon is known as Albasty or by closely related names. The Hungarian Turkologist Edina Dallos, in a 2019 survey of the albasty across Turkic peoples, gathers a picture that is recognizably the same being, but with features of its own.
The Breasts Thrown Over the Shoulders
Here at last is the genuine version of the detail that the borrowed description distorted. Steppe accounts often describe the albasty as a woman with long, tangled hair and very large breasts, which she throws back over her shoulders. In Bashkir sources the breasts are long enough for this, and the demon is said to force one into a victim’s mouth while she presses down on them at night. The image of the long-breasted demoness is widespread in Eurasian and African folklore, and it is entirely possible that the Turkic and Slavic traditions each held some version of it independently. What is not Turkic is the specific Polish detail of using the breasts as washing boards.
The Lungs and the Water
On the steppe the albasty is above all a puerperal demon, a danger to women in labour. She is said to steal the woman’s lungs during delivery, and the victim dies once the demon throws them into flowing water. Some legends allow that she can be caught and stopped before she reaches the river. In many stories the albasty appears not as a woman at all but as an animal, often a dog or a ram, seen carrying human lungs away. Elsewhere she is small, perhaps three feet tall, with long matted hair; in some Tatar accounts she is a shapeless thing like a heap of hay.
The Black and the Yellow
The Kyrgyz distinguish a black albasty from a yellow one. The black is the true demon of childbirth, the killer. The yellow is less dangerous and mainly causes illness. A shaman, the baksı, may drive out the yellow albasty, but the black one must be confronted by a different specialist, the kuuču, who drives the demon away, sometimes by beating it, and in some accounts merely by announcing that he is coming or by sending his clothing to the house. To take the demon’s hair, or to hide the book she is sometimes said to carry, gives power over her.
The One Who Presses
Among Kazakh and Kyrgyz speakers, and among Tatars and Bashkirs, the albasty is also the pressing demon who comes in the night to sit on sleepers, men as well as women, so that they wake unable to move or breathe. A Tatar tradition holds that the victim can break free by moving the little finger. This is the albasty as a figure of what is now called sleep paralysis, and her name, the red one who presses, is perfectly suited to it.
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VII. The Āl of Iran and the Caucasus
South of the Turkic world, the same demon is found in Iran, in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, in Armenia, in Georgia, among the Kurds, and among the peoples of the North Caucasus. The Encyclopaedia Iranica describes the Iranian āl as a spirit that attacks women after childbirth, causing illness and death, and that is believed to visit during the first days after delivery or until the mother has gone to the public bath. Her appearance varies from region to region: a frail woman, a hairy giant, a red creature.
The Clay Nose
One of the strangest Iranian details is the al’s nose. An eighteenth-century Persian text attributed to Āqā Jamāl Khānsārī, a satirical catalogue of the beliefs of women, records that the al has a nose of clay, and that a person who seizes the nose gains power over her. Dialect names gathered by the scholar W. Eilers preserve the same idea, with titles meaning “the one with a nose of clay.” In Iranian lore the al steals the mother’s liver or the placenta, and cannot cross running water. Protections include iron, coal, onions, rue, swords, and burying the placenta with a needle. Protective lines may be drawn around the bed.
The Armenian Als
Armenian tradition, as recorded by Mardiros Ananikian in his 1925 study of Armenian mythology, knows the als as a plural company, male and female, with fiery eyes, fangs, copper or brass claws, and sagging breasts, who resemble crones. They attack women in childbirth, cause miscarriage and stillbirth, and are said to blind unborn children. Armenian Christians defended themselves with the hmayil, a long protective scroll of prayers and images invoking saints against the demons of the childbed, a practice that makes the al part of the religious material culture of the Armenian church.
The First Wife
In Iranian and Caucasian tradition, a creation story is told of the al. God, it is said, made an al as the first companion of Adam, but Adam, being made of earth, could not live with her fiery nature, and she was replaced by Eve. From that time the al has hated Eve and all her daughters, and she comes for them in their most vulnerable hour. The parallel with the medieval Jewish legend of Lilith, the first wife of Adam who becomes a slayer of newborns, is unmistakable, and it is one reason scholars like Munteanu argue for a shared Near Eastern lineage running back to Lamaštu.
Galstyan and Hakobyan, working from fieldwork and from Armenian manuscripts, note one Armenian detail they did not find elsewhere: a scorpion numbered among the companions of the al. Such particulars are a reminder that the al, though recognizably one being across a continent, has been reimagined in every valley that has feared her.
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VIII. Red Against Red: The Logic of Protection
The protections against the al form one of the most consistent bodies of folk practice in Eurasia. Across Anatolia, Iran, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, families have relied on a common arsenal: iron, red cloth, light, sacred words, strong-smelling plants, and the presence of other people.
Iron
Iron is the oldest and most universal defense. A knife or scissors beneath the pillow, a needle driven into it, a sword in the room, a needle buried with the placenta. In Anatolia, iron is also the weapon by which the al is captured. The power of iron against spirits is found from Ireland to Japan, and the al is among its most persistent targets.
Red
The red ribbon is the custom most familiar to modern readers. In Anatolia it is tied to the mother’s head and to the baby’s cradle. Some families gave the new mother a red sherbet to drink. There is an apparent paradox here. If al means red, and the demon wears red and has a red face, why should red protect against her? Folklorists have offered several explanations. One is the principle of like against like, in which a demon is turned aside by its own sign, as though the house were already marked as hers. Another is that red, the colour of blood and life, is protective in its own right throughout much of Eurasia, and that its link with the demon is a second, separate association. The question remains open. What is certain is that the red ribbon on the lohusa is a genuine Anatolian custom, independent of the Polish material, and that it has outlived, in many families, any belief in the being it was meant to repel.
Light, Words, and Company
The lamp kept burning through the night, the Qur’an placed by the mother’s head, the amulets and written charms, the mirror set nearby: all of these keep the room bright and holy. Onion and garlic, with their sharp smell, appear in Anatolian, Iranian, and Caucasian practice alike. And the most important protection of all is human presence. The new mother is not to be left alone. In Anatolian accounts, if an attack has already come, remedies include prayers by a religious teacher or a member of an ocaklı family, the firing of guns, the clatter of iron, and even bringing a horse into the room so that it neighs, and feeding the horse barley over the patient’s body.
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IX. The Fever Behind the Figure
It is impossible to study the al without seeing the shape of something real behind her. For most of human history, childbirth was among the most dangerous events in a woman’s life. Among the gravest dangers was puerperal fever, an infection of the reproductive tract following delivery, which could kill within days and whose cause was not understood until the nineteenth century. The folk name for the illness in Turkish, albastı, is the demon’s own name. The Turkish encyclopedic literature notes plainly that better medicine, including antibiotics for puerperal fever, along with improved transport and education, has greatly reduced the al’s frightening role.
Other real conditions fit the demon’s profile. Postpartum hemorrhage could take a mother’s life within hours. Postpartum psychosis, though rare, could transform a woman in ways her family could not explain. The pressing albasty who sits on the chest of a sleeper corresponds closely to the experience of sleep paralysis, in which a person wakes unable to move, often with a sense of a heavy presence in the room. Newborn infants, too, died suddenly and often, from causes no one could see.
The Archivist offers a caution, however, against reading the al as nothing more than a misdiagnosis. Folk belief is not a failed attempt at modern medicine. The rules surrounding the al, that the mother must not be left alone, that she must rest for forty days, that lamps must burn and people must keep watch, describe a system of care. A woman guarded against the al was a woman fed, attended, kept from heavy work, and watched for signs of illness. Turkish public health researchers have studied traditional postpartum practices precisely because they shape how women are cared for after birth. The demon may be imaginary, but the circle of women around the bed was not.
The borrowed Polish description adds a darker strand that deserves notice. Its catalog of changeling children, with their huge abdomens, humps, large or small heads, thin limbs, and inability to speak, is a description of children with disabilities and developmental conditions, recast as demonic substitutes. In Europe, changeling belief is known to have had real and sometimes violent consequences for such children. Whatever its origins, that catalog should be read with care, and certainly not passed on as a quaint list of monster traits.
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X. An Archival Aside: On Copying
The case of Al Ana and the dziwożona is a small one, but it is instructive, and it belongs beside the other cautionary cases in this archive: the antlers that were added to the wendigo in the twentieth century, the iron maiden assembled from a single questionable account, the single witness behind the Yumboes of Senegal.
Folklore on the internet travels by copying. An article on a lesser-known figure is often thin, because the scholarship on it is in languages few editors read. Someone, seeking to fill the gap, borrows from a better-documented figure that seems similar. The borrowed text is then copied into blogs, wikis, role-playing bestiaries, and listicles, each copy citing the last or citing nothing, until the borrowed details have become, by sheer repetition, what everyone knows. The original Turkish, Kazakh, Persian, and Armenian scholarship, meanwhile, sits unread.
There is a particular injury in this kind of error. It is not only that a fact is wrong. It is that the tradition of one people has been overwritten by the tradition of another, so that a Turkish grandmother’s demon now wears a Polish cap. The al is no less frightening, no less interesting, and in some respects considerably stranger than the dziwożona; she did not need the loan. The cure is the oldest rule of the archive: go back to the sources, read them in their own context, and label clearly what is borrowed.
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XI. Field Study — The Ledger of the Attested, the Contested, and the Borrowed
Well Attested in the Al Tradition
The al, under many names, is a female demon of childbirth across Anatolia, Central Asia, Iran, Armenia, Georgia, and the Caucasus. She attacks women in labor and in the forty days after delivery, and their newborns. She steals the mother’s liver, lungs, or other organs, and must carry them to water for the mother to die. She rides horses at night and braids their manes. She can press upon sleepers. She is defended against with iron, red cloth, light, sacred texts, onion and garlic, and constant human presence. In Anatolia she can be captured with a needle and forced into service. The illness she causes, albastı, is a folk name for puerperal fever.
Regional and Variable
Her appearance: an ugly old woman in red, a beautiful woman, a frail crone with a clay nose, a hairy giant, a small figure with matted hair, a dog or ram, a heap of hay. Her long breasts thrown over the shoulders are attested on the steppe. The clay nose is Iranian. The plural, copper-clawed als and the protective hmayil scroll are Armenian. The black and yellow albasty and the kuuču healer are Kyrgyz. The creation story of the al as Adam’s first consort is recorded in Iranian and Caucasian tradition.
Contested
The etymology of al, whether Turkic, Iranian, or descended from older Near Eastern names; the meaning of the name as “red,” “fire,” or “evil”; the direction in which the belief travelled between Turkic, Iranian, and Caucasian peoples; and the proposed descent of the al from Mesopotamian Lamaštu by way of Lilith. Each of these is argued by serious scholars and none is settled.
Borrowed From the Polish Dziwożona
The breasts used to wash clothes; the red hat with a fern twig; the detailed physical and behavioural catalogue of the changeling child; the instruction to shield the child’s face from moonlight and to put a red hat on its head; the prohibitions on washing nappies after sunset and on turning away from the sleeping child; and the list of midwives, old maids, unmarried mothers, women who die pregnant, and abandoned illegitimate children as those who become the demon after death. These belong to Polish and West Slavic folklore and should not be cited as Turkic tradition.
Genuine Coincidence
The red ribbon on the hand or head of a vulnerable mother or infant, and the general idea of a demon who substitutes or steals a newborn, appear in both traditions. Their presence in the Polish material is likely what made the borrowing seem plausible.
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XII. The Lamp Left Burning
The al is among the oldest fears in the human record: the fear that in the very hour a new life arrives, the one who carried it may be taken. Mesopotamian mothers hung amulets of Pazuzu against Lamaštu. Armenian mothers unrolled the hmayil. Anatolian mothers lay with a needle beneath the pillow and a red ribbon at the brow, while the household kept the lamp burning and the women kept watch. On the steppe, a kuuču was summoned to beat the black albasty from the tent.
She is not the Polish dziwożona, and she never needed to borrow that demon’s cap. She is the red woman by the river, the one who presses in the dark, the thief of livers who must reach the water before dawn. She has a hundred names and a dozen faces, and in every one of them she is the shadow of a real and ancient danger, and the reason that no new mother, for forty days, was ever left alone.
In many houses the red ribbon is still tied. Few who tie it now would say they fear the al. But the gesture remembers what the words have forgotten: that the hours after birth are dangerous, and that a mother should be watched over, with light and company and care, until the danger has passed.
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This field study is preserved as one vestige among many within the haunted archive of Wicked Dual, an artisan boutique devoted to the reclamation of history’s clandestine and silenced corners. The red woman of the childbed is kept here with respect for the living Turkic, Iranian, Armenian, and Caucasian communities whose mothers and grandmothers still remember her name.
Read the written chronicles on the blog, the Wicked Archive: www.wickeddualblog.com
Secure the physical artifacts drawn from these histories at the Wicked Dual boutique: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Wickeddual
We invite you to enter the haunted archive and secure a piece for your private collection; it is a necessary addition for those who curate the darker corners of human history.
— The Archivist of the Unseen
Bibliography
The following works include peer-reviewed scholarship on the al across its Turkic, Iranian, Armenian, and Caucasian range, and the Polish source behind the borrowed description; readers pursuing formal citation are advised to verify editions and pagination against a library catalog.
Related Chronicles in the Archive
Field Study No. XVIII — Baba Yaga
Field Study No. XXIII — The Wendigo
Field Study No. XXXI — The Dancers Beneath the Mamelles: The Yumboes of Senegal
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