Унтул эбел, the Mother of the Diseases, is the darkest of the four personified Mothers, the bringer of epidemic and fever. Belief pictured her as a naked child whose body was hard and rough like tree-bark, a form marking her as a creature of the lower mythology rather than a beneficent power. As the others govern earth, water and wind, she governs sickness, sending and withholding the plagues that swept the mountain villages. Scholars group her with her sisters as a splitting-off of a single ancestral mother-creator, her benevolent maternal aspect here inverted into affliction; propitiatory and apotropaic customs sought to turn her away from the household.