Itelmen · deity · mythic / first times (creation of Kamchatka) · deity
Gaech (Steller's Haetsch) is the master of the underground world in the Itelmen cosmology recorded in the eighteenth century. Born of Kutkh, he was the first person to die in Kamchatka and lived alone below the earth until his two daughters died and joined him; thereafter he received all the dead, who continue below an existence much like the one above. Krasheninnikov records a pointed reversal in his hospitality: the dead who arrive rich in clothing and dog-teams are given poor ones, while the poor are given good clothing, good dogs and a good place to settle. Fear of the returning dead visiting in Gaech's manner was given as the reason the Kamchadals abandoned a dwelling in which someone had died.
to receive and host the dead in the underground world
Sources
S. P. Krasheninnikov, Opisanie zemli Kamchatki [Description of the Land of Kamchatka] (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1755), vol. 2, pt. 3, on the Kamchadal faith and the state of the dead.
G. W. Steller, Beschreibung von dem Lande Kamtschatka (Frankfurt and Leipzig: J. G. Fleischer, 1774), on the Itelmen afterlife; English: Steller's History of Kamchatka, trans. Margritt Engel and Karen Willmore (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2003).
A. A. Sirina and O. A. Murashko, 'Verovaniia itel'menov' [Beliefs of the Itelmens], in Narody Severo-Vostoka Sibiri, ed. E. P. Bat'ianova and V. A. Turaev (Moscow: Nauka, 2010).