Satanay-biyche is the great matriarch of the Nart epic, the wisest and most powerful of the Nart women, whom the Karachay-Balkar tradition shares with the Ossetian Satana and the wider Caucasian cycle. Descended from the Sun and the Moon or born of the sea, she unites beauty with supreme wisdom and magic: her counsel governs the assemblies of the heroes, her foresight and spells repeatedly deliver them, and she commands weather, disguise and healing. As wife of the Nart leader Oruzmek and foster-mother of the young champions she is the moral and intellectual centre of the epic, a figure who stands closer to a goddess than to a mortal woman.