Umchar
Tabasaran · deity · Tabasaran traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Umchar is the supreme sky- and thunder-god reconstructed for the pre-Islamic Tabasaran pantheon. No direct testimony of his cult survives; scholarship recovers him chiefly from linguistic evidence and from the wider Daghestani pattern in which each people preserves a named thunderer (Ass among the Laks, Arsh among the Tsakhurs). As lord of the upper world he governs thunder, the lightning-bolt and the rain, and stands typologically at the apex of the older celestial order later overlaid by Islam. Sources treat his reconstruction as probable rather than certain, and read the ending -ar as a Tabasaran collective or plural formant.
Domains
- thunder lightning
- sky supremacy
Powers
- hurls thunder and the lightning-bolt
- sends rain upon the fields
Sources
- Umchar was in all probability the supreme thunder-god at the head of the Tabasaran pantheon, reconstructed indirectly from linguistic evidence and oral tradition rather than from a direct cultic record.: R.I. Seferbekov, 'Verkhovnye bogi (gromoverzhtsy) narodov Dagestana', Istoriya, arkheologiya i etnografiya Kavkaza, 2019 (secondary); R.I. Seferbekov, Panteon yazycheskikh bozhestv narodov Dagestana (Makhachkala, 2009) (secondary)