Erlik is the sovereign of the lower world in Tuvan belief, the dark pole of a cosmos whose bright pole is the celestial Kurbustu. The dead are sorted by their conduct: those who lived righteously pass to a paradise called Duwaaschan, while the souls of the wicked are drawn down into Erlik's subterranean kingdom. Disease, misfortune and untimely death are laid to his account and to the emissaries he sends into the middle world, and it is the lower-world shaman who must journey down to argue, bribe or wrest back a captured soul. His name is shared across the Turkic and Mongol peoples, where he stands as the archetypal ruler of the dead; in Tuva his cult is inseparable from the shaman's role as psychopomp and healer.