“A fiery-eyed, iron-toothed hag that preys on newborns and stalks expectant mothers in the dark.”
Of all the demons of the Armenian highlands, none was feared in so precise a moment as the Al. She comes for women in childbirth and for the newly born — a shaggy, half-animal crone with fiery eyes, snake-like hair, fingernails of brass, teeth of iron and the tusk of a wild boar, carrying in some prayers a pair of iron scissors. Where other spirits haunt places, the Al haunts an hour: the most dangerous hour in a family's life.
The belief was never only Armenian. Under the names al, alk, hāl, xāl, almasti and albasti, the same iron-toothed hag stalks childbeds from Anatolia and the Caucasus across Iran into Central Asia — in Persian tellings a bony old woman with a clay nose and a reed basket on her shoulder. Wherever she appears, she is the same thing: the terror of childbed mortality given a face, and a body that iron can hold at bay.
The Legend
The Al's work is catalogued with terrible specificity. She attacks the mother in labour — scorching her ears, pulling out her liver, strangling her together with the unborn child. She steals unborn children of seven months, blights and blinds the child in the womb, sucks its brain and blood, and causes miscarriage. And for forty days after a safe birth the danger holds, for the Al may still carry off the infant and leave an imp of her own brood in the cradle.
The als are not solitary. Tradition gives them a 'mother,' male and female forms, and above them all a king: a being who dwells in the abysses, whom the als serve, chained and sprinkled up to the neck with molten lead. The image — a whole demonic nation held barely in check at the bottom of the world — explains the vigilance the belief demanded. The als that reach a birthing room are only the outriders of something vaster and imprisoned.
The Record
The medieval Armenian theologian Gregory of Datev described the als' habitat with a naturalist's care: they live in watery, damp and sandy places, but do not despise the corners of houses and stables. An Armenian prayer against the Al preserves her portrait — fiery eyes, a pair of iron scissors in her hands — and the fuller folk descriptions add the disheveled snake-hair, brass claws, iron teeth, boar's tusk and sagging breasts of the classic crone.
Mardiros H. Ananikian gathered the Armenian evidence in his Armenian Mythology of 1925, volume seven of the Mythology of All Races, setting the Al beside her kin — including Thepla, who kills infants by sitting upon women in childbed. The creature entered European scholarly literature in the middle of the nineteenth century, and comparative folklorists have since traced her relatives from Kurdish alk to the almasti and albasti of the Turkic-speaking steppe.
The Lore
The countermeasures were a domestic arsenal. A woman in travail was surrounded with iron weapons and instruments, and the air of her room — even the waters of the neighbouring brook where the spirits were thought to reside — was beaten with them to drive the als off. Charms and prayers, onions and garlic, and keeping the demon from reaching water completed the defences. In the most desperate cases, a child might be exposed on a flat roof as a peace-offering to the spirits.
Read plainly, the Al is obstetric catastrophe personified — fever, hemorrhage, stillbirth and crib death gathered into one figure that could be named, armed against and out-waited. The forty-day danger period mirrors the traditional confinement of mother and newborn across the region. That the same hag recurs from Armenian villages to Afghan valleys, always at the same bedside, marks the Al as one of the oldest and most widely shared terrors in the folklore of western Asia.
Field Notes
- ✦ Most dangerous during childbirth and the first forty days after — she may swap the infant for an imp.
- ✦ Depicted with snake-like hair, brass claws, iron teeth, a boar's tusk, and sometimes iron scissors.
- ✦ Iron weapons around the childbed, charms, and garlic were thought to repel her.
- ✦ Shared across Armenian, Persian, Kurdish and Central Asian traditions as al, hāl, almasti and albasti.
- ✦ Gregory of Datev placed the als in watery, damp and sandy places — and in corners of houses and stables.
Case File
- Classification
- Childbirth demon
- Category
- Spectral/Undead
- Territory
- Armenian and Caucasian folklore
- First Sighted
- Described by the medieval theologian Gregory of Datev; in European literature by the mid-1800s
- Habitat
- Damp, dark corners of houses, stables and ruins
- Reported Size
- Hunched, hideous
- Also Known As
- Als · Alk · Hal