Zhalmauyz Kempir

Zhalmauyz Kempir is a man-eating old witch of Kazakh folk tales. Forms of her name turn up across many Turkic languages.

Kazakh Wikipedia calls Zhalmauyz Kempir a villain of Kazakh fairy tales, sometimes drawn with seven heads, a crow's beak and claws like tusks, drinking human blood. English Wikipedia says her role is mixed, unlike that of Albasty and Zheztyrnaq: in some tales she helps a character. Usually, though, she terrorises the area, kills people, eats their flesh and steals children.

G. A. Adaeva and E. N. Aubakirov, writing in 2020, call her a figure named often in myth and list forms of the name across Turkic languages: zhalmauyz in Kazakh and Karakalpak, yalmavyz in Tatar, zhalmooz or zhelmoguz in Kyrgyz, dzhelmauuz in Karachay-Balkar and yylmaguz among the Siberian Tatars. P. Zh. Oteniyazov (2021) retells the Kazakh tale Altyn saqa (The Golden Knucklebone), in which the old woman Zhalmauyz wants to adopt a rich man's youngest son. He escapes on horseback and later kills her and her wicked daughter. Oteniyazov reads the tale as holding traces of several eras, since it shows her both as an old woman longing for a son and as a cannibal.

Scholars have offered readings of where she came from. Aizat Bektursyn (2023) cites Kaskabasov, who saw her as the memory of a real matriarchal clan head, a shaman-woman, distorted and coarsened by the mythic thinking of early patriarchal society. Bektursyn adds that shaman-women who once served as advisers, speakers, fortune-tellers and healers later came to be shown as figures such as cruel man-eaters, and cites T. K. Sabirova's view that the word joins two Old Turkic words, zhal and mauyz. Kazakh Wikipedia gives a similar account: in a matriarchal age old women led the clan, naming newborns, caring for orphans, taking in strangers, enforcing the law, arranging marriages and at times leading troops, and reverence for the old mother grew from this.