A Study on the Image and Meanings of the Underground World in Mongolian Oral Narrative Literature

In Mongolia, the traditional three worlds were represented by the ideas of high and low continents within a single world. Human cognition development, social changes, and acculturation, however, caused them to unfold in a vertical world where the value judgment of good and evil intervened. The underground world gradually inclined from a domain holding cultural patterns and beauty beyond the human world to a bad and weak domain. As the number symbols of 7 and 77 layers intervened, it developed into a vertical domain of devilism that confronted the celestial and earthly worlds. The underground world was largely represented as a negative domain where demons, monsters, and wicked wizards lived in the dark ground under 7 and 77 layers in the northeast or the black(red) ocean floor. The number 7 and the dark color have dual meanings between the metaphor of negative and evil things and strong and the power and ability to govern powerful force and evil. The underground deities also have such ambivalent features. The northeast direction, which is the direction of the underground world, is the same as the general idea that the otherworld and the underground world lie in the west and north in the northwest direction. The underground world has a three-dimensional nature of being connected to the celestial and earthly worlds and circulated with them beyond the place of death and the negative space of disgusting beings that should be eliminated. The beings of the underground world represent fierce and strong power. They were originally celestial beings(stars), but they govern the life and death of human beings and the haps and mishaps in their lives by getting involved in the earthly and underground worlds. They have the fundamental force to protect human lives and bring wealth to them. As they adjust the balance of the natural world and, at the same time, represent the excessive force of nature such as thunder, lightning, heavy rain, and storm, expanding their meanings as the source of conflicts and confrontations against the evil of the world.