Tengrism

What can be said about the historical sky cult rests on a thin but real body of evidence, and it is worth being clear about what that evidence is.

The central texts are the Old Turkic inscriptions raised in the Orkhon valley of present-day Mongolia in the 730s, commemorating the Gokturk prince Kul Tigin and his brother Bilge Khagan. They are the earliest substantial writing in a Turkic language, and they invoke Tengri repeatedly and matter-of-factly: heaven above and the dark earth below, the Turkic people made between them, and the khagan raised to rule because Tengri willed it. Defeat is explained the same way, as Tengri withdrawing favour when the people failed. Alongside Tengri appears Umay, associated with the womb, birth and the protection of children, and the sacred earth and water, yer-sub.

The same complex reappears in the Mongol empire several centuries later. Chinggis Khan and his successors justified their authority by the mandate of eternal heaven, a formula that opens Mongol letters to foreign rulers; the phrase is on the imperial seal impressed on the letter Guyug Khan sent to the pope in 1246. Friars and envoys who reached the Mongol court, William of Rubruck among them, describe rites, diviners and a broad tolerance of other religions consistent with that framing.

Chinese sources record comparable sky worship among earlier steppe peoples including the Xiongnu, though what they preserve is filtered through Chinese categories.

What is not in the record matters as much. There is no scripture, no clergy hierarchy, no creed, no fixed pantheon, and no name for the system used by its own practitioners: "Tengrism" is a modern coinage. The sky cult coexisted with ancestor rites, cults of mountains, rivers and fire, and with ritual specialists, and it was an aristocratic and political religion above all: the sky legitimated rule.

The steppe religion did not survive as an institution, because it never was one. It was displaced by religions that had texts, clergy and organisation, and the displacement was gradual, incomplete and largely voluntary.

Islam moved into Turkic Central Asia from the tenth century. The Karakhanid rulers converted around the middle of that century, and Turkic peoples across the region followed over the next several hundred years, with the Golden Horde adopting Islam formally under Ozbeg Khan in the fourteenth. Tibetan Buddhism took the same role among the Mongols, present under the Yuan and decisively established from the late sixteenth century when Altan Khan gave the title Dalai Lama to the third holder of that line and Buddhist institutions spread across Mongolia. Christianity of the Church of the East had a substantial earlier presence among the Kerait, Naiman and Ongud, and several Mongol royal women were Christians.

The steppe complex did not vanish so much as dissolve into these. Sky, earth and mountain rites continued as folk custom under Islamic and Buddhist cover; ovoo cairns are still built and offered at in Mongolia and are handled by Buddhist lamas; Tengri survived as a word for god or sky in several Turkic languages, including in Muslim usage. Ritual specialists persisted, especially in the north, where Buddhism and Islam reached later and less completely.

What did not persist was the political core: a khan ruling by the mandate of heaven, with sky worship as the religion of an imperial elite. That ended with the empires it served. This is the point at which histories most often go astray, treating unbroken folk custom as evidence of a continuing religion of Tengri, when the continuity is in the practices and the discontinuity is in the system that gave them their meaning.

Movements calling themselves Tengrist today are recent, and treating them as a survival of the steppe religion is the standard error in popular accounts.

They emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, in a period when post-Soviet peoples were reworking national identity and religion was one of the materials available. The earliest organised expression was in Tatarstan, where a Tengrist periodical began publishing in 1997, and the movement spread in the 2000s to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in particular, and in smaller measure to Buryatia and Mongolia. More recently a Tengrist current has appeared in Turkey, mostly online and mostly among the young.

Their content is reconstructed. The historical sources amount to a handful of inscriptions, foreign observers' notes, and folklore recorded much later, which is not enough to rebuild a religion from; what fills the gap is a combination of nineteenth and twentieth century ethnography, national epic, contemporary environmentalism, and in places borrowings from neo-pagan movements elsewhere. Practice varies widely between groups and there is no shared authority to settle anything.

Much of it is also political. Tengrism is frequently presented as the authentic, indigenous faith of Turkic or Mongol peoples, in contrast to Islam and Christianity as religions brought in by Arabs and Russians, and it appears in nationalist argument well beyond religious circles. Marlene Laruelle and other scholars have analysed political Tengrism as an invention of tradition in Eric Hobsbawm's sense: a modern construction given ancient credentials to serve present identity claims. Some versions carry ethnic exclusivity; others are ecological and quietist and carry none.

Adherents naturally reject the invention framing, and hold that they are restoring a suppressed religion rather than fabricating one. Both positions are represented here without endorsement. The factual points that stand regardless are that these organisations date from the 1990s, that no institutional lineage connects them to the Gokturk or Mongol sky cult, and that the historical material is genuinely ancient even where the modern movements are not.