Mongol religion before Buddhism addressed Tenger, the eternal blue sky, alongside Etugen, the earth, and a wide body of spirits of place and of ancestors. The Secret History of the Mongols, the tradition's own thirteenth century chronicle, opens with a descent from a wolf and a doe and shows Temujin climbing Burkhan Khaldun to pray before a campaign, hanging his belt about his neck in the gesture of submission the text records. Heaven's mandate is invoked throughout it as the warrant for the conquests, so the religion is not separable from the political claim.
The ovoo, a cairn of stones raised at a pass or a summit, is the visible institution. Travellers add a stone and circle it, and the spirit of the place is understood to hold that ground. Fire, the threshold of a dwelling, and the milk of the first milking each carry obligations of their own, and the sprinkling of milk or tea to the four directions before drinking is still an ordinary courtesy rather than a self conscious revival.
Chinggis Khan himself became an object of cult after his death, honoured at a shrine whose custodians have maintained the observance for centuries. Dorzhi Banzarov, a Buryat scholar writing in 1846, produced the first study of the tradition by a member of it, and argued against reading it as the worship of demons. The specialist, the boo, is called rather than trained, and works by hosting a spirit. The atlas describes the office and does not set out the procedure, and notes that Mongolian and Buryat practice today is a living tradition with practitioners rather than a reconstruction assembled out of books.