The Powers Beside the Sky

Tengri, the sky recognized across Turkic and Mongol tradition as a supreme power, is not the only figure the historical record preserves. The Orkhon inscriptions, the eighth century Old Turkic royal inscriptions from Mongolia that are among the earliest written sources for this whole tradition, also name Umai, a feminine deity associated with the womb, with birth, and with the protection of infants, invoked in one well known phrase as a power under whose auspices a ruling mother stands. Alongside Umai, the same inscriptions name the sacred earth and water of the homeland itself as an active power that acts on behalf of the people who belong to it, not simply as a backdrop to their lives. Taken together these figures describe what the tradition actually looked like in practice, as distinct from later simplified summaries of it: a supreme sky addressed rarely and from a considerable formal height, and beneath that a dense, constantly consulted field of more immediate powers, springs, mountains, rivers and the ancestors belonging to a particular lineage, addressed far more often than Tengri himself in the ordinary texture of daily and seasonal life. Later observers who approached the tradition mainly through royal inscriptions and formal court religion have sometimes overstated Tengri's centrality relative to Umai and the earth and water powers, projecting the structure of the state cult onto the wider practice of ordinary people, who very often engaged the closer powers far more directly.