Practices That Outlasted Every Regime Change

The practical expression of this tradition is a specific, recognizable set of small ritual acts rather than a single formal liturgy: the tying of a strip of cloth at a mountain pass or beside a spring, the pouring out of the first portion of a drink as an offering to the sky above and to the ground underfoot, and the deliberate building up of a cairn of stones at a high place, each stone added by a passing traveler. These acts, tied to Umai and to the sacred earth and water rather than to Tengri directly, have continued across Central Asia and Siberia in documented form through the long centuries in which Buddhism and then Islam became the dominant organized religions of the region, and they continued as well through the officially atheist Soviet period, when organized religious institutions faced direct state suppression but small, undramatic acts at a pass or a spring were far harder for any state to police or even to notice. Modern popular accounts that reduce this whole tradition to a single sky god miss most of what actually constituted it historically, since the earth and water powers, and Umai specifically, were what people were most often actually dealing with in the ordinary run of their lives, far more than Tengri.