Tengrist

Tengri is the sky, and in the political theology of the steppe empires he is also the source of legitimate rule. That combination is the distinctive thing about this tradition: it is a religion in which the relationship between a supreme power and a ruler is stated as an operating principle rather than a myth.

Below Tengri stands the earth, and with it the spirits of place, water, mountain and ancestor that ordinary observance addresses. The structure is a high god with a working order beneath him, but unlike the withdrawn creators of West Africa and the Caribbean, Tengri is directly invoked, and the invocation is public and political.

There is no generational succession and no assembly of gods with portfolios. The Orkhon inscriptions, carved for Turkic rulers in the eighth century, state the arrangement plainly: heaven above and earth below were made, and between them a ruler was set over the people. Failure is explained as heaven withdrawing its favour.

The route by which a person enters this order is ancestral. Rulers become the object of continuing regard after death, and Chinggis Khan is the largest instance, with a cult attached to him that has persisted for centuries.

Tengrism has been consciously revived across Central Asia and among Turkic and Mongolian peoples since the end of the Soviet Union, often with an explicitly national character.

The evidence for Tengrism is unusually front-loaded: the oldest sources are the most explicit, and much of what follows is later reconstruction.

The Orkhon inscriptions are the foundation. Carved in the Mongolian steppe in the early eighth century, in a runiform script, for rulers of the second Turkic khaganate, they are the earliest substantial texts in any Turkic language and they state a theology of heaven, earth and rule directly, in the first person, as royal address. They were deciphered at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Secret History of the Mongols, from the thirteenth century, supplies the fullest narrative source, an internal account of the rise of Chinggis Khan preserved in an unusual way: the Mongolian text survives chiefly through Chinese transcription made for the purpose of teaching the language.

Chinese dynastic histories record the steppe peoples from the outside, over many centuries, with the interests of a settled empire describing its neighbours. Persian and Arabic historians add another external layer, and the reports of European travellers and envoys to the Mongol courts a third.

Modern Tengrism complicates the picture rather than clarifying it. Its revival since the 1990s has produced a substantial literature that is partly scholarship and partly national construction, and reading current statements of the religion back onto the eighth century is a mistake that is easy to make.