The making of Tengrism

Rouran epoch Göktürk epoch Uyghur epoch Kirghiz epoch

Rouran First Göktürk Tang rule Second Göktürk Uyghur Kirghiz Huns Western Göktürk Türgesh Karluk Khazar

Rouran 400–554
First Göktürk 552–630
Tang rule 630–682
Second Göktürk 682–744
Uyghur 744–840
Kirghiz 840–924
Huns 370–469
Western Göktürk 552–659
Türgesh 699–766
Karluk 766–800
Khazar 650–969

On the stone raised for Kül Tegin in 732, the history of the Göktürks begins with the making of the world: when the blue sky above and the brown earth below were created, the sons of men were created between them.^[1] The word for that sky is Tengri. A few lines further on, Tengri is also the god who takes a man and his wife and raises them up so that the Göktürk people shall not perish.^[1] That is very nearly all the Göktürks say about their god. It fills a few dozen lines of stone. Twelve centuries later the same word names an entire religion: tiers of heaven, a creator who sends a man diving for earth, a lord of the dead, a tree that joins the worlds, and a name, Tengrism, that no one in the eighth century used. Four generations of scholars built that religion out of the word. Each added something the sources do not contain. The process runs from the first collectors of Siberian folklore in the nineteenth century to the revival movements of the present. Turkic Atlas sets out what the Göktürks themselves attest under Tengrism and under the eleven topics grouped around it.

The four layers

Everything that is said about Turkic religion rests on four bodies of evidence. Centuries separate them from one another. Most of the confusion in the field has come from treating them as if they were one.

The oldest is a single title. In the first century BC a Chinese historian wrote down the full style of the Xiongnu ruler in Chinese characters. Its first word is usually understood as the word for heaven.^[2] The title stands six hundred years before the Göktürks and reaches us through a foreign script. It can therefore show that the word was old. It cannot show what the Göktürks made of it. The second body is the runiform inscriptions of the eighth century. They are the only texts in a Turkic language from the time of the khaganates. They name Tengri, Kut, the sacred Earth-and-Water and Umay, and they name nothing else.^[1] The third is the Chinese dynastic histories. Their compilers describe what the Göktürks did: the yearly sacrifice at the ancestral cave, the gathering by the river in the fifth month, the funeral with its slaughtered sheep and horses. They never name the god the rites were for.^[3] The fourth, and by far the largest, is the ethnography of the Altai and Siberia. It was gathered a thousand years after the khaganates, among small Turkic-speaking communities of forest and mountain that had no state of their own. Outsiders wrote it down from the eighteenth century onward.

The picture that most readers would recognise as Tengrism comes almost entirely from that fourth body. It has the heavens in tiers, the creator who sends a man to the bottom of the sea for earth, the underworld and its lord, and the tree between the worlds.

The Russian and Finnish collectors

The men who gathered it were travellers, missionaries and philologists.^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8] Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they worked among the Altaians, Yakuts, Teleuts, Khakas and Tuvans and recorded what they were told. They were recording a living religion, and on the whole they recorded it well. For the most part they described the Altaians as Altaians, though some of them drew wider conclusions about the Turks. The collector of the Altaian cosmology wrote that the old shaman faith survived only among the tribes that stayed behind in the valleys of the Altai when the other Turks moved west and south.^[9] A philologist of the same years read the early role of the sky god off the Altaian shaman prayers.^[10] A survey of the Altaic peoples in 1927 called shamanism the religion once held by the whole Altaic race.^[11]

The turn from collection to system came in a single book, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker of the Finnish scholar of religion Uno Harva. In it the scattered reports were arranged, for the first time, into one coherent picture of the world, with chapters on the world axis, the world mountain, the tree of life, the layers of heaven and the origin of the earth.^[12] It became the standard account. Nearly everything now said about Turkic cosmology can be traced back to it.

Two things about the way Harva worked decide how his book should be read today. First, he was explicit about where his material came from. He introduces the story of the man who dives into the water for a handful of earth, at Ülgen’s bidding, as a legend of the Altai Tatars.^[13] He introduces the world mountain as something the Siberian Tatars tell.^[12] Second, he compared by design. He set the Siberian material beside Indian, Babylonian and even Sumatran parallels in the same paragraphs, because a comparativist of his generation was looking for the shape that all such beliefs had in common.^[12] The world-picture that emerges from his book is therefore a construction assembled across many cultures. That is what he set out to build. It is not a description of what any one people believed at any one date.^[12]

The Turkish synthesis

From the 1940s onward the material crossed into Turkish scholarship, and there it met a different question. The Russian and Finnish collectors had asked what the Altaians believed. Turkish scholars asked what the Turks had believed, as one people across the centuries. They took the Altaian material as the answer. Abdülkadir İnan carried the Russian and Finnish collections into Turkish in Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm and set them in a historical frame that reached back to the khaganates.^[14] Bahaeddin Ögel did the same for the mythological material, on a larger scale, in Türk Mitolojisi. One strand of Turkish writing goes back further still. It derives the sky religion of the Zhou dynasty in north-western China from Turkic tribes and regards it as the oldest layer of Turkic sky worship.^[15]

The material had not changed. The frame around it had. Before, the Altaians had been Altaians. Now they were witnesses to an older Turkic whole, and their beliefs became survivals from it. The assumption is not absurd. Survivals do exist, and the fire ritual is a fair candidate for one. It remains an assumption, supported by argument rather than by evidence. Once the assumption is granted, every spirit recorded among the Altaians in the nineteenth century becomes available as evidence for the eighth. This is what happened over the following decades.

The encyclopaedias and dictionaries of Turkish mythology published since the turn of the century fixed the result in reference form. At this stage the picture took the form now in circulation. It lists Ülgen, Kayra, Erlik, Kızağan, Mergen, Ak Ana, Umay, the seven or nine heavens and the world tree Ulukayın, each with an entry of its own, presented together as the pantheon of a religion. None of those entries can point to a source of the Göktürk period, because there is none to point to.^[1]

The Xiongnu rites in Turkish scholarship

The same scholarship met the oldest layer, the Chinese notices of the Xiongnu. Some of its members would not take the notices as they stand. İbrahim Kafesoğlu, in his book on the old Turkic religion, held that the Shiji does not speak of human sacrifice but of a funeral ordered by tens. He held that the practice, if real, belonged to the Mongol and Indo-European groups of the Xiongnu empire.^[16] He doubted that the Xiongnu had a golden image. He explained the killing of the Han general Li Guangli by the urging of a foreign or Chinese wu. He held that the skull cup was no Turkic custom.^[17] The Shiji and the Han Shu say in so many words that the ruler’s favourite servants and concubines followed him in death, 從死. The Han Shu calls the wu of the Li Guangli passage a wu of the Hu.^[18] Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç answers that excavation and genetics have since confirmed human sacrifice at Xiongnu graves. He ascribes the denials to the anti-communist politics of the Cold War and to a Turkish-Islamic synthesis that wished the old belief to resemble Islam. The objections to the golden image and the human sacrifice, he holds, are ideological in origin.^[19] The dispute turns on whether a Chinese notice that a later reader finds uncomfortable may be explained away. The notices are short enough that the answer has to be given text by text.

The dragon is a second case. The Shiji says that in the fifth month the Xiongnu held a great assembly at Longcheng, “dragon city”, where they sacrificed to their ancestors, to heaven and earth and to ghosts and spirits.^[20] The Hou Han Shu speaks of the “dragon sacrifice” of the fifth month and of the ninth.^[21] One scholar of early Turkic iconography saw in these notices evidence that the Xiongnu and the Göktürks worshipped a dragon god taken over from China, and a god of time taken over from India.^[22] The answer identifies “dragon” in the Hou Han Shu as a place name, the country of the Ongin river, and denies a dragon cult among both peoples. It holds that the dragon of the Göktürk calendar is only the name of a year. It holds that the god of time rests on a misreading of the inscription’s öd tengri yasar, which it understands to say that Tengri orders the time.^[23] Another proposal is that the dragon came to the Turks very early as a motif from China, and that the Xiongnu named their capital after it.^[24]

The scholar who gave that answer also denied that the wolf ancestor of the Göktürks was a totem. His reasons were patrilineal descent, private property, a single sacred animal, no belief in an impersonal power and no worship of the wolf. He took the shaman for a kind of magician, not for the bearer of a Turkic belief system.^[25] He held that the Tengri of the inscriptions was one creator without an image, with the sun, the moon and the spirits of earth and water as lesser sacred beings below him.^[26] Both points are positions in the debate, and Turkic Atlas sets out what the inscriptions say under Tengrism.

The growth of the picture

Set in order, the layers show what each generation added.

The eighth-century inscriptions give Tengri, Kut, the sacred Earth-and-Water and Umay. They give them together in a single passage.^[1] The Chinese histories add rites but no god: the ancestral cave, the gathering in the fifth month, the new khan raised on a felt, the funeral and the balbal.^[3] The Irk Bitig, two centuries later, adds a god of the road and a Tengri who hears what people say. It still has no pantheon and no underworld.^[27] The Altaian ethnography of the nineteenth century then adds the creator, his adversary, the tiers of heaven and the tree, and the modern reference works add the orderly list.

Each of those steps is legitimate scholarship in its own right. The step that is not legitimate is the last, in which the finished list is read back onto the earliest layer and presented as the religion of the men who cut the Orkhon stones.

The revival

Since the 1990s Tengrism has also been the name of a religious movement, with adherents in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tatarstan and Buryatia and in Turkish nationalist circles. The movement takes its doctrine from the reference works. With them it inherits the whole chain. A movement of the present relies on a synthesis of the 1930s and 1950s. That synthesis was built from ethnography of the 1800s. The ethnography is used to describe a religion of the 700s.

This is a chapter of modern religious and political history. It belongs beside the other national narratives, which are positions rather than findings. Turkic Atlas takes up the wider question under the ethnogenesis debate.

Consequences for the evidence

Three rules follow from all this. They govern the eleven articles on Göktürk religion.

The first is that the layers are kept apart and named. A statement that rests on the Altaian material is presented as a modern reconstruction, with the distance in time stated. A statement that rests on the inscriptions or on the Chinese accounts is presented as what it is.

The second is that the sources of the Göktürk period know no lord of the dead, no tiered heaven, no world tree and no priesthood. That absence is a finding in its own right.^[1]

The third is that the material the collectors gathered is still valuable. Harva arranged the Siberian reports into a system in 1938; İnan and Ögel carried them into Turkish scholarship in the 1950s and 1970s. All three worked with genuine, detailed evidence for what the Altaians, Yakuts and Teleuts believed in their own time.^[12] What changed was the question the evidence was asked to answer. Once the Altaians were regarded as heirs of the Göktürks, a belief recorded in 1880 could be presented as a belief of the year 730. Between those two dates lie more than a thousand years, in which the Altai passed from the Göktürks to the Uyghurs, the Kirghiz, the Mongols and finally Russia. Those years dropped out of the argument. Nobody has shown that the beliefs survived them unchanged. The Turkish synthesis assumed it, and the later encyclopaedias repeated the assumption. The Altaian material is therefore a reliable record of Siberia in the nineteenth century. For the Orkhon in the eighth, it is an open question.

References

^ a b c d e f Kül Tegin inscription
^ Han Shu, juan 94
^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Radloff 1884
^ Radloff 1893 (zweite Ausgabe)
^ Verbitskii 1893
^ Potanin 1881
^ Vámbéry 1879
^ Radloff 1893 (zweite Ausgabe), p. 1–2
^ Vámbéry 1879, p. 151
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 303
^ a b c d e Harva 1938
^ Harva 1938, p. 94
^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954
^ Özerdim 1963, p. 3–5, 17
^ Erkoç 2026, p. 242–243
^ Erkoç 2026, p. 245, 252–253
^ Shiji, juan 110; Han Shu, juan 94
^ Erkoç 2026, p. 242–243, 255
^ Shiji, juan 110
^ Hou Han Shu, juan 89
^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 312
^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 312–313
^ Ögel 1995, p. 566
^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 297–303
^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 309–311
^ Tekin 1993

Sources

Kül Tegin inscription
Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
Irk Bitig
Han Shu, juan 94 (after Shiji)
Shiji, juan 110
Hou Han Shu, juan 89

Literature

Uno Harva, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938)
Abdülkadir İnan, Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm: Materyaller ve Araştırmalar (2017; first edition 1954)
Talat Tekin, Irk Bitig: The Book of Omens (1993)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (2020, multi-volume)
Çoruhlu, Türk Mitolojisinin Ana Hatları (2017)
Karakurt, Türk Mitoloji Ansiklopedisi (2012)
Beydili, Türk Mitolojisi Ansiklopedik Sözlük (2005)
Jean-Paul Roux, La religion des Turcs et des Mongols (1984)
Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç, Asya Hunlarında Dinî İnançlar (Religious Beliefs of the Xiongnu) (2026)
Wilhelm Radloff, Aus Sibirien. Lose Blätter aus meinem Tagebuche. Erster Band (1884)
Wilhelm Radloff, Aus Sibirien. Lose Blätter aus meinem Tagebuche. Zweiter Band (1893 (zweite Ausgabe))
Vasilii Ivanovich Verbitskii, Алтайские инородцы (Altai Foreigners) (1893)
Grigorii Nikolaevich Potanin, Очерки Северо-западной Монголии. Вып. 2. Материалы этнографические (Ocherki severo-zapadnoi Mongolii, Bd. 2) (1881)
Ármin Vámbéry, Die primitive Cultur des turko-tatarischen Volkes, auf Grund sprachlicher Forschungen erörtert (1879)
Uno Holmberg (Harva), The Mythology of All Races, Volume IV: Finno-Ugric, Siberian (1927)
İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk Millî Kültürü (1997)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) II (1995)
Muhaddere N. Özerdim, Chou'lar ve bu devirde Türklerden gelen „Gök Dini“ (1963)