Religions · 8 articles
Shamanism
Practice of a ritual specialist who enters a trance to treat the sick, foretell the year and deal with spirits, recorded on the steppe since the Xiongnu. Tengrism grew out of it and rests on it.
- Animism Modern name for the belief that places, waters, mountains, fire, animals and the dead have spirits or owners. It is the base layer under shamanism and, through it, under Tengrism.
- Horse Sacrifice Killing of a horse as an offering among the steppe peoples. The Chinese histories give it at the sacrifice to heaven, at funerals and at oaths. The full rite, with its birch, its goose and its journey through the heavens, is known from the Altai of the nineteenth century.
- Iye The owner-spirits of the Turkic peoples, held to possess a mountain, a water, a hearth, a house or a pass. The word for owner, idi, stands on the Orkhon stones, said of land and water.
- Kam (Turkic Shaman) The Old Turkic ritual specialist. Chinese observers describe the office, and a Byzantine embassy saw it at work once, in 569.
- Sacred Mountains The mountains that the sources of the Göktürks, Uyghurs and Kirghiz set apart: the sacred Ötüken forest, a bare mountain called the spirit of the earth, and the sacred heads of the inscriptions.
- Ülgen and Kayra Khan Sky gods of the Altaians as recorded by Radloff, Verbitskii and Potanin in the nineteenth century. Ülgen is the good creator, Kayra Khan the gracious khan of the highest heaven. The records differ on whether the two are one god, father and son, or a god and an epithet.
- Water Cult Reverence for rivers, lakes and springs as powers with owners: the sacred Earth-and-Water beside Heaven, a river of sacrifice in the Zhou Shu, and the water that Theophylact has the Göktürks revere.
- Yada Stone The stone with which Turkic and Mongol weather-workers are said to bring rain, wind, snow and hail. Kashgari saw it put out a fire with summer snow in the eleventh century, and the Altai missionaries and Radloff recorded the yadachi in the nineteenth. The Chinese histories give weather-working men and do not name a stone.
