Yol Tengri

Yol Tengri is the road-god of the Irk Bitig, the runiform book of omens found among the Dunhuang manuscripts. He is one of the few divine figures of the Old Turkic corpus that is neither Tengri himself nor a power of the ground.^[1] He appears in a book whose whole subject is what will happen to a man who sets out.

The book he stands in

The Irk Bitig is a manual of divination. It contains sixty-five numbered omens, each a short scene. Each closes with the same formula: know thus, the omen is good, or extremely good, or bad.^[1] Its world is the world of a man on the move, with a horse, a road, a camp, a bird of prey and a lost thing found. The god of the road presides over that world.^[2]

He speaks in two of the omens. In the second, he is the road god on a dappled horse. He meets two travellers who are afraid and tells them not to fear, since he will give them his divine favour. In the forty-eighth, he is the old road god, who says that he mends what is broken and has set the realm in order.^[3]

The manuscript is dated to the ninth or tenth century. It belongs to the Uyghur period rather than to the Göktürk khaganates, and its vocabulary comes from a world in which Manichaean and Buddhist terms were already present. This is the first limit on reading it as a Göktürk source. The text is Turkic and pre-Islamic, but it is later than the monuments.

The ambiguity in the name

Yol is the road. In Old Turkic, and in Turkic since, it is also the fortune or the lot that a man meets. It means the way a life goes as well as the track it goes along.

The name therefore admits two interpretations, and the text does not separate them. On the first interpretation, he is a god of travel, who keeps or fails to keep a man on the road. This is the plain sense, and it suits a book of omens consulted by people who travelled. On the second interpretation, he is a god of what befalls, the power that apportions to each man the course of his going. This places the figure beside Kut and beside the ülüg, the allotted portion. The khans name the ülüg in the inscriptions as the thing they hold from Heaven.

The second interpretation has the stronger parallel in the corpus. In the Kül Tegin inscription, Heaven apportions the span of a life, and a khan rules because his Kut and his portion are there. A road-god who apportions the course of a journey expresses the same idea at the scale of a single man.^[4] The first interpretation has the stronger context, since the book is about journeys. Neither interpretation can be pressed, and the two senses were most likely not held apart.

Relation to Tengri

Teŋri in the name is the ordinary divine word. The construction, a qualifier followed by teŋri, is the one that produces türk teŋrisi, the Tengri of the Göktürks, in the monuments.^[4] This construction does not settle whether a separate being is meant or an aspect under which the one power is addressed.

Nothing in the Göktürk-period corpus names a road-god.^[4] The monuments show Heaven acting in politics. Heaven installs khans, gives armies strength and disorders the world when it is disordered. They name no figure whose province is the private fortune of an individual.^[4] The omen book has the second and barely has the first. Therefore the difference between the two texts is at least as much a difference of purpose as of belief.

References

^ a b Tekin 1993
^ Irk Bitig
^ Tekin 1993, p. 9, 21; 1442, 1448; Seçkin 2015, p. 9, 21; 1442, 1448
^ a b c d Kül Tegin inscription

Sources

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Talat Tekin, Irk Bitig: The Book of Omens (1993)
Uno Harva, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938)
Abdülkadir İnan, Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm: Materyaller ve Araştırmalar (2017; first edition 1954)
Kuban Seçkin, Irk Bitig: Toplumsal İyi ve Toplumsal Kötünün İnşasında İdeolojik Bir Fal Kitabı (2015)