Tengrism

• 1. Introduction

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  Tengrism is a belief system born on the Eurasian steppes, rooted in shamanism and animism, and built around a single sky deity whose name stretches across a dozen languages. The name Tengri itself carries the meaning of "the sky," possibly derived from the word for daybreak or dawn, and scholars have proposed it may even trace back to a Proto-Yeniseian root meaning "high." What kind of religion produces no prophets, no holy scriptures, no clergy, and no fixed place of worship, yet shapes the worldview of empires stretching from Hungary to Korea? How does a faith that prizes harmony with the universe find itself at the center of letters exchanged between Mongol khans and French kings, or march with cavalry regiments through the battles of Borodino and Paris? And how does a tradition suppressed for centuries under Soviet rule reemerge in the 1990s as a rallying point for national identity across Central Asia? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Sky God Across Empires

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  The first recorded mention of Tengri in Chinese chronicles dates to the 4th century BC, where he appears as the sky god of the Xiongnu people. That empire was founded in 209 BC, and from that origin point, the Xiongnu empire was only the first in a long succession of khanates and empires that would carry Tengrism across centuries. The Göktürks, the Huns, the Xianbei, the Bulgars, and eventually the Mongols all held Tengri as their governing spiritual force. State formations including the First Turkic Khaganate, Old Great Bulgaria, Volga Bulgaria, Khazaria, and the Mongol Empire all counted Tengrism as their official religion at various times. Genghis Khan and several generations of his descendants were Tengrian believers. His line did not fully break from that faith until his fifth-generation descendant, Ozbeg Khan, turned to Islam in the 14th century. The 9th-century Irk Bitig, a manuscript on divination from the Uyghur Khaganate, names the deity Türük Tängrisi, meaning God of the Turks, placing Tengri already in the center of Turkic political theology long before the Mongol conquests arrived. By the time the Golden Horde converted to Islam in the 14th century, Tengrism had held spiritual and political weight for well over a thousand years.

• 3. Heaven, Earth, and the Three Souls

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  Old Turkic inscriptions offer one of the oldest statements of Tengrist anthropology: "When the blue Heaven above and the brown Earth beneath arose, between them twain Mankind arose." That formula places humans not above nature but within it, as an expression of the union between sky-father and earth-mother. The earth spirit Eje and the sky deity Tengri together sustain existence, and the ruler of any Tengrist state is understood as chosen by that sky power. Within the cosmology, worlds are stacked in layers. The celestial world and the subterranean world are each divided into seven layers, though some traditions count nine layers below and seventeen above. They are connected through a world tree at the center. Shamans, known as kam, navigate these realms, riding a black bird, a deer, or a horse, or by scaling the world tree or crossing a rainbow. Persons are understood to carry three souls. The researcher Julie Stewart documented these as the Amin, which provides breathing and body temperature; the Sünesün, which moves through water and reincarnates, traveling to the world tree before entering a newborn child; and the Sülde, which carries personality and, after death, resides in nature without being reborn. The Samoyeds, a Uralic people of northern Siberia, held a variation: women carry four souls and men five. The Maria Czaplicka observation about terminology adds a striking detail. Siberian languages use different roots for male shamans across different peoples, but nearly all use variants of the same root word for female shamans, from the Mongolian idugan to Yakut udagan and Evenki udugan. She connected this uniformity to the theory that women's practice of shamanism preceded men's.

• 4. Tengri and Imperial Power

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  The Orkhon inscriptions, carved in the Old Turkic script used by the Göktürks during the 8th to 10th centuries, show Tengri framing nearly every major decision of a kaghan. Many actions were performed, the inscriptions record, because "Heaven so ordained," rendered in the original as Teŋіri yarïlqaduq üčün. The logic behind that formula is made explicit in a statement preserved in Jean-Paul Roux's scholarship: "As there is only one God in Heaven, there can only be one ruler on the earth." This was not merely a theological claim. It was a political instrument. Arghun, the Mongol ruler, expressed this in a letter to the King of France, placing the phrase "Tengri-yin Kuchin," the power of Tengri, before the phrase "Khagan-u Suu," the majesty of the khan, as if the divine sanction were the grammatical precondition for the political authority. The letter proposed joint military action against Egypt and the eventual transfer of Jerusalem if the French king sent soldiers at the appointed time. In a separate letter to Pope Nicholas IV, dated the 14th of May 1290, Arghun wrote on behalf of the Mongols that whether some of Genghis Khan's descendants received baptism or not was "only for Eternal Tengri to know." The letter positions Tengri above any particular religion, treating Christianity as one valid path under a broader cosmic order. That letter was written at Urumi. In another surviving correspondence, Hulegu Khan's Latin letter to King Louis IX, dated the 10th of April 1262, Jesus Christ is referred to as Misicatengrin, a compound blending the Syriac word for Messiah with the Mongol word for deity. The letter is held in the Vienna National Library as manuscript 339.

• 5. Meeting Other Faiths

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  The 11th-century Turkic scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari, writing around 1075, described non-Islamic Turks as infidels who "call the sky Tengri" and bow before great mountains and trees that they also call by that name. His frustration was diagnostic. The transition from Tengrism to Islam did not feel like a rupture to many Turkic peoples because, as the Medieval Syriac historian Michael the Syrian observed, the Turks had always proclaimed one God. The sky concept made monotheism feel familiar. The Kazakh ethnographer Shoqan Walikhanov framed the situation in stark terms: only the names but not the thoughts became Islamic. Gök Tengri was renamed Allah, and Tengrist spirits became div, peri, or jinn, but the underlying shamanic architecture remained. Scholars have also identified the most likely route of conversion as running through Sufism, where Dervishes were seen as something close to shamans. In the writings of Ahmad Yasawi, Tengrist elements coexist with Islamic themes, including Muhammad as a prototype of humanity's path toward divine union. The Kalmyk cavalry offers a striking material trace of Tengrism's persistence. During the Napoleonic Wars, Kalmyk prince Serebzhab Tyumen, who lived from 1774 to 1858, and his troops carried the yellow banner of Daichin Tengri, the Tengrist god of war, through the battles of Borodino, Warsaw, Leipzig, Fère-Champenoise in 1814, and into Paris. In early 1921, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, who lived from 1886 to 1921, was reportedly recognized as Daichin Tengri himself by the Bogd Khan of Mongolia, the last theocratic ruler of the country. James Palmer's book The Bloody White Baron preserves Ferdynand Ossendowski's account of a Buriat shamaness foretelling Ungern-Sternberg's death by reading blackened bones.

• 6. Revival After the Soviet Thaw

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  When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Tengrism re-emerged in the search for pre-Soviet, pre-Islamic spiritual roots across Central Asia. In Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, former presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev and Askar Akayev each called Tengrism the "natural" religion of the Turkic peoples. During Akayev's 2002 visit to Khakassia, he said that seeing the Yenisei Inscriptions felt "like a pilgrimage to a holy place for the Kyrgyz people," drawing a direct comparison with the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. The Kazakh writer Olzhas Suleimenov had laid some of the groundwork earlier. His 1975 book AZ-and-IA, which introduced the term "Tengriianstvo" into wider circulation, was banned in Soviet Kazakhstan after publication. Between 1990 and 1993, the Yakut philologist Lazar Afanasyev-Teris founded the Tengrist organisation Kut-Siur, which later developed into what is known as Aiyy Faith. In Tatarstan, a Tengrist periodical called Beznen-Yul appeared in 1997. Dastan Sarygulov, who served as secretary of state and had previously chaired the Kyrgyz state gold-mining company, established Tengir Ordo in 2005, a civic group promoting Tengrist values. In 2003, Tengir Ordo hosted the first international scientific symposium on Tengrism in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The French Institute for Central Asia Studies organized a follow-up conference in Almaty in 2005. By 2007, biennial scientific conferences on Tengrism began rotating through Russia, Mongolia, and other countries. By 2024, over one million people in Kazakhstan identified as followers of Tengrism, yet the religion has not been granted official recognition there. In 2022, the lawyer Burhanettin Mumcuoglu became the first person in Turkey to formally register a change of religion from Islam to Tengrism.

• 7. Names, Flags, and Sacred Peaks

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  The name Tengri appears across at least a dozen variant spellings in ancient and modern Turkic and Mongolic languages: Tengeri, Tangara, Tangri, Tanri, Tangre, Tegri, Tingir, Tenkri, Tangra, Teri, Ter, and Ture. In modern Turkey and parts of Kyrgyzstan, the faith is known as Tengricilik or Göktanri dini, which translates as sky god religion. Mongolia is sometimes called the Land of Eternal Blue Sky, rendered as Mönkh Khökh Tengeriin Oron in Mongolian. That poetic name is not accidental: the Tengrist understanding of the sky as the seat of ultimate power runs deep enough to shape how Mongolians describe their landscape. Tengrist designs appear on the flags of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Sacred places within Tengrism are typically the highest mountain peaks: Otgontenger and Burkhan Khaldun in Mongolia, Belukha in Russia, and Jengish Chokusu in Kyrgyzstan. Some scholars have noted that the chief deity Tengri bears a striking resemblance to the Indo-European sky god reconstructed by linguists as *Dyeus, and also to the East Asian concept of Tian, the Chinese sky and heaven. The structure of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion, according to those comparative studies, sits closer to early Turkic religion than to the religions of Neolithic European, Near Eastern, or Mediterranean antiquity. The Tengrist cosmology, the shamanic soul-doctrine, and the reverence for mountains and sky-peaks all survive into the present, not just in academic symposiums but in the rituals practiced around Lake Khovsgol and Lake Baikal in Mongolia's north, where Tengrism persists in forms closest to its ancient shape.