The religious complex that scholars commonly call Tengrism has deep roots in the mobile societies of the Eurasian steppe. Its name derives from Tengri (also spelled Tengger, Tenghir, or Tangri), a sky-deity term found in Old Turkic and Mongolic inscriptions. The earliest unambiguous textual reference to Tengri in extant sources appears in the Orkhon inscriptions of the Göktürks, discovered in the Orkhon Valley (modern central Mongolia) and first published after Nikolai Yadrintsev’s 1889 finds; those inscriptions date to the early eighth century CE and explicitly appeal to Tengri as a source of legitimacy. This archaeological datum provides a fixed point for the scholarly reconstruction of a sky-centred ideology on the steppe: historically, Tengri functioned as a cosmic guarantor of success, a transcendent sky‑power who endorsed rulers and the cohesion of tribes.
At a political level the religion’s formative phase is inseparable from the rise of pan‑Mongol rulership in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Temüjin’s unification of Mongol tribes at the kurultai convention usually dated to 1206 and his adoption of the title commonly rendered in the modern historiography as Genghis (Chinggis) Khan are classically understood in both popular and many traditional accounts as events suffused with a Tengri mandate: medieval chronicles, notably the 'Secret History of the Mongols' (compiled ca. mid‑thirteenth century), present Tengri as bestowing success upon Temüjin. Historians treat these literary claims as literary and legitimizing narratives — they are primary sources for how contemporaries and near‑contemporaries conceptualized rulership, while historical-critical studies emphasise the political function of invoking sky-authority rather than treating such claims as literal divine interventions.
The prehistory of steppe religious forms reaches further back, however. Archaeological and comparative linguistic scholarship trace ritual patterns, ancestor veneration, and reverence for mountains, rivers and particular animals through Iron Age and earlier contexts across Mongolia and adjacent regions. The Eurasian nomadic economy — based on horses, sheep, and pastoral mobility — shaped ritualities that emphasized place-based spirits (mountains, rivers), household ancestors, and portable ritual paraphernalia. The syncretic, non-scriptural character of these practices meant that they evolved through oral transmission, performance and material culture rather than through the canonization of a single scripture or centralized priesthood.
A crucial feature of the early tradition is its diversity. What later scholars group together as Tengrism was not a uniform 'church' but a cluster of local and regional ritual repertoires: some communities emphasized sky worship and ruler-legitimation; others focused on household and clan spirits, seasonal rites, and shamanic mediation. For Turkic-speaking Göktürks in the eighth century, the Orkhon texts frame Tengri as a legal and political authority; for later Mongol polities in the thirteenth century, the term was woven into imperial propaganda and the language of conquest. Comparative work shows overlap with Siberian shamanic practices — trance, spirit possession, and divination — but also important regional differences in ritual technique, cosmological emphasis and social organization.
The trajectory of the tradition changes markedly in the early modern period (roughly the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries) with the expansion of Tibetan Buddhism into Mongolian lands and the increased impact of Islam among Turkic peoples in Central Asia. From the sixteenth century onwards, many Mongol elites and whole polities adopted Gelug‑pa Tibetan Buddhism; monasteries became major social institutions in Inner Asia. In some areas, however, older shamanic practices persisted alongside Buddhism, producing syncretic forms sometimes labelled in scholarship as "yellow" (Buddhist‑influenced) versus "black" (non‑Buddhist) shamanism — terminologies that themselves are modern and contested and which scholars caution against reifying.
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries introduced new political vectors: Russian imperial expansion across Siberia and into parts of Mongolia, and the eventual creation of the Mongolian People’s Republic in 1924 under strong Soviet influence. These geopolitical shifts were decisive for religious life. Tsarist explorers, missionaries, and ethnographers documented local rituals in the late nineteenth century (for instance, the Orkhon discoveries were publicized in the 1880s and 1890s), while the Soviet ideological project and its Mongolian counterparts in the 1920s–1930s launched campaigns that suppressed many forms of indigenous ritual life. The result was a rupture that scholars identify as a significant break in the unbroken transmission of practice.
After the Soviet era’s official atheism and the violent purges of 1937 in Mongolia (a year in which Buddhist clergy, shamans and other religious functionaries were targeted during Stalinist‑era repression), the late twentieth century saw the beginnings of a resurgence. The collapse of Soviet power and the democratic openings in Mongolia (1990) and the dissolution of the USSR (1991) created a public space in which older beliefs could be reclaimed, reinterpreted, and institutionalized in new ways. The modern revival does not simply reconstruct an ancient religion but reworks inherited motifs — Tengri, ancestor‑spirits, sacred mountains — to address contemporary questions of identity, environment, and post‑socialist belonging.
Scholars continue to debate origins and continuity. Ethnohistorical, linguistic and archaeological data point to a long continuity of sky‑centered and shamanic practices across the steppe, but historians caution that the label "Tengrism" is a modern scholarly convenience rather than the name of a single, unified historical church. Adherents, by contrast, often present the relationship as direct continuity: they describe modern rites as the living expression of an "Eternal Blue Sky" that has governed steppe life for millennia. That tension — between historical-critical reconstruction and living self‑understanding — underlies much contemporary scholarship and public debate around the tradition.
This chapter has emphasized the combination of deep antiquity, regional variability, and political entanglement that characterizes the tradition’s early formation. From Orkhon inscriptions in the eighth century to the kurultai of 1206, to the transformations of the early modern and Soviet periods, the practices grouped under Tengrism evolved through contact, suppression and reinvention. The living faith seen today, then, is the product of a long and discontinuous history that remains, for practitioners, a present and active religious universe.