Authority in the religious formations collectively described as Tengrism is decentralized, performance‑based, and heavily grounded in lineage and local recognition. Unlike churches with a formalized textual canon and hierarchical priesthood, authority here tends to be embodied in persons — shamans, elders, clan leaders — and in the custodianship of sacred places, objects and songs. Transmission is often oral: ritual songs, invocation formulas, genealogies and liturgical sequences are taught face‑to‑face through apprenticeship and embodied repetition. In this sense, transmission is conservative but flexible, depending on memory, social endorsement and the continuity of ritual practice.
Shamans (known by various local terms, such as böö, praktik, or yertish in different Turkic and Mongolic languages) constitute the primary locus of transmitted authority. A shaman’s standing is frequently the product of a “calling” — experiences of prolonged illness, waking visions, or repeated dreams — followed by a period of initiation and training under a senior practitioner. Ethnographic studies from regions such as Tuva (centered on the capital Kyzyl), the Altai Republic (Gorno‑Altaysk), Khövsgöl and Khovd provinces in northwestern Mongolia and among Buryat communities around Lake Baikal document common elements of such socialization: the neophyte learns ritual songs, the sequence of offerings, and technical features of trance induction (drumming patterns, chanting, and the choreography of offerings). This apprenticeship model means that ritual knowledge survives in lineages; a shaman might inherit specific ongon (spirit‑objects that may be effigies, fetishes or consecrated bundles) that anchor the lineage’s cosmology and are cared for at household altars or local ovoo (sacred cairns on mountain passes).
The absence of a universally administered scripture does not mean textuality is irrelevant. From the mid‑nineteenth century onward, collectors such as the Finnish linguist Matthias Castrén and later ethnographers including Maria Czaplicka and Soviet scholars recorded and transcribed shamanic songs and rites, producing manuscript collections now held in archives in Helsinki, St. Petersburg and Ulaanbaatar. In the twentieth century, ritual manuals compiled by Mongolian and Russian scholars, as well as transcriptions of oral songs, acquired status as reference texts for some revivalist practitioners. In Mongolia, for instance, the arrival of Tibetan Buddhism in the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries introduced written liturgical corpora and monastic education as new vectors of authority; the canonical Kangyur and Tengyur became part of a literate religious horizon that influenced local ritual vocabulary. Where Buddhism and shamanism coexist, institutional authority may be split or negotiated between monasteries and local shamans. The analytical labels “yellow” (Buddhist‑influenced) and “black” (non‑Buddhist) shamanism that appear in some anthropological literature capture ways institutional affiliation reshaped ritual repertoires; historians and local scholars stress, however, that these categories are analytic and sometimes anachronistic when applied to pre‑modern practice.
Historical inscriptions and chronicles demonstrate that invocations of Tengri (the Sky) had political uses: medieval sources such as the Orkhon inscriptions (eighth century) and later Mongol chronicles show rulers appealing to sky‑power to legitimate leadership. Adherents of contemporary forms sometimes reiterate this connection, holding that Tengri confers a form of mandate on clan or territorial leaders; scholars note that such claims are part of the tradition’s political grammar but are interpreted in divergent ways by different communities and by modern nationalist movements.
Colonial and Soviet interventions profoundly altered patterns of transmission and institutional authority. Russian imperial administrators, Orthodox missionaries, and later Soviet atheist policies disrupted local structures of ritual authority. In the 1920s and 1930s, collectivization and anti‑religious campaigns in Mongolia and the Soviet republics undermined clan institutions and led to the persecution of ritual specialists. The purges of 1937 in Mongolia — part of a broader wave of Stalin‑era repression — resulted in the execution, imprisonment or exile of many Buddhist clerics and practitioners of indigenous rites, and large numbers of monasteries and ritual houses were closed. These disruptions severed many lines of oral transmission and caused the loss of ritual specialists and their accumulated repertoires across wide territories from the Altai Mountains to the steppes of eastern Mongolia.
The late twentieth‑ and early twenty‑first‑century revival has produced complex dynamics of re‑institutionalization. Mongolia’s democratic revolution of 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened space for public practice and for the re‑emergence of shamanic and Tengrist identities in urban centers such as Ulaanbaatar and in rural aimags (provinces). In Tuva and the Altai Republic, where populations number in the low hundreds of thousands and where indigenous collectivities form a significant share of local demographics, revivalist movements have attempted to reconstruct ritual sequences and reassert spiritual authority. Some of these movements are locally rooted, led by returning lineal shamans who preserved fragments of practice; others are new formations, blending scholarly reconstructions, invented traditions and global spiritual currents such as New Age influences. The involvement of scholars — both local ethnographers and international academics — in documenting songs and rituals has helped preserve some materials, yet it also raises debates about who may claim authority to publish or teach ritual knowledge that was formerly transmitted within confined lineages.
State institutions also interact with authority. In contemporary Mongolia, heritage agencies, universities and cultural ministries document and promote traditional practices; occasional official recognition of particular festivals, sacred sites (for example, designated protected areas in the Khangai and Altai ranges) and handicraft traditions influences which practices gain public prominence. In the Russian Federation, republic‑level policies and cultural programs in places such as Tuva, the Altai Republic and Buryatia provide frameworks within which shamanic associations may operate, and some regional governments have supported folkloric festivals and museums that display shamanic paraphernalia. Yet legal recognition does not eliminate disputes about who legitimately represents ancestral religion: competing claims may arise between self‑styled heads of revival movements, academic experts, municipal officials and older ritual lineages, and adjudication of such claims often depends on local networks and communal endorsement rather than judiciary decree.
Two recurring tensions mark authority structures. First, there is a tension between expert knowledge as academically validated and expert knowledge as ritually efficacious: a scholar may publish a careful transcription of a ritual song, but that publication does not necessarily confer ritual power. Ritual efficacy, according to many practitioners, hinges on proper initiation, sanctified objects, and communal endorsement. Second, there is a tension between secrecy and openness. Certain ritual sequences, sacred chants and ongon are treated as esoteric property of a lineage; the modern pressures of tourism, media exposure and heritage presentation — visible in staged performances for visitors in Ulaanbaatar, Kyzyl, or at heritage sites around the Altai — often push these elements into the public sphere, provoking ethical debates among practitioners about commodification, appropriation and authenticity.
Comparatively, the authority patterns of Tengrism share affinities with other indigenous and shamanic systems — decentralized, lineage‑based and performative — but the distinctive historical role of Tengri invocations in legitimating steppe polities gives the tradition a particular resonance in national historiographies and public rituals. Finally, new modalities of transmission have become important. Digital recordings, ethnographic archives housed in national institutes, and printed guides increasingly supplement oral apprenticeship; social media platforms and online video channels facilitate the rapid dissemination of rituals, images and instructional material. While these media expand access and have allowed diasporic communities to reconnect with ritual repertoires, they also alter the contexts in which ritual authority is established. For many practitioners and observers, the ongoing challenge is to balance the preservation of lineal, embodied knowledge — learned in the close presence of a mentor at a family altar or a mountain ovoo — with the opportunities and risks of broader public engagement and scholarly documentation.