Tengri
Nogai · deity · Nogai traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Tengri is the supreme sky-god of the ancient Turkic and Mongol peoples, the deified 'Eternal Blue Sky' who dispenses sovereignty, victory and fate. Among the Nogai, a Kipchak people Islamized from the fourteenth century onward, his name survives as a word for God and in a dense layer of oaths, curses and blessings that preserve the older Tengrist worldview beneath a Muslim surface. He is imagined less as an anthropomorphic figure than as the boundless heaven itself, paired in belief with the earth-and-water powers below.
Domains
- sky
- fate
Powers
- governs the eternal sky
- decrees human fate
Epithets
- Кӧк Тәңир — Blue (Eternal) SkyS. G. Klyashtornyy, 'Tengri', in Mify narodov mira, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1982) (secondary)
Sources
- Tengri is the pre-Islamic Turkic sky-god whose worship and invocation survive among the Nogai after their conversion to Islam.: S. G. Klyashtornyy, 'Tengri', in Mify narodov mira, vol. 2 (Moscow: Sovetskaya entsiklopediya, 1982) (secondary); N. A. Baskakov (ed.), Nogaysko-russkiy slovar' (Moscow, 1963), s.v. Тәңир (secondary)