Pantheon of gods in Kazakh mythology

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study the pantheon of gods in ancient Kazakh mythology and the worldview complex of Tengrianism. In the Kazakh culture there is an ancient and quite difficult to understand layer of Tengrianism. It should be noted that in Kazakh society to these days there are many people who sympathize with this worldview. So, relying on the Orkhon-Yenisei records, we can say that Tengriаnism is our national religion. Despite the religious renaissance taking place in Kazakh society today, many people are not religiously educated, they domesticate religion superficially and sometimes only at a verbal level. In these conditions, it seems important to conduct a historical and philosophical analysis of the formation and characteristics of the Kazakh religious worldview, continuity and novelty, the reasons for their occurrence through historical comparative analysis.

The article reveals the worldviews and religious ideas of protokazakhs, represents the methodological diversity in the interpretation of this issue, shows the difficult way of forming and consolidating the image of God-Tengri in the ethnic identity of the Kazakhs, the influence of other religious traditions and systems on this process. In addition, the article considers the interpretation of the phenomenon of time in the Kazakh culture, the initially dualistic perception of the God-Tengri, which later led to his understanding as a single Creator God and later overlapped the matrix of the dogma of Islamic monotheism. In the work on the article, the authors relied on the ethnographic and cultural anthropological works of famous Kazakh scholars Sh. Ualikhanov, M. Orynbekov, S. Kondybai, whose in their works examined and interpreted in detail the religious ideas of the Protokazakhs and the worldview complex of tengrianism.