Paper abstract:

The cart-mounted ordos (palace tents, a.k.a. “hordes”) of the Cult of Chinggis Khan, and the cults of the various süldes(standards), which survive today mostly in the Ordos municipality of Inner Mongolia and more sporadically elsewhere, have seasonal and other periodic ceremonies of renewal. That is, the officiants re-make the main relics of worship as well as the felt and wooden structures of the gers. There are also stories of how the more enduring ritual implements made of precious metal were donated, robbed, returned, smelted, and re-made. Because of this constant renewal, these objects of worship may seem inauthentic since we are accustomed to being awe-struck before original and ancient objects. However, renewal is not limited to the material implements of the cult of Chinggis Khan. The core ritual aim of the entire cultic establishment can be seen as generational renewal of his realm – the perpetuation of Chinggis Khan’s sacrality across time and space. The corpus of cultic texts transmitted to our time is known as the Altan Bichig (Golden Writings), and it is typical of the liturgical genre for its accretions of texts across time. Some texts probably include information passed down since the 13-14th c., some are devoid of any Buddhist influence typical of the Second Conversion of the 17-18th c., while others were presented to the Cult by famous ecclesiastical figures in the 18thcentury, most prominently the incense prayer composed by the Mergen Gegeen (1717-66). In this paper, I will present 1) the statements recited at the end of rituals indicating what the propitiating descendants are asking of the spirits of Chinggis Khan and his Queen(s), and 2) an analysis of what is achieved by the actual rituals in the instruction text excavated from the Qara Shorong site in 1957. I discuss the metaphors used by the Cult of Chinggis Khan rituals – both verbally in its prayers and physically in the bodily/material performance – to argue for the centrality of renewal as a theme consciously elaborated. The ephemeral nature of the shrines’ materiality, when viewed in this context, is no longer a conundrum, as the object of preservation is the institutions and relationships that constitute the Chinggisid Polity, and the physical implements serve that purpose in their own renewals.