This heading covers the traditions of a number of distinct peoples across northern Asia, the Evenki, Buryat, Yakut and others among them, and they are not one religion. What they share is a structure that outsiders have found easy to recognise and hard to describe accurately.
A high god of the sky stands at the top and is not the focus of practice. Below him the world is populated by masters and owners: of a river, a mountain, a forest, a species of animal, a household. These are the powers a person actually deals with, because they control the things a person needs, and dealing with them is a matter of respect, offering and restraint rather than devotion.
The cosmos is layered, upper, middle and lower, and the layers are connected. Movement between them is the specialist's work, and the office of that specialist is entered by a call that is not sought and often not wanted, followed by training under someone who already holds it.
The ancestors are part of the working order, and among several of these peoples a deceased practitioner becomes a spirit that later practitioners work with.
These are living traditions, held by Indigenous minority peoples, severely suppressed during the Soviet period and substantially revived since. The atlas lists them as restricted and does not reproduce what practitioners hold.