The Black Faith, or Shamanism among the Mongols (Chernaya vera, ili shamanstvo u mongolov)

Dorzhi Banzarov's The Black Faith, or Shamanism among the Mongols, his 1846 dissertation at Kazan University, is the earliest scholarly study of Mongol shamanic religion written by a scholar raised within the Buryat Mongol tradition itself, and it remains a foundational text in the field. Its strength is that it combines the philological training Banzarov received at Kazan with firsthand familiarity with the tradition he was describing, a combination unusual for its period. Its limit is that it is a nineteenth century work, written before much of the archival and fieldwork evidence later scholars have drawn on, so a claim resting on more recent findings about Mongol shamanism needs a source beyond this founding study.