เครื่องรางองกอนOngonонгон

The objects are described one at a time in the ethnography, and this record keeps them that way. For the Tuvan shamaness Yamaan, an ancestor spirit is represented in the handle of a drum: a carved figure with a pink head and chest, a black crown, and red eyes and forehead, with a wire for arms and, on a second wire, suspended holbogo standing for the spirit's earring.

Some ongod are not made at all but inhabited. Agaaryn Khairhan, a mountain in Khövsgöl Province, carries the name of one of the most powerful shamanesses of the Darkhad clan — Agaaryn Khairhan, also called Bagdan Udgan — who lived on that mountain in the eighteenth century.

Among the Darkhad in present-day Northern Mongolia, clusters of ongod stand in transitional places: the mouths of rivers, the border between taiga and steppe. That border is also a religious one, with the taiga and the mountains the traditional ground of shamanism and the steppe the ground of Buddhism. Many Darkhad households own lineage talismans, yazguur ongod, or household talismans, geriin ongod, which both contain and attract spirits.

The ongon matters most in black shamanism: the main job of the khar talynkh, the black shaman, is to bring people into contact with the ongon, whose spirit they call up while drumming in a trance. Otgony Purev records that in late-nineteenth-century Mongolia yellow shamans revered ongod as well, and that every three years they gathered at Dayan Deerh monastery in Khövsgöl Province to renew these ancestral spirits. Dayan Deerh is itself one of the well-known ongod.

Made by a shaman, not by a household member, and consecrated to a particular dead shaman. The renewal Purev records for yellow shamans ran on a three-year cycle at a named monastery. This atlas does not print how an ongon is made or what is said over it: the sources read describe particular objects among particular peoples — a Tuvan shamaness's drum handle, Darkhad household talismans — and do not publish a procedure, and neither a Darkhad practice nor a Tuvan one stands in for the other.

Recorded in the Darkhad Valley of Northern Mongolia in the ethnography of the 2010s, with household and lineage talismans in ordinary houses and clusters of ongod at the edges between taiga and steppe. Morten Axel Pedersen's Not Quite Shamans, 2011, and Ágnes Birtalan's 2011 study of Dayan Deerh are the recent published accounts this record leans on; Dmitry Zelenin's Культ онгонов в Сибири, 1936, is the old one.