Before the conversion of most of the Hathic-speaking population to various denominations of Institutional Tengrism, their religion was centered around a series of epics, known as r!ər ɕogoɭɨg c!aam "the Celestial and Chthonic Recitations", and glosses thereupon, which were occasionally very innovative, and occasionally versified and elevated to the status of Recitation themselves. The overall worldview of these epics was as follows.

Historical time is cyclical and divided into æons, or r!ər d!ɨɨʎ phe n!ag ʎerʔɔbʷ "the recurrent revolutions of the celestial sphere". The current æon is the fourth.

In the First Æon, the gods were created, including the three parents of the Great Unfathomable. The epics relating to the First Æon fall into two categories: the Keys of Heaven and the Keys of Spirit. The Keys of Heaven are repetitive, rigidly and unusually structured, and incomprehensible; the Keys of Spirit divide the Keys of Heaven into categories, describe the creation of the Keys of Heaven at the beginning of the First Æon, prescribe the preservation of the Keys of Heaven at all costs,  promise supernatural powers in exchange for mastery of the Keys of Heaven, and claim that all of the celestial spheres originate from the Keys of Heaven and will disappear, and that certain of the Keys of Heaven are the wheel on which the spheres and æons rotate, and that if those Keys of Heaven are lost the rotation of the spheres and æons will end and the cosmos will dissolve into eternal chaos.

In the Second Æon, a race of giants was created by a trickster-demiurge out of the clay on the back of the unfathomably enormous god R!harɭɨɨg "Father Volcano". Father Volcano tried to exterminate the giants. He immersed himself in water, but the giants learned to build boats, grew strong by eating fish, and bred until they fell into his scalp and plucked out all his hair. Then he covered his back in poison, but the giants learned to eat the poison without dying, relied on it for sustenance, and bred until they fell into his mouth and pulled out all his teeth.  After that, he set himself on fire, but the fire spread the seeds of the m!aat phʌŋ plant, animals grew fat off their leaves, and the giants killed the animals, grew stronger by eating meat, and bred until they fell into his lap and tore off his genitals. Father Volcano flew into a rage and fashioned an army of devils from his teeth, a net of hellfire from his hair, and a flaming sword from his penis. The giants responded by training three heroes: Sun-Hand the Strong to defeat the devils; Swamp-Foot the Quick to break the net; and (unetymologizable) nl!o mʷɔ-dr!ɔ-khɛɛɭ the Great Unfathomable to capture the sword. With the sword, Sun-Hand slew Father Volcano, Swamp-Foot threw the rest of the giants into Heaven, and the Great Unfathomable, badly wounded from the flames of the sword, splintered into the pantheon of the Third Æon.

In the Third Æon, the giants were transmuted somehow or other into humans and settled the celestial sphere, and then some other things happened, leading to the Fourth Æon, which began when humans descended from the celestial sphere in nl!o fʷʌʌ-ŋɛr, the Great Canoe.