The fundamentals therefore, along with many unique features, also bear many similarities with the primitive religion of the Germans, Greeks, Lithuanians and Persians. A relatively young people who adopted Christianity early and quickly, the Slavs did not have time to develop a completely complete mythological system. On the other hand, their mythological views were not enshrined in such integral works as the poems of Homer and Hesiod or the Edda of the Scandinavians, but were preserved only in songs, fairy tales, riddles and others that were not in a complementary relationship in content, works of folk art, on which in addition, there often lies the darkening and distorting stamp of later beliefs. Slavic legends about the creation of the world and man, views on the meaning of their deities and the names of the latter, therefore, differ among different tribes. By coordinating and complementing these options, we can generally establish the following scheme of Slavic cosmogony and mythology.
Gamayun, the prophetic bird. Painting by V. Vasnetsov on the theme of Slavic myths. 1897
Gods of Slavic mythology
They are based on dualism, that is, the recognition by the Slavs of a good principle in the person of Belbog and a subordinate, but still harmful element - in the person of Chernobog. By the united creative powers of both gods, a world arose from the boundless air space or heavenly ocean, among which there was a bright Iriy(paradise) or Buyan Island, blessed abode of the gods. Then Belbog created man from clay, and Chernobog did not fail to make his unclean contribution to the nature of the new creation. Jealous of Belbog's power, Chernobog tried to fight him, but was defeated and transferred his hatred to the first man (androgyne), who possessed titanic powers and lived in harmony with Belbog. In the absence of Belbog, he intoxicated a man “at God’s table” with the wine he had invented, and this brought upon him the wrath of Belbog, which resulted in the physical and moral destruction of the human race.
Shying from the inevitable evil in the world, Belbog (otherwise called Prabog or simply god, Belun, Svarog, Rod, Triglav, Diy) did not rule the world himself. With his wife Diva, the goddess of the earth, he reigned behind the clouds, leaving the rule of the world and the possible fight against evil to the four lower world lords. Between them, the first place in Slavic mythology was occupied by Perun, the heavenly ruler, a powerful and angry black-haired god with a fiery mustache and beard, protecting and guarding people and waging a continuous struggle with Chernobog with the help of a thunder hammer, a bow - a rainbow and arrows - lightning. Perun's wife, Simargla, Zhiva or Siva, was the goddess of lightning, summer thunderstorms and fertility. According to the myths of the Slavs, he ruled over the water and air elements, Stribog, the father of the winds and the god of the sea, along with whom in the people’s memory stood the elemental sea deity - Vodyanik, an ugly and angry giant, raising a disastrous storm on the sea with his frantic dance.
Baba Yaga. Character from Slavic mythology. Painting by V. Vasnetsov, 1917
Next came the king of fire: Zhizhal of the Belarusians Svarozhich or Radagast of the Pomorians, god of hospitality and guardian hearth and home, and the ruler of the underworld, Niy of the Poles, Sitivrat or Karachun of other Slavs, a gloomy winter deity, the husband of the goddess of death and the deadening winter cold, Morana. Below the named world lords stood the descendants of Perun in Slavic myths: his son, the sun god Khors, Dazhdbog or Lado, the most revered deity of the Slavs, the husband of the sea princess Lada or Kupala, the goddess of spring, rain and fertility, and his brother Veles or Volos, the god of the month, the inspirer of the singers, the “grandsons of Veles,” and the patron of herds and wild animals. The host of the highest gods was completed by the sons of Khorsa, Lel and Polel, the gods of legal love and marriage; Chur, guardian of borders, patron of trade and all profits, and Yarilo, priapic deity of sensual love and fertility.
Spirits and mythical creatures among the Slavs
In addition to these deities of the highest order, Slavic mythology knew many earthly, elemental spirits. All of nature seemed to be inhabited by supernatural beings. The forest was dominated by angry and hot-tempered people, but they were honest and did not do unnecessary evil. goblin. In the waters lived water grandfathers and beautiful, but crafty seductresses - mermaids. Spirits lived in the mountainous areas pitchfork, sometimes insidious and evil, but who loved heroic prowess and patronized brave warriors. Women in labor, goddesses of fate, who predicted their fate for newborns, etc., were hiding in a mountain cave.
Mermaids emerge from the water in front of Trinity. Painting by K. Makovsky, 1879
Temples and priests among the Slavs
The Slavs shared the beliefs of other Aryan tribes in the immortality of the soul, reward after death for good and evil deeds and the end of the world, but legends about this merged so early and closely with Christian ideas that it is very difficult to isolate purely pagan elements from this amalgam. Greatest development Slavic mythology reached Pomeranian Slavs, which, according to medieval German annalists, had luxurious temples, precious idols and a powerful priestly class. Regarding the cult, other Slavs did not preserve definite instructions, but the widespread existence of temples and priests cannot be doubted and is directly attested for the main cities of Rus' in the times preceding the adoption of Christianity.
Zbruch idol. Monument of Slavic paganism, dating back to approximately the 10th century
Literature about Slavic mythology
F. Buslaev, "Essays on folk poetry and art"
Afanasiev,"Poetic views of the Slavs on nature"
Averikiev, “Mythical Antiquity” (“Dawn”, 1870)
Batyr, monograph about Perun
"Belarusian songs" Bessonova
Kvashnin-Samarin, "Essays on Slavic mythology"
mythology, paganism, Gods, sanctuaries.
Annotation:The article examines the main direction of Slavic mythology, the electorate of the Slavic Gods and functionally structured relationships.
Article text:
1. Slavic paganism: gods, idols and sanctuaries
The entire existence of the Slavs was permeated with belief in the intervention of supernatural forces and dependence on gods and spirits. The Christian Church, with its concern for the salvation of the soul, considered the religious ideas of the ancient Slavs to be superstition and paganism. Pagans are peoples who do not believe in one God and do not revere His Testament - the Bible: the peoples in the Bible were called "tongues", that is, people speaking different languages, - hence the word “paganism” itself.
The oldest information about the faith of the Slavs belongs to Procopius of Caesarea. He wrote that the Slavs consider one of the gods, the creator of lightning, to be the “lord of everything”; Bulls and other animals are sacrificed to him. They also worship rivers, nymphs and some other “deities”, make sacrifices to them and during the sacrifices they tell fortunes about the future. Nymphs in ancient mythology are spirits of nature, springs, mountains, and trees. The Slavs revered, along with the highest gods who personified the natural elements - thunder and lightning, earth, etc., lower deities, or spirits, Procopius called them n and mf and m.
Half a millennium later, after the baptism of Rus', a Russian medieval scribe, in his teaching against the pagans, described the beliefs of the Slavs in a similar way. Just as the ancient Greeks made sacrifices to Apollo and Artemis, so the Slavs brought “tribes” to the birthwomen, as well as ghouls and beregins; then they began to worship Perun. Until now,” the Christian scribe was indignant in his teaching against the pagans, “on the outskirts they secretly pray to the “cursed” god Perun, Khors, Mokosha and the pitchfork spirits.
The name "Perun" means "thunder" in Slavic languages. Perun is the supreme deity of the Slavs, the god of thunder and lightning. Who the Rod and women in labor are, you can also guess from their names - these are the spirits who patronize the birth of offspring and the genus - the collective of relatives as a whole. Another name for these spirits among the Slavs is “court” and “sudenitsa”: at the birth of a person, patrons endowed him with fate, share. Ghouls are well known from Slavic folk beliefs until the 20th century. These are harmful dead people who rise from the grave at night and attack people, sucking their blood.
The pagan Slavs burned their dead, which means that those who were not buried according to this rite became ghouls.
Beregyns are not spirits called upon to take care of people, but spirits that live on the banks of reservoirs, apparently associated with the cult of springs and rivers.
Ideas about pitchforks also survived in Slavic folk beliefs until modern times: and they were considered the spirits of springs and wells. Pitchforks appeared in the form of beautiful girls in long dresses, but with goat or donkey legs. They were winged and endowed with the ability to fly. Forks, beregins, ghouls, women in labor belonged to the lower spirits, there were many of them, and usually they did not have personal names.
2. Slavic mythology
Research on Slavic mythology shows that it is no coincidence that Perun and Volos fit on the same hill in Kyiv. The myths of the pagan era have not reached our time. Christian scribes could not write down stories about the gods, whom they treated as cursed, as demons, and whose faith they condemned. But the folklore and mythology of related Indo-European peoples has been preserved: by comparing ancient myths and folklore, it is possible to restore Slavic mythology in its main features.
In the myths of the Indo-Europeans, the main feat of the god, the Thunderer, is the battle with the serpent, the dragon, who stole water and cattle. The Thunderer strikes the serpent with thunder and lightning, frees water and livestock, returns fertility and domestic animals to the earth - the main wealth of the ancient Indo-Europeans. The names of the serpent in various myths resemble the name of Veles - Volos.
The closest to the Slavic gods are the Baltic ones. Among the Balts, the name of the Thunderer was Perkunas; with his thunder arrows he struck the devil, who bore the name Vels, Velnyas.
U Eastern Slavs Stories have also been preserved about how Perun - God, the biblical Elijah - the prophet or Thunder - pursues with thunder and lightning a Snake or a devil that hides in cattle, in a tree, under a stone, in a person. The Thunderer overtakes the devil everywhere while he hides in the water, or kills the Serpent. In some mythological stories The serpent kidnaps a woman or seduces her, for which the Thunderer kills him. Maybe this woman is the incarnation of the goddess Mokosha or the Mother herself - the raw earth. After the victory over the Serpent, heavenly waters spill onto the earth - it rains. Thus, thunder and lightning cleanse the whole world of evil spirits and increase the fertility of the earth.
The name of the Snake was not preserved among the Slavs, but most likely it was Veles, Volos - the mythical patron of livestock. But the name of the pagan “cattle” god coincided with the name of the Christian patron saint of domestic animals - Vlasya. After the conversion of the Slavs to the Christian faith, he replaced the ancient “cattle” god. In the popular beliefs of the Slavs, Elijah the Prophet became the Thunderer, riding across the sky in a fiery chariot. In pre-Christian times, the image of Veles combined both good and evil principles: Veles was both the god of fertility and an evil demon, the embodiment of death. This combination of good and evil in one deity was characteristic of the pagan beliefs of the ancient Slavs.
Perun, Veles, Mokosh were common Slavic and even Balto-Slavic gods and mythical characters. In the Christian medieval chronicles there is almost no news about the gods and beliefs of the southern and western Slavs. But Western European chroniclers described in detail the idols and sanctuaries of the Baltic Slavs.
3. Gods of the Baltic Slavs. Zbruch idol
The Slavs, who lived on the shores of the Baltic Sea, from Polish Pomerania to the Elbe Labe in the present-day lands of Germany, maintained pagan beliefs for a long time, until the 12th century. Their temples, described by chroniclers, were already located in real cities of the 11th – 12th centuries. More ancient sanctuaries have been excavated by archaeologists. The most amazing of the sanctuaries was explored in Grosse Raden, among the tribe of Polabian Slavs-Obodrites, in the land of Mecklenburg. It stood near a settlement located on a cape jutting into the lake. No idols were found inside the sanctuary, but the walls were built from anthropomorphic boards - shaped like human figures. Two large anthropomorphic beams also served as roof supports. Among the finds in the temple are six horse skulls and one bull skull; There was a cattle pen next to the temple. Was the temple in Gross Raden connected with the cult of the “cattle god”?
From the descriptions of chroniclers, we know which gods belonged to the temples in Slavic cities. Szczecin, a city in Pomerania, stood on three hills, and on the highest stood the temple of Triglav. The idol of Triglav had three heads; the eyes and mouth of the idol were covered with a golden curtain. There was a lot of wealth in the temple: the Pomeranians gave tithes to the temple - a tenth of the booty captured in battles. Triglav owned a black horse, which was used for fortune telling; he was led three times through spears placed on the ground and observed how the prophetic animal behaved. The number three had a special meaning in the Slavic cult. The cult center of the land of the Ratars (the tribal union of the Luticians) was Radigost (Radigoshch, or Retra).
The city itself was triangular in plan, and three gates led into it: two were open to everyone, the third - from the sea - led to the pagan temple. The temple was guarded by priests, who also practiced fortune telling. The Slavs believed that before terrible wars, a huge boar emerges from the sea and shakes the earth. They asked for mercy from the gods during their military campaigns, and in order to pacify their anger, they sacrificed people and animals. The walls of the temple were decorated with carvings depicting gods and goddesses (reminiscent of the temple in Gross Raden), and inside there were idols - images of gods in full armor. The main one was Svarozhich or Radigost. Svarog and Svarozhich turn out to be common Slavic deities.
Among the Eastern Slavs, Svarozhich was the name for fire; the warlike Luticians revered him as the god of war. In the Russian chronicle, the son of Svarog is named Dazhbog - the god of the sun: this means that Svarozhich embodied not only earthly, but also heavenly fire.
Another god revered in many Slavic lands was Sventovit, or Svyatovit. His temple stood in the city of Arkon on the island of Rügen in the land of the Ruyans. The very name of God carried the idea of holiness: he was considered the highest god, victory in wars depended on him. For his victory, he was given a third of the spoils he won. The symbols of Sventovit were a cup, a sword, a banner and battle badges. He, like Triglav, owned a prophetic horse, but only white. They believed that at night it was covered with mud because God rode out on it to fight enemies.
Zbruch idol
The idol of Sventovit had, according to the descriptions of chroniclers, four heads. Such an idol was found far from the Baltic island of Rügen on the Zbruch River, a tributary of the Dniester. The idol was stone, 2.67 m high, tetrahedral; the four-faced head is crowned with one cap. Various images are carved on the sides of the idol. In the upper part, the god himself is depicted, who on one side held a ring-bracelet, on the other - a cup and a drinking horn; on the third side of the idol a saber and a horse are depicted. The middle part of the statue is surrounded on all sides by the image of a human round dance. In the lower part, on three sides, there are carved images of people in the pose of Atlanteans supporting the universe. The three parts of the idol embodied the three spheres of the universe: the upper, heavenly world of the gods, the earth of people and the underworld. The faces of the deity looked at all four cardinal directions.
The deity, in addition to weapons and a horse - attributes of Sventovit, had a cornucopia and a ring - a symbol of right and fidelity: in treaties with the Greeks, Russians swear on hoop rings. Another four-faced idol, albeit small (only 6 cm) long and made of wood, was found in another large urban center of the Pomeranian Slavs - Wolin. The find dates back to the 9th–10th centuries. It is interesting because it confirms the chronicler’s story, as in Wolin by Bishop Otto of Bamberg in the 12th century. The idols were burned, but some stubborn pagans kept small statues of the gods and continued to worship them. Similar images were preserved in medieval Novgorod after the baptism of Russia.
Of the numerous and rather primitive cult images of the Slavs, the discovery of an idol of a two-headed deity from Fisherman's Island (Fischerinsel) on Lake Tollen attracts attention. It was carved from a wooden beam almost 2 m high. Chroniclers mention other multi-headed gods of the pagans - the four or five-headed Porevit and the seven-headed Revit in the cult center on Rügen.
4. Higher and lower spirits
The Russian scribe ranked Perun, Khors and Mokosh among the highest gods, and noted that Rod and the women in labor were worshiped before Perun.
Is this really how Slavic beliefs developed?
It is known where the scribe got the list from Slavic gods. The same Nestor in “The Tale of Bygone Years” gives a list of idols that Prince Vladimir placed on a hill in Kyiv in 980, when he was still a pagan. The Eastern Slavs did not have temples - idols were placed in open-air sanctuaries. On the Kyiv Mountain near the princely palace a wooden idol of Perun with a silver head and a golden mustache, idols of Khors and Dazhbog were installed. Stribog, Simargl and Mokoshi. The hill and the entire Russian land were desecrated with the blood of pagan victims, wrote Nestor. A follower of Nestor cites the very beginning and end of the list of idols and concludes from the chronicle that the cult of Perun is a late one, established by Vladimir. In fact, Perun was the oldest Slavic deity, who was worshiped in Indo-European antiquity. Nestor's information is the only source on the Slavic pantheon (collection). Let's try to understand the meaning of the names of the gods. Dazhbog, who gives good luck, is also identified in Russian chronicles with the sun and is called the son of Svarog, the god of fire. Stribog, judging by his name, is a deity who extends his protection over the world: in “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” the winds blowing everywhere are called Stribog’s grandchildren. Mokosh is the only goddess in the East Slavic pantheon. She ends up last on the list of gods. Her name is related to the word “wet”, it is close to the concept of moisture, water and Mother - damp earth. The gods Horse and Simargl are of non-Slavic origin, they wear Iranian names. The name “Hors” is related to the word “good” and also means a shining solar deity, like Dazhbog. The name “S i m a r g l” is close to the name of the wonderful bird Simurgh from Iranian myths.
Where did the Iranian deities come from in the East Slavic pantheon? The Slavs have long been neighbors of the Iranians, primarily the Alans, who participated, along with the Goths and Huns, in the Great Migration of Peoples. The word “god” itself was borrowed by the Slavs from the Iranians - it means luck, a happy share and is related to the word “wealth”. When Vladimir established his power in Kyiv, in the south of Rus', many tribes in the forest-steppe borderland, including Iranian-speaking ones, became subject to him. The Russian prince included their gods in the pantheon, as well as the gods of various Slavic tribes. But not all gods were included in the Kiev pantheon. Nestor did not mention the fire god Svarog and the “cattle god” Volos, or Veles. Meanwhile, Volos, along with Perun, was the main god of Rus' and the Slavs. Pagan Rus', concluding peace treaties with Byzantium in the 10th century, she swore allegiance to the treaty obligations of Perun and Volos.
The cult of pagan gods and their idols were destroyed with the adoption of Christianity by the Slavic peoples. In Slavic folk beliefs, the gods were replaced by Christian saints: Perun Ilya the Prophet, Velesa - Blasius, Mokosh - Paraskeva Friday, the patroness of spinners. Even Sventovit was compared to the Christian Saint Vitus. The saints patronized people and punished the careless.
Lesser Spirits
The harmful properties of the ancient gods were embodied by evil spirits in popular beliefs. Hair or hairy was the name given to a disease of livestock: “mokoshka” was an evil spirit that tangled the spinners’ yarn. Ilya’s main opponent was the devil - the omnipresent evil spirit, whom the Thunderer pursues with thunder and lightning.
The pre-Christian spirit of disease and rabies was unable to inhabit humans and animals. Christian preachers called both pagan gods and spirits demons, and it was believed that saints were able to cast out demons. According to Christian folk legend, demons are angels who, led by Satan, rebelled against God. God threw them from heaven to earth. From those demons that fell into the forest came the goblin, from those that fell into the water came the merman, etc.
The Slavs believed in these “lower spirits” that inhabited the whole world for a long time. The house spirit, the house spirit, was especially revered: without his patronage, nothing would go well in the household. He punishes careless owners and torments their pets at night. When he shows himself, he takes on the appearance of the owner of the house. Special spirits - barn and bannik - lived in buildings and in the yard. The spirit of the forest - the goblin - could frighten and lead astray. It can be shorter than grass or taller than trees. Vodyanoy is the owner of water sources. It can lure a person into the water and drown. Water millers were especially revered: they made sacrifices so that the water millers would not break the mill wheels.
Various spirits also lived in the field. Midday was considered dangerous - the spirit of the summer midday heat punished with heatstroke those who worked in the fields at noon. Mermaids also came out of the water into the field - the spirits of dead girls, sometimes drowned women. Mermaids also punished those who worked in the fields during Mermaid Week, when the rye blooms. One could pay off the spirits with food, a chicken sacrifice, etc.
More dangerous were witches and sorcerers who could send damage and illness to people and livestock, turn people and entire wedding processions into wolves, and themselves become werewolves - werewolves. After death, sorcerers became ghouls. U The Slavs had entire systems of amulets against witchcraft and evil spirits, and special conspiracies against diseases were also common.
But the pagan Slavs worshiped not only deities and evil spirits. They also revered nature: trees, especially oaks, springs, mountains and stones. A tall oak tree stood above the sacred spring in Szczecin - the pagans thought that a deity lived in it.
The oak was considered the tree of Perun. In the middle of the 10th century, when Rus' set out on a campaign or trade trip to Byzantium from Kyiv along the Dnieper, the Russians stopped on the island of Khortitsa to make sacrifices. There grew a huge oak tree: near it, Russian warriors and merchants stuck arrows, sacrificed pieces of meat and bread, and also wondered what to do with the sacrificial roosters - eat them or let them go alive. Arrows stuck around the oak tree indicate the cult of Perun. The Slavs believed that the Thunderer strikes his opponent with thunder arrows.
5. World tree. Idea of the Universe
The tree, at the roots of which sacrifices are made and on which the deity lives, connects in Slavic beliefs the world of people and the world of gods, earth and sky. This is the world tree, the world axis, the center of the world and the embodiment of the universe as a whole. Its crown reaches the heavens, its roots reach the underworld. The image of the world tree has been preserved in folklore, especially in Russian riddles and conspiracies against diseases. This is the riddle about the road: “When the light began, then the oak fell and now lies.” This image combines the vertical (tree from earth to heaven) and horizontal (road) coordinates of the world.
The world tree embodies not only space, but also time. This is also evidenced by the riddle: “There is an oak tree, there are 12 branches on the oak tree, on each branch there are 4 nests, in the nest there are 7 chicks” - about a year, 12 months, 4 weeks and 7 days of the week.
In conspiracies, the world tree is placed in the center of the world, on an island in the middle of the ocean (“the umbilical cord of the sea”), where on the Alatyr stone there is a “damask oak” or a sacred tree of cypress, birch, apple tree, sycamore, oak... In the sacred trees, in conspiracies, the Mother of God lives, Paraskeva and other saints who replaced the ancient gods. There are demonic creatures at the roots of the tree: a demon is chained, a snake (Skin) and other demons live in the nest (rune).
In wedding folklore and “vine” songs, the image of the world tree was sung for the newlyweds – the “vine” – the image of the world tree embodied the fertility of living nature, the tree of life. A nightingale makes a nest in its crown, in the trunk there are bees bringing honey, at the roots an ermine brings out small children, the young ones themselves are sitting, and there is a matrimonial bed. Near the “three-year-old” tree there is a tower, where a feast takes place and “honey dishes” are prepared: honey is an ancient Slavic drink, the food of immortality.
In ancient and folk culture, the success of any ritual depended on how well this ritual corresponded to ideas about the universe. Therefore, in folk customs, be it a conspiracy against illness or a wedding, the image of the world tree, which embodies the universe, is so important.
Ritual trees, symbols of the world tree, were obligatory during a wedding, when a tree was installed at the gate of the bride’s house, during the construction of a house, when a ritual tree was placed in the center of the building, and right up to the custom of installing a Christmas (New Year) tree. On Trinity - spring holiday- all the courtyards were decorated with birch trees. Every ritual, therefore, was performed as if in the center of the universe, at the world tree, and repeating the act of creation of the world, renewal of nature (New Year and other calendar holidays) and family life(wedding).
Literature
- Afanasyev A.N. Tree of life. M, 1982. →
Brief sketch of Russian mythology
The pagan beliefs of the Slavic people can generally be divided into three tribal areas of mythical legends: southern, western and eastern (Russian) Slavs. Although these areas are closely connected both by the philological affinity of the language and by the common customs and rituals between them, they are nevertheless completely different from each other both in the external form of the cult and in its internal meaning. Each of them constitutes its own special and completely closed world of its tribal beliefs. These three tribal areas of Slavic mythology correspond to the three main stages of their pagan religion. The first of these steps is direct worship of nature and the elements; the second is the worship of deities who personify these phenomena, and the third is the worship of idols that already command them. The Western Slavs of the Baltic Sea and the banks of the Elbe belong predominantly to the latter, i.e., idolatry, while, on the contrary, the Serbs and Croats belong to the direct, immediate worship of nature, enlivened by popular imagination by crowds of collective spirits, as numerous as The manifestations in nature of the same laws are varied. Our Russian legends were destined to serve as a link between these two extreme stages of development of the Slavic myth and to connect the idolatry of Western tribes with the worship of the elements and natural phenomena of the southern Slavs. At this first stage of development of the anthropomorphic direction, man, not yet understanding the general law of the unity of diverse but related phenomena and wanting to personify each individual phenomenon, each individual object in human form, creates in his imagination for each phenomenon a crowd of spirits that do not yet have an individual meaning, but understood by him only as collectives of different manifestations of the same force of nature. The individual personality of the deity still merges into a general generic concept, but his collective has certain characteristics, such as, for example, the Water Grandfather, the Goblin, the Brownie, etc. Little by little, these countless collectives merge into one main individuality, which either absorbs them into itself, or subjugates him to his power. So, for example, until now all the names of demons and demons in all languages, with their collective meaning, have another meaning - the proper name of their main leader, the demon of demons, the devil.
Meanwhile, man, living and studying nature, acquires new concepts every day, flowing one from the other and fragmenting ad infinitum in his mind. In this continuous transition from generic concepts to more specific ones, in this fragmentation of human thought, lies the logical process of development of all polytheism, which clothes abstract concepts in visible images of gods and idols. At the second stage of its development, paganism for each general concept of a homogeneous phenomenon creates a separate person, identical with the phenomenon itself, and the meaning of such a person is determined solely by the meaning of the phenomenon specifically associated with it; so, for example, the god of thunder, the god of rain are nothing more than the very phenomena of thunder, rain, etc. Therefore, both the external forms and symbols of these deities are still very colorless, and even their very names indicate an undeveloped personality. The reason for this is that these names are either borrowed from the phenomenon itself, like weather - frost, or are composed of adjectives that define a general property not so much of a person as of a phenomenon and require the necessary addition of a noun god, lord, king and so on, to become the proper name of a deity, for example, Bel-God, Dobro-Pan, Tsar-Sea, etc. For these deities, folk fantasy creates its own images, oral tradition names them, and rituals explain their meaning; but, despite this, images, names and attributes still fluctuate in some mysterious uncertainty until, finally, architecture establishes various shades of the concept of some deity and petrifies it, so to speak, once and for all in certain forms.
Here comes the third period of mythical development. Idols, having ceased to be a means of representation that arouses popular reverence, become themselves objects of deification and worship, and, having lost the concrete unity of their images with the concepts they express, they take on a completely individual meaning as patrons and stewards of those phenomena and forces of nature with which they were previously identical. Temples are built for these idols, entire castes of priests are established to make sacrifices to them and to perform worship; their names from adjectives expressing general properties of nature turn into proper names or are replaced by other, random and local names. In a word, idols receive a completely definite objective individuality.
The people, becoming more and more akin to their deities through their human forms, soon involuntarily convey to them in their imagination all their passions and revive their soulless idols through the physical activity of man. The gods begin to live an earthly life, subject, in addition to death, to all its contingencies, and from figurative objectivity they move on to real subjective existence: they enter into bonds of marriage and kinship, and new idols not only as concepts, by way of thought, flow from their prototypes, but are born from them by the physical birth of man.
In our opinion, the Slavic myth has not matured to this subjectivity of its gods, although many believe that this last degree of development is only lost in folk memory, but nevertheless once existed among us along with other peoples of antiquity. We will not dispute this opinion here, but the fact remains the same that for us, at the present time, this subjective life of Slavic idols does not exist.
So, according to its development, Slavic mythology can be divided into three eras: spirits, nature deities and idol gods.
This division is partly confirmed by the words of St. Gregory (Paisievsky collection), which clearly indicate three different periods of pagan worship: “The demands began to be laid on the clan and women in labor before Perun their god, and before that they laid demands on the upirs and bereginians.”
We will find confirmation of the same in the very gradual introduction of Christianity among the Slavs. So, for example, in the legends of the southern Slavs, who were the first to accept the Christian faith, predominantly collective spirits predominate, but they do not have idols at all. In Moravia, Bohemia, Poland and Russia, although some even idols exist, most of the gods are deities of nature belonging to the second era, when, on the contrary, among the Polabians and Pomeranians, groups completely disappear and the whole religion is concentrated on some of the main objective personalities of the Arkonian and Retrayan idols. Sometimes even with the predominance of objective idols, some signs of the gods’ transition to subjective life are noticed. So, for example, there was a belief about Svetovit’s horse that God himself rode it at night, and Perun in Novgorod spoke in a human voice and threw his club at Volkhov.
Paying attention to the very worship of Slavic paganism, we will also find in it complete confirmation of our opinion. In fact, although the information that has reached us about the liturgical rites of the Slavs is scanty and insufficient, for all that they clearly bear the stamp of some kind of diversity, which, in our opinion, can only be explained by different times of religious development. If we extend our general division of Slavic myth to the rites of worship, then we will not only confirm the proposed division, but also explain the very facts, which, taken together, often contradict each other.
In fact, in the first era of our myth, man, not even knowing personal gods, naturally had neither specific places of worship, nor specific persons to perform it, and just as the deities were inseparably merged with the very phenomena of nature, to which they served as allegories, so It is natural that man made his sacrifices directly to the phenomena themselves. Procopius already testifies that the Slavs made sacrifices to rivers and nymphs; and to this day the customs and rituals of throwing wreaths, food and money into rivers, wells and lakes have been preserved. “Do not call yourself a god, neither in stones, nor in students, nor in rivers,” says the “Word of Cyril,” and Nestor also directly mentions that “we offer sacrifices to the wells and lakes.” The custom of hanging gifts brought by humans to invisible spirits on tree branches and placing them on stones or at the root of an old oak tree fully confirms our idea that sacrifices were once made to natural phenomena themselves. These sacrifices were made by everyone, without the help of special priests appointed for this purpose; however, this position, on major national holidays, was perhaps performed by the elders, who always enjoyed great rights in the national and civil life of the Slavs.
With a more precise definition of the meaning of the deities of nature, the places of sacrifices and prayers began to be determined. Indeed, before the existence of idols and, therefore, before the construction of temples, the Slavs had well-known places where they were accustomed to pray to some deity. This is confirmed by many testimonies. Thus, Konstantin Porfirorodny says that the Russians made sacrifices on the Dnieper island of St. George; Sefrid speaks of an oak tree where some god lives, to whom sacrifices were made; Helmold, Dietmar, Saxon and Andrew, the biography of Saint Otgon of Bamberg, knew among the Polabian Slavs many sacred groves where they worshiped some sacred tree, in later time sometimes replaced by an idol of some god.
To the category of places dedicated to worship, one should also include sacred mountains, hills and all the numerous fortifications, and finally, as a transition to the last era of the Slavic myth and some temples, like the temple of Juterbok, whose structure clearly proves that there was no idol in it, but the phenomenon of the first ray was simply deified rising sun. This temple was illuminated only by one small hole, which was facing the eastern side so that it was illuminated with light only at sunrise; The Arab writer Massoudi also mentions one Slavic temple, in the dome of which a hole was made to observe the rising of the sun.
In certain localities, certain persons had to exist to perform liturgical rites, but, probably, they did not yet constitute a closed caste of priests. Were they not the Magi, the Prophets and the Magicians (Wonders), persons who were not initiated into this title, but were called upon by momentary inspiration? The answer to this question can be the appointment of the Magi, who, like the priests of other nations, guessed and predicted the future.
With the appearance of idols, special rituals for worship are determined, rich temples appear and a whole caste of ministers and priests is formed, who, taking advantage of the people’s superstitious fear of the idol, not only enrich themselves with its gifts, but also often seize the political power of its kings. This was the case in Rügen and among the Redarians.
Holidays, sacrifices, rituals and fortune-telling - everything is concentrated around the idol and his servants and is surrounded for the people by some kind of inaccessible mystery, under which it is easy to find the cunning deceptions of self-interested priests. The last feature sharply divides the entire worship of our ancestors into two, completely separate halves: direct worship of natural phenomena and pure idolatry. The first, like faith in the spirits and deities of nature, has not yet been eradicated from the life of the common people: their holidays, songs, fortune telling, superstitions - everything bears the stamp of these times of paganism and serves us as materials for its study; whereas from the times of pure idolatry everything disappeared: the debauchery of Bacchic feasts, and outrageous bloody sacrifices, and rich temples, and monstrous idols - everything, often even the names of these idols. The very fact of erasing from the people's memory everything that relates to the last period of our myth proves to us the novelty of idolatry among the Russian Slavs, which had not yet had time to firmly take root among them, and was destroyed, along with the idols themselves, at the first appearance of Christianity. This may be the reason why Christianity not only met almost no resistance anywhere among the Eastern Slavs, but that the pagans themselves called for preachers new faith. It is impossible not to notice here that these two completely separate eras of the deification of natural phenomena and later idolatry were echoed in the information that has reached us (Russian mythology itself) in the division of this information according to their sources into popular beliefs and historical data. Some came to us through oral tradition in superstitious rituals, fairy tales, songs and various sayings of the common people, while others were preserved in the chronicles and written monuments of our historical antiquity.
The deities of oral tradition live to this day in popular superstition, and their names are known to almost every Russian commoner; We do not find the slightest recollection among the people about the idols of written tradition, and if they had not been preserved in the chronicles and spiritual works of our medieval literature, the names of these idols would have remained forever unknown to us.
Of the few proper names of idol gods that have come down to us, we have absolutely no information not only about the personality of these deities, but even about the external form of their idols. About Perun alone we know that he was made of wood with a silver head and a golden mustache, and that he had a club, which the Novgorod idol threw at Volkhov. These gods do not have special symbols or attributes, and our imagination cannot be guided by anything to recreate these idols when we encounter their names in our chronicles.
With such an absence of any definite appearance, it seems impossible to admit the existence of the subjective personality of these idols, and we would rather believe that they did not grow up to the individual life of Thors and Odins, Jupiters and Apollos, than to admit the assumption that the biographical myths (if we dare to put it that way) of our deities could have disappeared from people's memory to such an extent that even the external appearance of these gods was not preserved in our legends.
The only basis for the fact that our gods once lived a human life, entered into marriage and had children for themselves, is, for the defenders of such a thesis, the patronymic of Svarog.
The name of Svarog is found in our written monuments in only one place in the Ipatiev Chronicle, borrowed from the Bulgarian Chronograph and translated by him, in turn, from the Byzantine writer Malala. It is clear that we are talking about Egypt here; but just as in the Greek and Latin texts of Malala the names of Hephaestus - Vulcan and Helios - are inserted for explanation - Sol, in the same way, the names of Svarog and Dazhbog are inserted in the Slavic text: “And after the flood and the division of the tongue, the first Mestrom, from the family of Ham, began to reign, after him Ermiy, after him Theosta, who also called Savarog the Egyptians, and therefore the king’s son his name is the Sun, and he will be called Dazhbog.” And then: “The sun is king, the son of Svarog, who is Dazhbog.”
The form Svarozhich is found in the “Tale of Superstition”: “Ognevi pray, they call him Svarozhich.” Finally, the Baltic Slavs had an idol called Dietmar Zuarosici, which Saint Bruno also mentions in his letter to Emperor Heinrich II. For a long time this name was mistakenly read by Lvarazik and explained in many different ways, until finally Safarik decided the matter by identifying him with Svarozhich’s “Tales on Superstition.” From these data, some scientists a little arbitrarily produced Svarog into the Slavic Saturn, the partially forgotten god of the sky and the father of the sun and thunder, Dazhbog and Perun, whom they therefore call Svarozhich.
But to base this genealogy of our gods on the words of Malala would be to mistake Helios for the son of Hephaestus in the Greek myth, and it is hardly necessary to divide the Western Slavs into two different persons of Svarog and Svarozhich or Zuarazik and certainly see in the final form of these latter the patronymic, other examples of which our mythology does not represent.
The fragments of Russian paganism, preserved for us in folk rituals, beliefs, signs, fairy tales, riddles, conspiracies and epic techniques and expressions of the ancient language - all directly relate to the very objects, laws and phenomena of nature. Thus, with these data we can completely recreate the degree of religious concept associated in the imagination of our ancestors with their physical knowledge of various forces and natural phenomena. The superstitious rituals of our pre-Christian antiquity point directly to the worship and sacrifice of the elements, such as jumping over fire and burning in fire, bathing and throwing into water, etc. Main characteristics Such legends of the Russian people represent a deep observational knowledge of nature and life in general. This knowledge is often hidden from the naked eye under the shell of an allegorical tale or an apt epithet, and is sometimes expressed by transferring (by comparison) an abstract idea to a material object close to a person. Thus, this visible object becomes a symbol and emblem of abstract thought, the memory of which is inextricably linked with this object. So, for example, the black color, reminiscent of the darkness of the night, constantly serves as an image of everything gloomy, evil and deadening, while, on the contrary, white, red and yellow colors, like the colors of the day and the sun, not only become synonymous epithets of these phenomena, but are associated in the human imagination with all the concepts of good and good.
With this luxuriously epic view of man on nature, the deity-idols, who once personified the same forces and phenomena of nature, have come down to us in the colorless vagueness of empty names that say nothing to our imagination, so that in absolutely none of our idols we we will not find the fabulous legends that we are accustomed to meeting in the classical myths of Greece and Rome.
What a multitude of beliefs, signs, riddles and sentences we have, which define not only the natural, but also the superstitious and mythical qualities and properties of the heavenly bodies, natural elements and even many animals and plants, and meanwhile, as just noted above, about the most important idols of the Kiev Hill, whose names are constantly repeated by all chroniclers, we know absolutely nothing except this empty name.
Of all the places where Nestor talks about the pagan deities of our ancestors, the most important is where he mentions the idols set up by Vladimir in Kyiv. This place leaves its indelible stamp on all the later testimonies of our ancient writers on this subject. There, the name of the main god Perun is separated from other idols by the description of his idol; followed by Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Semargla and Mokosh (Mokosha). This order of calculating idols is maintained in the same place in our history and with the most minor changes in the Arkhangelsk, Nikon and Gustin chronicles, in the “Degree Book” and in German writer Herberstein, from where it goes to Polish historians, and later, with their changes, comes back to us, as we will see later. In the texts testifying to the beliefs of the Slavs in general, a description of the idol of Perun is published, but nevertheless he retains first place in them. Of the other deities, apparently, those whom the writers considered less important are sometimes released: Iakov names only Perun and Khors; Saint Gregory - Perun, Khorsa and Mokosha; in the Prologue, published by Professor Bodyansky, - Perun, Khors, Semargla (Sima and Rgla) and Mokosh; in the “Makaryevsky Menaia” - Perun, Khors, Dazhbog and Mokosh, and so on. and so on.
Since the influence of Polish chronicles on our writers, a completely new order of deities appears in the “Gustin Chronicle” (about the idols of the Russians), in St. Demetrius of Rostov and in Gisel’s “Kiev Synopsis”. In it, Perun occupies the first place, but to the description of his idol is added the remark that he was idolized on high mountains and that bonfires were burned in his honor, the extinguishing of which was punishable by death; the second deity is Volos, the third is Pozvizd, the fourth is Lado, the fifth is Kupala, the sixth is Kolyada. That this series of gods was directly borrowed from foreign sources is clearly shown in the “Gustin Chronicle” by the very name of Perun, called Perkonos in this place in the chronicle, when a few pages before that we immediately encounter Nestor’s pure text about the construction of idols in Kiev. Even at the end of this alien order, we can still see the influence of Nestor, but already changed in its spelling: in addition to those demonic idols, also “and ini idols byahu, with the names: Uslyad or Oslyad, Korsha or Khors, Dashuba or Dazhb,” and other names Nestorov's idols. Uslyad came from an erroneous translation of words mustache zlat German traveler Herberstein. Further, the names Korsh and Dashub are also completely alien to our native writers, although the latter is partly explained by the spelling of the “Degree Book”: Dazhaba, but this, perhaps, is a typo, especially since in another place in the same book Dazhba is printed, probably derived from non-compliance with the title over the abbreviated god (ba).
Volos is not mentioned by Nestor among the idols built by Vladimir; but from Svyatoslav’s treaty it is clear that he occupied a very important place among the Slavic deities, almost equal to Perun, with whom he seems to be placed in parallel, which is why he occupies first place behind Perun among Polish writers and their Russian followers. A similar rapprochement between Perun and Volos is also found in the words of the poet Yakov. From this evidence, repeated in the “Torzhestvennik” and in Makary’s “Cheti-Minea”, we can conclude that the idol of Volos was in Kiev, probably even before Vladimir, which is why it was not mentioned by Nestor. This assumption is even more clearly confirmed by the evidence of the Book of Degrees, where, when creating the Kyiv idols, the chronicler, copying directly from Nestor, does not mention Volos; but, on the contrary, when they are destroyed, he lists everyone by name, and after Mokosh he also names Blasius, the cattle god. In the "Word of Saint Gregory" it appears mysterious name Vila in the singular and masculine gender: “and Khorsu, and Mokoshi, and Vila,” which we take here for Volos on the basis that in the unpublished part of this “Word...” the Phoenician Baal is called Vilos: “There was an idol called Vila, Daniel the Prophet destroyed him in Babylon.”
In addition to the six main idols mentioned in the Laurentian Chronicle, several other nicknames of pagan polytheism of ancient Rus' are found in our oldest written monuments, such as Svarog, Svarozhich, Rod and Rozhanitsa, Ghouls, Beregini, Navii, Plowa, etc.
With the insertion in the “Bustin Chronicle” (about the idols of the Russians) and Gisel’s “Synopsis”, the literary treatment of Slavic mythology begins, the false direction of which flourished in our country for a long time, both in the fake chronicles of the 18th century (like Joachim’s) and in the writings of native mythologists the end of the last century: Popov, Chulkova, Glinka and Kaisarov. These works, under the influence of Polish-German scholarship of the 17th century and its extremely false direction, flooded our native fables with lists of gods, demigods, heroes and geniuses of all kinds and with a multitude of legends and details, based for the most part on arbitrary inventions or on facts taken from outside and completely alien to our region.
Most of the names found in these lists belong to the idols of the Western Slavs and partly the ancient Prussians, deified in the famous temples of Arkona, Retra and Romova. Kyiv idols are constantly mentioned in the non-Russian forms of Dashuba, Korsha, etc., clearly borrowed from foreign sources. Of our folk superstitions and fairy tales, only a few of the most famous names are included in these lists: mermaids, goblins, brownies, Polkan, Koshchei and Baba Yaga. The names of the national holidays Kupala and Kolyada were granted to special deities of fruits and festive feasts, whose idols seemed to stand in Kyiv; in the same way, the Don and Bug rivers are elevated to some kind of special deification by our ancestors, although Great Russian songs and legends know nothing about the latter, when, on the contrary, the Danube, Volga and the fabulous Safat and Smorodina Rivers really have some right to attention Russian mythology. But hardly Messrs. Popov and Glinka knew about our ancient heroic epic when they did not even bother to check the German-Polish information about the Kyiv idols by comparing this information with the Russian sources available to them. The rest of the names on these lists belong for the most part to pure fiction. The forgery of many of them is now obvious to us, such as the above-mentioned Uslad, Zimtserla (the goddess of spring, who erased winter), Detinets, Volkhovets, Slovyan, Rodomysl and many others. But we are not always able to accurately point out the initial source of forgery or misunderstanding: where did the idol of the Strong God, described in such detail in Chulkov’s dictionary, come from? Where does the information about the Golden Woman, idolized by the Obdorians, come from? Where do the walls, lituns and kudas come from, which according to Glinka fell into the same category with brownies, goblins and devils in general, Belly, the keeper of life, and, finally, even Lel and his brother Polel, sung by Pushkin, these imaginary Castor and Pollux of the Slavic fable?
To this day, entire systems of Slavic mythology are based on such shaky foundations, not only by German scientists, like the mythology of Eckermann (1848), but also by many Slavic researchers, especially among the Czechs, such as Hanush, Jungmann and Tkani, in whose mythological dictionary ( 1824) Ilya Muromets is mentioned by the Russian Hercules, and Saint Zosimus of Solovetsky - Zosim Schuzgott der Bienen hex den Russen.
In general, Slavic mythology in its Germanic processing has remained to this day in the field of outdated classicism, which certainly sought to bring it under the level of Greek theogony and, at all costs, to find among us deities corresponding to the famous gods ancient world.
The second significant mistake of this trend is the generalization of any purely local legend: without taking into account at all that often the same deity appears in different places under different names, the learned methodologist tries to recreate a new personality from each similar synonym, to which he immediately attributes in one’s imagination, a meaning corresponding to one or another deity of classical legends. With each new work written in this spirit, the number of deities in our country increased with new, if not fictitious, then in Russia, at least, positively never-existent names. That is why it seems to us that the first modern task of science is to cleanse our Russian traditions of sediments alien to them and finally determine the correct distinction between Russian and non-Russian sources.
In general, in Russian myth proper names play for the most part the most recent and insignificant role, as we will try to prove this later. Much more important are the rituals and celebrations of the common people and, in particular, their superstitious concepts and views on natural phenomena, luminaries and elements, mountains and rivers, fabulous plants and animals, about which our poems and songs, conspiracies, fairy tales, riddles and jokes. For example, rituals of plowing or the death of a cow, the calling of spring, the production of a living king of fire, beliefs about the flight of fiery kites or the blossoming of ferns on Midsummer night and, finally, the most ancient legends about the creation of the world, the island of Buyan and the mysterious “Pigeon Book”.
In childhood, humanity fearfully and reverently worships those objects and natural phenomena that more than others amaze its physical senses, and therefore it is natural that celestial phenomena, like the sun and stars, thunder and lightning, become the primary objects of superstitious adoration. But when, with a settled life, a person becomes acquainted with arable farming and the cultivation of fruits, a sense of personal benefit forces him to turn his attention to the earth and the fruitful power of plant nature, then in his religion the gods of the sky gradually yield their primacy to the representatives of the earth. That is why among the Western Slavs, who lived a settled life before ours, the worship of earthly nature was more clearly formulated in the deification of the goddesses Zhiva and Mora, who divided the entire annual cycle earthly vegetation.
Zhiva’s share was the share of half a year of nature’s fruitful summer life, while Mora’s share was the time of her fruitless winter rest. The concept of everything young, bright, powerful, warm and fruitful merged with the idea of \u200b\u200bZhiva; with the representation of Mora - everything dark, cold, frail and barren.
If we in Rus' have not preserved the memory of two goddesses sharing the annual life of earthly nature, like the Western Slavs, then the reason for this should be sought in the predominance of the religion of the male creative power of heaven over the deification of the passive female element of the earth. The sun, in its beneficial and harmful relation to earthly nature, is in the same way divided into two faces: the winter and summer sun, the bright god of ardent fruitful rays (Belbog) and the god of the unwarming, barren period of darkness and cold (Chernobog). Among the Pomeranian Slavs, the idols of all solar deities were represented with two or four faces or heads, indicating the two main halves, summer and winter, or all four seasons. Massoudi in his travels around Slavic lands I saw somewhere by the sea an image whose members were made of precious stones four genera: green peridot, red ruby, yellow carnelian and white crystal; his head was made of pure gold. These colors clearly hint at green spring, red summer, yellowing autumn and snowy winter; the golden head is the most heavenly body. The names of the Pomeranian sun gods all end with a common nickname Vita, just as the multi-colored members of an idol end in one common golden head; and not without some probability we can assume that the first half of these names contained precisely the private meaning - spring, summer or winter, when the word Vit meant general concept god or person. For example, Gerowit - Jerowit involuntarily pushes us to the word yar, which has retained the meaning of spring to this day: spring bread, ravines (spring gullies), the Russian deity Yarylo, etc., when, on the contrary, Korevit or Khorevit resembles the Russian Khors (Korsh) and Karachun.
Of the Kiev idols mentioned in our chronicles, the names of the sun gods are Dazhbog and Khors, which, as Professor Bodyansky noted, in almost all texts stand inseparably next to each other, as synonyms of the same concept; and both of them, according to their word production, are one from Doug- day (German Tag), another from sur or korshid- the sun, are identical in meaning.
Of these two main personifications of the sun, its formidable meaning is as the winter Saturn, Cityvrat or Krt (Krchun) of Slavic-Germanic beliefs Central Europe belongs to us in Rus', apparently, to Khorsu. This formidable meaning of the winter sun is inextricably linked in the world of fairy tales and superstitions with the concepts of death, darkness, cold and powerlessness; the same concepts are also combined with the representation of the deity of a destructive storm, blizzard and cold western wind in general as the antithesis of the warm wind of the summer half of the year. This is why the winter and summer sun deities could easily merge into one representation with their corresponding wind deities, or at least exchange names and meanings with them. Thus, in the Alekseevsky Church Slavonic Dictionary the word choir explained by the western wind, and in Sredovsky’s “Sacra Moraviae historia” Chrwors(our Horse, or Korsha) is interpreted by Typhon.
In general, the predominance of the deities of the sky and the air element over the deities of earthly fertility indicates the most ancient period of nomadic life, when cattle breeding provided the only wealth to a person not yet familiar with arable farming. That is why all the gods are patrons of livestock in their original meaning as sun deities. Epizootics are still expressed in our word fad, directly pointing to the most ancient view of man on the air element as the cause of every disease. Thus, Stribog (whose meaning as the god of the wind, according to “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, is beyond doubt) passes from Sredovsky to Trzibek- god of pestilence; among the Carpathian Slovaks a similar meaning is attached to Karachun. Our Saturn - Horse appears in the meaning of the western wind - choir, when the Serbian Hora is the wife of the wind god Posvist, whom Sredovsky, in turn, calls Nehoda and translates in words Intemperae. Thus, the gods of not only the cold winter wind, but also the winter sun are also the gods of the deadly pestilence regarding the animal kingdom. Remarkable in this regard is the Czech nickname of Krta (Saturn) Kostomlad, that is, the bone thresher, which partly corresponds to our Russian Koschey the immortal, who constantly in fairy tales bears the cosmogonic meaning of the maleficent principle of the winter sun. In the same way, on the other hand, the bestial god Volos (Veles, Blasius), like Yegor the Brave of our songs, is nothing more than the personification of the same sun, but in the beneficial meaning of warmth and summer.
Thus, under the influence of this dualism, every natural phenomenon appears to man from two different sides of its beneficial and harmful influence. If, in the ever-renewing struggle between good and evil, the final victory always remains for the good principle, then this is only because a person, studying the laws of nature, is convinced by them that there is no absolute evil and that every apparently harmful phenomenon carries within itself the germ of new good The falling fruit, through its rotting, releases the grain stored in it to life, and sleep and rest, through their lifelessness, renew the strength of both man and nature.
With similar conviction, the Russian people looked at their own death, not as final destruction, but saw in it, on the contrary, a continuation of the same earthly life, only under a different form, invisible to the simple eye.
Nowhere in our pagan legends do we find the slightest hint of the idea of special heavenly or underground dwellings of the dead. In the grave, they continue to live an earthly life, patronize their living descendants, and directly share with them all the joys and worries of their earthly existence. That is why the patron spirits of the family and home: Rod, Chur (Shchur) and Grandfather Domovoy are connected by family ties with their living descendants and the real owners of the hut. The owner is often used in the sense of Domovoy, so that the actual owner is the earthly representative of his deceased ancestor - Grandfather, or Shchur - ancestor.
The grave is considered the permanent home of the dead, which is why the expressions: go home in the sense of dying, home, home- a coffin, sometimes a cemetery; so the very nickname Domovoy rather carries the meaning of the afterlife than the patron of the house, especially since in rural common life this last word, in the sense of housing, is not commonly used, being replaced by the expressions: hut, hut, smoke, nest or yard:“You are the sun, the clear sun! you rise, rise from midnight, you illuminate all the graves with a joyful light; so that our dead don’t sit in darkness, don’t grieve in misfortune, don’t live in melancholy forever. You are already a month, a clear month! you rise, rise in the evening, you illuminate all the graves with a joyful light, so that our dead do not destroy their zealous hearts in the darkness, do not grieve in the darkness for the white light, do not shed burning tears in the darkness.”
In steppe villages they place the first pancake on the dormer window and say: “Our honest parents! here for your darling." In Belarus, on the grave, poured with honey and vodka, food is served and the deceased are greeted: “Holy Rodzitseli! Hodzitsa to eat bread and salt for us.” On Easter they go to celebrate Christ with their deceased parents at their grave, and they immediately bury red eggs in the hole; orphan brides go to their parents’ graves to ask for the blessings of the deceased for marriage.
Finally, in Rus' we have many special days and weeks dedicated to folk customs for visiting graves, such as: large and small parental, Radunitsa, Krasnaya Gorka, Naviy day; This was also the ancient meaning of Maslenitsa. On such days, often a whole family, gathered at their own grave, has their meal on it in the superstitious belief that the dead man shares it and is present in an invisible way between them. On the brownie's name day (January 28), porridge and all sorts of treats are placed on the table for him at night with the thought that when everyone in the house falls asleep, he will certainly come to his relatives to celebrate his name day.
In close connection with a similar view of the afterlife and folk beliefs about werewolves and ghosts, ghouls (vampires) sucking blood at night, strangers (dashing) brownies playing their evil jokes on sleeping household members, wolfhounds prowling the night as a fierce beast, and jumping navias spreading pestilence just by his appearance. The very word Navii(navy day, go to Nava) carries in itself the concept of death and the afterlife ghost, also the brownie, as noted above, is a synonym for the afterlife; exactly the same genus sometimes used in regional dialects in the sense of spirit, image, ghost; finally, the ancient name of the goddess of death Mora or Morena retained almost the same meaning in Little Russian Mara (ghost) and in beliefs about kikimors. We still have a belief that evil sorcerers, after their death, rise from their graves at night to suck blood from sleepy people, why, in order to prevent such a disaster, a deceased person suspected of witchcraft is dug out of the grave, beaten with stakes and burned, or, in other localities, they drive a stake into his heart and bury him in the grave again. There are also many stories about drowned men and women and about children who died without baptism, who, after their death, continue their earthly existence in the form of water men or mermaids -
Straw spirit!
My mother gave birth to me
Buried an unbaptized woman -
the latter sing, running all night through the fields and groves. Finally, there is a story about a mermaid (a drowned woman), who, visiting her living parents, told them various details about her underwater life.
G. Soloviev rightly reveres mermaids as dead people and with this meaning explains their nickname in one song as earthlings, that is, underground inhabitants of graves. This nickname, apparently, identifies the mermaids with the beregins, whom St. Gregory mentions along with the ghouls: “And before that they laid the demand for the upirs and beregins.” In this rapprochement of the Ghoul with Rod and Beregini with Rozhanitsa, both Rod and the Ghoul are dead. Therefore, it is very likely to assume that the bereginii, as mountain, earthly spirits, had partly the same meaning. In ancient times, mounds were built over graves, and in particular, coastal ones were chosen for this place, near large rivers; the very word breg - shore sometimes has the meaning of a mountain (compare German Berg), and in regional expressions the word mountain, on the contrary, it means the bank of a river or even land (not water).
In general, in Slavic paganism there are many fantastic creatures that, despite their human duties, are endowed by superstitious tradition with some higher supernatural (divine) power. They cannot be called deities, and, meanwhile, they are not mere mortals.
In those nations where, even in fabulous times, historical figures of sages or conquering kings managed to stand out from the crowd, their names are often elevated by popular memory to the realm of mythical deities; with us, in the absence of any personality, apparently the same thing happened with some purely human positions and duties, which, decorated by popular imagination with a supernatural divine gift, produced a special demonological sphere of intermediary spirits between man and deity. With the above view of death and the afterlife, such supernatural intermediaries could easily be imagined as dead people of purely human origin. Thus, the fabulous personality of Rod or Grandfather of the Brownie corresponds to the duties of the householder and head of the family; Likewise, the position of the liturgical priest corresponds to the concept of Vedun - Magician. And just as under the name of Family and Grandfather a person imagines the real personality of his long-deceased great-grandfather, in the same way he could assume about the sorcerers that they were deceased priests and elders, famous for their wisdom during their lifetime. Witchcraft is a simple human craft, probably dating back to pagan priesthood; witchcraft is already witchcraft, which has passed through death into the realm of fantastic supernaturalism.
The influence of Christianity in the first centuries of its appearance in Rus' did not destroy pagan superstitions among the people, but deprived them only of their good properties, combining all these beliefs into a general idea of the obsession of an unclean, devilish force. But if we remove the coloring given to them by Christianity from these mythical personalities, we will clearly see both from the names and from the actions attributed to them that the Sorcerers are nothing more than priests of ancient worship, elevated to the realm of fabulous demonology.
How medicine man derived from know, similar witchcraft And sorcerer have their beginning in know whence other derivatives, like prophetic, prophet, broadcast, foreshadowing, veche(people's court) and witch How female uniform sorceress.
Sorcery is entwining, encircling with enchantment, that is, with supernatural ties or traits. The outline of a circle on the ground takes on the magical power of chains and bonds, just as charm is the binding of a person by invisible bonds (such as, for example, the gaze of a beauty). In its primitive meaning, enchantment is nothing more than the descent of divine help onto a person through charmed prayers and sacrifices.
Witchcraft And witch have their origin in the root kold, klud, meaning purification, rebirth (through fire) and sacrifice; in Czech cludity- to cleanse, in Serbian kudipi- speak. Ours also belongs here at its root. judge- judgment, also cleansing in it moral significance. Philologists derive the name Magus from Sanskrit shaft- to shine, to shine, just like priest derived from eat, burn; the victim is consumed by fire, which is why our eat, and the altar in this regard is vent(throat) of consuming fire. When belief in pagan rituals disappeared, folk humor gave priestly sacrifices the vulgar current meaning of the verb eat; the verb suffered the same fate lie that is, to charm the disease with divine prayer, hence the words doctor, healing, just as from miracle workers, conductors of divine miracles, the concepts magician And where, in the meaning of evil witchcraft, and even more often simple tricks and antics.
In the times of paganism, religion embraced all the abilities and gifts of the human mind, all the mysterious knowledge of its observational study of nature, all the activities and concerns of its daily life. The area of religion included wisdom and eloquence, poetic inspiration, singing, the prophetic power of sorcery and knowledge of the future; it overshadowed the justice of the court, the healing of illness and the happiness of home, and all this was embodied in one general representation of the things of the wisdom of the Magus - the Sorcerer. But since the Sorcerer is only an intermediary between man and the highest deity, the miracles performed by sorcerers and witches do not come directly from them, but are sent to man through their mediation from the highest deities, with the help of conspiracies, sacrifices and ordinary rituals.
The only supernatural quality that relates directly to the characteristics of sorcerers and witches themselves is the ability to fly through the air and were a werewolf; but even here there is a belief that witches keep wonderful water, boiled with ashes from the Bathing Fire, and that in order to fly through the air, they must sprinkle themselves with this water, and some kind of conspiracy was probably assumed. The werewolf also required knowledge of well-known conspiracies and mysterious rituals:
It was during this time that Volkh learned wisdom:
And I learned the first wisdom
Wrap yourself in a clear falcon,
Volkh studied another wisdom
Wrap yourself in a gray wolf
Volkh studied the third wisdom
Wrapping yourself in a bay aurochs means golden horns.
His own deity did not need fortune telling to find out the future, just as he would not need to learn wisdom for a werewolf. And indeed, the Serbian pitchforks and the Khorutan Rojanits predict the future without any fortune-telling, which indicates the immediacy of their divinity. Domovoi, mermaids and sorcerers do not make prayers and do not make expiatory sacrifices; and if sometimes gifts and offerings are presented to them, such as hanging yarn on trees for mermaids, leaving dinner for the brownie, or laying out cheeses, breads and honey in honor of Rod, then all these customs are purely in the nature of treats or memorials for the dead, and not sacrifices.
Chapter 1. Idea of the world
The world tree, or cosmic tree, is a typical image for mythopoetic consciousness, embodying the model of the world. In mythopoetic texts and ancient fine arts, symbols of parts of the world tree are corresponding images. Birds are associated with the crown of the tree, most often an eagle. The middle part corresponds to ungulates - deer, elk, cows, horses, occasionally - bees, and in later mythological traditions - humans. Corresponding to the roots of the world tree are reptiles - snakes, frogs - as well as mice, fish, and the fantastic. The image of the cosmic tree reflects not only the spatial structure, it has universal significance for mythological consciousness. With the help of this image, in relation to the category of time, the past, present and future are distinguished. In genealogical refraction, for example, it connects ancestors, the present generation and descendants. For the archaic worldview, other correspondences to the three-part structure of a tree are possible: three parts of the body (head, torso, legs); three types of elemental elements (fire, earth, water), etc. Thus, for each part of the world tree a number of special characteristics can be defined. Actually, thanks to the image of the world tree, a holistic view of the world and a person’s determination of his place in the universe was possible.
According to mythological ideas, the world tree is located at the most important, sacred point of world space - its center. In Russian folklore texts, the image of a tree quite clearly appears as the center of the universe. The same set of spatial objects - ocean-sea, island, tree, stone - representing elements of a horizontal model of the world, the center of which is the last two images, is also known to others folklore genres: in particular, a mystery fairy tale. The image of the world tree in them can be represented as a cypress, oak, birch or just a tree, and serves as a communication channel between worlds.
The structure of the tree corresponds to the ideas about the three-part organization of the space of the universe. When dividing the world tree vertically, the lower, middle and upper parts are distinguished - roots, trunk and crown, corresponding to the main zones of the universe: the heavenly kingdom, the earthly world and the underground kingdom. In mythopoetic texts and ancient fine arts, symbols of parts of the world tree are corresponding images. Birds are associated with the crown of the tree, most often an eagle. The middle part corresponds to ungulates - deer, elk, cows, horses, and occasionally bees. And in later mythological traditions - a person. The roots of the world tree are associated with reptiles - snakes, frogs - as well as mice, fish, fantastic monsters
The image of the cosmic tree reflects not only the spatial structure, it has universal significance for mythological consciousness. With the help of this image, in relation to the category of time, the past, present and future are distinguished. In genealogical refraction, for example, it connects ancestors, the present generation and descendants. For the archaic worldview, other correspondences to the three-part structure of a tree are possible: three parts of the body (head, torso, legs); three types of elemental elements (fire, earth, water), etc. Thus, for each part of the world tree a number of special characteristics can be defined. Actually, thanks to the image of the world tree, a holistic view of the world and a person’s determination of his place in the universe was possible.
According to mythological ideas, the world tree is located at the most important, sacred point of world space - its center. In Russian folklore texts, the image of a tree quite clearly appears as the center of the universe. It is especially often found in conspiracies, where the speaker of the text makes a mental journey to it.
1.1 Creation of the world
Myths and mythopoetic texts produce different models of the creation of the world. In the mythologies of different peoples, the motif of its generation in an unusual way is widespread: from parts of the body of the creator of God and man. At the same time, sometimes the creator himself either dies - sacrificing himself. The motive of the emergence of the world from primordial waters is almost universal; it is often identified with chaos: the creation of the Universe is carried out from foam, silt, earth and sand found in the ocean. In myths that reflect this model, the process of creation can occur as a result of act of will the creator himself or in response to someone else's request. The Creator, as some first being, can have a divine cosmic nature. Among different peoples of the world, the creator is sometimes represented in the guise of an animal or bird, diving into the waters of the primordial ocean and taking out the earth from there.
Cosmogonic legends of a dualistic nature were widespread among the Russians. In them, the motive of the joint creation of the earth by God and his opponent Satanail, or Idol, the Evil One, and the ideas of the official Christian doctrine, developed in the spirit of Bogomil teaching, are obvious. In the Kyiv legend, for example, there is a motif of God creating Satanail, which excludes their equality in the creative process. Often as significant images Elements of Christian culture are introduced into the narrative, and the activity of an enemy of God is affirmed as fruitless.
So, in one of the legends, after Satanail’s two unsuccessful attempts to get the earth out of the water, God tells him to bow to the icon of the Virgin and Child, which is located on the seabed. This time the devil brings the earth and gives it to God, but hides some of it behind his cheek. God scatters the earth on the eastern side - and a “wonderful, beautiful land” is created. The devil scatters his land on the northern side - and a cold, rocky, barren land is created. At the same time, these later legends sometimes preserved archaic images and ideas about the cosmogonic process. This is the initial situation of the beginning, when “there was neither sky nor earth, but there was only darkness and water,” and the image of primordial waters, with the inseparability of the elements in them, perceived in the peasant consciousness like “kvasha”, batter, and even the image the bird that creates the world.
1.2 Legends about heavenly bodies
According to legends, the earth is flat, like a plate, and at the edges it meets the sky. Vladimir peasants believed that the sky looked like a huge vaulted ceiling that connected to the earth “at the ends of the world.” God created heaven to live there together with angels, cherubim and holy saints. This happened on the third day of creation. In many places there was a widespread belief that in addition to the sky visible from the earth, there were several more heavenly vaults. Depending on local beliefs, there are only three, seven or eleven of them, and God lives in the last of the heavens. Associated with these ideas is the well-known popular expression “to be in seventh heaven,” meaning “to rejoice,” “to be happy.” The sky, according to popular belief, has a flat shape, like the earth. The place of their contact is very far away, where no one has reached. Here is a boundless, eternally raging sea. Only the souls of the dead reach this place with the help of angels. The sky has holes through which rain falls on the earth and stars come out. In some places the sky was represented as consisting of some kind of solid substance, confirming this opinion by the fact that Elijah the Prophet rides across the sky in his chariot. Sometimes peasants believed that the sky was a hardened shell of smoke. Between heaven and earth there is a canopy - a “cloud” like a canvas that prevents the earth and all living things on it from burning. In some places it was believed that the vault of heaven covered the entire world, and its ends flowed into the sea, hiding at its bottom. An extraordinary life lives on the shore of this sea strong people, whose people are distinguished by one-eyedness. Russians and Ukrainians in some places said that where at the end of the world the sky rests on the earth, women place spinning wheels on the edge of the sky after work or rollers when washing clothes on the river.
In many places, peasants were convinced that the heavenly bodies were created from fire. The main one, according to traditional ideas, is the sun. People often called him “the king of heaven.” The sun illuminates and warms the earth during the day, and at night it hides outside the earth, as if it goes around it and, in the morning, appears again in the east. In some places, the Eastern Slavs represented the sun as a huge spark, which is unknown how it stays in space, or as a fireproof ball. In some places, the celestial body was represented by a large wheel and it was believed that it could even be reached by hand when it descends at sunset.
There were also widespread ideas about him leaving for the night for the earth, for the mountains, or “to the next world.” Almost everywhere, people were convinced that the earth stood still and the sun moved around it. At noon it rests a little, and in the evening it completely goes to rest. At night the daylight sleeps, and in the morning it rises. The Ukrainians were told that once upon a time, where the sun rises, there lived an extraordinary beauty. Before the luminary rose into the sky, she washed it and wiped it thoroughly. Therefore, in former times the sun shone much brighter. According to mythological consciousness, the sun could be personified and perceived as a living being in the form of a man kidnapping his wife among people!
Everywhere the month was recognized as the second most important celestial body after the sun. Folk memory has preserved mythological ideas about their relationship: most often it was believed that the sun was the elder brother of the month. This opinion is reflected in the riddle about the month and the sun: “The younger one leaves, but the older one comes.” The duty of the month is to illuminate the earth at night when the sun is at rest. Sometimes the night luminary was perceived as a heavenly stone. It is no coincidence that the month is riddled through the image of a stone: “Stone is a flame.” The Ukrainians believed that it was made of the same material as the sun, and they were the same size - “no more than the back wheel of a cart.”
On the moon you can see spots in the form of two people and a tub. These stains are usually associated with the biblical story of Cain and Abel, which received a unique design in the popular consciousness. According to one legend, the brothers were putting hay into a cart in a meadow. They quarreled, and Cain stabbed his brother with a pitchfork. According to God's judgment, neither earth, nor water, nor any other place could shelter the fratricide. Only a month, having disobeyed God's will, gave him shelter at home. Since then, the month bears the imprint of Cain’s terrible sin. In the moon spots, the peasants see an image of the murder of one brother by another. An explanation of the phases of the moon is sometimes associated with this plot. In the Podolsk province they said that the moon, because it depicted Cain’s murder of Abel, was destined by God to be born, grow and die every month. After her death, she descends into hell, is melted there, purified and then reborn. People also explain the lunar phases in a different way: on the moon there is a special valve, which is in charge of Saint Yuri, he either raises or lowers this valve. The moon, like the sun, in the mythopoetic consciousness was often personified in the image of a person: a man or a woman. She is portrayed as such, for example, in the genre of riddles: “Chub-faced, bright-eyed / Walks, walks, comforts people”; “Chubby, white-faced, looks in all the mirrors.”
There were different ideas about the nature of stars. There was a widespread perception of stars as candles that God lit in the sky. Often the stars were considered infant souls and the souls of righteous people who look from the sky at their relatives. In some places the stars were thought of as children of the sun, sometimes personified in the form of little boys. Similar ideas about the family relationships of the heavenly bodies were reflected in the ritual poetry that accompanied the Christmas ritual of caroling. In carol songs, using the device of metaphor, a peasant family is depicted as a heavenly family: the father is called “red sun”, “little children” are called “frequent stars”. Sometimes the owner of the house, the mistress and their children correspond, respectively, with the images of a bright moon, a red sun and frequent stars. According to the peasants, the stars were created by God to illuminate the earth and are designed in such a way that they can move freely from one place to another. In cosmological concepts, stars are also likened to nails in the dome of the sky, which is reflected in the texts of the riddles: “The blue ceilings are nailed down with golden nails”; “The sieve is beaten and covered with gold.” The peasants believed that the stars revolved around the main “nail” - the North Star. It is no coincidence that the people called zdu by the word “stozhar”, meaning “a pole that was stuck into the ground in the middle of a haystack for its stability.”
According to popular beliefs, stars are inextricably linked with human destinies. There are as many stars in the sky as there are people on earth. With the birth of a person, a star “lights up”; it grows with him and then falls to the ground or goes out when he dies. If a person’s star is “strong”, then he copes with all his troubles, and if it is “weak”, then it is very difficult for him in life. Associated with these ideas folk concept"to be born under a lucky star."
1.3 Legends about the creation of the first people
The legends that existed among the Eastern Slavs about the creation of the first people are late in origin and, for the most part, are adaptations of apocryphal book legends. They, however, preserved archaic mythological ideas about the unity of the elements that make up the macrocosm - the world order and the microcosm - man as a similarity, a reflection of the Universe. Thus, in the translated monument of ancient Russian literature Palea it is noted that God created man by taking the material of eight parts corresponding natural phenomena: from the earth - body, from stone - bones, from the sea - blood, from the sun - eyes, from clouds - thoughts, from light - light, from wind - breath, from fire - warmth.
The most common East Slavic ideas about the origin of man directly go back to the biblical motif of the creation of man from the earth, from clay. However, making the first people from clay or dough is not the only way. Linguistic material - phraseology data - as well as folklore texts of the Eastern Slavs make it possible to reconstruct other “craft” models of human creation. In popular expressions such as “wrongly cut, but tightly sewn”, “not sewn with bast”, “cut to fit”, the motive for creating a person with the help of sewing is obvious.
The motif of making people using sewing skills, as well as technological techniques of other crafts, can also be traced in the fairy tale tradition. In one of the fairy tales, for example, Baba Yaga, who is at war with the Russian heroes, has unusual workers in the underground kingdom who make an army for her. This - magic blacksmiths, tailors, weavers, shoemakers. A blacksmith hits a sledgehammer with a hammer once - a soldier; hits again - another. A tailor or seamstress “once pricks himself with a needle towards himself and away from him - a soldier with a horse”, over the “hoop” (hoop) “waves a needle - a hero jumps out” or “a Cossack with a lance”. The weaver girl “as soon as she throws a duck, a hero will jump out” or “waving a shuttle, a soldier with a cleaver will jump out.” The shoemaker “pricks with an awl, then the soldier with a gun mounts his horse and gets into formation.”
Most legends on this topic are dualistic in nature. Such monuments of ancient Russian literature as Paleya and the apocryphal legend “How God Created Adam” had a significant influence on their formation. In Belarusian legends, the process of creating man repeats the pattern of the creation of the earth: the material for the creation of the first man, at the request of God, is obtained by the devil from the bottom of the sea. The legends of all three East Slavic peoples consistently repeat the motif of the dual nature of man - divine and devilish. God makes man, and Satan spoils God's creation.
In another legend, the devil, wanting to make himself the same person as God created, sets to work, but what he ends up with is a wolf. Some texts reflect traditional evaluation characteristics components of man and at the same time explain the origin of some characteristics of animals, in particular dogs.
East Slavic legends about the creation of people, dating back to the biblical myth, preserve the idea of the creation of men first, and then women, known to archaic mythological traditions. Sometimes the making of Eve - Adam's wife - is portrayed as accidental.
According to some legends, Adam's rib was stolen not by a dog, but by the devil. The Angel, who tried to grab the devil and take away his rib, only had his tail in his hands, from which God created Eve. That is why “all women are cunning and cunning as devils.”
Chapter 2. Deities of the Slavs and pagan Rus'
2.1 High mythology
A feature of the pagan religion is polytheism, i.e. belief not in one god, but in many deities and mythological creatures, each of which belongs to one or another rank within a single hierarchical system. The highest level consisted of gods responsible for the most important spheres of society: economic, military, legal, ritual, etc. In pagan ideas, the gods were endowed with the greatest strength and authority, and human well-being depended on them. Therefore, in important and difficult situations, he turned to the gods with requests for help. It is no coincidence that the word “god,” known to all Slavs, meant not only deity, but also wealth, debt. For example, the Russian word “rich,” derived from “god,” originally meant “endowed with a good share.”
The images of the gods were embodied in idols, or idols - sculptural forms made of stone or wood in the form of humanoid or zoomorphic images. One of the most striking examples of such sculptures was discovered in 1848 in the Zbruch River, in the possessions of the Polish Count M. Potocki in the Podolsk province. The Zbruch idol is a tetrahedral limestone stone more than 2.5 m long, about 0.3 m wide and weighs about 1000 kg. The composition of the image on each face is three-part and is repeated with minor changes. At the top of the pillar, on all four sides, you can distinguish the image of a man in long clothes with a belt and a high hat. On one side he holds a ring in his hands, on the other - a horn, on the third - a sword and a horse are depicted below the belt. In the middle part of the pillar, on each of the four faces, a female image is carved, and at the very base on three sides there is a figure of a man kneeling. In May 1851, the stone was donated by Potocki to the Krakow Society of Sciences, and was later kept in Krakow at the university and then in the ethnographic museum of that city. In scientific circles, this statue was called the “Zbruch idol” and dates back to the 10th century. But it is still not known to which god it was dedicated.
Idols were worshiped and sacrifices were made to them during festivals, as well as before particularly important events, such as military operations or trade transactions. Abundant thanksgiving sacrifices were also performed upon the successful completion of one or another task. Back in 1534, when more than five centuries had passed after the adoption of Christianity, Novgorod Archbishop Macarius wrote to Ivan the Terrible about the performance of pagan sacrifices: “In many Russian places... nasty idol prayers persisted until the reign of Grand Duke Vasily Ivanovich... of all creation they worship and honor God like God and make blood sacrifices to demons - oxen and sheep and all kinds of livestock and poultry.” (Vasily Ivanovich - Grand Duke of Moscow Vasily III (1505-1533), father of Ivan the Terrible). Not only the meat of specially slaughtered animals, but also bread, milk, intoxicating drinks, and valuables could be used as a sacrifice.
Lists of gods of pagan Rus' are most fully presented in written sources in connection with the creation of a national pantheon by Prince Vladimir in 980. Thus, in the Laurentian Chronicle (year 980) this is reported: “And Volodymer began to reign in Kyiv alone and placed idols on a hill outside the courtyard of the tower. Perun is wooden and his head is silvered and ous zlat and Khorsa Dazhbog and Strib and Simargla and Mokosh...” Not all of the gods listed here were known to the Eastern Slavs everywhere, and the names and images of some of them go back to other ethnic cultural traditions. This allowed modern researchers to conclude that the pantheon of Prince Vladimir is an artificial structure that does not reflect real picture pagan beliefs of the ancient Slavs. The creation of this pantheon was most likely determined by the political situation in Kyiv at that time and was intended to solve state problems that faced Prince Vladimir.
By the time of the pagan reform of 980, the Eastern Slavs probably did not yet have a clear system of gods. Scientists have determined that independent pantheons have just begun to take shape in the southern lands, the main center of which was Kyiv, and in the northern territories Ancient Rus' led by Novgorod. In addition, in the vast territories of settlement of the Eastern Slavs, there was a belief in local gods, idols and spirits.
In addition to the “Tale of Bygone Years,” the listing of Vladimir’s gods with slight variations and mention of them and gods not included in the national pantheon are also contained in such ancient Russian monuments as “The Word of St. Gregory ... about how the first pagan peoples worshiped idols" (XIV century), "The Word of a certain Lover of Christ" (XIV century), "The Gustyn Chronicle" (XVI century), "The Prologue Life of Prince Vladimir" (XIV century), "On the offering of idolatry", "The Word about the Igoreven regiment (XII century) and a number of others.
Perun is the most famous of the Svarozhich brothers. He's a god storm clouds, thunder and lightning. A very expressive portrait of the Thunderer was given by Konstantin Balmont:
Perun's thoughts are quick,
Whatever he wants, so now.
Throws sparks, throws sparks
From the pupils of sparkling eyes.
In the popular imagination, he was represented as a warrior deity, whose weapons were directed against evil spirits; probably, the thickening of the atmosphere, which stopped after a thunderstorm, was attributed to the action of evil spirits. Folk customs turned out to be so strong that even in the 19th century. Many people, especially during a thunderstorm, locked all the windows and turned the vessels upside down, believing that evil souls, driven by lightning, tried to hide in any opening. The connection between Perun and weapons is indicated by the custom of swearing before Perun, placing the weapon in front of oneself.
Many of Perun's adventures are known from the myths of different peoples, fairy tales and Russian epics about Ilya Muromets. In Novgorod there was the most famous sanctuary of Perun in Rus', built in the form of a wheel with six spokes - a thunder sign.
The thunder sign was also carved on every Slavic house - as protection from Perun’s lightning.
Of the days of the week, Thursday was associated with Perun - “Perun’s day.” The fact that Thursday was associated with a thunderstorm is confirmed by modern stable expression"After the rain it's Thursday." Landscape objects include mountains and hills.
After the adoption of Christianity, Perun, like other pagan gods, was ranked among the demons. In the books of Christian scribes, the worship of him and the offering of bloody sacrifices were condemned. Orthodox churches arose on the site of Perkna sanctuaries. In Kyiv, on a hill, Prince Vladimir ordered the construction of a church in honor of St. Basil, whose name the prince received at baptism.
Despite the active struggle of the church against pagan cults and gods, the memory of Perun remained in the popular consciousness for many centuries.
In versions of East Slavic fairy tales with a plot about the struggle of the thunder god with an enemy, the role of Perun is often played by the prophet Ilya or God.
The replacement of the image of Perun with the image of God indicates that Perun in the system of pagan perception occupied the status of the supreme deity, the god of gods. And ideas about lightning as God’s medium, striking the devil, exist in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian fairy tales to this day.
Mokosh is the only female deity mentioned in the list of Prince Vladimir in the Tale of Bygone Years. Accordingly written source, the idol of Mokoshi stood in Kyiv on the top of a hill, along with other idols. The cult of Mokoshi apparently continued to be maintained in secret for many centuries after the adoption of Christianity.
The appearance of the goddess was restored not so much on the basis historical sources, according to linguistic and ethnographic data, taking into account changes in the original appearance of the deity, which were caused by the displacement of pagan beliefs by Christianity.
In some areas it was believed that if a woman is dozing and her spindle is spinning, it means Mokosha is the spinner. In folk tradition, the occupation of Mokosha is associated with the prohibition of leaving the tow on the spinning wheel overnight without a blessing, otherwise, according to beliefs, “Mokosha will come and spin it.” When a sheep had not been sheared for a long time, and the wool on it was wiped off, it was believed that “Mokosha had sheared the sheep.” Being dissatisfied, she cuts off some of the owners' hair. As a demand (sacrifice) for Mokoshe, after shearing the sheep, a piece of wool was left in the shears overnight. This image of Mokoshi is comparable in functions and characteristics to a kikimora.
Obviously, Mokosha was the patron of not only spinning, but also other women's activities. Prohibitions on some of them on Friday, for example, spinning and washing, remained in many places even in the 20th century, and this indicates that of the days of the week, Friday was most likely dedicated to Mokosha.
As the only female deity, Mokosh was probably the patroness of other areas of female activity. Researchers have constructed for her the functions of a deity of love, birth, fertility, and fate. This is indicated by the correlation of Mokosha with the elements of earth and water, which are usually endowed with productive power in Slavic traditions and which in mythological representations are directly related to the idea of fertility, as well as the connection of the pagan deity with spinning and weaving, the products of which - thread and linen - were interpreted in the folk consciousness as symbols of the life-destiny that every person was endowed with at birth.
Veles (Volos).
In The Tale of Bygone Years, the chronicler Nestor calls Veles the “cattle god,” the patron saint of domestic animals. Perhaps this monk did not know the pre-Christian mythology of Rus' well or tried to downplay the importance of the son of Rod, brother of Svarog.
Veles is one of the greatest gods of the ancient world. His main act was that Veles set the world created by Rod and Svarog into motion. Day began to give way to night; winter was inevitably followed by spring, summer and autumn; after exhalation - inhale, after sadness - joy. It was not a monotonous repetition of the same cycles, but learning the basics of life. People learned to overcome difficulties and value happiness. The rotation occurs according to the highest law of Rule following the movement of the Sun across the sky - Posolon. The guiding force is Great Love, helping with testing.
Veles and the giver of wealth (through cattle, the main wealth of nomadic tribes is the “god of cattle” (“On the idols of Vladimirov”), and later simply the god of wealth, which is earned by labor throughout life. There is every reason to believe that it is Veles who monitors fulfilling laws and treaties, he is the father and judge of truth, like Hermes and Odin.
The significance of Veles is evidenced by this. That his name, along with the name of Perun, was used in oaths at the state level.
Obviously, the cult of Veles was associated with thread and hair, which in mythological representations were perceived as being of the same nature and endowed with the same symbolic meaning. In folk culture, fiber/thread from plants, animal wool and human hair were associated with the idea of wealth, well-being, potential strength, fertility, which is explained by the multiplicity of their structure.
Extensive, richly decorated temples of Veles were in many places on Russian soil: near Novgorod, in other places in the Russian North, in Rostov and Kyiv. In the Christian era, the cult of Veles was replaced by the veneration of the patron saint of cattle, St. Basil.
Stribog is the god of the wind in East Slavic mythology.
The name Stribog goes back to the ancient root “strega”, which means “elder”, “paternal uncle”. A similar meaning is found in the “Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” where the winds are called “Stribozh’s grandchildren.” Stribog was born from the breath of Rod.
He can summon and tame a storm and can turn into his assistant, the mythical bird Stratim. In general, the wind was usually represented in the form of a gray-haired old man living at the edge of the world, in a dense forest or on an island in the middle of the ocean.
The idol of Stribog was installed in Kyiv among the seven most important Slavic deities.
It is unknown whether there was a permanent holiday in honor of Stribog, but he was mentioned and revered along with Dazhbog. Probably the wind, like rain and sun, was considered the most important for the farmer. The sailors also prayed to Stribog to give “wind to the sail.” The main temples of Stribog were located on sea islands, near the mouths of rivers, where merchant ships often stopped (for example, on the island of Berezan near the mouth of the Dnieper). Before going out to the open sea, Rus ships approached him, and the merchants brought rich gifts to Stribog.
According to legend, Stribog raged across the earth with winds, and also, together with Perun, commanded thunder and lightning.
2.2 Lower mythology
Vodyanoy, vodyanik, vodovik, in Slavic mythology, an evil spirit, the embodiment of a dangerous and formidable water element. Most often, he appeared in the guise of a man with the features of an animal - paws instead of hands, a horn on his head, or an ugly old man entangled in mud with a long beard. The Slavs believed that the merman were the descendants of those representatives of evil spirits whom God cast down from heaven into rivers, lakes and ponds.
The waterman especially loves to climb under the water mill for the night, near the wheel itself, which is why in the old days all millers were certainly considered sorcerers. However, the mermen also have their own homes: in the thickets of reeds and sedges they have built rich chambers made of shells and semi-precious river pebbles. The watermen have their own herds of cows, horses, pigs and sheep, which are driven out of the waters at night and grazed in nearby meadows. Mermen marry mermaids and beautiful drowned women.
When, during a flood from the spring melting of snow or from long torrential rains, a river emerges from its banks and breaks bridges, dams and mills with the rapid pressure of waves, the peasants think that these are water cuts at a wedding, indulge in riotous fun and dancing, and in their revelry destroy everything they come across. obstacles. Well, when the merman’s wife is about to give birth, he takes the form an ordinary person, appears in a city or village, invites a midwife to his place, leads him to his underwater possessions, and then generously rewards him for his work with silver and gold. They say that once fishermen pulled out a child in their nets, who frolicked and played when they lowered him into the water in the nets, but languished, sad and cried when they brought him to the hut. The child turned out to be the creation of a merman; The fishermen released him to his father on the condition that he catch as many fish as possible in their nets, and this condition was met. However, if a merman goes among people, even if he has taken on a human form, he is easy to recognize, because water is constantly dripping from his left hem: wherever he sits, the place always turns out to be wet, and when he starts to comb his hair, water flows from his hair.
In its native element, the water one is irresistible, but on earth its strength weakens. But on the rivers, all fish are subject to him, all storms, storms and hurricanes: he protects the swimmer - or drowns him; gives the fisherman a lucky catch - or breaks his nets.
He usually rides on catfish, and therefore in some areas this fish, the “devil’s horse,” is not recommended to be eaten. However, a caught catfish should not be scolded, lest the merman hear it and decide to take revenge for it: In daylight, the merman mostly hides in the depths, but in the darkness of the night it emerges: sometimes in the form of a huge moss-covered pike, sometimes in its true form. Then you can see that during the new moon his hair is fresh and green, like seaweed, and at the end of the month it turns gray. The age of the merman also changes: at the birth of the month he is young, at the end he is old.
Over those people whom fate has determined to drown, the merman receives a mysterious power that cannot be avoided in any way, which is why some superstitions do not decide to help a drowning person: all the same, they say, one cannot escape fate!
Like a brownie who drags everything from neighbors' storerooms and barns to own house, the merman manages to lure fish from other people's rivers and lakes.
In the summer he is awake, and in the winter he sleeps, for the winter cold locks in the rains and covers the waters with ice. With the beginning of spring, in April, the merman awakens from hibernation, hungry and angry, like a bear: out of frustration, he breaks the ice, stirs up waves, scatters fish in different directions, and completely torments small ones. At this time, the angry lord of the river is appeased with sacrifices: they pour oil on the water, and give him geese, the waterman’s favorite bird.
In mythological beliefs, a brownie is a household spirit, the owner and patron of the family. In the popular consciousness, Domovoy was perceived as a deceased ancestor - the keeper of the hearth, the invisible assistant of the owners.
His main job is to inspect the farm. The brownie sees every little thing, tirelessly cares and worries so that everything is in order and ready: he will help the hard worker, correct his mistake; he enjoys the offspring of domestic animals and birds; he does not tolerate unnecessary expenses and is angry with them - in a word, the brownie is inclined to work, thrifty and prudent.
According to the beliefs of lazy and careless owners, the brownie willingly helps run the household, torments people to the point that he crushes them almost to death at night or throws them out of their beds. However, according to popular belief, making peace with an angry brownie is not difficult: you just need to put snuff under the stove, which he is a big fan of, or give any gift: a multi-colored rag, a crust of bread... If the owners of their Brownie love, if they live with him in okay, they will never want to part with it, even when moving to a new house: they will scrape under the threshold, collect the garbage in a dustpan - and sprinkle it in the new hut, without noticing how the “owner” is moving with this garbage to a new place of residence. Whom the brownie really doesn't like are drunkards and simple-haired women: according to his ancient views, every married woman should definitely wear a headscarf. In the north of Rus' there was a belief that if for some reason there are no men in the family, then the housewife is the patron of the household.
It was almost impossible to see the brownie. It is much easier to hear: his crying and dull restrained moans, his soft and affectionate, and sometimes dull voice. Sometimes at night he appears in the form of a gray, smoky cat. He often strokes the sleepy ones with his soft paw, and then no questions are required - and it is so clear that this is for good. If you hear the cry of a brownie, even in the hut itself, you will be dead.
Leshy, forester, leshak, forester, forester, forester - the spirit of the forest in Slavic mythology. The goblin lives in every forest, especially loves spruce trees. Dressed like a man - a red sash, the left side of the caftan is usually wrapped behind the right side, and not vice versa, as everyone wears. The goblin's eyes are green and burn like coals.
No matter how carefully he hides his unclean origin, he fails to do this: if you look at him through the horse’s right ear, the goblin has a bluish tint, because his blood is blue. His eyebrows and eyelashes are not visible, he has corny ears (no right ear), and the hair on his head is combed to the left.
A goblin can become a stump and a hummock, turn into an animal and a bird, he turns into a bear and a grouse, a hare, and anyone, even a plant, because he is not only the spirit of the forest, but also its essence: he is overgrown with moss, sniffles as if the forest is noisy, It not only shows itself as spruce, but also spreads like moss and grass. The goblin differs from other spirits by special properties inherent to him alone: if he walks through the forest, then he is equal in height to the most tall trees. But at the same time, going out for walks, fun and jokes on the forest edges, he walks there like a small blade of grass, below the grass, freely hiding under any berry leaf. But, in fact, he rarely goes out to the meadows, strictly observing the rights of his neighbor, called the field worker, or field worker. The goblin also does not enter the villages, so as not to quarrel with the brownies, especially in those villages where completely black roosters crow, “two-eyed” dogs (with spots above the eyes in the form of second eyes) and three-haired cats live near the huts.
But in the forest, the goblin is a full-fledged and unlimited master: all animals and birds are under his jurisdiction and obey him unrequitedly. Hares are especially subordinate to him. He has them as complete serfs, at least he even has the power to lose them at cards to the neighboring goblin.
A real goblin vocalist: he can sing without words and encourages himself by clapping his hands. He sometimes sings at the top of his lungs (with the same force as the forest rustles in a storm) almost from evening until midnight; he does not like the crowing of a rooster and immediately falls silent at the first cry.
The goblin rushes through his forests like crazy, with extreme speed and always without a hat.
Leshy know how to laugh, call, whistle and cry like humans, and if they become speechless, it is only when they meet real, living people.
Leshy do not so much harm people as they play pranks and jokes, and in this case they are quite similar to their relatives - brownies. They will act rudely, as well as decently clumsy forest dwellers, and they joke evilly, because after all, they are not their brother, a baptized person. The most common methods of pranks and jokes of goblin are that they “deceive” a person: they will either “lead” anyone who goes deep into the thicket with the aim of picking mushrooms or berries to a place from which there is no way out, or they will put such a fog in their eyes, that they will be completely confused, and a lost person will circle around the forest for a long time in the same place.
Village rumors very persistently attribute to goblin a passion for women and often accuse them of kidnapping girls. They are credited with wives of the same breed as themselves (leshacha), and cubs
IN ancient times At the beginning of summer, shepherds made an agreement with the goblin: do not suck milk from cows, do not drive cattle into swamps, etc. If the agreement was violated, they wrote a complaint against the offender on a wide board and hung it from a hollow tree in the thicket - let Grandfather Lesovik sort it out.
Conclusion
Slavic myths about the creation of the world testify to their understanding and perception of the world around them. The mythological and modern periods are clearly distinguished not only in the time interval. But also a fundamentally different attitude towards them: mythological time is sacred (when “everything was different from what it is now”), and our time was perceived as more simplified (“It’s not for nothing that they say that now everything has become smaller”). The mythological past is an entire era when the first creation took place, and the first objects were formed: the first fire was produced, the first actions were committed, which became a model of behavior for people of subsequent eras. To explain the present, myth turns to the past as a model, a canon, an ideal.
In myth, all ideas about the structure of the world are conveyed in the form of a narrative about the origin of its individual elements. For the mythological consciousness, everything that is created now is the result of the first creation.
The content of myths is perceived as reality (this is the difference between a myth and a fairy tale) and there is no boundary between fiction and reality. All events in myths occur as the basis of the subsequent era. Myths embody the experience of many generations, connecting the past and the present. Therefore, this experience, concentrated in the wisdom of ancestors and traditional institutions, which were perceived as the basis of the existing order, not subject to verification, and not requiring it.
A feature of Slavic mythology is the close intertwining of paganism and Christianity. In the hierarchy of pagan gods and other mythological creatures highest level occupied by the gods responsible for the most important spheres of life: ritual, military, economic, etc. in the pagan’s mind, the gods were endowed with the greatest power and human well-being depended on them. It is no coincidence that the word “god,” known to all Slavs, meant not only deity, but also wealth and share.
Russian mythology is a completely special world. And although, due to the advent of Christianity, he lost his deities early, laying the foundation for dual faith, much was managed to be preserved in people's memory and faith.
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In his work “The War with the Goths” (553), he wrote that the Slavs are people of “tremendous strength” and “tall stature.” He noted that they worshiped nymphs and rivers, as well as “all sorts of deities.” The Slavs make sacrifices to all of them and “make fortune telling” with the help of these sacrifices.
Where are the Slavs' ideas about the world reflected?
One of the first to talk about our ancestors was the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea. He left us rare and invaluable information about the Slavs. During the creation of the work "War with the Goths" they barely entered the world stage. At that time, the Slavs still lived as a separate culture, which was far from the culture of antiquity. Our ancestors will touch upon its achievements much later. This will happen after our country adopts Christianity.
A slightly different version is put forward by other myths of Ancient Rus'. Summary her next. When Svarog created (cooked) the earth, he found this magic stone. Alatyr grew after God cast a magic spell. Svarog foamed the ocean with it. The moisture, thickening, became the first dry land. The gods were born from sparks when Svarog hit Alatyr with a magic hammer. The location of this stone in Russian folklore is inextricably linked with the island of Buyan, which was located in the “Okiyan-sea”. Alatyr is mentioned in conspiracies, epics and Russian folk tales.
Smorodina River
Kalinov Bridge and are often mentioned in conspiracies and fairy tales. However, in them this river is most often called simply Resin or Fiery. This matches the descriptions presented in fairy tales. Sometimes, especially often in epics, Currant is called the Puchai River. Probably, it began to be called that because its boiling surface swells, seethes, and bubbles.
Currant in the mythology of the ancient Slavs is a river that separates two worlds from each other: the living and the dead. The human soul needs to overcome this obstacle on the way to the “other world.” The river did not get its name from the berry bush known to us. In the Old Russian language there was a word "currant", used in the 11th-17th centuries. It means stench, stench, pungent and strong odor. Later, when the meaning of the name of this river was forgotten, the distorted name “Currant” appeared in fairy tales.
Penetration of Christian ideas
The ideas of Christianity began to penetrate our ancestors in the 9th century. Having visited Byzantium, Princess Olga was baptized there. Prince Svyatoslav, her son, buried his mother according to the customs of Christianity, but he himself was a pagan and remained a follower of the ancient gods. As you know, it was established by Prince Vladimir, his son. This happened in 988. After this, the struggle with ancient Slavic mythological ideas began.
