Topic "Beliefs Eastern Slavs”is interesting to me, since paganism is an integral part of the history of our country - mysterious, appearing either in rock compositions, or in works of fiction, in art publications, or told by one of the grandparents as “the one who what great-grandfathers told” and, as far as I understood, exciting not only me, as an idle amateur, but, as it turned out, occupying the minds of many modern people who believe that paganism is not at all in the past.
The most important cultural prerequisite for the history of Russian civilization is the beliefs of the Eastern Slavs. They were associated with the predominantly agrarian, agricultural nature of production in the 6th-9th centuries. and the tribal nature of society, divided according to the principle of kinship and neighborhood
The pagan religion corresponded to the era of the primitive communal system among the Eastern Slavs. Slavic paganism is a whole complex of beliefs, ideas, rituals that came from ancient times and which reflected the complete dependence of ancient people on the forces of nature. These are polytheistic beliefs and rituals that existed among the Slavs before the adoption of the monotheistic religion - Christianity.
The term "paganism" appeared in the Old Russian language after the adoption of Christianity to refer to all pre-Christian and non-Christian cults and was used by Orthodox preachers. In other words, the term "paganism" is conditional and does not mean any specific beliefs, but any traditional folk religion. In modern scientific literature, the term "polytheism" is more often used (from the Greek polys - numerous, and theos - god; i.e. polytheism, belief in many gods).
Paganism belongs to an archaic type of culture, very different from traditional and modern types. From world religions, ancient paganism is that the imperfection of man was not associated with his falling away from the divine ideal (fall). Imperfection was considered a quality inherent in the whole world, both earthly and heavenly, both the world of everyday life and the world of the mysterious forces of nature. In fact, man himself was one of these forces. In order to achieve the fulfillment of his will, he could scare and force a brownie or goblin to obey him, and people with witchcraft power, such as sorcerer priests or tribal leaders, could control the forces of nature: send and prevent rain, illness, crop failure, hunger to ensure victory in the war.
This worldview created a rather cozy image of the world, in which there were no insoluble contradictions, there was no that gap between everyday life and the ideal, man and God, the appearance of which in the great cultures of the East and Greece in the 8-2 centuries BC allowed the philosopher K. Jaspers to name this time is "axial", dividing the history of mankind. The spiritual revolution of the "axial time" aroused in people the need to strive for the ideal, to seek "salvation" from their imperfection. It is associated with the emergence of world religions and great philosophical teachings, traditional culture. The Slavs in the pre-Christian period did not have a religion common to all tribes. However, their ideas about nature, the surrounding world, the elements that rule in it are very close to each other. This allows us to talk about the existence of a special folk faith among the ancient Slavs, i.e. Paganism. Paganism is the national religion. Unlike the great world religions, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, which do not recognize national borders, paganism is addressed only to the Slavs, or only to the Germans, or only to the Celts, etc., perceiving each people as a tribal family community and opposing it to the rest the world.
The religion of the Eastern Slavs is strikingly similar to the original religion of the Aryan tribes: it consisted in the worship of physical deities, natural phenomena and the souls of the dead, tribal, domestic geniuses; we do not notice traces of the heroic element, which develops anthropomorphism so strongly among our Slavs - a sign that conquering squads were not formed between them under the command of hero leaders and that their migrations were carried out not in a squad, but in a tribal form.
The Eastern Slavs did not know all this until the 10th century. Their world was inhabited by many strange creatures that personified the forces of nature. Gods and spirits were everywhere: in the rain, in the sun, in the forest, under the threshold of the house, in the water, on the ground. The Slavs tried to find a common language with everyone, appease some and scare others. These were local deities, numbering in the tens and hundreds. They, like people, were good and evil, simple-minded and cunning. Some helped a person in achieving his goals, while others, on the contrary, hindered him. They had nothing of the omnipotence and perfection of the Christian God. In order to communicate with pagan gods, it was not necessary to fight for spiritual purity, as Christian monks did, but it was only necessary to know certain technical techniques: rituals, prayers, conspiracies.
Having arisen in ancient times, when human consciousness had just begun to form, Slavic paganism did not remain petrified, but developed along with primitive society. In the 12th century, interesting notes were compiled on the development of pagan beliefs among the ancient Slavs: "A word about how pagan peoples worshiped idols and made sacrifices to them." Its author divided the history of Slavic beliefs into three periods: first, the Slavs made sacrifices to ghouls and coastlines (in other sources? It is written “beregyns”); then they began to “set a meal” for Rod and women in labor; finally, in the late period of paganism, they began to pray to Perun. (This periodization takes place in the textbook for grades 10-11 of educational institutions, I.N. Ionov “Russian civilization, 9th-early 20th century”? M .: Education, 1995 ).
Another source (A. Lukutin "History. Grades 9-11", M.: AST-PRESS SCHOOL, 2006) provides the following data: scientists note 4 stages in the development of Slavic paganism.
The first stage corresponds to the era of the Stone Age, the Slavs made sacrifices to the "ghouls" and "beregyns". Ghouls and beregini are evil and good local gods. Ghouls are vampires, werewolves, mermaids, goblin. Usually these are former people who did not die by their own death, were not buried and avenged for this alive. You can fight them, knowing protective rites. Especially often ghouls inhabited remote, little-visited places: forests and rivers. In the villages they were searched for in wells. Christian priests for a long time still accused the peasants that they "eat (pray) to demons and swamps and wells." Beregini were good deities. For example, the idea of a brownie, which can be both evil and good, has come down to our times, depending on how you propitiate him. N.M. Karamzin wrote in “History of the Russian State”: “In the superstitious traditions of the Russian people, we also discover some traces of ancient Slavic worship: until now, ordinary people talk about us goblin, who look like satyrs, they seem to live in the darkness of forests, equal to trees and grass, they terrify wanderers, go around them and lead them astray, about mermaids, or nymphs of oak forests (where they run around with their hair loose, especially before Trinity Day), about beneficent and evil brownies, about kikimors.
Later, when the ancient Slavs made the transition from a nomadic to a settled way of life, when agriculture appeared, the cult of Rod and Rozhanits, fertility deities, was born, which is associated with the development of the tribal system and agriculture among the Slavs. In Rod, the forces of the fertility of the earth and the unity of generations of people were simultaneously personified. After all, the fertility of the earth, according to the beliefs of the Slavs, is provided by the ancestors, and if the earth does not bear fruit, then the sacrifice must be made to them. The pagan idea of the unity of the world was also manifested in the fact that the ability of a person to produce offspring was considered to stimulate the creative forces of nature.
Therefore, the spring holidays in honor of Rod and Rozhanitsy were accompanied by general drunkenness (“not into the law, but into a drunken state” and obscenities. At this stage in the development of pagan beliefs, attempts appear to portray the gods in a humanoid form.
It is significant that already after the adoption of Christianity, peasant women prayed to Rozhanitsa along with the Christian Mother of God. According to the beliefs of the ancient Slavs, Rod is the creator of the entire universe. He "breathed" life into people, commanded the sky, rain, fire, sent lightning to the earth. The famous historian B.A. Rybakov in his work “History. The initial centuries of Russian history ”writes about Rod like this:“ God Rod was the supreme deity of heaven and the universe. He was compared with Osiris, Baad Gad and the biblical hosts. This was a deity more significant than the retinue-princely Perun who replaced him. And here is another interesting version of it: “On the Dnieper, 120 km from Kyiv, at the mouth of the Ros River, there was the city of Roden, from which there is now a settlement on a high mountain - Knyazhya Gora.
Judging by the location in the middle of the range of antiquities of the Rus of the 6th-7th centuries, Roden could be the tribal center of the Rus and be named after the main god of the ancient Slavs - Rod ... Such an assumption would fully explain the chronicle phrase (possibly taken from Greek sources of the 9th century) " Give birth, we call Russia ... ". The name of the union of tribes according to a common deity can also be traced in the name of the Krivichi, named after the ancient native (Lithuanian) god Kriva - Krivite. Russ on the Ros River could get their name from the god Rod, whose place of worship was Roden on Ros.
Gradually, many of the functions of the Family were transferred to the jurisdiction of other gods.
Rod had assistants - Yarilo and Kupala.
Yarilo personified the awakening spring. To the Slavs, he appeared as a young handsome youth who rode through the fields and villages on a white horse and in a white robe.
Kupala was considered as a fruitful deity of summer. His day was celebrated on June 24, and it was preceded by "Rusalia" - celebrations dedicated to the nymphs of fields and waters.
Worship of the god Veles (Volos), the patron saint of cattle and cattle breeding, arose at a time when the ancient Slavs learned to tame wild animals. It was believed that this god contributed to the accumulation of wealth.
In the 8th-9th centuries, a “divine” picture is formed, where each deity has its own place:
Svarog is the lord of the sky, to whom the whole Universe obeys (it can be compared with Zeus among the ancient Greeks). Svarog had several children.
Svarozhich, the son of Svarog, is the god of fire, the patron of blacksmiths and blacksmithing, as well as jewelers.
Dazhbog is the son (according to another version - the daughter) of Svarog, personifying the sun. According to Slavic beliefs, Dazhbog lives far to the east, in the land of eternal summer. Every morning, on his luminous chariot, Dazhbog makes a circular detour across the sky.
Khors is a deity close to Dazhbog and directly connected with him. He was represented as a white horse, also making its run over the earth from east to west.
Stribog is the god of the wind, storm, hurricane and all kinds of bad weather. He was worshiped by people whose activities depended on weather conditions: farmers, travelers, sailors, etc.
Mokosh (Makosh) - the patroness of women, women's needlework, as well as trade, the mother of the harvest, the goddess of the earth.
Simargl (Semargl) - seemed to be a sacred winged dog. It was not possible to fully understand the purpose of this deity. It is only clear that he was a deity of a lower order, a winged dog that guarded seeds and crops, was considered the god of the underworld. (Simargl and Horos, or Khors, mentioned in the Tale of Bygone Years, are apparently Iranian deities brought to Russia by the Khorezm guard hired by the Khazars).
Over time, when military campaigns took a significant place in the life of the Eastern Slavs, one of the most revered gods becomes Perun - the lord of thunder and lightning, the patron of the prince, combatants and military affairs in general.
The phenomenon of thunder, lightning is the most striking of the phenomena of nature; no wonder that primitive man gave him the first place among all other phenomena: man could not fail to notice the beneficial effect of a thunderstorm on the life of nature, could not fail to notice that the light of lightning independently at all times reveals its power, while, for example, the action of the sun is limited , subject to a certain law and can only be revealed at a certain time, yielding dominion to another, opposite and, therefore, hostile, beginning - darkness; the sun was eclipsed, died in the eyes of a person, and lightning never lost its power in his eyes, was not defeated by another principle, because the light of lightning is usually accompanied by rain that is life-giving for nature - hence the necessary idea that Perun sends down rain to thirsty nature, which without him would die from burning rays of the sun. Thus, lightning was for primitive man a productive force, with the character of a deity of the highest, acting, ruling predominantly, moderating, correcting the harm caused by other deities, while the sun, for example, was something suffering, subordinate for a pagan worshiping him. Finally, lightning received the meaning of the supreme deity-ruler in the eyes of the pagan because of its terrible punitive power, acting quickly and directly.
Gradually, Perun seizes supreme power over the rest of the pagan gods, pushing Svarog into the background. The latter retains the right to patronize artisans involved in metal processing.
The oath by weapons, Perun and Veles is already known from the story of the treaty of 911 between the Kiev prince Oleg (882-912) and the Byzantines.
The Tale of Bygone Years, under 980, says that the Kyiv prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich, having captured Kyiv and began to reign in it, even before the baptism of Russia, placed on the Mountain, not far from the princely palace, wooden idols of the gods: Perun, Khors, Dazhbog , Stribog, Simargl, Mokosh. However, Rod, Rozhanitsy, Svarog, Svarozhich and Volos were not among the gods. Scientists explain this choice of the prince by the fact that the pagan pantheon of Vladimir was intended to pray not to ordinary people, but to the Kievan nobility, who lived on the Mountain and preferred to worship their gods.
The Slavic pagan world is surprisingly poetic, permeated with magic and the belief that all the nature around us is alive. Our distant ancestors worshiped the elements, believed in the kinship of people with animals, and were convinced that the progenitor animal of their kind always patronizes its human descendants. Pagan Slavs made numerous sacrifices, most often allocating part of their prey for hunting, fishing or harvesting to deities, good and evil spirits that inhabited the world around them. Each Slavic tribe prayed to its especially revered gods, but often they differed only in the pronunciation of names.
Very little information has been preserved about the paganism of the ancient Slavs. In most cases, the supreme Slavic gods are known from later Christian teachings against them. Speaking of the pagans, Metropolitan Macarius in the 17th century. wrote: “Their nasty prayer places: forest, and stones, and rivers, and swamps, and springs, and mountains, and hills, the sun and the moon, and the stars, and lakes. And to put it simply, everything that exists was worshiped as God, and honored, and sacrificed.” Deifying the surrounding world, the Slavs, as it were, concentrate all their disparate beliefs around three main phenomena in their primitive life: hunting, farming and housekeeping. Forest, field and house - these are the three pillars of the Slavic universe, around which the whole pagan Slavic mythology is formed, in Slavic paganism the whole life path of a communal peasant is reflected and expressed: a cycle of agricultural work, household life, weddings, funerals, etc.
Hunting beliefs were very common.
In the primitive era, the forest not only gave the Slavs the opportunity to survive, get food, build a solid dwelling, heat it with fire, the fuel for which was abundant around, but also endowed them with special ideas about their origin. Hunting clans and tribes believed that their distant ancestors were wild animals with supernatural magical abilities. Such animals were considered great deities and worshiped by their totems, that is, sacred images that protected the family. Each tribe had its own totem.
The most important deity of the forest pantheon of the ancient Slavs was the BEAR. His mighty image was perceived as the image of the great owner of the forest - the most powerful beast. The true name of this beast is forever lost, because it was not spoken aloud and, apparently, was known only to the priests. Oaths and contracts were sealed with this sacred unpronounceable name. In everyday life, the hunters called their god "honey badger", whence the name "bear" came from. The ancient root "ber", preserved in the word "lair", that is, the lair of a ber, sounds the same as the Scandinavian word "ber" - a bear, and means "brown".
Extremely common, especially among the northern Slavs, was the cult of the WOLF. During holidays and important rituals dedicated to this animal, the men of the tribe dressed up in wolf skins. The wolf was perceived as a devourer of evil spirits, not without reason the priests of the wolf cult and even simple warriors from the "wolf" tribes were considered good healers. The name of the powerful patron was so sacred that it was forbidden to say it out loud. Instead, the wolf was designated by the epithet "fierce". Hence the name of one of the large Slavic tribes "Lutichi". The feminine principle, always associated with fertility, in the forest era was personified by the great goddess DEER or ELSE. Unlike real female deer and elk, the goddess had horns, which also brings to mind the cow. The horns were considered symbols of the sun's rays, so they were a talisman against dark forces and were attached above the entrance to the dwelling.
Both hunters and farmers revered the HORSE. They represented the sun in the form of a Golden Horse running through the heavens. The image of the sun-horse was preserved in the decoration of the Russian hut, decorated with a ridge with one or two horse heads. Amulets depicting a horse's head, and later just a horseshoe, were considered solar symbols and were perceived as powerful amulets.
According to pagan beliefs, there were also rituals of those distant years. For example, the rites of the cult of ancestors (worship of the souls and geniuses of the deceased). In ancient Russian monuments, the focus of this cult is with the meaning of the guardian of relatives genus with their women in labor, i.e. grandfather with grandmothers, - a hint at the polygamy that once dominated among the Slavs. The same deified ancestor was honored under the name chura, in Church Slavonic form scura; this form has survived to this day in the compound word ancestor. The meaning of this grandfather-ancestor as the protector of all relatives is still preserved in a spell from evil spirits or unexpected danger: fuck me! those. save me, grandfather. Protecting relatives from evil dashing, chur protected their family heritage. The legend, which left traces in the language, gives the chur the same meaning as the Roman term, the meaning of the protector of ancestral fields and borders. The violation of the boundary, the proper border, the legal measure, we now express in the word too, means, chur - measure, limit. This meaning of chur can, it seems, explain one feature of the funeral rite among the Russian Slavs, as described by the Primary Chronicle. The deceased, having performed a feast over him, was burned, his bones were collected in a small vessel and placed on a pole at the crossroads where the paths crossed, i.e. converge the boundaries of different possessions. Roadside poles are boundary signs that guarded the boundaries of the family field or grandfather's estate. Hence the superstitious fear that seized the Russian man at the crossroads: here, on neutral soil, the relative felt himself in a foreign land, not at home, outside his native field, outside the sphere of power of his protective wards.
The infant people could not understand the spiritual existence beyond the grave and imagined the souls of the departed forefathers accessible to all sensations of this white light; they thought that winter is the time of night, darkness for the souls of the departed, but as soon as spring begins to replace winter, the night path also stops for souls that rise to heavenly light, the moon and others, rise to a new life. On the first feast of the newborn sun, on the first winter Kolyada (a holiday that now coincides with the feast of the Nativity of Christ), the dead already rose from their graves and frightened the living - hence now Christmas time is considered the time of wandering spirits.
The essential rite of the feast consists of walking to praise the deity and collect alms, as can be seen in times pagan offerings were collected for a common sacrifice.
Maslenitsa - the spring holiday of the sun, is also a commemoration week, which is directly indicated by the use of pancakes, commemorative food. From the ancient Maslenitsa, the living greet the dead, visit their graves, and the Red Hill holiday is connected with Radunitsa, the holiday of light, the sun for the dead, it is believed that the souls of the dead rise from the dungeons during the commemoration and share the commemorative food with the bringer.
So, spring is met on Krasnaya Gorka, usually round dances begin, the religious significance of which and the relationship to the sun is beyond doubt. The time of the resurrection of all nature and the intensification of desires was considered the most appropriate time for marriage and for congratulating young spouses: this congratulation is known under the name of vunitstva. The long struggle with the Church's Shrovetide feast ended in the end only with its removal beyond the time of Great Lent before Pascha. However, the pagan character of the holiday was preserved. According to the beliefs of some Slavic tribes, on Maslenitsa days, the deity of winter, Morana, cedes his power to the deity of spring, Lada. According to other beliefs, this is a celebration of the death and resurrection of the goddess of fertility Maslenitsa or Kostroma, whose straw image was burned at the end of the holiday, and the resulting coals were scattered over winter crops.
The importance of games and laughter during Christmas time and Shrovetide was important. Particularly characteristic in this sense are the games of weddings, the capture of snowy towns. At the same time, laughter was of a ritual nature: it was supposed to provide fun and harvest for the whole next year. The attitude towards the burning of Shrovetide was more difficult. According to custom, some of the people were supposed to cry at this time, and the other to laugh. This rite expresses the idea of the immortality of the creative forces of nature, the absence of death.
The current Christian holiday of Easter is associated with the custom of visiting the graves of deceased relatives, but these are echoes of a pagan holiday that fell on the time before plowing. It was associated with the desire of the peasants to achieve support from the dead ancestors in awakening the fruitful forces of the earth, ensuring the harvest. The time after Easter was known as the Navi holiday, that is, the feast of the dead. At this time, boiled eggs were rolled on the graves, oil, wine, and beer were poured on them. All these were sacrifices that were supposed to remind the dead of their family ties and duty to the living. By the way, such sacrifices were made repeatedly during the spring and summer; the church later turned them into a celebration of parental Saturdays, a visit to the cemetery, accompanied by the commemoration of the dead.
In direct connection with the belief that in the spring the souls of the dead rise to enjoy new life nature, there is a holiday of mermaids, or mermaid week. Mermaids are not at all river nymphs or any kind of nymphs; their name does not come from the channel, but from blond ( those. light, clear); mermaids are the souls of the dead, coming out in the spring to enjoy the revived nature. Mermaids appear from Good Thursday, as soon as the meadows are covered with spring water, willows bloom. If they seem beautiful, they always bear the imprint of lifelessness, pallor.
CM. Soloviev wrote about mermaids in this way: “The lights coming out of the graves are the essence of the lights of mermaids, they run through the fields, saying:“ Boom! Wow! Straw spirit. Mother gave birth to me, laid me unbaptized. Mermaids live in the waters until Trinity Day, they only go out to the shores to play, but among all pagan peoples waterway was considered a guide to the underworld and back from it, which is why mermaids appear in rivers, at wells. But already from Trinity Day, mermaids moved to the forest, to the trees - a favorite place for souls to stay until death. Mermaid games are games in honor of the dead, as indicated by dressing up, masks - a rite that not only Slavs needed during the holiday for the shadows of the dead, since it is common for a person to represent the dead with something terrible, ugly and think that especially the souls of evil people turn into fearsome and ugly creatures.
Among the Russian Slavs, the main holiday of the mermaids was Semik - the great day of the mermaids, on which they were sent off. And the end of the mermaid week - Trinity Day - was the final holiday of the mermaids, on this day the mermaids, according to legend, fall from the trees - the time for spring pleasures ends for them. On the first Monday of Peter's Day, in some Slavic places, there was a game - seeing off the mermaids to the graves. By the way, Semik was considered a girl's holiday, dedicated to Yarila and Lada, the goddess of family harmony. At this time, a young birch tree, the sacred tree of Lada, was removed with ribbons and the houses were decorated with birch branches. The girls went to the forest to weave wreaths of flowers, dance and sing ritual songs. On Thursday of the Semitsky week, in the afternoon, at the height of the holiday, a review of brides was held. In the evenings, young people “chased mermaids” - they played burners with stems of wormwood or buttercup in their hands. According to legend, these herbs protected from the machinations of evil spirits. On the last day, the birch was cut down, and the girl's wreaths were let down the river. Whoever's wreath floats far away will soon get married. For fun and fortune-telling, the Semitsky week, which was celebrated in the last century, is called green Christmas time.
On June 24, a great holiday was celebrated, which has come down to us as Ivan's Day, or Ivan Kupala. This holiday, however, like Maslenitsa and Kolyada, is common, i.e. not only for all Slavic, but also for foreign peoples. Although, according to the rites of the holiday, one can guess that it refers to three elemental deities - both Svarozhichs, the sun and fire, and water, but it can also be attributed to one sun. The night on Ivanov's day was accompanied by the gathering of herbs, to which miraculous power was attributed; bathing (since the sun, according to the beliefs of the Slavs, producing a miraculous effect on everything, produced it on water as well) - after all, bathing during the summer solstice is healing; lighting fires and jumping over them, because the jump was judged by luck in marriage (in addition, lighting fires is necessary for sacrifices). And on the summer holiday, the rite of extermination of the effigy of Mary is repeated - cold and death: she is drowned in water or burned (Ionov calls her the goddess of spring Lada. The sun, which gives life and growth to everything that exists, should have been a force that arouses natural desires - hence the festival of Kupala was connected with the festival of Yarila, by the way, some negative (according to the later clergy) phenomena took place in it, for example, the kidnapping of girls... Ivan Kupala was considered, and even now, also the most famous and magical of pagan holidays.
Here are the main initial features of the beliefs of the Eastern Slavs. Over time, they could also be distorted: the same deity in different tribes had different names; later, with the convergence of the tribes, different names could already appear as different deities. Elemental deities initially did not have a gender and therefore afterward easily changed it: for example, the sun could easily be both male and female, and husband and wife of the month.
CM. Solovyov believes that the main distorters of the original religion of the people were always and everywhere priests and artists, and that is why among our Eastern Slavs, who did not have a class of priests and did not have a common custom of depicting deities as idealized, religion was preserved in much greater simplicity. Chronicles are silent about the existence of temples and priests among the Eastern Slavs (and if temples existed, this would certainly be reflected in the annals, as well as their destruction).
The Eastern Slavs did not have a priestly class, but there were magicians, fortune-tellers, sorcerers, sorcerers and witches. Very little is known about the Slavic Magi, but there is no doubt that they had a close connection with the Finnish Magi in the close neighborhood and alliance of these two peoples, especially since after the adoption of Christianity, the Magi mainly appear in the Finnish north and from there stir up the Slavic population (and From time immemorial, the Finnish tribe was distinguished by a penchant for magic, from time immemorial it was famous for it: among the Finns it was developed mainly about evil deities, about evil spirits and about messages with them.
So, the Magi is the old Russian name for the ministers of pagan cults. For the first time they are mentioned in the annals in 912: one of the Magi predicted the death of the Kiev prince Oleg from his own horse. Under the year 1071, it tells about unrest in the Rostov land during the famine, headed by two wise men. Later, astrologers, sorcerers, "warlocks" were called magi - that is, people who possess some kind of secret knowledge, fortune-telling from "forgotten books". In the Christian tradition, it was believed that demons endowed the Magi with the gift of prediction and miracles. Magic was later banned by the decisions of the Stoglavy Cathedral, they were subjected to persecution, punishment, persecution, and execution.
The pagan gods were, first of all, local deities and the planting of their cult in other tribal lands (for example, the cult of Perun in Novgorod) was not always successful. On this basis, it was unthinkable to achieve the spiritual unity of the population of the country, without which it is impossible to create a stable state.
Pagan religion gradually ceased to be a link between various social groups in Kievan Rus. Sooner or later, another religion had to give way, which could, to one degree or another, satisfy the interests of all social strata.
Pagan beliefs did not enjoy authority in the countries closest to Russia: Christian Byzantium, Jewish Khazaria and Bulgar, which converted to Islam. In order to have equal relations with them, it was necessary to join one of the great world religions. Actually, this is what happened. The aforementioned Vladimir 1 Svyatoslavich around 987-88 adopted Christianity and began to plant a new religion, calling for help from Greek priests.
The persecuted paganism had one path: first to the outskirts of Russia, and then to the corners of people's souls, to the subconscious, in order to stay there, apparently forever, no matter how they call it: superstition, remnants of the past faith, etc.
And if you think about it, how much is the new really new, and the old - irrevocably obsolete?
Paganism had a significant impact on the formation of the Christian cult and rituals. For example, between Christmas and Epiphany there are pre-Christian Christmas time. The pagan Maslenitsa became the eve of Great Lent. Pagan funeral rites, as well as the ancient Slavic cult of bread, were woven into Christian Easter, the cult of birch and grass, as well as other elements of the ancient Slavic Semik, were woven into the feast of the Trinity. The feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord was combined with the feast of fruit picking and was called Apple Spas. Pagan influence is sometimes traced in the ornaments of monuments of ancient Russian temple construction - solar (solar) signs, decorative carvings, etc. Pagan beliefs left their mark on the monuments of literary and oral folk art, especially in epic, epics, songs. At the level of everyday superstitions, paganism was preserved, constantly remaining a means of mythological exploration of nature by man.
I consider very interesting the data with which I got acquainted, preparing for the writing of this test. It turns out that paganism is not only the past of our country (I do not mean residual phenomena that have been preserved in holidays, etc.). This is the current religion! Since the following data (which, I confess, I found on the Internet) shocked me, I decided to include them in my control work (in quotation marks, because these are quotes).
“Currently in Russia there is whole line pagan movements and communities that set as their goal the revival of the original Russian faith. Despite the fact that the total number of their members is much less than the number of followers of various Christian and other religious movements, their ranks are constantly replenished with new members - true Russian patriots. Russian pagans are the successors of a long historical process. Modern paganism is a complex worldview, the basis of which is the path of personal self-improvement using independent thinking. According to the intellectuals, paganism is Poetry; in various cities of Russia, in recent decades, pagan communities have arisen that set themselves the goal of restoring the faith of their ancestors in its entirety and in accordance with modern understanding. For a thousand years, paganism has gone from decay and oblivion to scientific, and after aesthetic and, finally, spiritual revival. In light of this, the process of formation of Slavic paganism seems irreversible. Paganism inherits all the diversity of human communication with the spirits and forces of Nature, to which the Magi and ordinary people of past centuries turned. All of these practices continue to this day. Paganism, being a universal and comprehensive philosophy, remains at the same time a deeply national phenomenon. This tradition manifests itself through the totality of the traditions of each particular people, set forth in a language that is understandable and characteristic for it, taking into account all the specifics of the national worldview.
One of the characteristic features of modern Russia is the presence of well-known differences between urban and rural lifestyles. Modern urban pagans, as a rule, pay more attention to philosophical and historical concepts, literary and scientific activities, etc., while rural pagans prefer mainly the practical side of things (ritualism, arrangement of temples, related craft activities, etc. ). However, recently there has been a tendency to merge small communities into larger ones, where both of these currents meet, which in the future will make it possible to restore historical traditions lost over the past seventy years. Paganism, devoid of any rigid systems, dogmas and prescriptions that are mandatory for all people without taking into account their personal characteristics, is able to return a holistic view of the world to a modern person, stimulating his personal spiritual search and not fitting him into a narrow framework.
On the official scheme of the Losiny Ostrov national park, a pagan temple is indicated - one of a dozen and a half operating in the capital. Only 17 religious organizations of pagans are registered with the bodies of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation (and most of them are in the territory of Mari El), but religious scholars say that there are actually several hundred pagan communities in our country. This is much more than Catholic and comparable to the number of Old Believers. Most Russian pagans do not need registration - everyone is allowed into the forest for now. "In order to embark on the path of paganism," says the sorcerer Ingeld, "you must go beyond the threshold and follow an inconspicuous path into the forest. And there listen to the rustle of leaves, the creak of tall pines, the murmur of a key. And it, paganism, will come and capture you."
It only seems from the outside that the new Russian paganism is marginal. Take a walk in the morning after the summer Ivan Kupala (July 7) or the winter Kolyada (December 25) through the Tsaritsyno or Bitsevsky park - and you will find fresh fire pits, colorful ribbons on trees, wheat grains and flowers sacrificed to the spirits of the forest. Although the pagans are almost not engaged in missionary work, thousands gather for their colorful holidays and performances. Each city in central Russia has its own "sacred trees", and in tourist centers such as Suzdal or Pereslavl-Zalessky, crowds of tourists "worship" pagan shrines - Mount Perunova and the Blue Stone. The pagans also consider “their own” those millions of Russians who unconsciously participate in pre-Christian rites - they decorate Christmas trees, leave vodka and bread on the graves, tell fortunes and spit over their right shoulders.”
“According to the British Center for Religious and Sociological Research, Russia ranks fourth in Europe in terms of the number of pagans. 3rd place is occupied by neighboring Ukraine, and 1st and 2nd, respectively, by Iceland and Norway.”
To be honest, I do not quite understand the desire to revive paganism, even if in new forms. My generation, in principle brought up on the ideas of atheism, can hardly, in my opinion, seriously and consciously accept a pagan religion. Most likely, this is a tribute to fashion (somewhat paradoxical: we rush from one extreme to another, we want to stand out from the crowd, to show “how extraordinary we are!”). Again, though, this is my personal opinion. By the way, an example of the fact that modern paganism is just a fashion trend can serve as a new age paganism, which some consider sophisticated and elitist. It incorporates everything "the most fashionable" in this world: "environmental consciousness", "free love", feminism, "ethno" music.
For me, paganism is, as the poet put it, “traditions of the deep antiquity”, which I respect and which fascinate with their primitiveness, amaze with the beauty, naivety and primordialness of the preserved cultural monuments, but that’s all. I respect paganism as an integral part of our history and culture. But modern paganism, as a movement, makes me feel surprised and misunderstood.
You can argue as much as you like on this topic, but it is impossible to begin the history of Russian culture with the baptism of Russia, just as it is impossible to derive it from Byzantium. It is impossible to deny that the entire Christian culture was largely rethought in accordance with the traditional pagan ideas of the Slavs. This manifested the syncretism of Russian culture - the fusion in it of various, often contradictory elements. And the fact that the pagan beliefs of the Slavs are the most important cultural prerequisite for the history of Russian civilization has been proven by history itself.
Literature
pagan religion slavic belief
Klyuchevsky V.O. Russian history course. ? M.: Thought, 1987.
Rybakov B.A. The world of history. - M.: Young Guard, 1987.
Mironenko S.V. History of the Fatherland: people, ideas, solutions. / Essays on the history of Russia 9 - early 20 centuries. - M.: Politizdat, 1991.
World of Russian history. / Encyclopedic reference book. - St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg branch named after V.B. Bobkov, Russian Customs Academy, 1998.
Putilov B.N. Ancient Russia in faces. - St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2000.
Ionov I.N. Russian civilization (9th - early 20th century). - M.: Enlightenment, 1995.
Lyubimov L. The Art of Ancient Russia. - M.: Enlightenment, 1974.
Soviet encyclopedic Dictionary. - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia. 1982.
The World History. People, events, dates. / Encyclopedia. ? Rider/s Digest, 2001.
Merkulov. Russia has many faces. - M.: Soviet writer, 1990.
Kravtsov N.I., Lazutin S.G. Russian oral folk art. - M.: Higher school, 1983.
Karamzin N.M. History of Russian Goverment. - M.: Eksmo, 2005.
http://heathenism.ru/target.
http://heathenism.ru/new_edge.
http://heathenism.ru/slav.
The Slavs worshiped natural phenomena and deified them. Also, our ancestors believed in evil and good spirits, they had a cult of family and ancestors in honor. The first religious belief of the Eastern Slavs was paganism. The main distinguishing feature of paganism is polytheism. worshiped Svarog, Rod, Dazhdbog, Yarilo, Horos, Stribog, Mokosh and.
Summer was replaced by winter, day was replaced by night. People could not understand why frosts come to replace warm days, snow begins to fall. The Slavs thought that all this depended on the will of the gods and other mysterious forces. If it rained heavily in the summer, people believed that it was the angry god Perun who sent fiery arrows to the earth, and therefore such a terrible thunder rumbled and bright lightning flashed.
When the rain ended, it means that God calmed down, the Slavs concluded. Perun seemed to them a giant with a big head, a gray head and a red beard. IN right hand he has a bow, and in his left arrows. Carving an idol out of wood, people covered their beards and mustaches with gold, and the top of their heads with silver. They put an idol on the temple (the highest place), and brought trebs (bloody sacrifices) to the foot.
The victims were birds, animals, and sometimes people. Unlike other pagans, the ancient Slavs did not build temples, they did not have a class of priests, although the Magi (interpreters of the will of the gods) existed. This was the faith of the ancient Slavs, pagan.
People did not know why the sun shines, the wind blows, the sky comes in different colors. After thinking, they came to the conclusion that all these phenomena depend on the deities and are in their power. So they appeared: the father of the sun - Svarog, the manager of the air element - Stribog. The Slavs loved their Russian land, so they revered Mokosh, the goddess of the earth.
They composed many songs about the land of the nurse. They treated her with kindness and respect. A plowman, for example, before plowing the land, with tears asked for forgiveness from Mother Earth, that he would hurt her, tear with a plow. If a person took an oath in something and ate or kissed the ground, then he had to fulfill his promise. Otherwise, he became an outcast.
The Slavs came up with a Brownie, Leshy, Vodyanoy, Kikimora, Baba Yaga. They believed that at home, in the forest, on the river, there should be an owner who can help a person, or maybe destroy him.
The pagan ones were associated with agricultural work and the change of the year. The day of the spring equinox is the Maslenitsa holiday, the summer solstice is Ivan Kupala, the New Year is Carols. They performed special rituals at birth, death, weddings. All this was accompanied by songs, of which there were a lot.
jealous, before christian religion Slavic peoples are far from known to us enough. Scientists began to be interested in it from the end of the 18th century, when many Slavic peoples awakened their national consciousness, and European literature began to show interest in folk culture and folk art. But by this time, all the Slavic peoples, long converted to Christianity, had managed to forget their ancient beliefs; some of them have preserved only individual folk customs and rituals that were once associated with these beliefs. Therefore, in writings on the themes of the ancient Slavic religion of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there is more romantic fantasy than historical facts. It was only at the end of the last century that attempts began to soberly and seriously consider the surviving data on pre-Christian peoples. The sources for the study of Slavic paganism are, firstly, written records dating back to the 6th-12th centuries, secondly, archaeological monuments, and thirdly, remnants of ancient beliefs and rituals that have been preserved until recently and described in ethnographic literature. The first two categories of sources are very scarce, so the main, defining material for the study of paganism is ethnographic: rituals, round dances, songs, incantations and spells, children's games into which archaic rituals have degenerated, fairy tales that have preserved fragments of ancient mythology and epic; the symbolic ornament of embroidery and woodcarving is also important. Elucidation of the evolution of religious ideas over many millennia requires the introduction of a chronological principle into ethnographic materials. Comparing folklore data with reliable chronological landmarks available to archeology (the beginning of agriculture, the beginning of metal casting, the appearance ofiron, the time of the construction of the first fortifications, etc.), one can catch the dynamics of pagan ideas, identify the stages of their development. Studies of the history of paganism have shown that the evolution of religious ideas took place not by their complete change, but by layering the new on the remaining old. As a result, the ethnographic material revealed relics of the ideas of Paleolithic hunters (the cult of bear paws, "proboscis monsters" - mammoths in fairy tales, etc.), the Mesolithic (single forest hunters), the first farmers of the Eneolithic, and much more from the subsequent, closer time to us.
In the middle of the II millennium BC. an array of Proto-Slavic tribes begins to take shape and separate in a wide strip from the Oder to the Dnieper. Their religious ideas, as far as can be judged from archaeological data, fit into the general scheme of primitive agricultural tribes. This means that the primitive religion of the Praslavyans is a cult of the deification of nature (with remnants of totemism observed in it), developing on the basis of animism and magic, and as the economy grows, there is a transition from the cult of the animal ancestor to the cult of the human ancestor. In Slavic paganism, much of what should be attributed to the common Indo-European unity was deposited; some of the earlier hunting ideas have been preserved, although all this does not yet bear precisely the Slavic specifics; it is acquired in the process of evolution of paganism.
At the very beginning of the XII century. The Russian writer, a contemporary of Vladimir Monomakh (maybe a pilgrim, hegumen Daniel) gave an interesting periodization of Slavic paganism, dividing it into four stages:
1) the cult of "ghouls" (vampires) and "shorelines" - the dualistic animism of primitive hunters of the Stone Age, inspiring all nature and dividing spirits into hostile and benevolent;
2) the cult of the agricultural celestial deities of the Family and "childbirth". Historically, two "women in labor" precede the Rod; these were the goddesses of the fertility of all living things, who later became the matriarchal goddesses of agrarian fertility (Eneolithic). The clan is a further, patriarchal stage in the development of the same ideas, which degenerated in the Bronze Age into primitive agricultural monotheism. 12th century author believes that the cult of the Family was inherent not only to the Slavs, but also to many peoples of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. It is assumed that in the sources Rod also appears under the name of Svarog (literally "Heavenly" - an archaic form) or Stribog ("God the Father" - a form known from the 10th century). In all likelihood, another of the guises of the supreme heavenly deity was the Indo-European Dy. The cult of two "ro-zhanitsy" survived the cult of the Family,
3) the cult of Perun, who in ancient times was the god of thunder, lightning and thunder, and later became the deity of war and the patron saint of warriors and princes. When the state of Kievan Rus was created, Perun became the first, main deity in the princely-state cult of the 10th century.
,4) after the adoption of Christianity in 988, paganism continued to exist, moving to the outskirts of the state.
The Slavs held on to the patriarchal tribal structure for a very long time. Therefore, it is natural that they also retained a family and clan cult in the form of veneration of ancestors, associated with a funeral cult. Throughout the territory inhabited by the Slavic tribes, there are numerous burial grounds and mounds with burials. Burial customs were complex and varied: cremation (especially among the Eastern and partly among the Western Slavs; among the southern Slavs it is not attested), the position of a corpse (everywhere from the 10th to 20th centuries), they were often buried or burned in a boat (a relic of a water burial). A burial mound was usually poured over the grave; different things were always laid with the deceased, during the burial of nobles they killed a horse, sometimes a slave, even the wife of the deceased.
All this is connected with ideas about the afterlife. The word "paradise" - a pre-Christian and common Slavic word - meant a beautiful garden, which apparently depicted the afterlife; but it probably wasn't available to everyone. Of pre-Christian origin, of course, the word "inferno" (literally "heat", "fire"), possibly meaning the underworld, where the souls of the evil ones burn. Subsequently, the Christian doctrine of the future life blocked these ancient ideas. On the other hand, beliefs concerning the relationship of the dead to the living were remarkably firmly held, and they are not entirely similar to Christian ones; those who died a natural death ("pure" dead) and those who died an unnatural death ("impure" dead) were distinguished. The former were called "parents" and were revered, while the latter were feared ghouls. The veneration of "parents" is a real family (and earlier tribal) cult of ancestors, it is attested by medieval authors (Titmar of Merseburg wrote: "They honor household gods");
partly it has survived as vestiges to the present day. Suffice it to recall Russian commemorations, Belarusian dzyads, Serbian and Bulgarian stranglers, when they commemorate the dead in cemeteries. ,
Another trace of the cult of ancestors that once existed is the fantastic image of Chur (or Shchur). The exclamations “Chur!”, “Chur me!”, “Chur, this is mine1” apparently meant a spell, calling Chur for help. Perhaps the images of Chur were made of wood, which is hinted at by the Russian word "churka" - a stump of a tree. And finally
the last vestige of the ancient family-clan cult of ancestors is the belief in the brownie, which has survived to this day where the patriarchal-family way of life lasted longer.
The attitude towards the shady dead, who had not the slightest relation to either the family or the tribal cult, was completely different. The unclean were simply feared, and this superstitious fear was generated either by fear of these people during their lifetime (sorcerers), or by the unusual cause of their death. In superstitious ideas about these unclean dead, there are obviously very few animistic elements: the Slavs were afraid not of the soul or spirit of the dead, but of himself. This is evident from the fact that, until recently, popular superstitious methods of neutralizing such a dangerous dead man lived: in order to prevent him from getting up from the grave and harming the living, the corpse was pierced with an aspen stake, a tooth from a harrow was driven in behind the ears, etc .; in a word, they were afraid of the corpse itself, and not of the soul, and believed in its supernatural ability to move after death. The unclean dead were also attributed a bad influence on the weather, for example, they could cause drought; to prevent it, the corpse of a suicide or other ghoul was dug out of the grave and thrown into a swamp or the grave was flooded with water. Such unclean dead were called ghouls (a word of unclear origin, perhaps purely Slavic, since it is found in all Slavic languages), among the Serbs - vampires, among northern Russians - heretniks, etc. Perhaps the ancient word “Navie”1 (“Navii”) meant just such unclean and dangerous dead, in any case, the Kiev Chronicle contains (marked 1092) a story about how the pestilence (epidemic) that happened in Polotsk scared the people explained by the fact that "Se Navier (the dead) are beating Polochans." In the ancient church teaching "The Word of John Chrysostom" it is also said about some rites in honor of these dead: "they make fire and sing in the middle." The Bulgarians still have navi - these are the souls of unbaptized people. Hence, probably, Ukrainian Navkas, Mavkas. Against all these vampires, ghouls, navi, there have long been conspiracies and magical means.
Written sources preserved the names of ancient Slavic deities, and some of them - later lost - had something to do with agriculture. These included the solar deities Svarog, Dazhdbog, Hora; probably, there was also a cult of the goddess of the earth, although there is no direct evidence in favor of this assumption. It is possible that the thunder god Perun, who later became a princely god in Russia, was also associated with agriculture; whether he was revered by the peasants is unknown. The patron saint of cattle breeding was Veles-Volos, at the same time
There is an assumption about the opposition that existed in antiquity, reality (existing, daytime, sunny) - and chav (night, dark).
the god of the underworld and the dead, it was in his name that they swore. Belee was considered the god of wealth and trade; hence it is clear why his statue was on retail space in Kyiv, Veliky Novgorod, Rostov, and obviously in Kazan.
On the island of Ruyan (Rügen), an intertribal god of war, called Svyatovit, was revered. He lived in the heavily fortified village of Arko-ne, in a shrine full of treasures, he had a white horse and a squad of three hundred cavalry soldiers. Another god on Ruyan was Rugevit, in the temple there was a statue of him with seven faces; there was also a statue of Porevit with five heads, and in another shrine there was a statue of Porenut with five faces. In Szczecin and Volhynia, the three-headed god Triglav was revered. In Wolgast and Havelberg they worshiped Yarovit. A common feature of these seaside deities is their militancy, attributes - a warrior's shield or sword, a war horse, and military banners as emblems. All of them patronized the Baltic tribes in their fight against the German invasions.
From the messages of the Arab author of the second half of the 9th century. Ibn-Rusta knows that all Slavs worshiped Fire - according to Massudi (X century), they revered the Sun. The Slavs revered both earthly and heavenly fire in the form of a flaming solar disk, calling the deity of fire Svarog, and the sun - Svarozhich, and the second name possibly refers to the son of Svarog. The latter was worshiped by both Western and Eastern Slavs as a divine blacksmith. There is nothing surprising in the fact that in the pantheon of the early medieval Slavs, the main places are occupied by Svarog and Svarozhich.
The goddess of happiness Sreka among the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, apparently, is a rather late mythical creation; she borrowed some features from Fortune and Tyche. She acts as fate, like Fatum and the parks; during the festivities, libations were made in her honor, and during trade transactions, coins were donated to her.
Modern studies of the ancient Slavic pantheon testify in favor of the existence of Thracian Rus. V. Shcherbakov, mentioned in the previous juction, in his works “Asgard and the Vans”, “Asgard is the city of the gods” writes the following: “All the gods of the Eastern Slavs (in Kievan Rus) are the gods of the Trojan-Thracians: the Thracian Per-kon is Perun, Stribog is the god Satre of the Thracian Sat-Rov tribe, Dazhdbog is the Asia Minor Tadi, Dazh, Tadaena ... Kupala is the Phrygian Cybele, etc. ”
Tall, physically strong Thracians (who called themselves Russ) believed in the immortality of the soul. With such a people (as well as with the Celts) it was difficult to fight; it is clear that they were part of the Roman legions. At the beginning new era the stream of the Thracians moved north, occupying all the lands suitable for agriculture, up to the banks of the Dnieper (remained
thousands of treasures of the 1st-2nd centuries, in which there are many Roman awards to Thracian legionnaires) It was on the right bank of the Dnieper that Kievan Rus was later formed - a kind of Thracian Rus.
The word god itself is primordially Slavic, common to all Slavic languages, and also related to the ancient Iranian boga and the ancient Indian bhaga. The main meaning of this word, as shown by linguistic data, is happiness, luck. ”) and “y-god” (“y” is a prefix meaning the loss or removal of something); Polish zboze - harvest, Lusatian zbozo, zbze - livestock, prosperity Over time, ideas about luck, success, luck were personified in the image of a certain spirit that gives good luck. As early as the beginning of the 15th century in Moscow, at a royal wedding, one boyar said to another, whose brother was married to the tsar’s sister, arguing with him over the place: “Your brother has God in kike (that is, happiness in kichka, in his wife), and you don't have a god in your kick."
Another common Slavic designation for a supernatural being is a demon. This word, apparently, meant at first everything supernatural and strange (compare the Lithuanian baisas - fear, the Latin boedus - terrible, disgusting). Until now, the words “mad”, “rage” are preserved in the Russian language. After the adoption of Christianity, the word "demon" became a synonym for an evil spirit, equivalent to the concept of the devil, Satan. The same fate befell the concept of the devil. But the pre-Christian meaning of this image is unclear, just as the etymology of the word "devil" is not entirely clear. Of the various attempts to explain it, the most plausible is the assumption of the Czech Karel Erben. He raises it to the Old Slavonic krt, which sounds in the name of the West Slavic god krodo, in the names of the house spirit among the Czechs kret, among the Poles skrzat, among the Latvians krat. Apparently, the same root is in the word "karachun" ("korochun"), which is also known to all Slavs and some of their neighbors. This word has several meanings: the winter holiday of Christmas time, ritual bread baked at this time, as well as some kind of spirit or deity of winter, death. “Korochun grabbed him” in Russian means: “he died.” Probably, the ancient Slavs believed in some deity of winter and death, the personification of winter darkness and cold. But the root "krt" has almost disappeared, and "chrt" - the devil - has been preserved in almost all Slavic languages as the personification of evil supernatural power and has become synonymous with the Christian devil.
During the formation of the early feudal Slavic states, by absorbing various tribes, the reorganization of the pagan cult also took place, the transformation of tribal cults into state ones. In the official cult, the entire ensemble of deities from
separate tribes, among which the god of the tribe that carried out political consolidation dominates, and it is not without interest that this process falls on the 10th century
According to Thietmar, in the metropolitan Radogoshche Velesov, a number of deities headed by Svarog are concentrated in one sanctuary. The cult of Svyatovit, obviously, spread among the Pomeranian Slavs precisely in connection with this socio-political process of state formation. Among the Eastern Slavs, an attempt to create a nationwide pantheon and a state cult was made by Prince Vladimir of Kyiv. According to the chronicler Nestor, in 980 he gathered on one of the hills of Kyiv a host of idols of various gods (Perun, Veles, Dazhdbog, Khors, Stribog, etc.) and ordered to pray and make sacrifices to them. Some researchers believe that these Vladimir gods were from the very beginning princely or retinue gods and their cult had no roots among the people. However, the solar deities Hora, Dazhdbog and others were also folk deities, as the history of the religion of the Slavs testifies; Vladimir only tried to make of them, as it were, the official gods of his principality, in order to give it ideological unity.
But the prince himself was not satisfied with the attempt to create his own pantheon of Slavic gods, and just eight years later he adopted Christianity from Byzantium and forced the whole people to do so, since the Christian religion was more in line with the emerging feudal relations. Although slowly, overcoming the resistance of the people, it spread among the Eastern Slavs. The Western Slavs, under great pressure from the feudal-royal power, adopted Christianity in the Roman Catholic form.The spread of Christianity was accompanied by its fusion with the old religion. The Christian clergy themselves took care of this in order to make the new faith more acceptable to the people. The old agricultural and other holidays were timed to coincide with the days of the church calendar. The old pagan gods gradually merged with the Christian saints and for the most part lost their names, but transferred their functions and attributes to these saints. So, Perun continued to be revered as a thunder deity under the name of Elijah the Prophet, the cattle god Veles - under the name of St. Blaise, etc.
However, the images of "lower mythology" turned out to be more stable. They have survived to the present day, although it is not always easy to distinguish what in these images really comes from ancient times, and what has accumulated on them after.
All Slavic peoples have beliefs about the spirits of nature Spirits - personifications of the forest - are known mainly in the forest belt: Russian goblin, Belarusian Leshuk, Pushchevik, Polish spirit of the forest, upland. They embodied the fearful hostility of the Slavs -
a farmer to a dense forest, from which land had to be won for arable land and in which a person was in danger of getting lost, dying from wild animals. The spirit of the water element - Russian waterman, Polish waterman, Lukitsky water husband (water wife), etc. - inspired much more fear than the relatively good-natured joker goblin, for drowning in a pool, a lake is much more terrible than the danger of getting lost in the forest. The image of a field spirit is characteristic: Russian midday, Lukitskaya naturalist, Czech midday, etc. This is a woman in white, who supposedly appears to be working in the field in the midday heat, when custom requires a break in work: midday punishes the violator of the custom by turning his head or how something else. The image of noon is the personification of the danger of a sunstroke. In the mountainous regions of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, there is a belief about the spirits of the mountains guarding treasures or patronizing miners.
More complex and less clear is the image of a pitchfork, especially common among the Serbs; it is found in both Czech and Russian sources. Some researchers consider it to be common Slavic, others still only South Slavic. Pitchforks are forest, field, mountain, water or air maidens who can behave both friendly and hostile towards a person, depending on his own behavior. In addition to beliefs, pitchforks appear in South Slavic erotic songs. The origin of the image of the vila is unclear, but there is no doubt that different elements are intertwined here: the personification of natural elements, and, perhaps, ideas about the souls of the dead, and the power of fertility.
More clear is the question of mermaids. This image, even more complex, is known to all Slavs. It arose as a result of the influence of ancient and early Christian rituals on the Slavs. The very mythological image of a mermaid - a girl living in water, a forest or a field - is late: it is attested only in the 18th century; it is largely the personification of the holiday or ceremony itself. But this image merged, apparently, with the ancient purely Slavic mythological ideas:
the mermaid loves to lure people into the water and drown people, mermaids embody women and girls who died in the water, etc. Obviously, the new complex image of the mermaid supplanted the original Slavic ancient images of coastlines, vodonitsa and other female water spirits. All these mythological representations of Slavic paganism still live in folklore and literary works.
The roots of healing magic go back to the most ancient era, which among the Slavs, as well as among other peoples, was associated with folk medicine. The church teachings mention, although very unclearly, healing-magical rites, they also talk about the animistic images associated with them:
ki, they bring the demon, and the demon, the verb shaking, they create, repelling ... ”(E. Anichkov). As you know, the use of quackery remedies was preserved among the Slavic (as well as among other) peoples until modern times. Various symptoms of the disease were personified in the form of special evil creatures mentioned in healing conspiracies: “shaking”, “fire”, “yellow”, “lome” and etc.
Protective magic was also widely practiced among the Slavs - the use of various kinds of amulets was common, for example, broken teeth of a bear, already revered by the Proto-Slavs, or Easter eggs, symbolizing resurgent life. For divination, horses were used in Shchecin, Radogoshch and Arkon shrines. They told fortunes according to a variety of signs, threw wooden cubes with marks, led a horse between spears driven into the ground. It is clear that here it was impossible to do without sorcerer-priests.^
The question of the ancient Slavic clergy, performers of religious rites is very unclear. The ritual of the family and clan cult was most likely performed by the heads of families and clans; the public cult was in the hands of special professionals - the Magi. It is possible that already with the emergence of grandiose tribal sanctuaries in the VI-IV centuries. BC. the Proto-Slavs formed some groups of priests-sorcerers who organized the ritual of the “event”, led the process of pagan worship and performed fortune-telling. They made wise calendars, knew "features and cuts", kept in their memory myths that date back at least to the Bronze Age. The Magi were close to the tribal nobility, and, perhaps, were part of it; probably, the supreme priestly power also belonged to the "bright princes" of the tribes.
The common name of the Slavic priests was "wizards" or "wizards", but, judging by the branching of the terminology, there were many different categories in the entire priestly class. There are well-known magicians-clouders, those who were supposed to predict and create the weather necessary for people with their magical actions. There were magicians-healers who treated people with traditional medicine; the clergy recognized their medical success, but believed that it was a sin to turn to them. There were sorcerers-keepers who led the complex business of making amulets-amulets and, obviously, ornamental symbolic compositions. The work of this category of magi can be studied as archaeologists on numerous
The Polish "prince" comes from the same stem as the Russian "prince", but it means not a secular, but a spiritual leader, it is possible that the roots of this split go back to the times when secular and spiritual power was concentrated in one hand
ancient ornaments, which simultaneously served as amulets, and ethnographers based on remnant embroidery plots with the goddess Mokosh (the patroness of women's work, spinning and weaving) and the goddesses of spring, riding horses “with a golden plow”, and numerous symbolic patterns.
It is quite possible that the Magi of the highest rank, close to such guardians in their knowledge of pagan cosmology, led the creation of complex and comprehensive compositions such as the famous Zbruch idol. In addition to the magicians-sorcerers, there were also women sorceresses, witches (from "know" - to know), enchantresses, "indulgences". An interesting category of sorcerers were blasphemers, narrators of "koshchyun"1 - myths, keepers of ancient legends and epic tales. The storytellers were also called bayans, charmers, which is associated with the verb "bayat" - to tell, sing, conjure.
In the ancient Slavic religion, undoubtedly, there were sacred and sacrificial places, and in some places real sanctuaries and temples with images of gods, etc. But only very few are known:
Arkonsky sanctuary on the island of Rügen, sanctuary in Retra, pre-Christian sanctuary in Kyiv (under the Church of the Tithes). In sacred places, a cult was performed, the main part of which was the offering of sacrifices, sometimes human.
The Slavic "kotyup" can go back to the word "bone" - one who manipulates bones, a sorcerer.
Introduction
Slavic paganism originates in ancient times and is based on primitive views, beliefs, rituals common to all mankind. On the basis of such views, all the later world religions developed. One can talk a lot about the history of the Slavs, the development of their languages and countries, but without an analysis of paganism, we are unlikely to be able to understand the Slavic ideology, both medieval and modern.
Slavic paganism is not something closed, frozen once and for all. The way of life of the Slavs, their occupations, and with them their ideas about the origin of the world and man changed. Throughout its existence, paganism has also evolved - the worship of the forces of nature. But there was no complete replacement of one type of faith for another: elements of the cult of the Genus and Women in Childbirth were superimposed on the elements of dualistic animism, on them - elements of anthropomorphic gods, on them - elements of Christianity. The monotheistic Christian church itself has absorbed elements of paganism over the millennium of existence among the Slavs. The people transferred the functions of their gods to the new Christian saints. In Saint Ilya, the image of Perun is clearly traced, in Saint Paraskeva - the image of Mokosh, in Saint Blaise - the image of Veles. The deities that arose under certain conditions acquire new functions over time, their names are replaced by others, acquire additional epithets, their place in the pantheon, as well as their primary function, may change.
Paganism has passed a complex centuries-old path from the archaic, primitive beliefs of an ancient person to the state "princely" religion of Kievan Rus by the 9th century. By this time, paganism was enriched with complex rites (one can single out the burial rite, in which many ideas of the pagans about the world were concentrated), a clear hierarchy of deities (the creation of a pantheon) and had a huge impact on the culture and life of the ancient Slavs.
Ethnographic studies show the amazing vitality of many ideas about the world, which the Slavs transferred even to Christianity. Ethnographers are also surprised by the folk memory: in some legends even extinct giants are mentioned - mammoths "proboscis monsters".
After the adoption of Christianity in Russia, paganism began to be persecuted, but it was not so easy to eradicate the beliefs that had developed over the centuries from the soul of the people. The Christianization of Russia continued for several centuries, as a result, Russian Orthodoxy, at least in the popular imagination, turned into a symbiosis of Byzantine Christianity and Slavic paganism. Many Christian holidays have their roots in paganism. For example, the day of Saints Boris and Gleb (May 2) coincided with the pagan holiday of the first sprouts.
The paganism of the Eastern Slavs is a huge cultural layer of interest to historians, ethnographers and art critics. It is difficult to overestimate its influence on the future fate of the Russian state.
1. Origin of the Eastern Slavs
The ancestors of the Slavs have long lived in Central and Eastern Europe. According to their language, they belong to the Indo-European peoples who inhabit Europe and part of Asia up to India. Archaeologists believe that the Slavic tribes can be traced according to excavations from the middle of the second millennium BC. The ancestors of the Slavs (in the scientific literature they are called Proto-Slavs) are supposedly found among the tribes that inhabited the basin of the Odra, Vistula and Dnieper; Slavic tribes appeared in the Danube basin and in the Balkans only at the beginning of our era.
It is possible that Herodotus speaks about the ancestors of the Slavs when he describes the agricultural tribes of the middle Dnieper region.
He calls them "chips" or "borisfenites" (Boris-fen is the name of the Dnieper among ancient authors), noting that the Greeks erroneously classify them as Scythians, although the Scythians did not know agriculture at all.
Ancient authors of the 1st-6th centuries AD they call the Slavs Wends, Ants, Splapins and speak of them as "countless tribes". The estimated maximum territory of the settlement of the ancestors of the Slavs in the west reached the Elbe (Laba), in the north to the Baltic Sea, in the east - to the Seim and Oka, and in the south their border was a wide strip of forest-steppe, which went from the left bank of the Danube to the east in the direction of Kharkov. Several hundred Slavic tribes lived in this territory.
The resettlement of the Eastern Slavs
In the VI century. from a single Slavic community, the East Slavic branch stands out (future Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian peoples). Around this time, the emergence of large tribal unions of the Eastern Slavs. The chronicle preserved the legend about the reigning in the Middle Dnieper region of the brothers Kyi, Shchek, Khoriv and their sister Lybid and about the founding of Kyiv. The chronicler noted that the same reigns were in other tribal unions, naming more than a dozen tribal unions of the Eastern Slavs. Such a tribal union included 100-200 separate tribes. Near Kyiv, on the right bank of the Dnieper, there lived a clearing. Along the upper reaches of the Dnieper and along the Western Dvina - Krivichi. On the banks of the Pripyat - the Drevlyans. Along the Dniester, the Prut, the lower reaches of the Dnieper and along the northern coast of the Black Sea - streets and Tivertsy. Along the Oka - Vyatichi, in the western regions of modern Ukraine - Volynians, north of Pripyat to the Western Dvina - Dregovichi, along the left bank of the Dnieper and along the Desna - northerners, along the Sozh River, a tributary of the Dnieper - Radimichi, around Lake Ilmen - Ilmen Slavs ( Slovenia).
The chronicler noted the uneven development of individual East Slavic associations. He shows the most cultured glades. To the north of them was a kind of border, beyond which the tribes lived in a "bestial way." According to the chronicler, the land of the glades also bore the name "Rus". One of the explanations of the origin of the term "Rus", put forward by historians, is associated with the name of the Ros River, a tributary of the Dnieper, which gave the name of the tribe on whose territory the meadow lived.
The data of the chronicler about the location of the Slavic tribal unions are confirmed by archaeological materials. In particular, the data on various forms of women's jewelry (temporal rings) obtained as a result of archaeological excavations coincide with the indications of the annals on the placement of Slavic tribal unions. The neighbors of the Eastern Slavs in the west were the Baltic peoples, the Western Slavs (Poles, Czechs), in the south - the Pechenegs and Khazars, in the east - the Volga Bulgars and numerous Finno-Ugric tribes.
3. Pagan beliefs of the Eastern Slavs
Modern Ukrainian historian Ya.E. Borovsky wrote about the rituals and customs of the pagan Slavs in the book “The Mythological World of Ancient Kiev”: “Since ancient times, long before the adoption of Christianity, our ancestors deified the forces of nature they did not understand and worshiped rivers, lakes, springs, trees and animals.”
The chronicle, talking about the Eastern Slavs, notes the diversity of their pagan rites: "... they had their own customs, and the laws of their fathers and traditions, and each their own disposition." These words refer to the tribes of glades, drevlyans, dregovichi, polchan, krivichi, northerners, radimichi, vyatichi.
The chronicler singles out the glades in particular, who honor "the custom of their fathers, meek and quiet, and before their daughters-in-law and sisters, mothers and parents, before their mothers-in-law, they have great shame." The meadows had a marriage custom, according to which the son-in-law did not go to take the bride. They brought her the day before, and the next day they brought her for her, "who will give what." But the Drevlyans, the nearest neighbors of the glades, did not know marriages, they abducted girls for themselves near the water and lived "like bestiality." Radimichi, Vyatichi and northerners had similar customs. They lived in the forest, the chronicler notes, like animals, they did not have marriages, but arranged games between the villages.
They converged on these games, on dances and on all sorts of demonic songs, and here they kidnapped (kidnapped) their wives in collusion with them.
In chronicle descriptions, we notice a sharp contrast between the tribes. Nestor the chronicler, who compiled The Tale of Bygone Years in 1113 in Kyiv, praised the glades baptized at one time and, on the contrary, showed the rather ugly life of other tribes who “lived in the forest like animals” and still adhered to pagan customs.
The glades (and especially the people of Kiev) were at a higher level of development than the northern tribes, which is why they are called wise and intelligent. They build cities, adhere to the good customs of their fathers, have proper family relationships ...
The story about the pagan glades refers to the well-known legend about the foundation of Kyiv by three brothers - Kiy, Shchek and Khoriv.
It is interesting that in the "History of the Russian" V.N. Tatishchev (XVIII century), the message about the veneration of lakes, wells and trees by glades is supplemented with lines that are not in any of the annalistic lists. This refers to the veneration of the Sun, Fire and other gods by the people of Kiev: “These men were wise and smart, they are called glades to this day, by faith they were then pagans, they made sacrifices to lakes, wells and growths. The sun and fire and others were revered as gods, as other pagans do.
This concept usually means a complex of views, beliefs and cults of the ancient Slavs, which existed before the introduction of Christianity in 988 by Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich, which is still preserved in the culture of the Slavic peoples as traditions, and the original foundation of ancient culture.
The term "paganism" has a Christian bookish origin and is applied to the beliefs of various peoples. In relation to the mythology and religion of the Slavs, the use of this term is fully justified by its Slavic etymology. The word "language" meant, among other things, "a separate people, a tribe." The Russian chronicler, talking about the history of the Slavs, was of the opinion that all the Slavs came from a single root: “There was one Slavic language: the Slavs who sat along the Danube. sold out Slavic…". Thus, the word "paganism" can be used as a synonym for the folk, tribal religion of the Slavs.
It is worth noting that the Slavs themselves, judging by many sources, never called themselves "pagans" since this name is given by an external observer and serves rather to generalize the archaic religions of various peoples.
Slavic mythology and religion were formed over a long period in the process of separating the ancient Slavs from the Indo-European community of peoples in the II-I millennium BC. and in interaction with the mythology and religion of neighboring peoples.
Historians identify a significant layer of Indo-European vocabulary, which was used by the pagans as sacred. Among the parallels: Svarog and svarga, Makosh and moksha, company (oath) and rita (in Sanskrit "order"), prophetic and Vesta, witch and Vedas, Divas and virgins, etc. Among the oldest cults that have common Indo-European and European roots, one can name the twin myth, the cult of the bull and the horn, the worship of the Moon and the Sun. Since the Middle Ages, it has been traditional to identify Slavic deities with the gods and characters of Greco-Roman mythology, who have much in common.
But it is worth considering what was the cause and what was the effect? In my opinion, it is impossible to say with absolute certainty that the Slavic deities were borrowed from ancient Greek mythology. The basis for these doubts is the uncertainty of the history of the Slavs before their arrival in Europe. It is possible that this similarity is due to nothing more than archetypes that lie in the deep layers of the collective unconscious.
The religion of the Slavs is not homogeneous, this is most likely due to the territorial features and living conditions of various Slavic peoples. Along with the common Slavic deities (Svarog, Perun, Lada), each tribe developed its own pantheon of gods, the same gods received different names. It can be argued that in the early Middle Ages, the beliefs of the western Baltic Slavs and the eastern Dnieper Slavs were divided, while the paganism of the southern, eastern, and also Polish Slavs largely retained unity.
During the settlement of the Slavic tribes in the VI-IX centuries. their culture was mixed with the beliefs of the local Finno-Ugric, Baltic and Turkic peoples. This caused a strong fragmentation and inter-tribal enmity of the Slavs. Each village could have its own gods, and religious conflicts arose with enviable regularity.
Slavic paganism refers to polytheistic religions, that is, the Slavs recognized the existence of many gods. The pagan, using the word "god", had in mind a specific supernatural being, a representative of the Slavic clans, who reached the spiritual level of the Creator and got the opportunity to operate with the processes of the universe. The Slavs say: "Our gods are our ancestors, and we are their children."
A feature of Slavic paganism is often the allocation of its main deity for each tribe. So in the treaties of Russia with Byzantium, Perun is called "our god", "in whom we believe." Helmold speaks of the worship of Svyatovit, "to whom a temple and an idol were dedicated to the greatest splendor, precisely attributing primacy among the gods to him." At the same time, the Slavs, like the Balts, had an idea of the supreme deity. But, as a rule, these gods could be different for different tribes.
Dualism is characteristic of Slavic paganism. If among the Scandinavians, for example, it is difficult to identify "good" and "evil" gods, then the Slavs distinguished and contrasted the black and white beginnings of the world, dark and light, earthly and heavenly, feminine and masculine. Such opposition is known for Belobog and Chernobog, Perun and Veles, Svyatovit and his nocturnal enemies. The researchers noticed that neither Veles, nor Svarog, nor Rod, the most important gods who opposed Perun, entered the pantheon of Prince Vladimir.
Universe of ancient Slavs
The Slavs divided the world into three tiers. The upper tier is the sky, the world of the gods. The middle tier is the world of people. The lower, underground tier is the world of spirits, shadows. Each tier had a digital designation (1,2,3) and was symbolized by birds (sky), a wolf and a bear (earth) and a snake (underworld). The lower tier included several parts, it was possible to penetrate underground, and it was possible to return back through wells, rivers, lakes and seas.
All three tiers were united by the world tree, or the tree of life: its roots went underground, the trunk and hollow in it - in the world of people, and the branches - in the sky. According to scientists, the oak was the world tree among the Slavs. The letter "Zh" is associated with the image of a tree
The sun, moving around the world of people along its path ("the path of Khors"), visits both the sky and the underworld (the night Sun). A special place is occupied by the moments of sunrise and sunset (images of the evening and morning Dawn).
The Slavs singled out four or eight cardinal directions. The most significant were the west, as the orientation of the body of the deceased in the grave, and the northeast, as the orientation of the temples to the point of sunrise on the day of the summer solstice.
The element that binds the universe, for the Slavs, was fire. It was used when making sacrifices, at funerals, at holidays, for protective purposes, etc. Fire was a symbol of eternity. The personification of fire was Svarog. Researchers call Svarog the god of the universe. Arab authors call Slavs and Russes fire-worshippers.
It is believed that the Slavs had ideas about "paradise", which in East Slavic folklore is called Iriy (Vyriy), this place is associated with the Sun and birds, is located in the south or underground (under water, in a well). The souls of the dead go there. There are also ideas about the island of Buyan, also identified with the other world. In medieval Novgorod, there was an idea that paradise could be reached by sea, and that allegedly one of the Novgorodians did this by going east.
The Eastern Slavs associate the origin of people with Dazhbog, the son of Svarog. All Slavs believed in life after death, believed in immortality. It was believed that after burning, the soul of the deceased went to heaven. According to some researchers, the Slavs believed in reincarnation.
Periodization of the development of Slavic paganism
B.A. Rybakov compiled his periodization of Slavic paganism, it includes three stages.
I am the stage. People live in the Stone Age, fight with clubs and stones, know only group marriage, and before the appearance of Svapog, obviously, they do not know a single god. At that time there was a lunar calendar.
I am the stage. The era of Svarog. The deity of sky and fire appeared - Svapog. People got to know metal. Monogamy is established and a cruel execution (burning) is established for violating it.
I am the stage. The era of Dazhbog. A class society was established, people began to pay tribute to the kings. And, in all likelihood, at this time, in connection with the cult of the Sun, the old account of lunar months was replaced by a solar calendar of 12 months.
This periodization does not accurately reflect the chronicle text, since it deals with two periods - before and after the reigns of Svarog and Dazhbog. The first period is characterized by matriarchal orders, the lunar calendar and stone tools. The second - patriarchy, solar calendar, metal weapons, the presence of princely power and faith in the gods. In this work, I do not consider it appropriate to present other views on periodization, since this is a topic for a separate work. It is worth noting that there are plenty of views on this: each historian tried to compile his own periodization. Therefore, it is quite difficult to judge the reliability of Rybakov's systems.
6. Gods of the Eastern Slavs
Belobog (Belbog, Rod) - a deity symbolizing the primordial good. In many cases, B. is not so much a proper name, but an epithet of one of the progenitors of the gods - Rod (see "Kin") or (much less often) Svarog (see "Svarog"). It is one of the few examples of dualistic ideas of the ancient Slavs. An attempt to reconstruct the protopantheon of the linguistic ancestors of the Slavs also suggests that initially B. and Veles (see "Veles") were one deity.
Veles (Volos) is one of the very first deities of the Proto-Slavs, thanks to which it has many spheres of influence. Being originally the god of the forest and animals, he gradually becomes the "god of slaughtered animals" or the god of hunting, and hence his influence on everything connected with hunting in those days - shamanism and witchcraft, power and leadership, as well as prosperity and wealth. It is possible that it was at that time that he was also revered as the god of the moon (see "Volodimir", "Month") and as the god of the afterlife (see "Ny", "Nyya"). With the promotion of agriculture to the fore, the functions of V. were supplemented by the patronage of crops and domestic animals. In the middle of the tenth century, this deity cedes such a sphere of influence as power to another god - Perun (see "Perun").
Winds (Winds) - in relation to this divine family, researchers disagree. Some indicate a single deity of the wind (see "Stribog", "Pozvizd"), others also speak of his children, the number of which ranges from three to eight. The names of V. are called different each time, which does not allow us to collect a single picture. These names are listed below in alphabetical order. As for the appearance of the winds, according to ethnic legends, they appear as people of different ages (young men and mature men) in disheveled clothes and disheveled hair. "The Lay of Igor's Campaign" adds to the winds such an attribute as bows and arrows.
Dazhdbog - the god of the sun (according to T. Muravyova - the autumn sun), the second son of Svarog (see "Svarog") and the grandfather of people. Despite the sufficient antiquity of the deity, the very form of his name belongs to later times and has pronounced Iranian roots. It is possible that his original name was Dazhd. However, this form can be more of an epithet than a name. D. was known among the people as a giver of blessings and a vigilant witness to human affairs. He owns twelve kingdoms, and his halls were located on high mountains, in the land of eternal summer and eternal youth. Depicted as a mature man with a fire shield. Initially, it was believed that D. makes a circle of his way on a boat drawn by waterfowl. Later, the boat was already used by him only for moving along the Navi at night, and during the day it was replaced by a chariot drawn by white horses. Scholars explain this change by the clash between the sedentary Slavic culture and the nomadic culture of the Asian peoples.
Zhiva - goddess of life and fertility
Zarya Vechernyaya is the goddess of the evening sky. Depicted as a woman in green clothes with a box in her hands.
Dawn Morning - the goddess of the morning sky. Depicted as a woman in red clothes; in her hands is a torch and a ring.
Kashchei - despite the utmost clarity of the functions of this god, disputes have not subsided so far. According to most experts, K. is one of the names or incarnations of the god of evil (see "Chernobog"), and his name comes from the word "backbone" (skeleton) or "bone". A. Buenok offers another version, according to which K. is the name of the sun, locked in the ground during the winter, and that his name comes from the word "kosh" (bag, purse or fate, fate) and is directly related to the name Mokosh (see "Mokosh"). And Asov completely unreasonably considers the name K. to come from the word "cat" and is the name of the Magi. The first theory seems to me more probable, since it is confirmed by ethnic oral works, but the second deserves attention both for its originality and logic. K. was portrayed as a very thin man, inseparably watching wealth. This, by the way, fully corresponds to the concept of "kosh". Worthy of attention is the translation of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", where K. is mentioned twice and under different definitions. In one case, this name is translated as "nomad", and in the other - it is used as a curse and denotes a slave, which, in principle, also corresponds to the concept of "kosh".
Kolyada is one of the names of the sun god (according to T. Muravyova - the winter sun), meaning "round". According to D. Dudko, under this name the solar deity of the Slavs is the patron of animals. K. introduced himself as a rider on a white horse.
Kupalo - there were fierce disputes about the functions of this deity for a long time. Versions were put forward like that K. is one of the epithets of Lada (see "Lada"). Currently Yu.D. Petukhov very competently drew analogies between K. and Apollo, as well as between the words "dome", "boil", "bale", "kapa" (skull) and "drop". It follows from this reconstruction that the indicated name is one of the archaic names of the sun god (see "Dazhdbog", "Kolyada", "Khors"). According to T. Muravyova, K. is the god of the summer sun specifically.
Lada is the goddess of happiness, order, family, beauty and marriage. According to B. Rybakov, L. is one of the two Rozhanitsy and one of the very first goddesses of mankind. D. Dudko seeks to merge many female deities (such as Mokosh, Zhiva, etc.) in the image of one goddess - L., which, however, is very controversial. There is a theory according to which L. was the individual deity of each person, but this version does not stand up to scrutiny of any kind. L. was originally depicted as a pregnant or portly woman, but during the time of our era, due to changes in Slavic ideas about beauty, L. already appears as a slender woman. On embroideries, it is symbolized by a figure with arms raised up or with a figure under it.
Lelya is the goddess of infancy, growth, maturation and maturation. According to B. Rybakov, L. is one of the Rozhanitsa (see "Rozhanitsa") and one of the very first goddesses of mankind.
Letnitsa (Dodola, Peperuda) - the goddess of rain and the wife of Perun (see "Perun"). Depicted as a naked young woman dancing under jets of water.
Mother Earth is one of the most ancient goddesses, most revered by the Slavic peoples. She was called the universal mother and guardian (from where one of her epithets, Bereginya, may come from (see "Bereginya")). According to the most common version, she is the wife of heaven (Svarog (see "Svarog")), while others call her husband Yarilo (see "Yarilo").
The month is one of the names of the moon god. In this interpretation, he was revered as the sun of the dead. According to the most archaic beliefs, M. is the unfaithful husband of the sun, and the stars are their children.
Mokosh - originally the goddess of moisture and fertility (from where the name "Mokosh" originates, which is akin to the words "wet" and "sputum"). Around 8-5 millennium BC. the entire female half of the household was added to its functions (spinning, weaving, storage, etc.), and the name was transformed into Makosh - "mother of the household" or "mother of the lot". Depicted as a portly (sometimes three-breasted) woman. On Neolithic figurines, a ball of snakes was depicted on her chest (which confirms her connection with rain and dew). On the Zbruch idol, M. is depicted holding a horn (of abundance?). On embroideries, she is represented by a figure with her hands lowered to the ground or a figure towering over the other two surrounding her. M. was represented as the wife of Veles (see "Veles") or Stribog (see "Stribog"), or Perun (see "Perun"). The latter fact allows us to identify her and Letnitsa (see "Letnitsa"). However, this is yet to be proven.
Perun is the god of thunder and war, a symbol of heavenly justice. With the advancement of the military nobility among the Slavs, he gradually became her god, and the first religious reform of Prince Vladimir made P. for a short time the head of the Slavic pantheon. This god was revered as the first son of Svarog (see "Svarog"). He was depicted as a gray-headed, red-bearded, elderly warrior in full armor, holding in his hand either a club or a bright gem, symbolizing lightning in this case. According to T. Muravyova, P. was accompanied by the demigods Thunder, Lightning, Rain and Hurricane. And A.N. Afanasiev cites an archaic belief, according to which the sun is the wife of P.
Rod is the god-creator of the Universe (otherwise - protodemiurge). He is also called Belobog (see "Belobog") or Dyem (see "Dyy") and is charged with not only the creation of the world and the birth of gods, but also the phenomena of rain, ball lightning, fertility and childbearing. It was believed that the sun came from his face, stars from his eyes, a moon from his chest, dawns from his eyebrows, night from his thoughts, winds from his breath, rain and snow from tears, thunder and lightning from his voice. Depicted as a four-faced deity (Zbruch idol). According to one of my theories, R. is not the name of a separate deity, but the designation of the entire Slavic pantheon (which, however, needs complementary or refuting facts).
Svarog is the god of the sky and blacksmithing, the son of Rod (see "Rod"), the father of gods and people, who taught the latter to forge iron and plow the earth. Depicted as a gray-haired mighty old man with blacksmith tongs.
Svarozhich - the patronymic name of the fourth son of Svarog (see "Svarog") - the god of fire (see "Zhyzh", "Pek", "Rarog", "Radigost").
Stribog is the god of the wind and the father of the wind brothers (see "Winds"). Some researchers (including, unfortunately, B. Rybakov) deduce the origin of this name from Iranian roots and, having translated the name as "exalted god", believe that it was just an epithet of Svarog (see "Svarog" ), however, the following facts speak against this theory:
Chernobog is the god of evil. Depicted as a black man with a silver mustache. He was considered the brother-antipode of Belobog (see "Belobog") and one of the few examples of the dualism of the religion of the Slavs.
Yaga is the wife of Chernobog (see "Chernobog"), the progenitor of evil spirits and the guardian of the gates of Navi. Depicted as a huge ugly old woman with iron breasts and a bone leg. The existence of this character among the gods could be considered controversial if it were not for her three features that speak for the divine nature:
a) Lada and Yaga are antonyms, and if such a character as Lada (see "Lada") is not one of the last deities, then it can be suspected that Yaga was a goddess, and not an ordinary witch, as is customary consider;
Yarilo (Yarun (according to P.I. Melnikov - Yar-Khmel)) is a very "multifunctional" god. The sphere of its influence includes: the fertility of the earth and the fertility of people, love and debauchery, rage and vitality, colors, paints and even the sun (according to T. Muravyova - the spring sun). Revered as the third son of Svarog (see "Svarog"). Depicted as a young rider on a white horse, holding ears of corn in one hand and a skull in the other.
The presence of several main Gods forming a heavenly hierarchy
Each God has its own functions, its actions explain some natural phenomena
Rites, traditions, cults associated with a particular God
So it is with the Slavs. Seeing lightning, hearing thunder, they created their own religion. Paganism, although outwardly similar, had some differences, because you need to understand that there were no clear dogmas establishing certain connections and actions. The differences are also explained by the mixed composition of the population. And also the place of residence of the tribes. Ideas about incomprehensible forces are often correlated with the geographical features of the area, as well as with the specific occupations of its population (tribes living in the mountains and worshiping the spirits of the mountains cannot often perceive the rites of the inhabitants of the steppes and plains). But if you do not dwell on minor differences, that paganism throughout the territory of Kievan Rus was one and the same. As I said in the introduction about the Slavs, books are written that are rather thick and voluminous, but since the heyday of paganism has sunk into oblivion, only facts remain that allow us to study this historical issue. There are very few sources on this issue. The first and most important source of information about Slavic paganism is the "Word of the Idols" - a work by an unknown Christian author, the text of which is based on the famous work of Gregory the Theologian. The system of the "Tale of Idols" is given against a very broad comparative background of all the religions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Asia Minor known to the literature of that time, with the addition of Islam. The author of the Lay arranged his chronological milestones in accordance with the cult that he considered the most basic - the cult of the Family, which, in his opinion, constituted the main content of contemporary pagan sacrifices in Russia. The work clearly defines the chronological milestones of Russian paganism:
1. The cult of ghouls and coastlines.
2. The cult of the Family as the deity of the Universe, all nature and fertility. It seems to the author that the cult is close to the cult of Osiris ( Ancient Egypt) and was distributed in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, from where it reached the Slavic world, obscuring the old demonology. Chronologically, the cult of Rod and Rozhanits should have covered the entire era of agricultural (non-irrigated) economy.
Cult of Perun. God of thunder, thunder and lightning. Also a very ancient cult (correlated with the ancient Indian Parjanya-Indra).
As you can see, not a very comprehensive source. After all, there were not even several Gods, but much more. But there is nothing to do, so in the future I will refer to it. Interestingly, the Slavs did not have a pronounced mythology. And there was no writing as such (Cyril and Methodius will come a little later). Stone temples, as they didn’t build in Athens, they didn’t make statues, they didn’t write books, basically all God and religious objects were made of wood, so archaeologists can do little to help. In Russia, the country of cities, there was no habit of building temples to their gods. Places of worship were called temples, which were also not particularly common. The most famous were in Novgorod and Kiev. But I stop the eternal demagoguery of historians about the sharp lack of historical facts and proceed to the presentation of these facts (no matter how tautological it may sound).
Hierarchy of Slavic Gods
As already mentioned in the “Word about idols”, there were not only Higher Gods, but also Lower ones, not even Gods, but Deities. From here it is possible to make some conditional division into Higher and Lower mythology. Higher mythology includes information about gods and goddesses who have various functions of controlling the entire surrounding world and predetermining human destiny. Such gods throughout history were first sanctuaries, then temples, people and domestic animals were sacrificed. The lower mythology is its section, which studies various small deities of local significance, living in a pond, in the sea (siren), in the thicket of the forest (forest spirits - rakshasas in Indian mythology, - I compare with deities from Indian mythology because in the book there were precisely these comparisons, but this does not mean that paganism is akin in spirit to Indian mythology, and it has nothing in common with others, on the contrary, one can find a lot in common in each, for example, the same God Perun is in many ways similar to the Thunderer Zeus, from the Greek epic), in the field, etc. These were, as a rule, various spirits inhabiting a person’s dwelling and the world around him, on which well-being in the house, successful hunting, and a good harvest often depended.
The highest deities, as a rule, had a certain external appearance and had their own internal hierarchy. At the head was the supreme god, controlling all the other gods, like a king over his subjects on earth.
So, as signs of the difference between higher and lower mythology, conscious myth-making in higher mythology is singled out (priests, if they do not create special myths, then systematize the mythological heritage for the purposes of official religion) and spontaneous - in the lower. Consequently, in contrast to lower mythology, plots, themes, images of higher mythology are more harmonious, more uniform, more definite. At the same time, if we talk about the antiquity of origin, then the highest mythology arises much later, in the era of the formation of a class society, which is clearly reflected in the hierarchy of the supreme deities.
9. Honoring forests and groves
As the chronicle indicates, the people of Kiev worshiped trees, that is, they revered forests and groves, dedicating them to the gods. Separate groves among the Slavs were completely deified: they were not allowed to catch birds, animals, or cut down trees. Severe punishment, sometimes death, awaited violators. Forests and groves were considered dwellings of the gods. Therefore, here, sometimes near individual trees, they worshiped a deity, conducted worship, and made sacrifices. The veneration of trees among the Slavs is indicated by foreign sources, folk legends. The "Ustav" of Vladimir and church courts, for example, speak of those "who pray in the grove." The worship of trees is mentioned in the life of Konstantin of Murom, the sacrifices to the groves - in the Gustyn chronicle.
According to scientists, the veneration of sacred trees, along with the deification of water and the cult of fire under the barn, are the main features of the folk faith of our ancestors. This faith among the tribes, who lived mainly by agriculture, was associated with agriculture, that is, these cults were of economic importance.
In addition to worshiping water and trees, the Eastern Slavs revered the sun, moon, stars and fire as special deities.
Deification of the Sun
The sun has been revered by the Eastern Slavs for a long time. It is not for nothing that the Arab writer of the 10th century, Al-Masudi, calls the Slavic pagans sun-worshippers.
In the 12th-century apocrypha "The Virgin's Journey through Torment", among other Slavic gods, the sun god is also mentioned. Yaroslavna turns to the sun as a deity in lamentation. Here is how the author of The Tale of Igor's Campaign writes about it:
Yaroslavna cries early in Putivl on her visor, saying: “The bright and crackling sun! You are warm and beautiful for everyone. Why, sir, did you stretch your hot torches of my dear warriors? »
Yes, and the main characters of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" Oleg and Igor considered themselves the grandchildren of the sun god.
Undoubtedly, the ancient Slav saw in the sun a powerful giver of heat and light, representing him as a red-hot heavenly fire, a wheel on which his life and well-being depended entirely. The change of seasons evoked ideas of a dying and resurrecting god. The sun was spoken of as a living being: it wakes up from sleep, sets down, hides behind the clouds.
They swore by the sun at the conclusion peace treaties: oaths and spells were proclaimed towards the rising of the divine luminary. Often priests, sorcerers and other servants of the supreme deity on earth acted on his behalf. The red sun, reviving all nature, was also dedicated to special holidays - Ivan Kupala, Kolyada, wires. They were accompanied by ritual games, dances and songs, in which people glorified the sun, asked him for rain and harvest. However, the sun was not only kind. As a living being, it was angry with people, and sometimes brought misfortune. In The Tale of Igor's Campaign, the sun with its hot rays destroys the soldiers of Prince Igor.
As you can see, the Slavs revered the bright, bright sun most of all. Therefore, it is not surprising that Kiy, Shchek and Khoriv, their warriors and ordinary Kievans worshiped the red sun. Over time, they could call the sun Trojan. It is not for nothing that the name of this deity is mentioned four times in the Tale of Igor's Campaign when indicating the "ages of Troyan", "the land of Troyan", "Troyan's path" and "the seventh century of Troyan".
The original meaning of Troyan lies in the triune deity, recognized by many religions of ancient peoples in all periods of human civilization. In ancient Russia, the word Troyan was interpreted as three suns in one, that is, three Jans.
Other East Slavic tribes, neighbors of the glades, could call the solar deity in their own way. Therefore, in ancient monuments we meet such names of the sun among the Eastern Slavs as Dazhdbog, Yarilo, Kupalo, Kolyada, Troyan.
Honoring fire. Svarog
Another god that the people of Kiev revered was Fire. In ancient times and during the Kiya, he could be called Svarog. Indeed, in the view of the ancients, it was Svarog who personified Heaven and was a god who kindles fire and gives life to the sun, that is, he was the father of Svarozhich and Dazhdbog - the two most powerful gods in Russia. In addition, the name of Svarog, the supreme god of the Slavs, and its origin are associated with Sanskrit words denoting light, the sun in the sky. And this confirms that Svarog in ancient times was the god of light, the sky and the whole world, like the most ancient main deity of the Greeks Uranus.
The supreme ruler of the world, the lord of heavenly fire, Svarog, in the translated monuments of the 12th century, is identified with the Greek Hephaestus, the god of fire and the blacksmith god. So, in the story about Svarog-Hephaestus in the Ipatiev Chronicle, extracts from the chronicle of John Malala are given. In the time of Svarog, the chronicler noted, people learned to “forge weapons”, mastered the art of blacksmithing. The name of Svarog is also associated with the struggle for a monogamous family, monogamy, in connection with which he was considered the patron saint of marriage and family.
Perun - god of thunder and lightning
After Svarog and Rod, the main place among the pagan gods of Ancient Russia was taken by Perun, the god of thunder and lightning. In terms of its functions, Perun resembles the Greek god Zeus, the Roman Jupiter, the Scandinavian Odin.
From the texts of the treaties between the Rus and the Greeks, it is known that the princely squads of Oleg, Igor and Svyatoslav invariably took the oath in the name of Perun. The oath was constantly attached to the traditional oath by arms. So, telling about the conclusion of peace between the Greeks and Oleg, the chronicler notes: “And Oleg and his husbands were taken in an oath according to Russian law, and they swore by their weapons and Perun, their god.” The oath of 945 is even more effective: “If any of the princes or people of Russia, Christians or non-Christians, violates what is written in this charter, let him be worthy to die from his weapon and be damned from God and from Perun for who broke his oath."
The perjurer was awaited by a formidable and terrible revenge inexorable god, as stated in the agreement between Svyatoslav and the Greeks in 971: “If we do not comply with any of what was said before, let me (that is, Prince Svyatoslav. - B.V.) and those who are with me and under by me, we will be cursed from the god in whom we believe - from Perun and Volos, the god of cattle, and let us be yellow as gold, and let our own weapons cut us.
From the agreements of the Rus with the Greeks, recorded in the Tale of Bygone Years, it is clear that Perun of the 10th century became the god of weapons, the princely squad, the patron of the prince himself, that is, the god of princely squad Russia.
The idol of Perun stood in Kyiv on a mountain. Here is how the “Tale of Bygone Years” tells about this under the year 945: “The next day Igor called on the ambassadors and came to the hill where Perun stood; and laid down their weapons, and shields, and gold, and Igor and his people swore allegiance - how many pagans were among the Russians. According to researchers, in particular E. V. Anichkov, the idol of Perun mentioned here stood in the princely court of the Igoreviches, that is, in the ancient settlement on Starokievsky Hill.
When Prince Vladimir became the ruler of Russia, that is, the prince and the squad became political power, then, according to the annals, Perun was placed “outside the terem courtyard” on a hill, surrounded by a host of other gods. The foundation of the pagan pantheon in Kyiv was carried out with the aim of uniting various tribes into a single state with a single faith. Perun - the god of princes and warriors - was turned by Vladimir into the main deity of the entire Russian land.
Among the newly appointed gods (Dazhdbog, Khors, Stribog, Simargl, Mokosh), the chronicler puts Perun in the first place. This almighty god had a human likeness. His body was carved from wood, his head was cast from silver, and his mustache was made from gold. The Gustyn chronicle complements the image of Perun: his legs were iron, his eyes were made of precious stones. In his hand he held a stone likeness of an arrow, showered with yahonts. A fire always burned in front of Perun, which the priests, under pain of death, were obliged to maintain.
The cult of Perun was also established in Novgorod. Thus, the two main points on the way from the "Varangians to the Greeks" were united by a single cult. The Novgorod sanctuary was placed on the left bank of the Volkhov, on a high hill. In the center stood the idol of Perun. He held a heavy oak staff and looked to the east, and around him eight fires were constantly burning.
The introduction of Christianity in Russia led to the destruction of all the idols of that time, including Perun. Vladimir ordered to overthrow the idols: some to chop, others to burn. According to the chronicle, the main god of Kyiv and Russia was the first to be overthrown. He was tied to the tail of a horse and dragged from the mountain along the Borichev vozvoz to the Dnieper, and 12 strong men beat the god with rods. And they threw Perun into the Dnieper, and he swam, and the pagans ran after him and shouted: "Swim out, God, swim out." Passed Perun thresholds, and threw him ashore by the wind. Since that time, that place has been called Perunova shoal.
No less miserable was the fate of the Novgorod Perun. Legends say that the newly baptized Novgorodians threw the idol into the Volkhov. One of the Novgorodians threw to Perun that he “ate and drank to his full,” mocking his shameful departure from Novgorod by Volkhov. The enraged Perun seemed to wave an oak club at him and threw it onto the bridge, shouting to people: “Remember me and fight on this bridge.” So in the old days the reason for the frequent clashes of Novgorodians on the bridge over the Volkhov was explained, and their sticks were called Perun's clubs.
paganism slavic religious
13. Pagan Holidays
Mermaid week
Mermaid Week is celebrated right before Kupala or the summer solstice. In a different way, Mermaid Week is called Gryana Week, Seeing Mermaids, Green Week, Green Christmastide, Rusalia, Semik, Ukrainian. Klechalnaya week, Polish, lit. Green week, Czech. words. Rusalda. At the end of the week, various rituals are performed, such as Seeing the Mermaids, the Funeral of Kostroma, and so on (for more details, see Kupala<#"justify">Kupala holiday
Kupala (Kupailo, Kolosok, Kres, Yarilin Day, Soncekres, Kokuy, Summer Solstice, Ivan the Herbalist) is one of the most revered holidays that has come down to our days from the boundless depths of centuries. Kupala is a holiday of the summer solstice, which is celebrated on June 20-24, depending on the year. For example, in 2013, the summer solstice will be June 21st. With the advent of the Internet, it became very easy to determine the exact day of the solstice, just enter the necessary request and you will get the exact date when it is worth celebrating Kupala. Now it is better known as Ivan Kupala or Ivan's Day, named after the Christian Saint John the Baptist. Ivan Kupala, unlike the real holiday of Kupail or Kupala, is not timed to coincide with the solstice, but is celebrated on the date of the birth of John the Baptist on July 7th. It makes no sense to celebrate Kupala on July 7 according to pagan traditions, with bonfires, wreaths, searching for ferns, since the solstice has long been left behind. Our ancestors celebrated it exactly at the solstice, which occurs on the shortest night of the year - the Night on the Eve of Kupala. In fact, this holiday does not belong at all to John the Baptist or some incomprehensible Ivan Kupala, but to the pagan God Kupala (Kupailo). One of the myths about Kupala and Kolyada is closely connected with this holiday, which can be read here "The Tale of Kostroma and its brother Kupala<#"justify">Shrovetide holiday (Komoeditsa)
Maslenitsa or pagan Komoyeditsa. In what follows, I will use both names. Komoyeditsa is traditionally celebrated on March 21-22. This date is considered the beginning of astronomical spring, and according to the Slavic-pagan tradition, the Day of the Creation of the World. This holiday is timed to the spring equinox (day and night are equal in time), one of the four main holidays associated with the sun. From this day on, solar time becomes longer, and the sun becomes young Yarila and drives away Zima-Marena. In addition, Maslenitsa is associated with the world of Navi and the veneration of the spirits of the dead. It is believed that with the arrival of spring and the turning of the sun for summer, the souls of ancestors return from Iriy, who flew away from Yavi for the whole winter. They fly, according to the beliefs of the Slavs, right on the wings of birds that return to their native lands. The gates of Svarga open and the White Gods come into the world.
The name Komoyeditsy is associated with several concepts: 1. Coma or eating coma, that is, on this holiday they ate dishes that looked like lumps, perhaps they were pancakes or other goodies resembling koloboks. 2. It is believed that the bear wakes up these days. "Kom" could be the allegorical name of a fluffy bear, which from afar looks like a lump.
Kolyada holiday
Kolyada is traditionally celebrated on December 21-22 on the Day of the Winter Solstice. We can say that Kolyada has been perfectly preserved to this day since pagan times, along with such a holiday as Kupala. In general, the four annual solstices, solstices or rotations are the most revered in pagan culture. The Winter Solstice is no exception. The Kolyada holiday, after which the day becomes a little longer by a sparrow's leap, is undoubtedly revered by almost all peoples of the world. Winter with its dark Gods begins to recede little by little and the onset of spring is not far off. At the heart of the holiday is the worship of the sun, as the giver of heat and harvest.
Mesyatseslov (Slavic, pagan)
pagan calendar. Month names
From time immemorial, the Slavic calendar has been called the calendar. The calendar consists of twelve months with native names, which make up a full year, year or summer.<#"justify">Election of a victim to Perun
The election of a victim to the god Perun is celebrated on July 12. Perun is one of the main gods in the pagan pantheon. The patron of wars, warriors, victories and military successes. In addition, Perun is subject to some of the acts of people and the elements of nature, especially powerful and destructive. It was Perun who was glorified in the days of victory and brought various sacrifices and offerings.
Perun can be called one of the most powerful gods, whose influence is always visible and noticeable. He throws lightning, destroying evil power and thunder is also his work. It is closely associated with the cult of fire and water, wood and stone. The titanic efforts that he makes every time provide people with life on earth. He brings the sun out from behind the clouds and is the ancestor of the life-giving fire that descended from heaven to earth.
Perun was presented in the form of Tur, since it was his appearance that this god assumed, walking around the wide world. Therefore, the bull is considered a sacred animal. The symbol of Perun is a blue Iris with six petals - a thunder sign. Sanctuaries were arranged in the form of 6-8 iris petals<#"justify">Veles day
Veles Day right in the middle of winter is traditionally celebrated on February 11th. It is believed that the god Veles walks through forests, villages and cities, blows into a magic pipe, despite all the machinations of Marena-winter, which brings cold and cold on him. Despite all his desperate attempts to defeat Veles, Marene<#"justify">Holidays in honor of the gods were accompanied by various games, processions, dances to songs and music, sometimes with disguise. The chronicler already at the beginning of The Tale of Bygone Years reports about games and dances as an integral part of pagan worship among the Eastern Slavs:
“And they converged on these games, on dances and on all sorts of demonic songs.” Such games continued after the adoption of Christianity. Under the year 1015, the chronicler noted: “Woe to that city in which the prince is young, who loves to drink wine with harp along with young advisers,” from which we can conclude that princely feasts in ancient times were accompanied by music.
The chronicler tells about pagan games and dances as a legacy of paganism after reporting on the Polovtsian attack on Russia in 1068, considering the arrival of strangers as a consequence of the sins of Christians (including Kievans), who continued to adhere to old customs, various signs: “... the devil leads into deception, turning us away from God with all sorts of tricks, with trumpets and buffoons, harps and mermaids. After all, we see the games trampled down, with such crowds of people on them that they crush each other, showing a spectacle-the demon of the planned action - and the churches are empty. Here the chronicler directly opposes the then widespread custom of spending holidays in games and dances.
The fact that music (gudba), dances, demonic songs are pagan games and "idol sacrifices" is quite clearly stated in the "Word of a certain Christ-lover". Music and dancing were common entertainment at the courts of the Kievan princes. The Life of Theodosius tells how, having gone into the chambers to Svyatoslav, he saw that many musicians were playing in front of the seated prince: they had fun, as is the custom with princes. Seeing the displeasure of Theodosius, the prince ordered the musicians to stop playing. Since then, having learned about the arrival of the blessed, the prince ordered the musicians to stop playing.
Princely games and amusements are depicted on the walls of Kiev's St. Sophia Cathedral. One fresco depicts dancers and musicians, acrobats and mummers. Frescoes and the duel of a man with a costumed animal, the Kolyada holiday, equestrian competitions are recreated.
The love of the Rus for games and dances was specially supported by buffoons, who during holidays, folk games and various ceremonies were their main participants and performers of songs and dances. The Tale of Bygone Years mentions buffoons as early as 1068, although they undoubtedly existed much earlier. Let us recall the famous feasts of Vladimir Svyatoslavich in Kyiv, where, according to epics, buffoons were always present. Of course, buffoons were associated with ancient Russian paganism. And it is not surprising that the church waged a constant struggle against buffoonery from at least the middle of the 11th century. Buffoons were called devilish servants, their games were demonic, and their actions were objectionable to God. Listening to buffoons, watching their performances was considered one of the biggest sins.
Researchers note that games were an integral part of the worship of the pagans. They began, as a rule, after the sacrifices. And the buffoons played the main role here.
The complexity of studying the history of paganism in such a vast area as the zone of settlement of the Slavs is aggravated by several more factors. First, this is the general unevenness of the pace of historical development in different zones; secondly, the bizarre interweaving of the ideas of the local population with those ideas that were brought by other peoples, the destruction of the integrity of the Slavic mythological ideas by Christianity; thirdly, the lack of reliable Slavic mythological texts. At present, we have a fairly large complex of studies of the paganism of the Slavs, which is built on the basis of medieval chronicles, annals (the mythology of the Baltic Slavs; Polish and Czech tribes), teachings against paganism and chronicles (fragmentary information about the mythology of the Eastern Slavs). The most extensive material on Slavic paganism is provided by folklore, ethnographic and linguistic data obtained in the 19th - 20th centuries. They make it possible to judge mythological characters, the objects accompanying them, and to identify individual mythological motifs. Archaeological data obtained during the study of pagan sanctuaries and cult objects confirm their Proto-Slavic affiliation.
Tutoring
Need help learning a topic?
Our experts will advise or provide tutoring services on topics of interest to you.
Submit an application indicating the topic right now to find out about the possibility of obtaining a consultation.
We, modern people, are used to looking at the world through the prism of science: soberly and rationally. Even the most striking manifestations of the elements, such as earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, solar and lunar eclipses, do not evoke in us that horror before the unknown that once possessed our ancestors. For we know that behind the phenomena of nature is not God, not the Devil, not evil spirits, but blind forces tamed by those general laws that are known to us from the world of physics, forces that we are able to comprehend, calculate and measure. Therefore, modern man sees himself as the master of nature rather than its victim. However, in ancient times, people perceived the world in a completely different way. He was mysterious and enigmatic. And since the causes of everything that happened to them and around them were inaccessible to their understanding, and since they could not explain what the essence of thunderstorms and hail, droughts and floods, plague epidemics and invasions of pests, diseases and death, nocturnal nightmares and mental illnesses - they involuntarily attributed all these terrible phenomena, events and blows of fate to dark forces: gods and demigods, fairies and elves, necromancers and gnomes, devils and demons, ghosts and restless souls that lived in the sky, underground or in water. People imagined themselves to be the prey of these omnipresent spirits, because happiness or misfortune, health or illness, life or death could depend on their mercy or anger. Every religion originates from the fear of the unknown, and paganism is no exception.
The theme of Slavic (in particular, East Slavic) paganism has recently become very popular. In addition to the actual scientific interest, its relevance today is also due to other factors: many political movements (primarily “patriotic”, including “ultra-patriotic”) are trying to exploit it for their own purposes. This, of course, does not contribute to increasing the objectivity of the results obtained. However, this situation is not unique. The study of paganism in pre-revolutionary Russia was under a fairly solid pressure of the state religion. Moreover, spiritual censorship at that time surpassed secular censorship in its rigidity. Nevertheless, it should be noted that an increased interest in pagan issues has led to the emergence of a huge number of works in which it is studied using the most diverse material and at various levels: from purely academic studies to completely fantastic constructions. Even for a specialist, orientation in this array of publications is far from being an easy task.
The word "culture" comes from the word "cult" - faith, customs and traditions of ancestors. Anyone who forgets this has no right to be considered a cultured person.
Before Christianity and other monotheistic religions, all nations were pagans. The culture of earthlings dates back millennia. In Russia, the countdown of domestic culture, at best, is from the baptism of Russia, at worst - from 1917. In both cases, the ancient history of peoples, and, most importantly, their views on the cosmos, nature and man, is excluded from the sphere of knowledge of ordinary people. In particular, not a word is said about paganism in schools. Not only students, but also teachers have no idea about paganism.
Christianity, which originated far from the Slavic tribes, perceived Slavic paganism as an alien religion, and it was brutally destroyed from above. The people, however, resisted this for several centuries and introduced paganism into Christianity in various ways (by way of allegory, coding, allusion, essence, etc.). We believe in some pagan signs and customs to this day.
Pretending that our ancient ancestors did not have any views, ideals and cults, we thereby squeeze the understanding of the history of the people, and especially their spirituality, into the bed of Darwinism, which denies any spirituality (Divine origin of the spirit) of man and studies only his monkey physiology.
Paganism is surrounded, on the one hand, by the mysteries of oblivion and many losses, like an ancient lost and therefore completely unfamiliar world. On the other hand, there is an unspoken “taboo” on it. This last - the phenomenon of trampling, erasing from the consciousness of people of their original culture began among the Eastern Slavs with the introduction of Christianity and was not canceled with the advent of atheists to Russia in 1917. Therefore, if anyone treats paganism and atheism as equally godless phenomena, he is deeply mistaken.
Atheism is opposed to any religion and spirituality. Paganism is a religion, and it is close to any other religion already in its main essence - faith in God. That is why paganism, while approaching each other in its different channels, also approached other, later ones that came in an evolutionary way (man became more complex, his ideas about the cosmos, God became more complicated) monotheistic religions, merged with them and in many ways dissolved in them.
Paganism - from "languages" (essence: peoples, tribes); this word combines the principle of faith different peoples. The very faith of these peoples, even within the framework of the union of tribes, could be very different among themselves.
Slavic paganism developed in different directions: some tribes believed in the forces of space and nature; others - in Rod and Rozhanits, others - in the souls of dead ancestors and spirits (inspired forces); the fourth - in totem animal ancestors, etc. Some buried their dead ancestors in the ground, believing that they then help the living from the Other World, leaving them something to eat. Others - they burned the dead in boats, sending their souls on a heavenly voyage, they believed that if the body was burned, the soul would quickly rise to heaven and there each would attach itself to its own star (hence - passed away).
In ancient times, the Slavs had certain places for burning the dead and for offering pagan sacrifices - open-air altars in the form of a triangle, square or circle, which were called steals; stealing was also called a burning sacrificial fire. “Thefts and trespasses of idols,” wrote Nestor the chronicler. There was also a deity guarding the altar, probably it was called Krada (Krodo). In the funeral cult, a combination of opposing aspirations was universally widespread: to remove a potentially harmful dead person to another world and at the same time keep a beneficent ancestor close to the collective, to ensure the possibility of contact with another world; the presence of funerary monuments, burial grounds, etc. is connected with the latter. The Slavic tradition of cremation includes various ways of handling ashes - from simple scattering to burial in a pit and collecting in an urn. In traditional Slavic rituals directed against ghouls, in fact in Russian, cremation matters as the only radical way to deal with a ghoul. In one of the Russian fairy tales, the deceased sorcerer, who after his death terrorized the whole village, himself describes the way to get rid of him: by me!"
There was a belief that the burnt one was carried away to paradise-vyry (iry, ary; hence the ancient name of the Aryans), immediately, in front of his loved ones who loved him. The soul was associated with breath and smoke. Further, the soul was picked up by larks, the first birds that flew in the spring from vyria-paradise. The day of the arrival of the larks - March 9 - was considered the day of remembrance of the ancestors and was called Radunitsa. During the period of the struggle with the pagan gods, the image of the enemy was created, therefore, according to Slavic customs, the day of commemoration of the dead, according to Slavic customs, at first, in connection with the spreading Easter calendar, was moved to May 1 and was considered a demonic, unclean day, or rather at night (Walpurgis night). But later, imperceptibly, the Slavic day of remembrance of the dead and Christian Easter drew closer.
The most ancient non-personalized gods of the Slavs are Rod and Rozhanitsy. The genus was sometimes identified with the phalos, sometimes with the grain (including the solar rain grain that fertilizes the earth). Women in labor are the female giving birth, giving life to all living things: man, flora and fauna. Later, Rod and Rozhanitsy began to perform more functions, unified into supreme gods and personified in different tribes of the Slavs - they received proper names: Yarovit, Svetovid, Rigevit, Makosh, Golden Baba, Didiliya, Zizya, etc.
Ancient Slavic customs include the worship of ghouls and shorelines, as well as non-personalized deities, personifying the souls of people who once died - good and evil, helping and harming. Especially restless, restless were the souls of those who died in a foreign land, innocently killed or not buried according to the customs of their ancestors. Only under the shadow of the customs of the ancestors, even after death, could a person feel calm. Such souls were also called Navi and tried to appease them, always offering them victims - food.
Beregini (like Greek penates) kept the well-being of different places and types of nature, as well as the house. There were many house spirits: brownie, kutny drema (home peaceful deity of sleep), bayunok (storyteller, night storyteller, lullaby songwriter), laziness, otet (extreme laziness), okoyoma, prosecutors, prokudy (rogues, non-rumors, pranksters), bannik (the spirit of the bathhouse), evildoers (Ukrainian “god you evil-doers!”), demons, devils, shishigs (devils with hair sticking out with a bump), kikimora or shishimora (devil with hair sticking out with a bump, deity of restless dreams and nocturnal phenomena). The Proto-Slavic "devil" means the damned one, who has crossed the line, the border.
There were many beregins; they saved people everywhere: at home, in the forest, in the field, on the water, protected crops, stockyards, children, sang lullabies to them, told fairy tales (tales), evoked dreams. Later they received some proper names, some - their own-group, for example, their own Did, Baba - the progenitors; group - mermaids, goblin, etc.
Grandfather (did) - progenitor, ancestor. For those who believed that they were descended from Perun (Olgovichi and others), this is also a synonym for Perun. Grandfather is the guardian of the family and, above all, children, of course. The senior man, a representative of the tribal eldership, who pacifies the passions within the clan, keeps the basic principles of the morality of the clan, strictly following their implementation. Some East Slavic tribes called grandfather (did) the house deity guarding the hearth (way of life), the stove fire, as it were, a small perun fire, in contrast to the large one in the sky. The forest deity was also called grandfather - the keeper of the Perunov treasure (gold, silver, that is, lightning, thunderstorms, silver rain). Grandfather prayed for guidance, the discovery of the treasure. According to legend, where the light flashes, there is this treasure (rain with a thunderstorm), which is vital and important for people (for the family, home, Perun's descendants). Grandfather (did) is mentioned in old Slavic songs:
“And we sowed millet, sowed, oh did-lado sowed, sowed,
And we will trample the millet, we will trample it, oh, we will trample the lado ... "
Woman. The most ancient of them is Baba Yaga. Everyone has questions: what does Yaga mean? Why is she so scary? And even more so, no one believes that Baba Yaga was originally a caring coastline.
The word "Yaga" coarsened from "Yashka". Yasha in Slavic songs was called foot-and-mouth disease - once living on earth and the disappeared progenitor of all living things; hence our more understandable - ancestor. Baba Yaga was originally the progenitor, a very ancient positive deity of the Slavic pantheon, the guardian (if necessary, militant) of the clan and traditions, children and the near-home (often forest) space. During the period of Christianity, all pagan gods, deities, spirits, including those who protected people (shores), were given evil, demonic features, ugliness of appearance and character, evil intentions. So the pagan strict progenitor was turned into an evil demon, which is still used to frighten young children.
In different Slavic tribes there were later other progenitors who received proper names: Golden Baba, Golden Mother, Makosh, etc.
There are especially many coastlines (they were also later given evil features) among the wood spirits: a forester, a woodsman, a leshak, a wild man, Mikola (Nikola) Duplyansky, a companion, a boletus, crafty (bent and twisted, like a bow, and the same internally, which is the main thing) , grandfather, grandfather; as well as demons (Slavic “demon” literally means “without”, and then a positive concept could follow, for example, a person without ... conscience, God, concepts (knowledge), goodness, justice, honor, mind, etc .; devils; shishigs; forest mavkas; ghouls; anchutki (a cross between a devil and a duck); werewolves; bats; wonder-yudo; forest king; little ships and gartsuki (small spirits, assistants to Perun); famously one-eyed; bird Fear-Rah - this is an incomplete list of forest inhabitants , which were the embodiment of the forest, as a space hostile to man.
Sometimes, the goblin almost did not differ from people, but more often the owner of the forest seemed to be dressed in an animal skin (dlaka); sometimes it was with animal attributes: horns, hooves, etc. Endowed (possibly later) with negative signs, “left”: the left side is wrapped around the right, the left bast shoe is put on the right foot, the goblin could be one-eyed or crooked in the left eye, lame on the left foot, etc.
In winter, the "habitual" wood goblin in the forest was forced out by Perun's helpers, who were even stricter towards a person, Kalinniks (from the word "fire"): Morozko, Treskunets, Karachun. Thus, a person, leaving the house in the forest, field, tuned in to a constant struggle with unforeseen circumstances and merciless elements; on the other hand, he could always count on the unexpected help of the forest deity, the forest owner, so he tried to please him: do not harm the forest, do not beat animals unnecessarily, do not break trees and bushes in vain, do not litter the forest, do not even shout loudly, do not disturb the peace and quiet of nature.
The fact that from the Slavic kikimora (shishimora) - the deities of sleep and night ghosts tried to make an evil spirit, is evidenced by the second part of the word - “mora”. Mora (Mor), Mara - the goddess of death (many universal gods had female and male incarnations - and this speaks of their antiquity: they went through the stages of matriarchy and patriarchy). But still, kikimora is not death. If she gets angry and plays pranks, for example, disturbs babies at night, confuses yarn left for the night, etc. - does not mean that someone will die as a result of her evil tricks (as we understand the word "scream"). Kikimora is a weak, as it were, distorted reflection of only the fear of death, or even just fear.
Christianity managed to turn into its opposite the mermaid - the oldest type of coastline that lived in the waters. She was always depicted with a woman's face and bare chest, a fish body and a tail. The very word "shoreline" comes from the concept - to protect, to help the wandering, sailing, in distress to get to the shore. This was done by the Slavs mermaids. However, during the period of criticism and denial of paganism, the demonization of pagan gods, the idea was gradually introduced that mermaids were drowned women and dead unbaptized children. They became afraid. It was believed that they are most dangerous for people in the Russian week (June 19-24), before Ivan Kupala, especially on Thursday (Perun's day). During the Russian week, they sang mermaid songs, hung yarn, threads, towels on trees and bushes - symbolic clothes for mermaids; either to appease them, or to pity them.
The ancient Semargl ascended to the shores - a sacred winged dog guarding seeds and crops. Semargl is, as it were, the personification of armed (warlike) good. Later, Semargl began to be called Pereplut, perhaps because he was more associated with the protection of plant roots. The cult of Pereblut celebrated the Russian week. And the seeds and crops began to protect Yadrey and Obilukh. Mermaids, pitchforks are also involved in this, they brought news of the rain.
Birds with a female face were also beregins: the sweet-sounding Sirin, the Phoenix bird reborn from the ashes, Stratim - the mother of all birds, the oldest and largest, the Firebird, swan girls (swans), Nail-bird, etc.
Mythical half-animals, half-humans were also called chimeric or chimeras. The purpose of many coastlines is now lost. Especially a lot of confusion with chimerical creatures. For example, the dog name Polkan was widespread, many researchers believe that in ancient times there was such a winged dog (confusing it with Semargl), while polkan (half-horse) is literally a half-horse. The half-horse guarded the solar horses of Svetovid, the horses (herd) of the gods of the sun and the gods of thunder. Among the half-horses are the Russian Little Humpbacked Horse, Sivka-Burka, etc. In appearance, they are half or much smaller than the heroic horses of God, they are plain, sometimes even ugly (hump, long ears, etc.). In a metaphorical sense, they are precisely half-horses, half-people: they understand the affairs of people (gods, demons), speak human language, distinguish between good and evil, and are active in affirming good (this is left from the banks).
There is also an unusual deity: Chur - the deity of the border, one of the most ancient deities-shores. Derived from "shur".
The land in which the ancestors (ancestors) of any kind rested, and which passed, being inherited from generation to generation, was considered inviolable. According to the beliefs of many tribes, the souls of those who do not respect the sanctity of the borders, move boundary stones (pillars), host other people's ancestors on the land, are cursed, and after death wander without shelter. Or such people are forever forced to carry stones and rush through the fields, finding no peace anywhere; or rush through the fields with a wandering light.
Chur is connected with the world. He illuminates and defends the right to property (cf. "mind - mine!"), Settlement of a person on earth, humane moral principles, divides everything fairly: "mind - in half!", "mind - together!".
With the word, "chur" is associated with "damn", "outline", "outline". Proto-Slavic "devil" - cursed, possibly violating boundaries, boundary, geographical, then - inevitably, moral; replacing good with evil.
Many references to solar cosmic pagan gods have come down to us. These gods are late, they no longer had their personal names and, as a rule, their “retinues” or an environment of deities and spirits that contribute to their deeds and purpose (in the likeness of earthly kings; truly, man, becoming more complicated from century to century, created gods according to image and likeness).
The Tale of Igor's Campaign mentions Svarog - the god of heaven (Ind. Svarga - the sky), hence, by the way, our expression "svara", "cook" - to swear, scold, to be like the sky in bad weather. Dazhdbog in "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" is called "the fire of Svarozhich."
Associated with Svarog Stribog - the god of air currents and elements. Apparently, it was he who obeyed the winds, the proper names of some of them have been lost, perhaps one of them was called the Wind, the other Hurricane, etc. But the names of the two winds have come down to us. This is Weather (Dogoda) - a light, pleasant westerly breeze. It is no coincidence that the rest of the state of the atmosphere, except for the one named, is called bad weather. Posvist (Pozvizd or Pokhvist) is an older wind living in the north. Depicted in a huge fluttering cloak. In fairy tales, Pozvizd is sometimes replaced by the Nightingale the Robber, who figuratively embodied all the evil and destructive power of the wind.
Among the researchers of Slavic culture there is no single answer to the question, who was the god of the sun among the ancient Slavs? Some believe that the sun god of the ancient Slavs was Yarilo, others - Dazhdbog, others call Svetovid - this is not entirely true. In part, each of the main tribal pagan gods, which were Dazhdbog and Svetovid, had the features of the Sun God, on the other hand, these gods and the sun were given masculine properties, the properties of the Genus (Yarila). However, the Slavs actually had the god of the sun, his name was Horos. It is best known among the southeastern Slavs, where, of course, there is a lot of sun, the sun simply reigns over the rest of the world there. It is no coincidence that in the Tale of Igor's Campaign Khors is mentioned precisely in connection with the south, with Tmutarakan. Prince Vseslav, making his way to Tmutarakan at night, "to the great Khorsov and the wolf roamed the path," that is, he had time before sunrise. It is believed that the southern city of Korsun also got its name from this word (originally Khorsun).
From the ancient roots “horo” and “kolo”, which meant a circle, the solar sign of the sun, the words “round dance”, “mansions” (circular building of the courtyard), “wheel” are formed. The Scythian plowmen (Proto-Slavs who lived precisely in the south) called themselves the descendants of the sun (the god of the sun) - chipped. The most famous king of Skolot was named Koloksay, that is, the king of the solar people, or the people originating from the sun.
Khors is dedicated to two very large Slavic pagan holidays a year (associated with Svetovid, Yarila, Yarovit, etc.) - the days of the summer and winter solstices. In June - when a heavy wheel was necessarily rolled from the mountain to the river - a solar sign of the sun, symbolizing the sun's rollback for the winter) and December - when they honored Kolyada, Yarila, etc.).
Many, even those who have heard carols, do not know what "Kolyada" means. Kolyada - a diminutive of "kolo", the sun-baby, (it seemed like a boy or a girl, because for a small age of a child, gender still does not play any role; the sun itself is of a middle gender). This deity arose from the winter solstice, from the poetic idea of the birth of a small sun, that is, the sun of the next year (this ancient idea of \u200b\u200bthe annual baby has not died to this day. It is transferred to the concept of " New Year”And on postcards and in the New Year's decoration of festivities, it is not by chance that artists depict him as a boy flying in space.
December 25 (month-jelly) begins the turning of the sun to spring. Kolyada (cf. the wheel-wheel, the circle is the solar sign of the sun) was represented as a beautiful baby captured by the evil witch Winter, who turns him into a wolf cub (cf. the synonym for the wolf is fierce - with the Proto-Slavic name of the most severe month of winter (February - fierce) Only when the wolf, sometimes other animals, skin is removed from it and burned on fire (spring warmth), then Kolyada will appear in all the splendor of its beauty. January (Veles day).This time coincides with severe frosts (cf. Moro - death), blizzards (cf. Viy) and the most violent abysses of unclean (in the Christian view) spirits and evil witches who hide the moon and stars. The sun dresses up in a sarafan and kokoshnik and rides "in a little cart on a black horse" to warm countries (by spring and summer). These days, young men and women evushki “dressed up in hari” or “larva and scarecrow”, mummers walked around the yards, sang carols - songs glorifying Kolyada, who gives blessings to everyone. They also glorified the well-being of the home and family (wishing everything “what the owner likes”), where carolers cheerfully demanded gifts and gifts (or rather, gifts for caroling), jokingly predicting ruin for the miser. The gifts themselves are ceremonial cookies: bagels, cows, goats, pies and loaves are symbols of fertility. A loaf, for example, symbolizes the obesity of a cow (old-fashioned - kravas).
On the nights of winter Christmas time, fortune-telling took place for the future harvest, for offspring, and most of all - for marriage unions. There are countless ways to guess. This custom comes from the desire to communicate with the ancient Slavic goddess, who was represented as a beautiful spinning girl spinning the thread of fate, the thread of life - Srecha (Meetings) - in order to find out her fate. In different tribes, the synonyms "court", "rock", "share", "fate", "lot", "kosh", "sentence", "decision", "choice" have the same meaning.
Srecha is a night goddess. No one saw how she was spinning, so fortune-telling took place at night. Most often they guessed at the betrothed (cf. the word "bride" literally - "unknown"). It is assumed that the duties of the goddess of fate among other East Slavic tribes were performed by Makosh, who patronized household chores, including spinning. On spinning wheels, the Slavs often depicted their idea of the universe, encrypting its symbols and signs.
If during the winter holidays, fortune-telling took place at night, then during the days - ladins - conspiracies of brides, and then weddings.
The Slavic holiday Kupalo is associated with the summer solstice. The summer solstice is the most important holiday of the Slavs. On this day, the sun (Khors, Kolo) in an elegant chariot leaves its heavenly chamber to meet the moon - its spouse. The day of the summer solstice is the time of the highest development of the creative forces of nature. At this time, Yarilo, Kupalo (kupa - a bush, a sheaf of plants, herbs) can and should die before the next spring.
On the night of June 24, there was a custom not to sleep: to guard the meeting of the month with the sun, in order to see how "the sun is shining." The Slavs went to ritual hills, called differently (Yarilin's baldness - near Pereslavl Zalessky, Lysaya Gora - near Saratov and in other areas, there were Sparrows, Maiden or Devina mountains), or to meadows near rivers, burned fires, sang, danced round dances , caddisflies. Jumping over bonfires was both a test of dexterity and fate: a high jump symbolized good luck in plans. With jokes, feigned cries and obscene songs, the straw dolls of Yarila, Kupala, Kostrubonka or Kostroma were burned (fire - woody parts of flax, hemp).
At dawn, all those who participated in the holiday bathed in order to remove evil infirmities and illnesses from themselves.
On the Kupala night, according to legend, all sorts of miracles happened: rare mysterious herbs bloomed - gap-grass, fern, etc .; unseen treasures were discovered. Evil spirits - witches and sorcerers - also indulged in all sorts of revelry, hid the stars, the month, and so on.
From the merger of the name of the pagan Slavic holiday of Kupala and the Christian Ivanov's day (meaning John the Baptist), a new name for the holiday appeared - Ivan Kupala.
If Khors was the god of the sun, then Svetovid, Dazhdbog, Rugevit, Porevit, Yarovit, Belbog carried the masculine tribal principle, and the solar, cosmic one. These gods of late Slavic paganism are the supreme (ancestral) gods of different tribes, so there is a lot in common in their functions.
Dazhdbog is one of the most famous gods of the East Slavic tribes. The author of The Tale of Igor's Campaign calls all Russians God's grandchildren. That is, it is literally our grandfather, ancestor, ancestor, progenitor. This is a giving god, a giver of earthly blessings, as well as a god protecting his family. He gave man everything that is important (by cosmic standards): the sun, heat, light, movement (of nature and the calendar - the change of day and night, seasons, years, etc.). It is likely that Dazhdbog was more than the god of the sun, although very close to this, he denoted what we call "the whole wide world." In addition, like all tribal gods, he carried a bright, creative masculine principle, a heavenly principle, in contrast to the dark, feminine, giving birth, earthly. Metaphorically, it is called "fire Svarozhich." Svarog is the god of the sky (as space), which means Dazhdbog is the fire (light) of heaven.
Belbog is also a keeper (conservative) and a giver of goodness, good luck, justice, happiness, all blessings. In the word “blago” there is a reduced vowel, after its fall the word is read “good”.
An ancient sculptor made a statue of Belbog with a piece of iron in his right hand (hence justice). Since ancient times, the Slavs have known a similar (trial by iron) method of restoring justice. Picking up a piece of iron, it was necessary to take a few steps with it. The arm injured by the test was lubricated with fat and allowed to heal. A few days later, "knowledgeable people" examined her. If the scars healed well, the person was considered innocent.
Such trials, which now seem cruel and senseless to us, were carried out, however, in Russia until the time of Ivan the Terrible. It is no coincidence that bloody sacrifices were made to the god who administered justice, so that he would not allow a terrible punishment for a person: to be condemned and, moreover, condemned unjustly. Heavy is the execution, but even heavier is the burden of shame. The concept of "branded with iron" from ancient times was equivalent to "branded with shame." From here we learn that the supreme Slavic gods carried another function - the Supreme Judge, Conscience, the Zealot of Justice, as well as the Punishing God, protecting the family from moral decline.
Of all the gods, the temple and the four-faced statue of Svetovid, as well as the ritual of the festival associated with him, are described in the most detail of all the gods. This happened because the temple of Svetovid was located in the distance and lasted longer than all pagan temples - until the XII century.
Holidays in honor of Svetovid began at the end of the harvest, in August. The Slavs brought fruits collected from fields, orchards and orchards as a gift to God. The priest filled Svetovid's horn with young wine, symbolizing the fullness of the next year's harvest. A lot of young animals were sacrificed to Svetovid, which were immediately eaten during the feast.
Svetovid, like Dazhdbog, meant what we used to call "the whole wide world", and therefore the god of the Western Slavs was well known in the East Slavic world, it is no coincidence that the word "Christmas" - games in honor of the god Svetovid - are common among the Eastern Slavs: Russians , Ukrainians, Belarusians and throughout the Slavic world.
On the same island of Rugene in the city of Karenze stood the idol of Rugevit, the supreme god of one of the Slavic tribes. Ruge - (lugi) - the name of the tribe (possibly a self-name), and vita - life. Just like the word "Svetovid". Consists of "light" and "vit". The Rugewit statue was made of a huge oak, and the temple was represented by walls made of red carpets or red fabrics. Rugewit had seven faces. Seven swords with knives hung from his belt, and he held one sword in his right hand. Rugevit stood guard over the life of his tribe.
In the same city of Karenza, there was also a statue of Porevit. Probably also one of the tribal supreme gods, but more ancient, the connection with which was lost, so many historians found it difficult to explain his appointment. It's time (spore) - nothing more than a seed, vito - life. That is, this is the god of the male seed, the giver of life and its joy, love, just like the East Slavic Yarovit and the already named Svetovid, Belbog, Dazhdbog, Rugevit.
These gods, whom different tribes considered their ancestors, ancestors, patrons and militant defenders of the tribe, their kind and people, were depicted with pronounced male attributes, militant all-seeing heavenly ancestors of the tribe. In the Tale of Igor's Campaign, the epithets "yar", "buoy", "tour" are attached to the names of the bravest princes, real men.
During the celebrations of summer Christmas time, the Slavs made an effigy of Yarila from grass with pronounced male attributes, and a male phallus. The root of the word "yar" was associated with male power, male seed.
Something close to all these gods is Perun, the Thunderer, the god of the Western Slavs. Just before the adoption of Christianity, together with pagan warriors, he came to Russia. Prince Vladimir I the Holy erected a statue of him in Kyiv, and his uncle Dobrynya - in Novgorod.
Perun had a huge retinue of relatives and assistants: Thunder, Lightning (aunt Malanitsa; lightning and arrows were also called peruns), Grad, Rain, mermaids and water, winds, of which there are four, like the four cardinal points. Hence the day of Perun is Thursday (cf. “after rain on Thursday”, “ Maundy Thursday”), sometimes there are seven, nine, twelve or just a lot of winds (Old Russian “Perun is many”).
Bogatyrs, oxen serve Perun and other gods, personifying the power of nature. If they roam, then stones are turned out from the mountains, trees are felled, rivers are dammed up with rubble. There are many such heroes of different strengths in Slavic mythology: Gorynya, Verni-gora, Valigora, Vertigor, Dubynya, Duboder, Vertodub, Vyrvidub, Elinya (spruce), Lesinya (forest), Duginya (arc oppression), Bor, Verni-voda, Zapri - water, Potok-bogatyr, Usynya, Medvedko, Nightingale the robber (hurricane wind), Force-tsarevich, Ivan Popyalov (Popel), Svyatogor, Water, etc.
Forests and rivers were dedicated to Perun, which were considered sacred, for example, the Bug, the Volkhov.
Associated with Perun and snakes. There were several meanings and purposes for snakes (as symbols).
There are two holidays in the Slavic calendar during which snakes are remembered (most often they are harmless snakes). March 25 is the time when livestock is driven out to St. George's dew and snakes crawl out of the ground, the earth becomes warm, agricultural work can begin. September 14 - the departure of snakes, the agricultural cycle was basically over. Thus, these animals, as it were, symbolized the cyclical nature of rural field work, they were a kind of natural climatic clock. It was believed that they also help to beg for rain (heavenly milk, breasts falling from the sky), since snakes love not only heat, but also moisture, hence in fairy tales snakes often suck milk from cows (clouds).
Images of snakes - snakes - adorned ancient vessels with water. The snakes from the Perunov retinue symbolized the clouds of heaven, thunderstorms, the powerful revelry of the elements. These snakes are multi-headed. You cut off one head - the other grows and shoots fiery tongues (lightning). Serpent-Gorynych - the son of the heavenly mountain (clouds). These snakes kidnap beauties (the moon, stars and even the sun). The snake can quickly turn into a boy and a girl. This is due to the rejuvenation of nature after the rain, after each winter.
Snakes are the keepers of countless treasures, healing herbs, living and dead water. Hence the snake-doctors (in Indo-European mythology - Indra, Donor, Asclepius, Panacea) and symbols of healing.
Snakes from the retinue of the gods of the underworld - Viy, Death, Mary, Chernobog, Kashchei and others guard the underworld. A variant of the snake - the owner of the underworld - Lizard, less often - Fish. The lizard is often found in folk songs of archaic times, sometimes, having lost the ancient meaning of symbolism, it is called Yasha.
During the period of Christianity in Russia, snakes were honored on St. George's Day (Yuri - George) - April 23.
Many tribes, especially in the hunting forest regions, believed that their ancestor was a mighty gigantic beast. For example, bear, deer, foot-and-mouth disease, etc. The cult of Veles is associated with such ideas. Ancient people believed that the family is descended from a god, who is shown only in the form of a beast, and then again goes to the heavenly chambers (the constellations Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, etc.).
Veles is one of the oldest East Slavic gods. At first he patronized the hunters. Due to the taboo on the deified beast, it was called “hairy”, “hairy”, “hair”, “veles”. He also designated the spirit of the killed animal, hunting prey. "Vel" is the root of words with the meaning "dead". To die, to repose means to be attached in spirit, soul to the heavenly ancestors, whose soul flies to heaven, but the body remains on earth. There was a custom to leave on a harvested field "a harvest of ears of hair to Hair on a beard", that is, the Slavs believed that ancestors resting in the ground also help fertility. Thus, the cult of the cattle god Veles was somehow associated with the ancestors, with the harvest, with the well-being of the family. Herbs, flowers, bushes, trees were called "hair of the earth."
Since ancient times, cattle has been considered the main wealth of the tribe, family. Therefore, the cattle god Veles was also the god of wealth. The root "volo" and "vlo" became an integral part of the word "volody" (to own).
The cult of Veles goes back to the cult of Rod and Rozhanitsy. Therefore, together with Yarila, the Slavs on the Semik holiday (June 4), on the oil week from March 20 to 25 and from December 25 to January 6, on winter Christmas time, paid tribute to the voluptuous cattle gods Tur and Veles, sacrificing them with round dances, singing, kisses through a wreath of fresh flowers and greenery, all kinds of loving actions.
During the period of Christianity in Russia, Veles' day on January 6 corresponded to Vlas'ev day - February 11.
The concept of Magi is also associated with the cult of Veles, since the root of this word also comes from “hairy”, “hairy”. Magi during the performance of ritual dances, spells, rituals in ancient times dressed in the skin (dlaka) of a bear or other animal. Magi are a kind of scientists, sages of antiquity, who know their culture, in any case, better than many.
Most of the names of gods, phenomena and objects given by the people under the inspiration of artistic creativity are based on very bold metaphors. But those original threads to which they were attached from the beginning often broke, metaphors lost their poetic meaning, were taken for simple, unbearable expressions, and in this form passed from one generation to another, surviving for centuries, breaking up in localities, wandering with peoples. Some sounds were replaced by others. Words were given new meanings. The meaning of the ancient sayings became more mysterious and darker, the metaphorical language lost its general accessibility and clarity. It took the help of prophetic people who knew their language and culture, priests-interpreters. Among the Slavs, these were the Magi.
Among the Slavs, women-goddesses were very revered, dating back to the ancient cult of Rozhanitsy, as well as to the pantheon of gods of the Indo-European world.
The most ancient is the goddess of the Western Slavs Triglav (Trigla). She was depicted with three faces, her idols always stood in the open air - on the mountains, hillocks, by the roads. She was identified with the goddess of the Earth. The interpretation of the concept of "Triglava" must be sought in the thousand-year-old culture of the Indo-Iranian world.
In Indian mythology, Triloka (loka - a place, a certain spatial limit) is a three-membered universe consisting of sky and water, earth and water, the underground lower world and water, although the concept of "water" most often falls out when interpreting the triad, it always seems to hold in the mind.
In Indian pagan mythology, there was a triple image of the god Trimurti: Brahma - the creator of the world; Vishnu is his guardian; Shiva is the destroyer. Most often, all three functions were represented by Vishnu. Later (in the 1st millennium BC) - Shiva. In the first millennium BC, the ancestors of the Slavs were formed as one of the branches of the Indo-European peoples. That is why the ancient deities of different tribes (differently pronounced) here in their female incarnation bear names that are largely consonant: Zhiva (cf. Shiva - literally life, the god of life); Siwa; Diva ("div" - Indian god); Virgo; Dziva; Ziva; Tsiza; Zize (zize among the Poles - the chest of a woman); Didylia (from a child); Lyalya (Lelya, Lel), etc. Thus, all these goddesses embodied the movement of life on earth.
The word “alive” (Shiva) is associated with many designations of fertility in the field and, as a result, wealth, security, contentment: “belly”, “housing”, “profit”, “profit” (get rich), “survive”, “heal ”, “Live”, “granary”, “living creatures” (foodstuffs), “fatten” (material contentment), “prosperous”, “pasture” (pasture), etc.
Makosh is one of the main goddesses of the Eastern Slavs. Her name is made up of two parts: "ma" - mother, and "kosh" - purse, basket, koshara. Makosh is the mother of filled cats, mother good harvest. This is not the goddess of fertility, but the goddess of the results of the agricultural year, the goddess of the harvest, the giver of blessings.
The volume of the harvest with equal labor costs of the year is determined by lot, fate, share, a happy accident. Therefore, Makosh was also revered as the goddess of fate. This goddess connected the abstract concept of a happy fate with the specific concept of abundance, patronized the hearth, sheared sheep, spun, punished the negligent. According to the Belarusian belief, it is unsuitable to leave a tow for the night, otherwise “Makosha is stranded”.
Makosh patronized marriage and family happiness. Specific concept"spinner" was associated with the metaphorical: "spinning the thread of fate", Fate - Srecha. The Serbs say: "Nezrecha finely stranded." That is, if the thread of fate is too thin, happiness and life can end at any moment.
In Russian Orthodoxy, Makosh reincarnated as Praskeva Friday. Since she had all the fruits of the earth at her disposal, she was also in charge of the fate of the harvest, that is, the distribution of products, raw materials, handicrafts. That is why she managed the market, patronized the trade. In Novgorod, in 1207, the Praskeva Pyatnitsa Church at the Market was built, the same temples were erected in the XII-XIII centuries. in Chernigov, Moscow in the trading and hunting row. Friday in Russia is a trading day.
A special apocryphal Friday calendar is known, consisting of 12 Fridays. This is a well-thought-out chain of interchangeable holidays. No other deity in Christendom has received so much attention.
Praskeva Friday - October 28, when the harvest is harvested, cattle are not driven into the field, winter homework begins: spinning, weaving, preparing a dowry, etc.
The Slavs especially loved Lada - the goddess of love, beauty, charm. With the onset of spring, when nature itself enters into an alliance with Yarila, Ladin's holidays also came. These days they played burners. Burn - love. Love has often been compared to red, fire, heat, fire. Cold is dislike. Red color - family, kinship, blood, love, as well as solar signs: kinship - hell; rodry, rydry, ryany - red; blush, blush - blush.
Many words of marital meaning, union and peace are associated with the root “lad”. Lad - conjugal consent based on love; get along - live lovingly; get along - marry; frets - engagement; got along - matchmaker; ladniki - an agreement on dowry; Ladkanya - a wedding song; fine - good, beautiful. And the most common - fret, so they called loved ones. This can be found in the Tale of Igor's Campaign.
Her child is associated with Lada, whose name is found in female and male incarnations: Lel (Lelya, Lelio) or Lyalya (Lelia). Lel is a child of Lada, he induces nature to fertilization, and people to marriage unions.
In many regions, on April 22, a spring holiday was held - lyalnik. Girls gathered in the meadow, chose Lyalya, dressed up in white clothes, bandaged their hands and waist with fresh greens. A wreath of spring flowers was put on the head. Round dances were made around her, songs were sung, and they asked for the harvest. Dodols - girls in dresses with fringes at the bottom - performed a rain dance, praying for rain.
Polelia is the second son of Lada, the god of matrimony. It is no coincidence that he was depicted in a simple white everyday shirt and a wreath of thorns, he gave the same wreath to his wife. He blessed people for everyday life, a family path full of thorns.
Znich is also associated with Lada - fire, heat, ardor, the flame of love, the sacred ardor of love (cf. on the back).
The gods of the sun, life and love, the earthly kingdom were opposed to the gods of death and the underworld. Among them is Chernobog, the ruler of the underworld, the representative of darkness. The negative concepts of “black soul” (a person who died for nobility), “rainy day” (day of disaster) are associated with it.
One of the main servants of Chernobog was Viy (Niy). He was considered the judge of the dead. The Slavs could never come to terms with the fact that those who lived lawlessly, not according to conscience, deceiving others, and unjustly used the benefits that did not belong to them, were not punished. They sincerely believed that they would take revenge, that someone else's grief would be cast off, at least not in this one - in the next world. Like many peoples, the Slavs believed that the place of execution for the lawless was inside the earth. Viy is also associated with the death of nature during winter. This god was considered the sender of nightmares, visions and ghosts, especially for those who have a guilty conscience.
Kashchei, the deity of the underworld, is associated with the seasonal death of nature during the winter. It symbolizes ossification, numbness from frost in the winter season of all nature. "Kosh" - also "kosht", "bone", "bony". Many heroes of fairy tales turn for some time into stone, wood, ice and another state - they become ossified. Then a hero comes - a red maiden, a good fellow (spring, sun) and they come to life from a kiss (beam) or a tear (drop).
Hence the Russian “blasphemer”, “sorcerer”, “blasphemers to create”.
Somehow connected with this concept "knit" - "knot". A prisoner is an enemy who has been taken prisoner. It is in this sense that the word "koshchei" is used in the Tale of Igor's Campaign and in many Russian fairy tales. Kashchei is not a real god of death, his power is short-lived.
The real goddess of death was Mara (Mor). Hence, probably, the words “die”, “death”, “die”, “die out”, “dead”.
The Slavs also had touching images of the female deities of mortal sadness Karna (cf. okarnat, punishment befell) and Zheli, who are found in the "Lay of Igor's Campaign"; Kruchins and Zhurba (in other tribes) - embodying boundless compassion. It was believed that the mere mention of their names (regret, pity) relieves souls and can save them from many disasters in the future. It is no coincidence that there are so many cries and lamentations in Slavic folklore.
The root "three" is associated with the negation of an unfavorable sign - "odd", as a symbol of unhappiness, which is why it is often found in spells. Yaroslavna cries: “The bright and crackling sun!” It is no coincidence that the day established in memory of the deceased, which included several ritual actions in its program, was called Trizna. Funeral games of warriors, also called trizna, reminded of the earthly affairs of the deceased and that a person equally belongs to three worlds: heavenly, earthly and underground (hence the sacred "three"). Then there was a strava - a commemoration, which is sometimes incorrectly called trizna.
Christianity has ruled our land for a thousand years. If it had come on bare ground, it would not have taken root so firmly. It lay down on the prepared spiritual soil, its name is faith in God. Paganism and Christianity, despite the fact that you can find in them the most opposite positions in relation to certain phenomena (for example, to sacrifices, to the concept of sin, enemies), the main thing is in common: both of them are faith in God - the creator and guardian of the entire world we see.
A person changed, thinking changed, faith became more complicated, and faith changed. Christianity, which came to Russia with the sword of Prince Vladimir I the Holy and trampled on pagan temples and shrines, could not resist the ethics of the people, their aesthetic predilections, could not but take into account the established rules of life.
So Easter - the optimistic holiday of Christian salvation and resurrection - joined with the pagan Radunitsa - the day of memory of the ancestors of all the dead. In Christianity, it was not customary to commemorate the dead with food - this is a purely pagan tradition, but it is she who has now taken over. Even seventy years of atheism have not struck out of the timetable for the life of an Orthodox Slav the day when he is accustomed to commemorate dead relatives. During the rampant most terrible orgy of the union of militant atheists, during the years of war, famine, the flow of people to the cemetery on Easter days was not interrupted, because this tradition is not a thousand years old, but several thousand years old.
Thus, not only Christianity influenced paganism, but vice versa. After a millennium of Christianity, a pagan holiday, Shrovetide, successfully passed. This is the farewell to winter and the meeting of spring. The pagans baked a pancake - a symbol of the hot spring sun - and ate it hot, thus filling themselves with the solar energy of life, solar power and health, which should have been enough for the entire agricultural annual cycle. Part of the stove was given to animals, forgetting to commemorate the souls of the dead.
Winter and summer Christmas time - games in honor of the god Svetovid during the turning of the sun for summer or winter are also not completely forgotten. Summer Christmas time partly merged with the Christian Trinity, and winter Christmas time with Christmas holidays.
More examples of the fusion of holidays and individual gods can be given. Thus, both faiths have undergone many changes from their original nature and now already exist together and monolithically, having received the name Russian Orthodoxy not by chance.
All the current debate about which is better - paganism or Christianity? - groundless. Well, let's say paganism is better. So what? After all, it does not exist in its pure form, in the broad faith of the people, in broad knowledge. Ask people who knows what the Slavic god of the sun was called? - not many will answer. Also Christianity - it was split into many currents: Catholicism, Lutheranism, Gregorianism, etc.
The only acceptable thing for a modern Russian person is to return to Russian Orthodoxy. But this does not mean that everything pre-Christian should be considered useless and useless. Paganism should be studied as the most ancient period of our culture, the infantile period of the life of our ancestors, which will strengthen our spirit, give each of us the strength of the spiritual and national soil, which will help us to endure in the most difficult moments of life.
The spiritual state of the Russian people before the adoption of Christianity was completely prepared by its entire previous history, which determined the political and cultural consequences of this step. It is from these positions that the significance of the Christianization of Russia as a spiritual holiday increases: the return of faith, corresponding to the spiritual worldview of the Russian people, the curse of self-interest and money-grubbing, the anthem of fraternal community and a single goal - the establishment of a just kingdom of God for people on Earth, as opposed to the disunited forces of evil. For the formation and unity of society, these are the most important provisions.
The study of the religion of the ancient Slavs is necessary for the current generation in order to comprehend, discuss the historical, cultural and moral aspects of the life of our ancestors, which will help us, living today, to know our distant, distant past, a bright and worthy past. The past, which has no limits of antiquity for establishing anniversaries.
The past, which every Russian person should know and be proud of.
The influence of the middle name on the name Yuri
Name Ilya - meaning and contraindications
Baby keeps crying
What does the name Aidar mean, the mystery of the name
Name Ilya - meaning and contraindications