Slavic religion

Beliefs and religious practices of the ancient Slavic peoples of East Europe, including the Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

Most Slavic mythologies hold that God ordered the devil to bring up a handful of sand from the bottom of the sea and created the land from it. Slavic religion was often characterized by dualism, with a Black God named in curses and a White God invoked to obtain protection or mercy. Lightning and fire gods were also common. The ancient Russians appear to have erected their idols outdoors, but the Baltic Slavs built temples and enclosed sacred places, where festivals were held and animal and human sacrifices occurred. Such festivals also often included communal banquets at which the flesh of sacrificial animals was consumed.

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Introduction

      beliefs and practices of the ancient Slavic peoples of eastern Europe. Slavs are usually subdivided into East Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians), West Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Lusatians [Sorbs]), and South Slavs (Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Bulgars).

      In antiquity the Slavs were perhaps the largest branch of the Indo-European family of peoples. The very late date at which they came into the light of recorded history (even their name does not appear before the 6th century AD) and the scarcity of relics of their culture make serious study of the Slavs a difficult task. Sources of information about their religious beliefs are all late and by Christian hands.

Slavic worldview

      Socially the Slavs were organized as exogamous clans (based on marriages (marriage) outside blood relationship) or, more properly, as sibs (groups of lineages with common ancestry) since marriage did not cancel membership in the clan of one's birth—a type of organization unique among Indo-European peoples. The elected chief did not have executive powers. The world had been created, in the Slavic view, once and for all, and no new law ought to modify the way of life transmitted by their ancestors. Since the social group was not homogeneous, validity and executive power were attributed only to decisions taken unanimously in an assembly, and the deliberations in each instance concerned only the question of conformity to tradition. Ancient Slavic civilization was one of the most conservative known on earth.

      According to a primitive Slavic belief, a forest spirit, leshy, regulates and assigns prey to hunters. Its food-distributing function may be related to an archaic divinity. Though in early times the leshy was the protector of wild animals, in later ages it became the protector of flocks and herds. In early 20th-century Russia, if a cow or a herdsman did not come back from pasture, the spirit was offered bran and eggs to obtain a safe return.

      Equally ancient is the belief in a tree spirit that enters buildings through the trunks of trees used in their construction. Every structure is thus inhabited by its particular spirit: the domovoy in the house, the ovinnik in the drying-house, the gumenik in the storehouse, and so on. The belief that either harmful or beneficial spirits dwell in the posts and beams of houses is still alive in the historic regions of Bosnia and Slovenia and the Poznań area of west central Poland. Old trees with fences around them are objects of veneration in Serbia and Russia and among the Slavs on the Elbe River. In 19th-century Russia a chicken was slaughtered in the drying house as a sacrifice to the ovinnik. This vegetal spirit is also present in the sheaf of grain kept in the “sacred corner” of the dwelling under the icon and venerated along with it, and also in noncultivated plant species that are kept in the house for propitiation or protection, such as branches of the birch tree and bunches of thistle. Such practices evidence the preagrarian origin of these beliefs. Similar to the leshy are the field spirit (polevoy), and, perhaps, the water spirit ( vodyanoy). Akin to the domovoy are the spirits of the auxiliary buildings of the homestead.

Mythology

Cosmogony

      A myth known to all Slavs tells how God ordered a handful of sand to be brought up from the bottom of the sea and created the land from it. Usually, it is the devil who brings up the sand; in only one case, in Slovenia, is it God himself. This earth-diver myth is diffused throughout practically all of Eurasia and is found in ancient India as well.

      The 12th-century German missionary Helmold Of Bosau recorded in Chronica Slavorum (Chronicle of the Slavs) his surprise in encountering among the Slavs on the Baltic a belief in a single heavenly God, who ignored the affairs of this world, having delegated the governance of it to certain spirits begotten by him. This is the only instance in which the sources allude to a hierarchy of divinities, but its centre is empty. The divinity mentioned by Helmold is a deus otiosus; (deus otiosus) i.e., an inactive god, unique in the mythology of the Indo-European peoples. Such a deity is, however, also found among the Volga Finns, the Ugrians, and the Uralians.

Principal divine beings

      Common to this Eurasian area is another divinity, called by Helmold and in the Knytlinga saga (a Danish legend that recounts the conquest of Arkona through the efforts of King Valdemar I of Denmark against the pagan and pirate Slavs) Zcerneboch (or Chernobog), the Black God, and Tiarnoglofi, the Black Head (Mind or Brain). The Black God survives in numerous Slavic curses and in a White God, whose aid is sought to obtain protection or mercy in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Pomerania. This religious dualism of white and black gods is common to practically all the peoples of Eurasia.

      The Russian Primary Chronicle (Russian Primary Chronicle, The) (Povest vremennykh let; “Tale of Bygone Years”)—a 12th-century account of events and life in the Kievan state—enumerates seven Russian pagan divinities: Perun, Volos, Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, and Mokosh. A Russian glossary to the 6th-century Byzantine writer John Malalas' Chronographia mentions a Svarog, apparently the son of Dazhbog. Of all these figures only two, Perun and Svarog, are at all likely to have been common to all the Slavs. In Polish, piorun, the lightning, is derived from the name of Perun, and not vice versa. In the province of Wielkopolska the expression do pierona—meaning “go to the Devil”—has been recorded. In the expression, pieron/piorun is no longer the lightning but the being who launches it. Uncertain or indirect traces of Perun are also encountered among the Carpathians and in Slovenia and Serbia. The lightning-wielding Perun cannot be considered the supreme god of the Slavs but is rather a spirit to whom was given the governance of the lightning.

      In Estonia the prophet Elijah is considered to be the successor to Ukko, the ancient spirit of lightning. Similarly, the prophet Elijah replaces Elwa in Georgia and Zeus in Greece. It is therefore probable that, among the Slavs also, Elijah is to be considered a successor of Perun. According to a popular Serbian tradition, God gave the lightning to Elijah when he decided to retire from governing the world. The Serbian story agrees with Helmold's description of the distribution of offices by an inactive God. Elijah is a severe and peevish saint. It is rare that his feast day passes without some ill fortune. Fires—even spontaneous combustion—are blamed on him.

      A similar complex may be seen if the Slavic Perun is equated with Perkūnas (Pērkons), the lightning deity of the Lithuanians. In Latvia, creatures with black fur or plumage were sacrificed to Pērkons, as they were to the fire god Agni in ancient India. Such deities are therefore generic deities of fire, not specifically celestial and even less to be regarded as supreme. Scholarly efforts to place Perun at the centre of Slavic religion and to create around him a pantheon of deities of the Greco-Roman type cannot yield appreciable results. Russian sources treat Svarog, present as Zuarasici among the Liutici of Rethra (an ancient locality in eastern Germany), as a god of the drying-house fire. But the Ukranians of Chernigov, when lighting the drying-house fire, invoke Perun and not Svarog, as if Svarog (apparently from svar, “litigation” or “dispute,” perhaps referring to the friction between the pieces of wood used to produce ignition) were an appellation of Perun.

Folk conceptions

      In a series of Belorussian songs a divine figure enters the homes of the peasants in four forms in order to bring them abundance. These forms are: bog (“god”); sporysh, anciently an edible herb, today a stalk of grain with two ears, a symbol of abundance; ray (“paradise”); and dobro (“the good”). The word bog is an Indo-Iranian (Iranian languages) word signifying riches, abundance, and good fortune. Sporysh symbolizes the same concept. In Iranian ray has a similar meaning, which it probably also had in Slavic languages before it acquired the Christian meaning of paradise. Bog, meaning “riches,” connotes grain. The same concept is also present in Mordvinian (Mordvin) pa and riz—where their provenance is certainly Iranian. Among the Mordvins, Paz, like the Slavic Bog, enters into the homes bringing abundance. The adoption of the foreign word bog probably displaced from the Slavic languages the Indo-European name of the celestial God, Deivos (Ancient Indian Deva, Latin Deus, Old High German Ziu, etc.), which Lithuanian, on the other hand, has conserved as Dievas.

      Among the heavenly bodies the primary object of Slavic veneration was the moon (moon worship). The name of the moon is of masculine gender in Slavic languages (Russian mesyats; compare Latin mensis). The word for sun (sun worship) (Russian solntse), on the other hand, is a neuter diminutive that may derive from an ancient feminine form. In many Russian folk songs a verb having the sun as its subject is put in the feminine form, and the sun is almost always thought of as a bride or a maiden.

      It is to the moon that recourse is had to obtain abundance and health. The moon is saluted with round dances and is prayed to for the health of children. During lunar eclipses, weapons are discharged at the monsters who are said to be devouring the moon, and weeping and wailing express the sharing of the moon's sufferings. In Serbia the people have always envisioned the moon as a human being. Such appellations as father and grandfather are customarily applied to the moon in Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian folk songs. At Risano (modern-day Risan, Yugos.) in the days of the 19th-century writer Vuk Karadžić—the father of modern Serbian literature—it was said of a baby four months old that he had four grandfathers. In Bulgaria the old people teach small children to call the moon Dedo Bozhe, Dedo Gospod (“Uncle God, Uncle Lord”). Ukrainian peasants in the Carpathians openly affirm that the moon is their god and that no other being could fulfill such functions if they were to be deprived of the moon. In two Great Russian supplications the sickle moon is invoked as “Adam”—the final phase of a fully developed moon worship in which the moon becomes the progenitor of the human family.

Practices, cults, and institutions

Places of worship

      Though the idols of which the Russian chronicles speak appear to have been erected out-of-doors, the German chronicles provide detailed descriptions of enclosed sacred places and temples (temple) among the Baltic Slavs. Such enclosures were walled and did not differ from profane fortifications—areas usually of triangular shape at the confluence of two rivers, fortified with earthwork and palisades, especially on the access side. The fortifications intended for religious purposes contained wooden structures including a cell for the statue of a god, also made of wood and sometimes covered in metal. These representations, all anthropomorphic, very often had supernumerary bodily parts: seven arms, three or five heads (Trigelavus, Suantevitus, and Porenutius). The temples were in the custody of priests, who enjoyed prestige and authority even in the eyes of the chiefs and received tribute and shares of military booty. Human sacrifices (human sacrifice), including eviscerations, decapitations, and trepanning, had a propitiatory role in securing abundance and victory. One enclosure might contain up to four temples; those at Szczecin (Stettin), in northwestern Poland, were erected in close proximity to each other. They were visited annually by the whole population of the surrounding district, who brought with them oxen and sheep destined to be butchered. The boiled meat of the animals was distributed to all the participants without regard to sex or age. Dances and plays, sometimes humorous, enlivened the festival.

Communal banquets and related practices

      The custom of communal banquets has been preserved into modern times in Russia in the bratchina (from brat, “brother”), in the mol'ba (“entreaty” or “supplication”), and in the kanun (a short religious service); in the Serbian slava (“glorification”); and in the sobor (“assembly”) and kurban (“victim” or “prey”) of Bulgaria. Formerly, communal banquets were also held by the Poles and the Polabs (Elbe Slavs) of Hannover. In Russia the love feasts are dedicated to the memory of a deceased person or to the patron saint of the village and in Serbia to the protecting saint from whom the rod or pleme (“clan”) took its name. Scholars no longer have any doubts of the pre-Christian nature of these banquets. The Serbian slava is clearly dedicated to a saint held to be the founder of the clan. These saints are patrons or founders and are all men who have died. When the Serbs celebrate the slava of the prophet Elijah or of the archangel Michael, they do not set out the “dead man's plate” (the koljivo, boiled wheat), because Elijah and Michael are not considered dead. In certain localities in Serbia, even the women given in marriage to another clan, the so-called odive, have to be present at the slava. They return with their children (according to the ancient matrilineal conception of the offspring), but not with their husbands, who belong to another clan and celebrate another slava. More akin to the ancient pagan feasts of the Baltic is the Serbian seoska slava, or “slava of the village,” in which the whole community participates and consumes in common the flesh of the victims prepared in the open air. Such feasts are votive. In Russia sometimes the animals (or their flesh) are first brought into the church and perfumed with incense. Even at the beginning of the 20th century, there were small villages in Russia where cattle were butchered only on the occasion of these festivities, three or four times a year. The Homily of Opatoviz (attributed to Herman, bishop of Prague) of the 10th–11th centuries emphatically condemns the love feasts as well as the veneration of statues and Slavic worship of the dead and veneration of saints as if they were gods. As in the Christian era the saints entered the line of ancestors, so perhaps in pagan antiquity ancient divinities (Perun, Svarog) were taken over as tribal progenitors. The Slavs did not record genealogies, and the founders of their clans were mainly legendary. The social unit sought to assure for itself the favour of powerful figures of the past, even of more than one, representing them in several forms on the same pillar or giving to their statues supernumerary bodily parts that would express their superhuman powers. A hollow bronze idol, probably ancient Russian, was found at Ryazan, Russia. The idol has four faces with a fifth face on its breast.

      The eastern Finns and the Ugrians venerated their dead in the same way, similarly representing them as polycephalic (multiple-headed), and also held communal banquets in their honour. Wooden buildings (the so-called continae) in which the faithful Baltic Slavs used to assemble for amusement, to deliberate, or to cook food have been observed in the 20th century among the Votyaks, the Cheremis, and the Mordvins but especially among the Votyaks. Such wooden buildings also existed sparsely in Slavic territory in the 19th century, in Russia, in Ukraine, and in various locales among the South Slavs.

      If it is supposed that, as among the Finns and the Ugrians, each clan venerated its own divine ancestor in a separate building, this would explain why many sacred enclosures would contain more than one contina—three at Carentia (the island of Garz at the mouth of the Oder River) and four at Szczecin.

      The system of idolatry of the Baltic area was essentially manistic (pertaining to worship of ancestors). It is not irrelevant that until the 19th century there survived here and there throughout the Danubian-Balkan region the custom of reopening graves three, five, or seven years after interment, taking out the bones of the corpses, washing them, wrapping them in new linen, and reinterring them. Detailed descriptions of this procedure have come particularly from Macedonia and Slovenia. Among East and West Slavs only faint echoes of the custom of a second interment survive in folk songs. In the former guberniya (province) of Vladimir, east of Moscow, as late as 1914, when a grave was to be dug, a piece of cloth was taken along with which to wrap the bones of any earlier corpse that might be unearthed in the process of digging. Such corpses would then be reinterred with the newly deceased. In protohistoric times the tumuli (mounds) of the mortuaries of the Krivichi, a populous tribe of the East Slavs of the northwest, the so-called long kurgans (Kurgan culture) (burial mounds), contained cinerary urns buried in the tumulus together and all at one time. Such a practice could occur only as the consequence of collective and simultaneous cremation. There must, therefore, have existed a periodic cremation season or date, as for the opening of the tombs in Macedonia and as has been verified elsewhere in comparing the South Asian areas of second interment, in preparation for which the corpses are temporarily exhumed. The cremations by the Krivichi are of exhumed bones. In the Volga region today the Mordvins (Mordvin) still burn the disinterred bones of the dead in the flames of a “living fire” ignited by friction.

      Considering the religious past of the Slavs, it is not surprising that manism was strong enough to epitomize and overwhelm all or practically all of their religious views. The seasonal festivals of the Slavs turn out to be almost entirely dedicated to the dead, very often without the participants realizing it, as in the case of the Koljada (Latin Kalendae)—the annual visit made by the spirits of the dead, under the disguise of beggars, to all the houses in the village. It is possible that the bones of the disinterred were kept for a long period inside the dwellings, as is still sometimes done in the Tyrol of Austria, and that the sacred corner—now occupied by the icon—was the place where they were kept.

      The spirits of the departed are not only venerated but also feared, especially the spirits of those who were prematurely deprived of life and its joys. It is believed that such spirits are greedy for the good things thus lost and that they make attempts to return to life—to the peril of the living. They are the prematurely dead, the so-called unclean dead. Particularly feared are maidens who died before marriage and are believed to be addicted to the kidnapping of bridegrooms and babies. One annual festival in particular, the Semik (seventh Thursday after Easter) was dedicated to the expulsion of these spirits. They are called rusalki in Russia, vile (rusalka) or samovile in Serbo-Croatia and Bulgaria.

      The dead person who does not decompose in the grave becomes a vampire, a word and concept of Slavic origin. To save the living from a vampire's evil deeds, it is necessary to plant a stake in the grave so that it passes through the heart of the corpse or else to exhume the corpse and burn it. Since the classes of unclean dead are believed to have been constantly increasing (in Macedonia, for example, it is believed that all those born in the three months between Christmas and Lady Day are unclean), then all of the dead—once objects of veneration and piety—will at some point be in danger of rancor, fear, and eventual disregard. A Christian clergy that has lent its presence at the exhumation and destruction of vampires has thereby contributed unwittingly to the preservation of this last phase of Slavic paganism into modern times.

      There are other rites associated with second interment of which the Slavs have forgotten the purpose, such as the cemetery pyres—fires lit on top of the tombs—or the assiduous watering of graves. In Polynesia and South America where second interment is practiced, these same acts have the purpose of fostering decomposition of the corpses in order to hasten exhumation.

      Numerous other ritual acts are performed by the Slavs, for the most part related to this complex of beliefs. In 19th-century Russia, if a man encountered the procession of naked women who were plowing a furrow around the village at night in order to protect it from an epidemic, he was inevitably killed. It was a chthonic (underworld) being to which, in those same times, human sacrifices (human sacrifice) were offered in Russia (more rarely in Poland and Bulgaria), since the victims were often buried alive. In most cases they were either voluntary victims or chosen by lot from among the devotees. Since such acts were punished by the law of the state, the sacrifices were performed in secrecy and are difficult to document.

Evel Gasparini

Additional Reading

Slavic mythology is outlined by Jan Máchal, “Slavic,” in Louis Herbert Gray, George Foot Moore, and J.A. MacCulloch (eds.), The Mythology of All Races, vol. 3 (1918, reissued 1964); and Myroslava T. Znayenko, The Gods of the Ancient Slavs: Tatishchev and the Beginnings of Slavic Mythology (1980). Aleksander Brückner, Mitologia słoviánska i polska, 2nd ed. (1985), represents an attempt to furnish an Indo-European interpretation of Slavic paganism; for the critical side of the problem this work remains indispensable. For the archaeological aspects, see Karl Schuchhardt, Arkona, Rethra, Vineta: Ortsuntersuchungen und Ausgrabungen, 2nd rev. and enlarged ed. (1926). A descriptive exposition can be found in B.-O. Unbegaun, Les Religions des Celtes, des Germains et des Slaves (1948). An attempt to find in the folklore traces of a more ancient mythology was made by W.R.S. Ralston, The Songs of the Russian People, as Illustrative of Slavonic Mythology and Russian Social Life, 2nd ed. (1872, reprinted 1970). A collection of materials and provocative suggestions in the same field is found in V.J. Mansikka, Die Religion der Ostslaven (1922, reissued 1967). For ethnography, see Dmitrij Zelenin, Russische (ostslavische) Volkskunde (1927); Edmund Schneeweis, Grundriss des Volksglaubens und Volksbrauchs der Serbokroaten (1935); and Pierre Bogatyrev, Actes magiques, rites et croyances en Russie subcarpathique (1929).Evel Gasparini Ed.

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