The Slavic Myths, page 1
‘The Slavic Myths combines analysis with celebration, context with storytelling, academic debate with new versions of some of the great folktales that emerged long, long ago from the crucible of the Carpathian Mountains. Vampires and werewolves are centrally featured – of course – and so are lesser-known figures, such as Queen Libuše and the city she founded; Mokoš, the powerful goddess who totters on chicken legs; the bannik, a water-demon who shares your hot bath; and a host of other gods and monsters and warring women. The book provides a welcome entrée into the intricate world of Slavic mythology, with plenty of esoteric facts to get your teeth into, stories to be read aloud at the witching hour, and memorable black-and-white woodcut-style illustrations.’
Sir Christopher Frayling, author of Vampyres
‘Delightfully dark and whimsical, this collection of folk tales from Slavic mythology unearths the bones of the original stories, boldly forcing us to question what we know about a mostly oral tradition that has been silenced for far too long.’
Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, author of The Witch and the Tsar
‘A delectable tasting menu of the rich myth and folklore that flowered for centuries among the Slavic peoples inhabiting the vast swath of Europe from the Adriatic to the Baltic and the Danube to the Urals. Synthesizing a great deal of solid scholarship, but wearing their erudition lightly, the authors include a curated array of original texts from Serbia, Czechoslovakia, Russia and other lands – wonderful tales of vampires, werewolves, witches, heroic maidens and warriors – that illustrate the different traditions and show how the ancient tales continue to resonate to this day.’
Vladimir Alexandrov, B. E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University
About the Authors
Noah Charney is an American art historian and internationally best-selling author of fiction (The Art Thief, published in fourteen languages) and non-fiction (The Art of Forgery, The Collector of Lives, The Museum of Lost Art). He teaches at the University of Ljubljana and presents for television and radio, including for the BBC.
Svetlana Slapšak is a leading specialist in Balkan studies and award-winning essayist who has published more than a hundred books. She won the American PEN Freedom of Expression Award in 1993 and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. She has served as a professor, researcher and dean at various universities, including the Ljubljana Graduate School of Humanities and Rutgers University in New Jersey. Both Charney and SlapŠak live in Slovenia.
Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:
The Greek Myths That Shape the Way We Think
Richard Buxton
The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think
Carolyne Larrington
The Celtic Myths That Shape the Way We Think
Mark Williams
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CONTENTS
Introduction
The Slav Epic
1Black Butterfly
Vampires
2At Stake
Werewolves
3Threshold
Libuše and Women
4Do Not Weep
Three Versions of the Great Goddess
5Ilya Muromets
Perun, Supreme God
6The Waterman
Creatures of the Deep
7Firebird
Slavic Magic
Last Words
Map
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION
You can probably name a few Egyptian gods: Osiris? Isis? Norse gods, surely: Thor (now more familiar than ever thanks to Marvel comics and films), Loki, Odin. And you likely know the Greco-Roman gods best of all, as they’ve been familiar throughout European culture since ancient times. After a brief retreat into the shadows following the collapse of the Roman Empire they were rediscovered by scholars of the Renaissance, who decided that the glories, beliefs and thoughts of ancient Rome and, above all, Athens represented the zenith of human civilization – and so you can spot Zeus/Jupiter, Athena/Minerva, Neptune/Poseidon, Venus/Aphrodite, Ares/Mars and their ilk, running like vivid threads through the fabric of what has been called Western culture. And it’s not only the gods. We still know the stories of many Greco-Roman heroes and their adventures: Jason and the golden fleece, Theseus and the Minotaur, the twelve labours of Hercules.
But what of Slavic gods, monsters and heroes? While the Slavic pantheon, including the likes of Vuk, Veles and Perun, may not be household names, there are some other figures born of Slavic legend who certainly are – though perhaps you’re not aware of their origins. What, for instance, could be more ubiquitous in popular culture than vampires and werewolves? It might come as a surprise to learn that these denizens of darkness emerged from the shallow graves of Slavic belief long before they stepped out onto the global stage.
Considering the tens of millions of people in the world who are ethnically Slavic – including millions in anglophone countries who are of Slavic ancestry – there have been remarkably few books in English about Slavic mythology, legends and gods. This applies just as much to editions of the myths themselves, the evocative tales of adventure, magic and lore, as it does to academic or anthropological texts about them. There are countless books for all ages about Aesop’s fables, the Grimms’ fairy tales, the ancient myths of Greece and Rome, of Egypt, of the Maya, of the Norse north; so the dearth of similar resources for the Slavic tradition seems like a surprising oversight for a corner of world history that is so wonderfully rich, and a touchstone for such an enormous potential readership.
This book offers a step towards correcting that imbalance by introducing some of the monsters, legends, gods and heroes of the Slavic world. It aims to explore what the original, pre-Christian Slavs believed before their pagan traditions were either overwritten by or, as was more often the case, interlaced with Catholicism (among western Slavs) or Orthodox Christianity (among eastern).
Together we’ll encounter vampires and werewolves, Baba Yaga and her witch’s home on its chicken legs, petulant gods and ethereal goddesses, warring women, devil-defeating damsels and a river-dwelling merman. But first, let’s meet the Slavs themselves and get to know the basics of their belief system.
MEET THE SLAVS
One surprising aspect of Slavic mythology is that most of the ideas we associate with it today are relatively modern.
The Slavs themselves are not, of course. They were an immense and heterogeneous group of tribes who began to move out of the region of the Carpathian Mountains (present-day Romania and Moldova) over the course of the 5th and 6th centuries CE. They spread in all directions, moving west towards Central Europe (as far as the modern Czech Republic), north-east towards what is now Russia and the Eurasian regions, north to the Baltic states, south into the Balkans as far as Crete, and even east, with some archaeological evidence showing up in China. But precious few literary or artistic sources survive from this earliest period of Slavic migration. Without written records or artwork there are few clues for historians and archaeologists to follow, a paucity of puzzle pieces from which to imagine how the complete picture might have looked. Archaeological data has been significantly enriched in the 20th and 21st centuries, with many previously unknown ritual sites and settlements uncovered. But the extent of material residue that helps us understand the Slavic past remains far more meagre than it is for some other ethnic groups, many of which shine more brightly in the popular imagination by virtue of having left a more extensive and vivid archaeological or written record.
The oldest record of someone writing about Slavs comes from two 6th-century CE Byzantine writers: Procopius, writing in Greek of the Sklaboi, and Jordanes, writing in Latin of the Sclaveni. Both were historiographers working under the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. Jordanes describes a tribe called the Veneti (after which the Veneto region of Italy, including the city of Venice, would be named), their metropolis Aquileia, their territory reaching ‘the bridge on Isontio’, and many other cities. He also notes that by the time they became known as the Veneti, they were already descendants of even more ancient tribes called the Antae and the Sclaveni. Just to confuse things, Procopius writes that ‘the Sclaveni and the Antae actually had a single name in the remote past, for they were both called Sporoi in olden times’.1 It’s fun to think of what ‘olden times’ meant to a historian writing in 545 CE. But Procopius goes on to tell us some useful things about this tribe:
For these nations, the Sclaveni and the Antae, are not ruled by one man, but they have lived from of old under a democracy, and consequently everything which involves their welfare, whether for good or for ill, is referred to the people. It is also true that in all other matters, practically speaking, these two barbarian peoples have had from ancient times the same institutions and customs. For they believe that one god, the maker of lightning, is alone lord of all things, and they sacrifice to him cattle and all other victims; but as for fate, they neither know it nor do they in any wise admit that it has any power among men, but whenever death stands close before them, either stricken with sickness or beginning a war, they make a promise that, if they escape, they will straightaway make a sacrifice to the god in return for their life; and if they escape, they sacrifi
‘Barbarians’ in this context was a term for any people who spoke neither Greek nor Latin, the only two ‘civilized’ languages. The Slavs lived under a democracy, as Procopius described it – a surprise, since most tribes were ruled by kings – and believed in one god, Perun, whom Procopius called ‘the maker of lightning’ and to whom they made sacrifices. This information must be taken with a pinch of salt, as a 6th-century historian would have been working on field reports many steps removed from personal experience, and in fact we know that there were Slavic kings as well as multiple gods. Procopius goes on to describe these people as living in scattered houses while regularly changing their settlement locations. Jordanes, meanwhile, says that they have ‘swamps and forests for their cities’,3 which suggests they were semi-nomadic – not in terms of moving every day with herds, but of setting up short-term, mobile villages using the safety of dense forests and wetlands.
Slavs apparently went into battle either lightly clothed or in their birthday suits with only their genitals covered, wielding shields and spears and fighting on foot. Procopius called them ‘neither very fair or blonde, nor indeed do they incline entirely to the dark type, but they are all slightly ruddy in colour. And they live a hard life, giving no heed to bodily comforts.’4 Apparently there were a lot of them: a Byzantine record claims that there were so many Slavs, the grass would not regrow where they had marched.
The early 7th-century historian Theophylact Simocatta wrote that Slavs were big and muscular but that they preferred music, singing and dancing to war activities. A 10th-century Byzantine text describes a group of Slavs travelling down a river in monoxyls: boats carved out of a single tree trunk, akin to the dugout canoes used by Amazonian tribes. A 10th-century Arab diplomat, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, described a ritual undertaken by Slav merchants living beside the Volga River: they would enter a circular sanctuary and kneel before a pillar painted with a god’s head. Other deities were painted on wood inside the circle. He also described a funerary ritual in which the deceased was placed on a boat in a sitting position and his wife, seated alongside him, was stabbed to death as a sacrifice. Then they were both pushed into the water while the boat was set alight. The 11th-century writer Thietmar of Merseburg described a temple made of timber situated on a fortified hill, its exterior adorned with sculptures fitted with animal horns. Inside were various sculpted idols dressed in helmets and armour, each dedicated to a different god, with the most important (according to this record) being Zuarasici (Svarožič, the son of Svarog – the suffix -ič, often found in southern Slavic surnames, denoting ‘son of’). Alas, no record of these temples or idols survives.
As well as Slavic kings, there were Slavic empires. In the 7th century, a Frankish merchant called Samo offered financial support to the Slavs in their war with another tribe, the Avars. When the Slavs won, they made Samo their king. He proved a good one, building the first Slavic state in Europe, which was referred to as Samo’s Empire and sprawled across most of Central Europe from 631 to 658 CE. Other settled territories followed in later centuries, including the 7th-century Duchy of Carantania (encompassing southern Austria and northern Slovenia), Great Moravia (833–907, throughout most of Central Europe) and the principalities of Nitra (in the 9th century in present-day Slovakia) and Balaton (a part of modern Hungary).
The oldest documents written by Slavs are in a language called Old Church Slavonic and date to around the 9th century. They refer to the people as Slovĕne (related to, but not to be confused with, Slovenes from modern Slovenia, where both authors of this book live). The term derives from slovo, a word that means ‘word’, and refers to a group of people who speak the same language. This contrasts interestingly with the old Slavic word for Germans, nemets, which approximately meant ‘mute or mumbling’ – essentially, ‘people the Slavs couldn’t understand’.
Originally, Old Church Slavonic was written in a lost alphabet called Glagolitic. This alphabet is believed to have been designed by one man – Saint Cyril, a 9th-century monk from Thessaloniki – to offer the Slavs a way of writing that would be distinct from the Latin alphabet used by the Frankish bishops and rulers who were encroaching on their territories. Cyril and his brother, Saint Methodius, were sent on a mission by the Byzantine emperor Michael III in 863 to introduce Christianity to the pagans of the western Slavic empire of Great Moravia. In order to bring religion closer to their target audience, they translated liturgy into the contemporary Slavic language spoken by most living in Great Moravia. This was what came to be known as Old Church Slavonic, though it was the language that the pagan Slavs spoke among themselves (it was dubbed ‘Church’ Slavonic because of its association with Cyril and Methodius). Its use was permissible thanks to an 885 bull issued by Pope Stephen V that allowed Christian services to be read in languages other than Latin or Greek. The written form of the language incorporated Greek letters with some rune-like pictograms, although the language had a phonetic alphabet, meaning that each ‘letter’ made a sound, as in English. The short-lived but intriguing Glagolitic was eventually replaced by a standardized, more orderly and angular alphabet that Cyril’s students named after him: Cyrillic, a script still used to this day among eastern Slavs from Bulgaria to Russia to Serbia.
Further confusing the story of Slavic beliefs, much of what has been discovered dates to periods when the Slavs were converting to Christianity. Ancient pagan stories have therefore, in many instances, been preserved only within apocryphal Christian texts. This means that some pagan rituals still survive in everyday life in Slavic communities today, but it also means that a good deal of sifting is required to separate later Christian elements from the original pre-Christian beliefs. Even more confusingly for anyone attempting to identify the original stories, the names of the gods and heroes differ, especially between the Baltic/Russian Slavic states and the southern (Yugo) Slavs.
MEET THE SLAVIC PANTHEON
The Slavic pantheon differs from its Scandinavian, German, Celtic and Mediterranean counterparts in that its form is less organized, mixing and matching gods and mythical beings. Our understanding of it today is coloured by the work of 19th-century scholars, who were generally well versed in better-known pantheons like the Greco-Roman and therefore tried to find the closest possible ‘matches’ or equivalents among the Slavic gods. Although it might seem superficially helpful to say that Vuk = Zeus/Jupiter, in truth it’s not quite that simple. And as we will see in later chapters, the original Slavic understanding of vampires and werewolves was as two names for a single monster: vampire = werewolf.
Many of those 19th-century scholars were working in the context of their own modern states of Slavic origin – Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia and beyond – and it is worth bearing in mind that the desire for an inspiring national origin story often shaped their interpretation of the material they were researching. So when, for instance, we learn about Queen Libuše and her involvement in the foundation of the city of Prague, we might question whether this was truly her role in Slavic legend before Prague became the capital of Czechoslovakia or, even earlier, before it was an important city at all.
As a consequence of all this, the supreme god in the Slavic pantheon is identified with different forms and different names depending on which source you consult. A core group of supreme male gods can be established, but they are rarely defined in simple, straightforward terms; nor are they unambiguously ‘good’ or ‘evil’.
Perun is the main god for most of the Slavs, the nearest to an equivalent of Zeus/Jupiter or Odin. Perun controls storms, summons thunder, hurls bolts of lightning, dwells on snow-strewn mountain tops and haunts oak trees. He is sometimes called Dažbog, god of rainstorms. He is a god of war wielding an arsenal of magical weapons: a battle-axe, a war hammer, a bow and arrows of lightning. He is the god most often cited as having appeared in person at major historical moments and in battles, so much so that he has even been listed as a conscriptor of state contracts in Russia.
