The Slavic Myths, page 15
‘God smiles on those who offer charity to wandering pilgrims, doesn’t he, Peter?’ replied the other.
The pilgrims dipped the wooden ladle into the water once more and carried it over to Ilya.
‘Drink of this, my son,’ said one, tipping the ladle towards Ilya’s lips.
Ilya drank and thanked them. No sooner had the words of thanks sounded than he felt a change come over him. Energy began to flow into his legs, flexing into muscles that had, mere moments before, been absent from his limbs. Ilya was carried forward by the newfound mass of his legs. Without thinking, he pushed himself off the tiled stove and landed, fully supporting his weight, upon his own legs.
‘Saints be praised!’ he shouted in surprise and delight. ‘I can walk!’
‘We saw that there was something special about you, Ilya Muromets,’ said one of the pilgrims.
‘How do you know my name?’ Ilya replied, while still wondering at those legs of his.
‘You are destined for great things. We have come from the court of Prince Vladimir. He will need your help. You must go forth and become a bogatyr, a knight-errant, a defender of the defenceless. We offer you but one word of warning: do not challenge in combat Vladimir’s current bogatyr, Svyatogor. The world will need you both. Take up your father’s mace and horse, for you will find that the sip of water you’ve just taken not only gave your legs strength but also taught you to ride and to fight.’
‘However can I thank you?’ Ilya asked humbly.
‘Fulfil,’ said both pilgrims, waving goodbye.
And so Ilya Muromets set out to become a knight-errant. He truly did find that he could ride, though he’d never been on a horse before. His father’s mace felt nimble in his hand, an extension of his fortress arms. He galloped and duelled birch trees in the forest, sprinted and leapt, testing and enjoying his newfound abilities.
On the road towards the court of Prince Vladimir, Ilya suddenly came upon a giant asleep upon a giant horse.
This giant, thought Ilya, must surely be menacing the countryside – for in the stories he’d been told growing up, giants always menaced. If I’m to be a bogatyr, he thought, I must defend the realm against such monsters. And so he rode right up to the giant, who dozed and snored thunderously upon his sleeping black horse.
To reach the giant, Ilya had to stand upon the saddle of his own horse and leap upwards. And so he did, smashing the giant’s giant helmet with his mace. The helmet resounded as if Ilya had struck a church bell, but the giant slept on.
Again Ilya rode his horse around, climbed up onto the saddle, then leapt up as he passed, smashing his mace against the giant’s head. Once again the helmet tolled like a church bell but the giant did not appear to be harmed, nor did he even wake.
When Ilya did this a third time, the giant reacted, but not as one might expect. Still asleep, he picked up Ilya and tucked him into his pocket.
There Ilya remained. It was more comfortable than you might expect, and after a time he fell asleep. When he woke, the giant, too, had woken. Ilya scrambled out of his pocket, slid down the giant’s hip and turned to face him.
The giant wore a much-dented battle helmet. He had a long white beard, and kindly giant eyes beneath a canopy of white eyebrows.
‘I am Svyatogor, bogatyr of Prince Vladimir.’
‘I am Ilya Muromets, and I must apologize to you, for I was told that, whatever I do, I must not challenge you. And yet, not knowing who you were, I’ve done the one thing that was forbidden me.’
‘It’s just as well,’ Svyatogor replied, his voice like a distant earthquake. ‘I am old and no longer able to defend the kingdom alone. My dear, blind father once told me that a legless man would take my place. I never believed him until now.’
‘So you know of me?’
‘And other things,’ Svyatogor replied, chuckling. ‘I knew that my time was approaching to pass from this world when I could no longer lift my magic bag, and when the world could no longer lift me.’
‘What do you mean?’ Ilya wondered.
Svyatogor pointed to a small bag made of burlap, a bag that was more appropriately sized for Ilya. It looked like a thimble in Svyatogor’s hand.
‘When I try to lift my magic bag, the earth gives way and I sink into it. My weight combined with that of the bag is too great. Whoever can carry it without sinking into the earth shall inherit it and go on to replace me as the defender of the realm. Go on, then…’
Ilya nodded and approached the burlap bag. He lifted it with ease, for it appeared to be empty. And he did not sink into the earth.
Svyatogor smiled. ‘So it is you. So be it. Let us travel together towards Prince Vladimir’s court. There is one more test to pass.’
And so Svyatogor the giant and his comparatively little friend, Ilya Muromets, journeyed together and through several adventures, until they came to a grey stone quarry, thick with mist. As the mist parted around them they saw a colossal stone coffin lying in the midst of the quarry, carved directly into the stone of the mountain, with a stone lid lying beside it.
Both Svyatogor and Ilya knew immediately who it was for, but by now Ilya could hardly bear the thought of being without his friend. So Ilya lay down in the coffin first.
Once inside, he wept, for it was far too large for him. Svyatogor smiled and nodded, calmly helping Ilya out of the coffin with his oversized hand. He then climbed in, and it was a perfect fit. The stone lid began to close, and he closed his eyes along with it.
Svyatogor had been, until this point, at perfect peace with his fate. But at the last moment his eyes flashed open, for he suddenly realized that he had not yet passed to Ilya his power.
‘Ilya, you must take this from me, to defend…’ As Svyatogor spoke, a white frost emerged from his mouth and passed into Ilya’s. But the lid slammed shut before it had quite finished. Some of the giant’s power had passed over, but not all.
Ilya wept for the passing of his friend. In his despair, he punched a boulder that sat in the quarry. The boulder shattered under the force of his bare fist, as if it were made of dry leaves. This surprised him so much that it shook him from his mourning. He sought another boulder and found that he was able to pick it up with one hand, throw it into the air and catch it upon a single finger.
Seeing what power had been passed to him, Ilya determined to fulfil his destiny and replace Svyatogor as the bogatyr of Kyiv. He would offer his services to Prince Vladimir the Fair Sun (who would one day become the future Saint Vladimir, though no one knew it then). Even Ilya himself would eventually become a saint, though many adventures awaited him first. He would free Kyiv from the bloated monster, Idolishche Poganoye, and he would single-handedly repel the invading Polovtsi from the walls of Chernigov, lifting the siege. Once, he would lose his mace – but when that happened, he still fought off a cohort of enemies armed only with his own boot.
One day, passing through Bryansk Forest, Ilya came upon a glade where all the grasses and meadows had become entangled, the azure flowers had lost their petals, the dark trees bent down towards the earth, and a number of people lay dead on the ground. They had been felled by the magic whistle of a forest monster known as Nightingale the Robber. Nightingale would perch in a tree and either stun travellers with his whistle, should he blow into it but lightly, or slay them with a full breath.
Ilya withstood the whistle when it came, although it stripped half the forest of its leaves and scorched the grasses. Then it was Nightingale’s turn to be stunned, for never before had his whistle failed him. Ilya shot him from his tree, landing arrows in his eye and temple. Nightingale fell from the branch, wounded but still living.
Ilya then dragged him to the court of Prince Vladimir, who was interested in the whistle and asked to hear it. Nightingale replied that he was too wounded to demonstrate its power, but if the prince really wanted to hear it, he could be healed with a flask of wine.
The curious (if not, at this point in his career, overly bright) prince called for wine. Nightingale drank it down in a single gulp and was healed. He then blew into his whistle. Immediately all of Vladimir’s palaces were destroyed, and half the people within them killed. At this, Ilya shook his head, lifted Nightingale up, took him to a field outside Kyiv and cut off his head.
Ilya’s relationship with Prince Vladimir was not always rosy. On one occasion, when the prince had failed to invite him to a party, Ilya had a tantrum and knocked down all the church steeples in Kyiv. Alarmed by this behaviour, the prince sent an invitation to Ilya, who was delighted to attend the party after all and was deemed the most charming of all the guests.
Despite occasional moments like this, Ilya remained chief bogatyr for the rest of his days, defending Kyiv against all its enemies – including the fearsome Kalin, khan of the Tatars and master of the Golden Horde. It is said that even now, a millennium later, the spirit of Ilya Muromets remains to defend Kyiv against foreign enemies…even fellow Slavs, should a new khan send brethren into irrational battle against brethren.
PERUN, SUPREME GOD
There are gods of specific realms and practices, and then there are universal gods: catch-all figures cobbled together from various traditions and imbued with a cornucopia of powers. The supreme god of most if not all historic Slavs, from the Baltic region to Russia to the Balkans, was Perun.
Perun probably belongs to the Indo-European mythos. It’s a little too simplistic to equate him to Zeus/Jupiter, although he is the god of thunder and lightning as well as the supreme god, ruling all others. He is also the god of mountain peaks, justice, ruling power, war: manly things. But that is not all, for he is the god of fertility too. There’s a manly component to that, of course, but in most pantheons fertility is framed as a female attribute. Perun’s struggles with other gods for supremacy are described in innumerable myths, and it has also been a struggle to establish the historical view of his role among scholars of Slavic culture.
For a long time, Perun was thought to have been a late addition to the pantheon, included only as a response to Christianity. There was indeed a younger generation of deities added during the Christian era, like Saint Petka, so this seemed plausible. Scholars also considered it problematic that Perun’s functions were so numerous – surely they could not all be connected with only one god? It seemed suspicious, too, that he was known only to Baltic and Russian peoples, or so it was thought at one time. These doubts about Perun pervaded the scholarship of Slavic mythology.
The Italian Slavist Evel Gasparini argues that Perun has no direct connection with humans – hence his seeming inactivity in myths – but instead governs them from a distance, through other deities.50 He’s the general, and other gods are the ones carrying out his plans. Or he might be evidence of Slavic monotheism – Perun is the only true god and others are holy figures, like saints, acting out his wishes. Gasparini tries to prove this hypothesis by connecting the notion of Slavic monotheism to the Finno-Ugric and Iranian religious systems. It has also been suggested that Perun was a borrowed deity, taken by Slavs from Norse mythology – that Perun was originally Thor.
Perun’s ubiquity is reflected in the fact that his name has historically been found throughout the Balkans, confirming his presence among all Slavs. The scholar Veselin Čajkanović believed that the southern Slavic name Pera was not adapted from the Christian name Petar (Peter), as sometimes assumed, but that it originated from Perun and was therefore much older.51
Russian researchers of the 20th century came up with a triangle connecting the three oldest deities of the Slavs: Perun, Mokoš and Veles – a heroic triad. Mokoš, Perun’s wife (Heaven/Earth), cheated on her husband with Veles (darkness/fire), for which she was punished.52 No single surviving myth conveys this story, but it aligns with the binary oppositions that scientists needed in order to organize and classify beliefs. For V.N. Toporov this is the ‘main’ myth, featuring as it does a heavenly wedding and a fight with the forces of darkness.53 Aspects of it are reflected in ‘humanized’ Slavic epics and other forms of oral literature such as Russian bylinas, or epic tales, which transpose the myths of the three main deities onto (super)human heroes battling monsters – many of which are allegories for invading armies like the Tatars.
The Slovenian god Kresnik, a god of fire, is one of many well-known variants of Perun, supporting the theory of a ‘main’ myth that served as the basis for numerous others. After scholarly debates over two centuries, the prevailing opinion emerged that Perun was the supreme god – perhaps the only truly ancient god, who had become anthropomorphic in his later versions.
Perun manages the most powerful natural phenomena: the strongest sound (thunder), the strongest impact (earthquakes) and the strongest light (lightning) – something instantaneous, fast, unexpected and extremely dangerous, capable of bringing about fundamental change and destruction on Earth. But it is accompanied by other natural phenomena: rain, wind, clouds, fire, clear skies, sun. That is why the list of Perun’s competencies is so long and varied, as well as the list of male deities who compete with him in certain areas: Svarog/Svarožič, Svetovid, Dažbog/Dajbog/Daba, Porovit and Jarovit represent the seasons, different jobs, different gifts for mortals, different functions performed by the supreme god at the same time. The question remains as to whether these deities are all ultimately descendants of the supreme god. Some of them seem to have been as important to certain Slavic groups as Perun himself: Dažbog is one of these. His name means ‘giving’, one of the most important qualities of the supreme god.
There is, among all these figures, a common image of the supreme male deity. He is a middle-aged, bearded man equipped for war, armed with a hammer, axe or arrow, often on horseback. All of these attributes could be described as Indo-European signs of male power. Perun is also described as having a silver head and a golden moustache. Curiously, he does not have a significant sexual life in myths – at least, nothing to compare with that of Zeus, who rarely missed an opportunity to strike up an affair with any female (or, for that matter, male) deity, human, monster or animal.
In Christian syncretism, Perun is equated with Saint Elias (mixed with the Old Testament prophet Elijah) and Saint Peter. In the former context he changes his horse for a horse-drawn carriage with which, just like ancient Helios, he follows the sun’s path in the sky every day. This has been linked to Elijah rising into Heaven, as described in 2 Kings Chapter 2, Verse 11: ‘Behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire…and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.’54
The power of Perun to regulate social relations, ruling and judging fairly, is described in the earliest written documents on the Slavic pantheon: three peace treaties from the 10th century CE (two of them armistices with the Byzantine Greeks) cite Perun as a guarantor of fulfilling the agreed-upon conditions. These prerogatives were also valid in the Russian cults of Novgorod and Kyiv. Prince (later Saint) Vladimir nominated his relative, Dobrynya, to the Slavic pantheon (with a holy place and cult figures) in 980, but just a few years later he converted to Christianity and demolished his pagan monuments, in part due to an uprising of the pro-Christian citizens of Novgorod.55
Perun the thunderbolt-bearer usually resides on mountain tops, on clouds or elsewhere in the sky. His tree is an oak (as is that of Odin, supreme god of the Norse pantheon) and his flower is the iris – Iris Germanica. In Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, the name of this flower is perunika. In Serbo-Croatian there is also a variant name: bogiša or ‘god’s flower’. Iris is used as a remedy for a number of diseases. Traditionally, when the holiday of Saint Petar Bogišar was celebrated in Dubrovnik, consecrated iris flowers were given away in churches and brought into houses as protection from lightning strikes. The iris was also said to protect vineyards from lightning.56
The Montenegrin prince-bishop and poet Petar Petrović Njegoš wanted to name an official state coin the perun, although he died before this project could be realized. With his numerous competencies, Perun was the preferred deity of many rulers and princes, and therefore of war and military skills. Consequently we find the continuity of Perun precisely in that social group, in the warrior class.
Ilya Muromets, the Russo-Ukrainian hero whose legend we retell here, was sometimes called ‘Perun’, and was later canonized as a Christian saint. He was one of the legendary bogatyrs, knights-errant in Russian bylinas, who were said to have superhuman abilities and who fought for real, historical princes; Ilya was essentially the guardian of Prince Vladimir of Kyiv.
If we take a step back and consider Perun’s characteristics – fighting ability, striking power, loneliness at the top, authority and the ability to dispense justice, but also stubbornness – we can see connections with many other mythical and legendary figures, not all of whom are associated with a particular location. Such characters are often nomadic, living in the mountains. They may have been unfairly barred from a position of unequivocal authority, which they must fight to regain. They usually do not have a partner, but if they do, they are ready to severely punish her infidelity. They fight individual human enemies as well as monsters, dragons and entire armies, vanquishing them.
Figures like this can be found in all Slavic cultures. While Ilya Muromets is the most famous Russo-Ukrainian example, in the Balkans we find the folk hero Marko Kraljević: fearless, energetic, aggressive and merciless to his enemies, he prefers to stay alone in the mountains in the company of his horse. Ilya is likewise childish at times: quick to anger, but equally quick to forget and recover his good spirits.
The prominence in Slavic culture of mythic heroes like this helped to shape the public perception of, and even the actual behaviour of, real-life rulers. The imaginary attributes ascribed to the 20th-century Yugoslav president Tito (Josip Broz) reflect this phenomenon. His military successes against the Nazis, mainly in the mountainous parts of Yugoslavia, his ruling style, his political achievements and global reputation were reflected in his authoritarian rule of Yugoslavia. He projected an implied immortality (keeping his role for life), lived an almost royal luxurious lifestyle despite ruling a socialist country without an aristocracy, and exerted complete political control – in a sense, he was the ‘supreme god’ of Yugoslavia. After his death, the country disintegrated into a destructive war accompanied by social decline affecting the majority of the population. This led unexpectedly to a cult of Tito within post-Yugoslav countries, a ‘Yugo-nostalgia’ for the ‘good old days’ that fed back into the utopian legend of a better past.
