Velez

For many millennia, successive generations passed on to each other mythical tales of amazing deities or terrible ghouls and monsters. These days, pop culture is definitely dominated by the Greek Olympus with Zeus at the helm. However, we Slavs must not forget about our own mythology, which, although not fully explored and largely abandoned at random, is nevertheless extremely interesting. This time about a god who was identified with the keeper of cattle, and somewhere else with death and the underworld - meet Veles!

Veles (or Volos) is mentioned in Czech sources at the turn of the XNUMX – XNUMX centuries and is identified with a demon. In these texts, researchers have found a record of the oaths ky veles ik welesu, which correspond to our ki devil and hell. According to some mythologists, this indicates the great popularity of this god. Alexander Brückner, one of the most prominent Polish literary historians, also shares this thesis. He argues that the aforementioned association of Veles with cattle was caused by a mistake when, at the end of the pagan era, Veles was mistaken for St. Vlas (Saint Vlas), the patron saint of cattle. Instead, Brueckner points to a sound similarity to the Lithuanian Welinas, which means “devil,” and therefore associates him with the god of death and the underworld. Such a statement would explain why he was sworn in. There were rituals associated with an underground deity. The Slavs were not at all willing to swear, but in this case, when they swore, they took the land into their own hands. Rusyns sprinkled the whole head with turf, that is, a ball of grass and earth.

Unfortunately, all this information cannot be one hundred percent confirmed, because the above sources are not entirely reliable, so Brueckner and other researchers must have used a lot of assumptions. Interestingly, there was also a camp of mythologists who argued that Veles or Volos did not exist at all! According to them, only the already mentioned St. Own. His cult began with the Byzantine Greeks, then he broke through with all his might to the Balkan, and then to the Rusyn Slavs, so that at the end Veles was able to stand almost on a par with one of the greatest Slavic gods - Perun.

Veles traditionally acts as the antagonist of Perun, whose traces have survived after Christianization in folklore as stories about the rivalry between God and the devil (hence the grounds for identifying the Snake with Veles) and even St. Nicholas with God or St. Or me. This motive coincides with the common Indo-European scheme of rivalry between two higher and opposing deities.

How could such confusion arise when comparing two numbers? Well, perhaps this is due to the linguistic changes that took place around the XNUMX century AD. At that time, the Slavs used the Old Slavonic language, which was the first literary language used in this area, and from which later Slavic languages, including Polish, originated. In short, the process led to the emergence of the original Vlas from Wallachia. This is where the mentioned problem could arise.

As you can see, the Slavic gods and their origin still remain a mystery. All this is connected with an insignificant number of written sources, of which even less are trustworthy. Over the years, many inventions of slightly less competent mythologists have appeared on the topic of Slavic beliefs, so now it is very difficult to separate the grain from the chaff. Nevertheless, we can be sure of one thing - Veles occupied a very high position in pagan cults and, of course, was very popular. The only deity above him is still Perun - the god of thunder.

If you want to deepen the topic, I recommend that you read the study by Stanislav Urbanchik, whose light language makes the study of Slavic mythology a pleasure. I also recommend Alexander Geishtor and Alexander Brueckner, mentioned many times, although the style of these two men seems a little more complex.