The ancient Slavs, who lived in particular in current Ukraine, practiced paganism with poorly known contours. The researcher Patrice Lajoye gathered this scattered knowledge in an unprecedented synthesis.
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The Slavs, a people from central and eastern Europe, have not always been Christians. But the paganism that preceded this monotheism is almost unknown to us, because of their “without appeal conversion”, which has spread out of the VIII e in the 13th e century under The effect of Byzantines and Latins, and which led to erasure “of the slightest memory of ancient paganism”, writes Patrice Lajoye.
This researcher at the CNRS, who had already been interested in one of the main gods of this pantheon in his work Perun. God Slavic of the storm (Lingva, 2015), underlines that, “therefore, the pagan Slavic religion is particularly difficult to apprehend”. The sources on the subject prove to be incomplete and often oriented. The oldest are often Christian, therefore biased. And, in Russian language, some books dealing with Slavic folklore
have been published since the end of the USSR, but they are scientifically contested.
This historic black hole is also observed in research: in French, the only general work on the subject dates… from 1901! With mythology and religion of pagan Slavs (Les Belles Lettres, 208 p., 23 €), Patrice Lajoye therefore intends to pick up rare and scattered work – including recent archaeological discoveries – in a summary book. The opportunity to immerse yourself in this little-known culture, which emerged within the Indo-European matrix.
1. A cosmogony: At the beginning was a giant
In Slavic paganism, the story to create the world seems to draw from an Indo-European myth of which there are many variants, observed from Scandinavia to India. According to this legend, the world was created from the fragments of the body of a giant killed by the gods then cut.
“Her hair then gives vegetation, blood, waters, bones, stones”, details Patrice Lajoye, who also mentions a Russian legend sophisticating this origin. This reports the dialogue of an old man and her grandson given as ancestors of humanity and mentions the construction of a bone palace, which would offer the “trace of a story of dismemberment of a giant Cosmic “.
This myth of the cosmic giant coexists among the Slavs with another mythical motif also widespread, that of the “cosmogonic plunge”: this dualist narrative stages the awakening of a first character who will send a second “at the bottom Simply waters seek there what to make the earth “.
2. The origin of men: born of divine sweating
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