The connection between Russian fairy tales and the mythology of the ancient Slavs. Mythological origins of Russian fairy tales. Not all the stories and myths of antiquity have disappeared. There is a fairy tale about a bear who took revenge on a man and woman for their severed paw. The bear broke a linden tree, made himself a wooden leg and

The fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it! Whoever learns is a lesson.

As they write in, the first Great Flood occurred as a result of the destruction of the Moon Leli, one of the three Moons orbiting Midgard-Earth at that time.

This is how ancient sources say about this event: “You are My children! Know that the Earth walks past the Sun, but My words will not pass you by! And about ancient times, people, remember! About the Great Flood that destroyed people, about the fall of fire on Mother Earth!” (“Songs of the bird Gamayun”).

“You have been living peacefully on Midgard since ancient times, when the world was established... Remembering from the Vedas about the deeds of Dazhdbog, how he destroyed the strongholds of the Koschei, who were on the nearest Moon... Tarkh did not allow the insidious Koschei to destroy Midgard, as they destroyed Deya... These Koschei, the rulers of the Grays , disappeared along with the Moon in half... But Midgard paid for freedom with Daariya, hidden by the Great Flood... The waters of the Moon created that Flood, they fell to the Earth from heaven like a rainbow, for the Moon split into pieces and with the army of Svarozhichi descended to Midgard...” (“Santii” Vedas of Perun”).

In memory of the salvation from the Flood and the Great Migration of the Clans of the Great Race, a unique ritual appeared in the 16th year - Easter with a deep inner meaning, performed by everyone Orthodox people. This ritual is well known to everyone. At Easter, colored eggs are hit against each other to see whose egg is stronger. The broken egg was called the egg of the Koshchei (they gave it to the dogs), i.e., the destroyed Moon Lelya with the bases of the Foreigners, and the whole egg was called the Power of Tarkh Dazhdbog (they ate it themselves). And so that the peeled egg differs from the unpeeled one, they are painted. The tale of Koshchei the Immortal, whose death was in an egg (on the Moon Lele) somewhere at the top of a tall oak tree (on the world tree, i.e. actually in the heavens), also appeared in common use. And do not confuse - a mortal demon and immortal, there used to be a form of writing that meant eternity. And Lunacharsky started a complete devilry. And note, not among Catholics, not in Judaism, not in Islam, although they all have the same roots, there is no such ritual! Having become Orthodox, Christianity was forced to introduce this custom, presenting it in a new way and staining it with the blood of Yeshua.

Christians not only distorted Slavic fairy tales, but also invented their own. Such tales mainly contain the eternal dream of the Christian people about a “freebie”. While in Slavic fairy tales, the main characters always achieve their goals only through their labor.

One example of distortion is The Tale of the Turnip, known to everyone from early childhood. In the original Slavic version, this tale points to the relationship between generations, and also points to the interaction of temporary structures, forms of life and forms of existence.

In the original tale there were nine elements, each of which had its own hidden image:

turnip- the heritage and wisdom of the Family, its roots. It seems to unite the earthly, underground and above-ground;
Grandfather– Ancient Wisdom;
Grandma– home traditions, housekeeping;
Father– protection and support;
Mother– love and care;
Granddaughter– children, grandchildren;
Bug- prosperity in the Family, there is something to protect;
Cat– a good environment in the Family, because they are harmonizers of human energy;
Mouse- the well-being of a family where there is nothing to eat and there are no mice.

But Christians removed the Father and Mother, and replaced their images with protection and support from the church, and care and love with Christ.

Initially the meaning was as follows: have a connection with the Family and Family Memory, live in harmony with relatives and have Happiness in the family. Maybe this is where the expression came from - Give a turnip - so that enlightenment comes.

Another of the many distortions is the fairy tale Kolobok.
Here is its original version:

Confirmation of this interpretation of Kolobok can be found in Russian folk riddles (from the collection of V. Dahl):

Blue scarf, red bun: rolls around on the scarf, grins at people.

This is about Heaven and Yarilo-Sun. I wonder how fairy-tale remakes would portray the red Kolobok? Did you mix blush into the dough?

Let's take the description of the serpent Gorynych.

Other ancient Russian fairy tales that describe the appearance of a snake say that it can fly, its wings are fiery. Clawed paws and a long tail with a point are a favorite detail popular prints in fairy tales, as a rule, they are absent. A constant feature of the serpent is its connection with fire: “A strong storm arose, thunder rumbled, the earth trembled, dense forest he bows down: a three-headed serpent flies,” “A fierce serpent flies at him, scorches him with fire, threatens him with death,” “Then the serpent emitted a fiery flame from itself, wants to burn the prince.”

This snake is recognized as the Kundalini serpent - the spiritual power of man. His constant threat: “I will burn your kingdom (i.e., body) with fire and scatter it with ashes.”

In Russians folk tales The serpent is the guardian of the border to the Kingdom of Heaven. The border itself is described as a fiery river called Smorodinka (“mor” - death, “one” - one; that is, one death). A bridge called “viburnum” leads across it (in Sanskrit “kali” - ill-fated), that is, only those whose eggchore (“seed of the devil” - a drop of Causal Matter) has fully manifested themselves can step on this border. The one who kills the snake (yaytsechore), that is, defeats all his animal elements, will be able to cross the bridge.

When meeting with the serpent, the hero faces the danger of sleep, falling asleep, that is, obsession - trouble: “The prince began to walk along the bridge, tapping with a cane (the main ascending channel of the Kundalini force, running along the center of the human spine), a jug popped up (mystical abilities that manifest themselves as they rise Kundalini) and began to dance in front of him; he stared at it (became carried away by his mystical abilities) and fell into a deep sleep (i.e., “fell into delusion”). An unprepared person falls asleep, a true hero never: “The storm - the hero didn’t give a damn (was not carried away by these abilities), coughed (brought them into “hara”, balanced) on him and broke him into small parts. The serpent is immortal and invincible for the uninitiated, it can only be destroyed by a certain hero: the eggchore can only be defeated by the one in whom it is located - “In the whole world there is no other rival for me except Ivan Tsarevich, and he is still young, even the raven of his bones is here won’t bring it.”

The serpent never tries to kill the hero with weapons, paws, or teeth - he tries to drive the hero into the ground (i.e. into sin) and thus destroy him: “The miracle of Yudo began to overcome him, drove him knee-deep into the damp earth.” In the second battle, he was “hammered waist-deep into damp earth,” that is, with each fight, the dirt (damp earth) of the egg chore begins to appear in the person to an increasing extent. The snake can only be destroyed by cutting off all its heads, that is, by defeating one’s senses. But these heads have a wonderful property - they grow again, that is, the power of feelings increases with their satisfaction: “I cut off nine heads of the miracle juda; Miracle Yudo picked them up, struck them with a fiery finger - the heads grew back.” Only after the fiery finger (lust) is cut off does the hero manage to cut off all the heads.

Knowing the dependence of spiritual development on mastering our feelings, our ancestors gave us the following instruction:

Where feelings rule - there is lust,
Where's the lust? - there is anger, blindness,
Where's the blindness? - loss of mind
Where the mind fades- knowledge perishes there,
Where knowledge perishes, let everyone know –
There a human child perishes in the darkness!
And the one who has achieved power over feelings,
Trampled disgust, knows no passions,
Who subjugated them forever to his will –
Achieved enlightenment, freed from pain,
And since then his heart has been immaculate,
And his mind is firmly established.

The third battle is the most terrible. A special condition of the last battle is that only the hero’s miraculous assistant, his spiritual body, can kill the snake: “The heroic horse rushed into the slaughter and began to gnaw the snake with its teeth and trample with its hooves. ...The stallions came running and kicked the snake out of the saddle. ...The animals rushed at him and tore him to shreds.” “One horse reared up and threw the snake on its shoulders, and the other hit its side with its hooves, the snake fell, and the horses oppressed the snake with their feet. Here are the horses! The battle, of course, ends in victory for the hero. But after the battle, one more thing needs to be done: the snake needs to be completely destroyed, that is, it is necessary to transform human bodies into the Light body (body of Light) - pure virtue: “And the body rolled into the fiery river”; “He picked up all the parts, burned them, and scattered the ashes across the field”; “He lit a fire, burned the snake to ashes and sent it to the wind.”

“With this, fairy tales prepare children for the search for the Kingdom of Heaven - for achieving complete perfection through acquiring the body of Light.

Remember, Baba Yaga, either a bone or a golden leg. But originally there was Baba Yoga. And it was not for nothing that she got along with Leshiy, the owner of the forest, where her house stood surrounded by a high tyne, hung with skulls. But the skulls were of animals, because they retain the strength and wisdom of their species, creating a protective circle. Again the hut was on chicken legs, from which she flew out on an aircraft into one evil spirit. But kuryi means smoke, that is, the house stood above the ground and could turn wherever you wanted. Kuril Islands - do they raise smoking chickens there? Nothing like that! And one more thing: Whoever passes through the smoke will end up in another world. Very clear description of stargate. Haze is a reflection of a changed space. Small on the outside - immense on the inside - this speaks of a changed matrix of perception.

Remember Pushkin - the mermaid was sitting on the branches, and her hair was brown. She was a bird maiden - wise and not tailed.

Do you remember the fairy tale about the Snow Maiden? Why are her parents never mentioned in modern versions? So why did she melt?

It is not easy to understand the Ancient Wisdom in its original interpretation, because it must be perceived with the heart, the Soul. This is well said in the fairy tale about the hen Ryaba. She laid a golden egg, which Grandfather beat but didn’t break, Grandma Biba didn’t break, but the mouse ran, waved its tail, the egg fell and broke. Here the golden egg bears the image of the hidden Ancestral Wisdom, which you cannot take in a swoop, no matter how hard you hit. At the same time, by accidentally touching it, this system can be destroyed, broken into fragments, destroying its integrity.
Therefore, if people have not reached the level that would allow them to understand the hidden, simple information in the form of an ordinary egg is sufficient for them to begin with, because a golden one can even blow the roof off.

Fairy tale “Tiny - Khavrocheska”. The girl was left an orphan, but she had a favorite cow. And when the girl needed something, she would climb into the cow’s left ear, get out of the right ear, and get what she needed. It would seem that such a big girl cannot climb cow ears. But this cow - the Heavenly Cow Zimun or the Little Dipper, as it is also called - is a rectangle and is a cow's ear, and then there is Khara, Dara, where the Kharians, Daariyans come from. But in a fairy tale they won’t write: So the girl passed through the gates of Interworld, aimed at this cow’s ear, and received everything she needed. And mind you, she asked everything from her mother. Mom is like the image of the cow Zimun, the ancestral home of the Ancestors, and Ingard is also not far away. And the girl went through her ear to Dazhdbog of the Sun, to the Land of Ingard, communicated with the Ancestors, and came out through a completely different ear, according to the movement of the stars, in a different place, and made her way home again. That is, she constantly communicated with her Ancestors. At the entrance, one palace of the Svarog circle was used, and after visiting from another palace, she descended to Midgard through another palace. And her stepmother has three daughters: one-eyed, two-eyed and three-eyed, whom she sent to spy on the girl. And the girl, before leaving, sang and lulled herself to sleep: Sleep, little eye. The first sister fell asleep. The stepmother sent her second daughter to keep an eye on the girl. Girl again: Sleep little eye, sleep the other one. This sister also fell asleep. And only the third managed to spy on the girl, because she sang to her: Sleep the little eye, sleep the other, but did not take into account the third eye, which is between the eyebrows, energy vision. As a result, the cow was slaughtered, but the girl did not eat the meat, but collected all the bones, buried them, and grew up in one version of the fairy tale - an apple tree, in another - a birch tree.

And the birch tree is also an image of the family: when a girl was born, they planted a birch tree; when a boy was born, they planted an oak tree. And the children, playing, grew up between the trees, and received strength from these trees. Therefore, let’s say, if a son was wounded in a military campaign, the parents, judging by the condition of the tree – it was drying up, saw that their son was in trouble. And the parents began to care for this tree, feed it, treat it, and as a result, the tree blossomed and the son got better. The daughters did the same with the birch tree.

An ancient fairy tale, when a young man goes to free his bride from Kashchei. A wolf helps him, a bear, who rolled up a tree with a chest, with a safe where Kashchei’s death was kept, a falcon or someone else: after all, when the young man was hungry, he wanted to shoot a bird or an animal, and they turned to him: Don’t touch me, I I'll still be useful to you. Even the pike brought an egg where the needle was kept, and on the tip of that needle was the death of the kashchei. Different interpretation options. Note that no matter how the Kashchei boasted, they were always defeated. Why? Because our Ancestors clearly defined that Kashchei is a demon and he is always mortal: a mortal demon. But because Previously, they wrote everything together, but over time they began to perceive it as meaning - without mortal. And only then Mr. Lunacharsky started the devilry: he actually introduced the word immortal. Although in the Russian language there were the concepts of “demon mortal”, which means: a demon who will die sooner or later, and “without mortal”, which means eternal. That's the difference.

And note, in any fairy tale, good always wins, and any action always has a complete figurative form. Please note that Kashchei always wore certain armor, that is, protective robes. Evil people have always loved to protect themselves. And a simple weapon, as in fairy tales: even a red-hot arrow does not take it, i.e. tempered, and the sword is tempered on herbs, it does not cut it, but only what kind of sword takes it? Kladinetz. How was the Kladinets sword different from a tempered sword? And the fact that this is not just a sword, but a powerful information weapon, why? But because there was a rune tie running along the sword, i.e. certain spells were cast along the blade. And sometimes even on the handle. And the rune knit also created a kind of special energy structure - the force around the sword. Those. kladinets - a weapon, as it were magical influence, or as they would say, a magic sword. And he any of this negative energy protection still punched. Because there is nothing more powerful than Slavic runes.

Very interesting, from an esoteric point of view, is the fabulous Instruction-Lesson that accompanies more than one Russian folk tale:

Go there, no one knows where,
Bring That, It Isn't Known What

It turns out that not only fairy tales were taught such a Lesson. This instruction was received by every descendant from the Clans of the Holy Race, who ascended along the Golden Path of Spiritual Development (in particular, mastering the Stages of Faith - the “science of imagery”).

A person begins the Second Lesson of the First Stage of Faith by looking inside himself to see all the diversity of colors and sounds within himself, as well as to experience the Ancient Ancestral Wisdom that he received at his birth on Midgard-Earth. The key to this great storehouse of Wisdom is known to every person from the Clans of the Great Race; it is contained in the ancient instruction:

Go There, not knowing Where,
Find out what is unknown to you.

On the same topic and the choice of path at the stone at the crossroads. But simply the cross of fate. If you go to the right, you will lose your horse; if you go to the left, you will lose glory; if you go straight, you will lose both yourself and your horse.
By horse we can understand both the horse and the material world, by glory - spiritual world, and the direct path is straight to the world of Navi. And it’s up to you to decide whether it’s Light or Dark.

“Az, Buki, Lead, Verb, Good” - this, as you understand, is not a, b, c, d, e. The first is living water, the second is dead. And it’s clear why foreigners don’t understand our fairy tales, no matter how much they scratch their heads! They cannot understand our deep images, because “Az, Buki, Vedi, Verb, Dobro” is simply impossible to translate into their language without violating the centuries-old harmony of our inner strength, our internal scale, without erasing the life-giving logic of our composition, so inseparable from the very nature of the meanings, without distorting the sacred basis of the letter Yat, which, even being expelled as unnecessary, continues to preserve the image of the connection between the top and bottom, and patiently wait for the return home to its wild and such an irresponsible family, because they do not know what they are doing! Life is the belly of our life, created from above. Combining Image and Life, we get: the gods and man created from the faces of Life. Alive is the true self of a person. It turns out to be in one of the faces of the many-sided soul of the Whole. The word Soul is also important to clarify. The good initially sent by man through his labors is multiplied. It is a grave mistake to say “my soul”; the soul is the good initially sent in man’s works and multiplied, that is, it is correct to say: “I am one of the facets of the soul of the Whole.” These are the levels at which we are all One.

IN modern world There is a huge number of so-called dichotomies, i.e. pairs of opposing concepts. Good is evil, bad is good, beautiful is ugly, earth is sky. But if you look at your original language, you will be more than amazed - these dichotomies do not exist in it! And how can that be, right? These glitches appeared in our language out of the need to simplify our space into trade concepts, well, you understand perfectly well how this happened. But from the point of view of the original runic words, beauty and ugliness are almost synonymous. Initially, the word freak meant closeness to Rod, i.e. located near Rod. The same thing, the old good and evil, previously meant something unknown, beyond understanding. We didn’t say, this one is good and this one is bad, we always said different, different-seeing, that is, perceiving the universe differently. In our DNA, with the help of language codes, amazing knowledge is recorded, respect for everything that is created and manifested in the Universe, all possible forms of life. Plus and minus are just mathematical concepts, not ethical ones. Our Soul is a big Soul, and everyone everywhere knows about it. A soul capable of compassion, containing within itself its own joy and the pain of others. There are not and never have been any opposites in it that exclude or deny something that does not fit into our understanding. We are created in the image of multitudes in unity, and therefore are able to live without conflict and our energy is created in the field of elements and not passions. In the field of generosity and not greed. In the field of luminosity there are fields of love.

Some of you, I’m sure, know the golden rule that was formulated by one wise man: in any conflict, between two people there is always an invisibly present third, and only ignorance that this third exists maintains the conflict between the warring parties. And now apply this to modern conflicts - it’s clear to tears, right? In a word, in order to be a Russian person, it is not enough to be fluent in Russian language, and we are all ready to agree with this. A Russian person is one who, through work and responsibility, has restored his ancestral memory. And at the basis of this tribal memory, in the language in which it speaks to us, there is not even the concept of death, that is, a symbol meaning the opposite of life. This is completely beyond comprehension! As we all know, life is finite, that we will all die someday. But God Perun tells us in response to this: “You observe death in your surroundings, but you will not find it for yourself.” For to dare is only a change in the measures of life. And to achieve the goal means to achieve a completed image, for which each of you will have to go there, I don’t know where, in order to find something, I don’t know what. And only under this condition will your image appear clearly, physical world, in the light of its perfection!"

S. V. Zharnikova "Golden Thread"

V.Ya. Propp emphasized that: “In the history of Russian artistic culture Pushkin was the first person who, from a simple peasant woman, began to write down fairy tales with a full understanding of all the beauty of a folk tale." Moreover, it should be noted that A.S. Pushkin perceived not only beauty purely literary form fairy tales, but also their deep essence, sometimes incomprehensible and mysterious in their figurative structure, which he carefully preserved and conveyed in his poetic tales practically without changes. Therefore, we often encounter here such images, situations, symbols that require special analysis and decoding already at the level of modern scientific data.

Let's start with “The Tale of Tsar Saltan, of his glorious and mighty hero Prince Gvidon Saltanovich and of the beautiful Swan Princess,” created by A. S. Pushkin eleven years after “Ruslan and Lyudmila” in 1831. The poet wrote down the text of this tale three times: in Chisinau (1822), from his nanny Arina Rodionovna (1824) and one more time, in 1828, although the source remained unknown. All this indicates that this plot was quite widespread and firmly preserved in the people's memory, so it hardly makes sense to look for the original version among the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, as is sometimes done. Here it is worth recalling the Russian folk tale “Knee-deep in gold, elbow-deep in silver” from the collection of A.N. Afanasyev: The Tsar and Tsarina have three daughters - three sisters. They go to a get-together with their grandmother in the backyard, where the eldest promises, if Ivan Tsarevich marries her, to embroider him a flying carpet; the second promises to give a baby cat, and the third promises to give birth nine sons - “knee-deep legs in gold, elbow-deep arms in silver, often small stars on their braids.” Ivan Tsarevich marries the younger princess. During his departure, the princess gave birth to three of the promised nine sons. But Baba Yaga took the children from the queen and left three puppies in return. The prince was angry, but for the first time he forgave his wife. During the next absence of Ivan Tsarevich, his wife gave birth again, but now to six sons. Knowing that Baba Yaga might come, she hid one son up her sleeve. Baba Yaga replaced five boys with puppies. The prince arrived home and ordered his wife to be put in a barrel, beaten, tarred and thrown into the ocean-sea. The son of Princess Martha is growing by leaps and bounds. The barrel runs aground. On the shore, at their request, “a great kingdom was established.” Beggars come to the princess and her son. Then they go to the kingdom of Ivan Tsarevich and talk about the miracle they saw. Baba Yaga says that in her forest, near an old oak tree, there live eight wonderful young men - “knee-deep legs in gold, elbow-deep arms in silver, often small stars on their braids.” Having learned about this, Princess Martha sends her son to the forest, where her sons lived in a dungeon under an old oak tree. The brothers recognize the bread brought to them from their mother and rise to the ground. Ivan Tsarevich hears from beggars about a new miracle and goes to see it. He recognizes his wife and sons and executes Baba Yaga. This is the plot of this fairy tale.

Apparently, A.S. Pushkin used some other version of this tale, which was extremely archaic in its core. The basis for this conclusion is the clear semantic connection of all elements of the narrative. Apparently, the beginning of “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” originates in the most ancient layers of mythology. Indeed, the idea of ​​three primordial threads that create everything in the Universe, three goddesses of fate, known to the Vedic mythological tradition, three spinner-Moiras of ancient Greek mythology, is very clearly recorded in the fairy tale of A.S. Pushkin. Further development of the plot indicates that it was Vedic mythologies that formed the basis of this fairy tale. Let us remember what the boyars did with the spinning queen, the mother of Prince Guidon and her heroic son, “who grew up by leaps and bounds” (which is not characteristic of an ordinary person, but is inherent only in divine characters who come in human form to the world of people and necessarily returning to the world of the gods). Unlike many widespread stories with the forced departure of a baby in a boat, box, basket, etc. across the waters (in the name of his salvation or with the hope of the possibility of such salvation), a targeted murder is being committed here. The boyars “put the queen... in a barrel with her son, tarred her, rolled her and let her into Okiyan.” Given to the element of water, Guidon begins to grow rapidly in the barrel; it is to him, and not his mother, that the waves obey. And this is natural, because his very name - Guidon - speaks of a connection with water, watery depths: the ancient Iranian Don, Dnieper, Dniester and the Russian word “bottom” are siblings. Subsequently, the plot is constructed in such a way that murder turns into its opposite - eternal happy life on the wonderful island of Buyan, where all wishes come true, where “everyone is rich, there is nothing, there are chambers everywhere.”

In epic conspiracies, a tree is always associated with Buyan Island, usually an oak. It is well known that in Indo-European mythology the oak is a symbol of the deity of the sky (thunder and lightning). Oak is the tree of Perun among the Slavs, Perkunas among the Balts, and in ancient Greek mythology Zeus (in its most archaic version) was worshiped in the form of an oak tree near the water. Sometimes, however, in conspiracies, instead of oak, “white birch” appears - also one of the sacred, pure trees of all Indo-Europeans since ancient times. The image of Buyan Island and the tree on it (oak or birch) is so persistent in Russian conspiracies that even a millennium of Christianity could not erase it from people's memory. And moreover, Christian motifs are combined in conspiracies with the image of the “holy island” and the “tree of life” in the most incredible combinations. For example: “Near this Okiyan-sea there is a carcolist tree; on this carcolist tree hang: Kozma and Demyan, Luke and Pavel, great helpers...” Here one involuntarily recalls Odin - the supreme god of Scandinavian mythology, who initially represented spiritual power, wisdom and sacred knowledge, the ruler of the heavenly kingdom of the dead, surprisingly close to the Aryan Varuna, also the ruler of the cosmic ocean (i.e., the heavenly kingdom of the dead), the king of the law and the keeper of the sacred knowledge. Varuna, as noted earlier, is associated with a tree, the crown of which he “holds in bottomless space” and “whose roots are upward, and whose branches look downward.” The Russian conspiracy involves a carcolyte tree, which is described in one of the texts as “a carcolyte oak, roots up, branches down.” It is on such an inverted Ecumenical cosmic tree that the Christian saints “Kozma and Demyan, Luke and Paul, great helpers” “hang” in the Russian folk plot recorded in the 19th century by V. Dahlem. They don’t sit under a tree, they don’t, finally, sit on a tree, but hang. Let us remember that Odin (Wodin or Wotan) sacrificed himself and, pierced by his own spear, hung on the world tree for nine days, after which he drank the sacred honey of poetry and comprehended the runes - the focus of the highest knowledge and wisdom. It is thanks to such a sacrifice that Odin-Wodan connects with the World Tree and becomes a mediator between gods and people, that is, a “great helper.” About complete recoding Christian image The following text of the conspiracy also testifies: “On the sea on Okiyan, on the island of Kurgan there is a white birch tree, with branches down, roots up; on that birch tree the Mother of the Most Holy Theotokos winds silk threads and sews up bloody wounds...” The connection of the Mother of God with the world tree in this conspiracy is more than obvious; the whole question is what kind of “Holy Mother of God” this is. Apparently, before us is the same ancient pre-Christian image of the Mother Goddess, who “according to the ideas of the Indo-Iranians was associated with the world tree.” The image of the Most Holy Mother of God in conspiracies is very often connected with the sacred Alatyr or Apatr stone located on the island of Buyan - a symbol of the world mountain. Let us remember that in the fairy tale “About Tsar Saltan” an oak grows on a hill (or mound), which is an analogue of the world mountain or Alatyr-stone. Moreover, it is to this hill, under the oak tree, that Prince Guidon brings his mother, one of the three spinning maidens. Let us note in this regard that in Russian folk conspiracies the Mother of God is repeatedly included in a certain triad: for example, in one of the conspiracies to stop bleeding, recorded in the city of Dedyukhin, Perm province. D.Petukhov in mid-19th century, it is said: “On the eastern side there is a blue sea, on it is the white Latyr stone, on the stone is the holy church, in the church is a golden throne. On that golden throne sits the Mother of God with two sisters, spinning and twisting silk.” True, there are also variants of conspiracies where three girls simply appear. For example: “At sea on Okiyan, on the island of Buyan, there is a room, in the room there are three girls: the first one holds needles, the other girl makes threads, and the third girl sews up a bloody wound.” There is also this option: “In this great ocean-sea there is a stone hut; In this stone hut sit three sisters, daughters of Christ himself. The big sister sits at the threshold on a golden chair, takes a damask needle, threads a silk thread, and sews up the bloody wound.” It should be noted that even in those conspiracies where the ancient basis seemed to have completely disappeared, echoes of the deepest, many-thousand-year-old archaism still make themselves felt, as in this one: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us! I, God’s servant, will stand, blessing myself, I will go, crossing myself, from the hut by the doors, from the gates by the gates, I will stand to the east with my face, to the west with my cross. A red soul maiden sits, the Most Holy Theotokos, sewing golden hoops in threes, a silk thread, a gold needle...” The sea-ocean, Buyan Island, the old oak tree or the sacred stone Alatyr (Alatr), as obligatory elements of sacred space, are inherent in a huge number of Russian folk conspiracies. Christian topography, getting into the ancient text, is, as it were, melted into it, without changing anything essentially: “On the sea on the Ocean, on the island of Buyan there is a steep Mount Zion-Mother, on a steep mountain an old oak tree grows...”, “On the sea, on Okiyan, on the island of Buyan stands Mount Ararat, and on that mountain, on Ararat, lies a sacred stone...” Moreover, the most ancient sacralized spatial elements constantly receive definitions in conspiracies of such a nature as “the most pure holy Ocean”, “the holy sea of ​​Okin”, “Okiyan-the iron sea”, “Holy Island of God”, etc.

Speaking about the fairy tale “About Tsar Saltan”, it can be emphasized that A.S. Pushkin treated the mythological text with amazing care, preserving all its details, that is, he did what V. Belinsky later demanded from writers, convincing them of the tales created by the people , write down as faithfully as possible under the dictation of the people, and not falsify and alter. A sad experience of such forgeries and alterations was in the 19th century the collection of I.P. Sakharov “Russian folk tales”, published in 1841. V.Ya. Propp noted that V.I. Dahl “quite consciously reworked folk tales and published them. He published two books that are of almost no interest to folklorists and are very weak from an artistic point of view. Meanwhile, Dahl had a huge collection of fairy tales in his hands. He gave Afanasyev up to a thousand numbers of folk tales recorded by him and others. Afanasyev used only 148 of them for his collection, bitterly noting that “very few ... were altered in compliance with local grammatical forms.” And further V.Ya. Propp states: “Why did Dal, who published a classic collection of Russian proverbs, who published a wonderful dictionary of the Great Russian living language, not publish genuine folk tales, but preferred to publish his own adaptations? We can only explain this by the level of development of science at that time.” Note that the second book of fairy tales by V.I. Dahl (“Tales, fairy tales and stories of the Cossack Lugansky” St. Petersburg, 1846), and the collection of I.P. Sakharov were published after all the fairy tales of A.S. Pushkin in the 40s of the 19th century. All the more striking is the attention to the smallest details that marked the great poet’s handling of folk fairy-tale texts. Thus, in “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” he preserved such an image (as a rule, lost in other versions of this plot) as the mother of three spinning girls - “Matchmaker Baba Babarikha”. We find this image in spells: “At sea on the Ocean, on the island of Buyan, a woman sits on a stone, the woman has three daughters: the first with fire, the second with flame, the third speaks to ore and aches.” In the Vedic tradition, the embodiment of the “divine, supracosmic and intracosmic laws” was Prakriti - the original essence, which consisted of three substances or three threads (gunas): sattva - peace, intelligence, illumination, goodness (white thread); rajas – movement, passion, desire (red thread); tamas - inertia, dullness, drowsiness, anger, darkness, heaviness (black thread). It should be noted that in the Northern Russian folk tradition the memory of these original threads intertwining the fate of a person has been preserved. Thus, in one of the Pomeranian conspiracies (recorded in 1912 by G. Tseitlin) it is said: “On the sea, on the ocean, on an island on Buyan, Kleimon Paparinsky and Vasily Lekarinsky are sitting and pulling a tight bow... White has come - white is gone; black it comes, black it goes; red came - red goes away...” Probably, it is precisely this ancient circle of images that includes Pushkin’s matchmaker Baba Babarikha and her spinner daughters in the fairy tale “About Tsar Saltan.”

One of the leading characters in this fairy tale by A.S. Pushkin is the Swan Princess, whose “month shines under her scythe, and a star burns in her forehead.” Moreover, if Prince Guidon is the lord of the waters, then the Swan Princess is a symbol of the starry sky. There are more than enough reasons for such an assumption. If we turn to the most ancient literary monuments of the Indo-Europeans, the Rig Veda and Avesta, we will learn that in Sanskrit “hansa” means a goose, a swan and a soul that has cognized the highest truth, the highest spirit. In the hymns of the Rig Veda and Avesta, the swan goose is associated with creativity Universe, with light, reason and creator God. In the Khorezmian concept of the origin of the Universe there is evidence that “the original deity, containing parts of the universe, was represented in the form of a waterfowl.” It is also worth remembering that the companion of Saraswati, the great water goddess of the Vedic era, was a swan goose, which personified the all-encompassing sky. This image was no less significant in the Slavic cultural tradition. Even on Proto-Slavic jewelry there are numerous images of swans. In ancient Slavic ash pits - places of ritual fires - archaeologists find giant figures of swans dug into the ground. Ancient Greek mythology It is no coincidence that he connects swans - the sacred birds of Apollo - with the northern outskirts of the Oikumene, where they annually carried the god to the shores of the cold Kronian Ocean, to the lands of the Hyperboreans. Probably, B. A. Rybakov is right, believing that “sun swans are great Slavic world we should consider it not as a mechanical borrowing of an ancient myth, but as the participation of northern tribes in some kind of general (maybe Indo-European) myth-making associated with the sun and the solar deity.” The East Slavic folklore tradition is characterized by almost the same perception of this image as in the Vedic hymns of four thousand years ago. And just as the Vedic tradition connects waterfowl with the supreme being - the creator of the World, so it was written down in the middle of the 20th century (!) in the Russian Ustye on the river. In Indigirka, the cosmogonic legend about the creation of the earth connects the image of the creator with the ghagra duck. Moreover, this legend is surprisingly close to the Vedic idea of ​​the act of creation. In general, in Russian folk tradition, images of waterfowl - ducks, geese, swans - play a completely exceptional role. Often it is a duck, a swan or a goose that marks the sphere of the sacred in the ritual songs of the calendar cycle. The images of geese and white swans are especially widespread in Russian folk wedding songs, where there is a constant comparison of the bride with a “white swan”, floating on the “Sea of ​​Praise”, “along the Danube”, exclaiming “on quiet backwaters”, “lagging behind the swan herd” etc. By the way, the Russian “peahen” folk songs, apparently, was also thought of as a waterfowl-duck or swan. This is evidenced by a song recorded in 1958 in the Arkhangelsk region:

"What's in the quiet in the silence,
Yes, on a quiet swan
It wasn’t a little girl swimming there,
It wasn’t the peahen that dropped its feathers...”

A. S. Pushkin probably knew this very well when he wrote about his Swan Princess:
“And she herself is majestic,
It floats out like a peahen.”

Of course, during the time of A.S. Pushkin, this tradition was much brighter and more diverse, and the very awareness of the image of the “white swan” by the people was deeper and more serious.

So, E.E. Kuzmina emphasizes that in Indo-Iranian mythology, a waterfowl was the personification and companion of the mother goddess associated with water, who was often depicted as a “world tree” with birds sitting on it. But it is precisely this composition - a tree with birds, ducks, swans or peahens sitting on it - that is one of the most common in Russian folk embroidery from Orel to Arkhangelsk. In Pushkin’s “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” the entire complex of connections noted for the Indo-Iranian tradition by E. E. Kuzmina is revealed in exceptional relief. There is a mother goddess associated with water (and her son - the lord of the waters), a waterfowl (Swan Princess) and a world tree (oak).

It is known that the Vedic tradition associates the swan goose with a musical mode, with sacred musical rhythms, with a special structure of the chanting of sacred texts, with a poetic meter, with a certain position of the hand in the dance. But in the East Slavic, and especially Northern Russian, traditions, geese-swans are closely connected with the musical mode, with the gusli (often wing-shaped, in connection with which we note that in Sanskrit “hansapaksa” - swan wing - the name of a certain position of the hand in dance), with ritual dances.

We should also note that in the language of ancient Indian culture, Sanskrit, the word hansa-pada means cinnabar, that is, the color red. It is interesting that the working part of the weaving mill, which creates patterns with red thread on a white base, is called “weft” in the Russian tradition. But in Vedic texts, the concept of “weft of the weaving mill” is associated with the idea of ​​the universe, where the weft thread, without interruption, intertwines with the warp and forms a fabric pattern. In it, the warp is a substantial-quality (energy) thread, and the weft colors the foundation of nature, realizing the diversity of its vast, but unified fabric.

Knowing that in the most ancient tradition the musical mode associated with geese-swans creates the music of the Cosmos, that playing the harp is commensurate in this mythological and poetic series with the fabric of “world harmony”, with the structuring of the Universe, one can understand why the 12th century preacher Kirill of Turov threatened with posthumous torment those who cast spells, play the harp and tell fairy tales, which is why in the breviary of the 16th century, among the questions in confession were questions such as: “Didn’t you sing the songs of demons. Didn’t you play the gusli...", and Hegumen Pamphil scolded the Pskov people for playing "tambourines and sniffles and string drones" during the Kupala night.

In light of these historical data, it is surprising that A.M. Mekhnetsov managed to discover archaic forms in the living gusel tradition of the Pskov region in the 80s of the 20th century! This indicates that despite all the persecution, tradition (and therefore, to some extent, the ancient faith) remained alive on the Pskov land - the land of the descendants of the legendary Krivichi, a people known to the hymns of the Rigveda and the legends of the Mahabharata, right up to the present day . It is difficult for us to imagine how preserved and developed it was during the time of A.S. Pushkin. We can only assume that this tradition was represented much richer and more diverse than in our days. Ducks, geese and swans of Russian folk embroidery, duck-shaped saddles of weaving mills, solonitsa, brackets and brothers in the form of a duck or swan, ducks crowning, along with skates, the roofs of peasant houses, wing-shaped harps and geese-swans of folk songs, fairy tales, spells - this entire archaic layer of folk culture was still alive and full-blooded even in the middle of the 19th century, especially in its first quarter. And such a sensitive artist as A.S. Pushkin, of course, could not ignore the mysterious and beautiful image The Swan Princess (or White Swan), preserved in one of the versions of the fairy tale “About Tsar Saltan”.

It should be noted that in the original source, taken by the poet as the basis for “The Tale of Tsar Saltan,” even seemingly minor details of the narrative, upon closer examination, turn out to be very serious and significant elements of the ancient myth. So, the first thing that Prince Guidon did when he set foot on the shore of Buyan Island was to make a bow from an oak branch, the string of which becomes a “silk cord” from a pectoral cross. It is thanks to this bow that Prince Guidon saves the Swan Princess and, in the end, gets her as his wife. Here, analogies inevitably arise with the situation in the Odyssey, where an unrecognized husband again receives conjugal rights by drawing his bow. This seems especially interesting due to the fact that the bow and arrows are typically Scythian weapons, and there are no images of Greek archers. Perhaps the explanation for such a special attitude towards the bow in general and its drawing in particular, both in the ancient Greek mythopoetic tradition and in Russian folk tales, is that the concept of “bow”, in addition to weapons, in ancient times also included the idea of ​​male sexual power, which is recorded, for example, in Prakrit poetry and hunting songs.

Such a character in the fairy tale “About Tsar Saltan” as a squirrel that “sings songs and gnaws all the nuts” has its analogue in German-Scandinavian mythology, where the image of a squirrel associated with the world tree Yggrasil, which scurries around this tree, being an intermediary, is preserved between "top" and "bottom". There is also an assumption that in “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, where, by the way, the strings of the gusel are compared to a “flock of swans”, Boyan moved not “with his mind along the tree,” but with a “mouse,” that is, a squirrel.

Returning again to “Buyan Island,” we note that in some 19th-century conspiracies, “Buyan Island” is directly called a graveyard or cemetery: “I, servant of God, will stand, blessing myself, I will go, crossing myself, I will go to the graveyard, to Buevo... I will turn I’m going to the holy grave, I’ll ask the dead for the corpse...” and correlates with the place where the dead are buried: “On the seashore on Kiyani, on the island on Buyani, on a high stone there is a tomb, in the coffin lies a red maiden...” . It is interesting that the 33 sea knights - the brothers of the Swan Princess, associated with the sea-ocean and the island of Buyan, are known to Russian conspiracies: “On the sea of ​​Ocean, on the island of Buyan, there lie thirty-three dead people...”. Let us note that the heroes are led by “Uncle Chernomor”; here, within its locus - the world of the dead, the heavenly cosmic ocean, it is certainly a positive beginning.

In connection with the image of the 33 heroes from the fairy tale “About Tsar Saltan”, which it makes sense to remember that in Vedic mythology, as in ancient Iranian (Videvdat), the total number of ancient gods was 33: “There are 11 gods in heaven, 11 on earth , in the waters – 11.” In the hymn of the Rig Veda, addressed to the deities of the morning and evening dawn, the horsemen Ashvins, the singer calls: “Here, O Nasatya, with three times eleven,” that is, with all the gods living in the depths of the sky - the cosmic ocean of Eternity.

The fact that in “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” Buyan Island really is “that light,” the place where the dead live, is also evidenced by the constant werewolf behavior of Prince Guidon, who for all his returns to the world of the living (the kingdom of Saltan) uses someone else’s guise. It is well known that in popular beliefs, the dead do not have an ordinary earthly body (“the navei have no appearance”), so they can come to this world only by borrowing his flesh from someone. Associated with these ideas is the tradition of dressing up on Christmastide and Maslenitsa - days dedicated to ancestors returning to the world of the living. This perception of mummers has survived almost to this day. According to data obtained by folklore and ethnographic expeditions led by A.M. Mekhnetsova, in the 80s - 90s of the 20th century in all regions of the Pskov region, informants remember such obligatory characters in mumming as “ancestors” (elders, deceased), “non-humans”, “strangers” (beggars, beggars), “ tall old women." L.N. Vinogradova emphasizes that mummers (okrutniki, magicians, shulikons, carolers, climbers, etc.) and beggars are those who ritually significant persons, through which you can contact the world of the dead. It is worth noting here that the Russian word beggar correlates with the ancient Indian nistyas, which means “stranger”, “not from here” and is generally similar to the concept of “mummer”. L.N. Vinogradova believes that “apparently, one can share the opinion of a number of experts that there are grounds (including linguistic evidence) to assume that beggars (and mummers) were perceived as substitutes for the dead, and their generous gifting was an echo of funeral sacrifices ". In order to prevent the soul of a living person from remaining forever in the “other world,” the mummers categorically forbade calling themselves by name and recognizing themselves. For violating this prohibition, the offender was “beaten to death,” since it was believed that the soul of the named person might not return to his body, which was occupied during Christmas time or Maslenitsa by one of his ancestors. This situation could bring untold disasters to the community, because... on the days of Christmastide and Maslenitsa, everyone lived according to the laws of the “inverted world” - the world of their ancestors. This is precisely what is evidenced by the memories of old men and women from different regions of the Pskov region (80s - 90s of the XX century), who noted that the mummers were called “grandfathers”, that they walked silently or “howled like a dog”, bowed to the ground that their faces were smeared with soot, that they were not funny, but aroused respect and fear, that they were expected in every house and prepared for this meeting. But at the end of these ritual cycles, everything returned to its place, and the living began to live according to the laws of the world of living people. The soul of the deceased remaining in the human body would continue to live according to the laws of the “other world,” bringing harm to the living. One can only wonder how subtly the great Russian poet felt these shades of the ritual, since even such, it would seem, small parts noted by him in “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”: neither Tsar Saltan, nor the weaver, nor the cook, nor the matchmaker Baba Babarikha ever calls a mosquito a mosquito, a fly a fly, or a bumblebee a bumblebee. When “they catch a mosquito screaming,” then it’s “you damned midge!”, when they try to catch a fly, then “catch, catch, crush it, crush it...”, when a bumblebee bites the nose of “his old grandmother,” then we again we hear: “catch him, crush him, crush him...”. Nothing living that can transfer even a piece of “the other world” into our world can be named.

After his exploits in the world of the living, Prince Guidon returns to Buyan Island, crossing the sea. In the Russian folk tradition, mummers in the Russian folk tradition always bathed in the ice hole on Epiphany (when, as a rule, the most severe frosts crackled), after the blessing of the water, returning to “that world” the soul of the ancestor, to whom they “lent” their body during Christmas time. It was necessary to do this, since since ancient Vedic times it was believed that the shortest path for the soul to heaven, to the abode of the gods and ancestors, was immersion in river or sea waters. Such ideas were still alive in the Russian outback at the beginning of the 20th century. But one can only be surprised that even in 1996, in the village of Zhuravlev Konets, Gdovsky district, Pskov region, folklorists were told that those who dressed up for Christmastide had to douse themselves with three buckets of well water on Christmas Day. Of course, Russian peasants - contemporaries of A.S. Pushkin, there was no need to explain that “Buyan Island” is the world of the dead, the other world. This was evidenced not only by the name of the wonderful island, but also by the fact that “everyone on that island is rich, there are no pictures, there are chambers everywhere.” But in the mouth of a nobleman, a master - A.S. Pushkin - all this testified to the fact that he was surprisingly well versed in folk ritual texts and knew how to find among them those that most accurately expressed the poet’s thoughts.

From the same series are the images of the guest shipmen who sail from the kingdom of Saltan to the island of Buyan and back. In principle, one can put an equal sign between them and the “beggars”, “wanderers”, “strangers” of the Yuletide mummers; they also connect the world of the living (the kingdom of Saltan) and the world of the dead (Buyan Island).

Therefore, it is not surprising that the entire plot Pushkin's fairy tale is built on the basis of archaic mythologemes and, in fact, is a logical mythopoetic text with a minimum of innovations. The poet had a wonderful fairy-tale source. Another surprising thing is how carefully A.S. Pushkin treated this primary source, preserving all its details even in the smallest detail. It must be emphasized that other fairy tales by A.S. Pushkin, written on the basis of Russian folk fairy tales, are also filled with the richest and most archaic folklore material, moreover, used precisely in the context that the ancient mythological texts intended. Since the prototypes of the fairy tales “About the Golden Cockerel” and “About the Fisherman and the Fish” are controversial: V.Ya. Propp believed that “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish” goes back to the fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm, and “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel” - to V. Irving , then we turn to “The Tale of dead princess and seven heroes”, about which V.Ya. Propp wrote: “There is a fragmentary record of the tale about the dead princess. Her belonging to Arina Rodionovna is doubtful, although possible. Pushkin used it, but Pushkin’s fairy tale is richer and more harmonious than this text.”

Since the analysis of “The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights” was brilliantly carried out by V.Ya. Propp, we will allow ourselves to dwell only on some details of Pushkin’s text, confirming the presence in it of folklore and mythological motifs that are extremely close to those recorded in Vedic literature - Rigveda, Mahabharata, Brahmanah - on the one hand, and in Russian ritual songs, conspiracies, fairy tales - on the other. Let's start with what has already been repeatedly noted by researchers: that part of the plot of Pushkin's fairy tale, which relates to the life of the Princess in the forest with seven heroes, is surprisingly similar to the situation described in the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata, where the five Pandava brothers live in the forest with their common wife Draupadi . But this is where the similarity ends, from which we can conclude that at the heart of one of the plots ancient Indian epic, and the Russian fairy tale lay some common proto-plot or, as V.Ya. Propp believed, some ancient ritual associated with the so-called “men's houses”. But in the plot outline of A.S. Pushkin’s fairy tale there is one amazing detail - the journey of Prince Elisha. Looking for his bride everywhere, he travels around the cardinal directions, and then turns to the sun, moon and wind for an answer. He receives an answer only from the Wind, which “blows everywhere in the open air.” But here in front of us ancient legend- “shruti” (lit., “heard”) from the Brahmana texts called “Teachings of Dhira”, which says the following: Fire is everything that exists in the world. “Truly, Agni is breath. For when a person sleeps, his speech dies in breathing, and his sight dies in breathing, and his mind and hearing. And when a person awakens, all of them arise again - exhalations. It's about our essence." But “Being sight, it (Fire) is the Sun; being the mind - the Moon; being a rumor - the Land of Light; and being breath, he is the Wind that blows everywhere.”

And here it makes sense to again quote the ancient text of the “Teachings of Dhira”, which says that: “When fire goes up, then it truly disappears in the wind, and because it disappears in the wind, they say about it: “dispersed.” When the sun sets, it also plunges into the wind, and the moon plunges into the wind, and the countries of the world are based on the wind and emerge again from the wind. And when the one who knows this leaves our world, with his speech he merges with Fire, his sight with the Sun, his mind with the Moon, his hearing with the cardinal points, his breath with the Wind. And having dissolved in them, he becomes whichever of these deities he wishes, and finds peace.”

In “The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights,” the Princess sleeps: her speech, hearing, vision, and mind “died in her breath,” that is, in the wind, so neither the cardinal directions, nor the sun, nor the month can answer the prince Elisha. This is given only to the Wind-breath, in which everything else has dissolved.

Introduction

What is the secret of the popularity of fairy tales? Fairy tales are endlessly fascinating, mysterious and entertaining. These are stories about the obviously impossible, wonderful, extraordinary. They contain something fantastic, implausible. Fairy tales awaken the imagination, develop fantasy, and transport the reader to an unusual, but at the same time, easily recognizable world. “The fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it, good fellows lesson,” our ancestors loved to repeat. Originating in ancient times, fairy tales were passed down from generation to generation, from storyteller to storyteller, and retained their vitality.

At the end of the 19th century in P.V. Vladimirov, in his book “Introduction to the History of Russian Literature” (1896), singled out animal epics, myths and everyday works in fairy tales. By myth he meant fairy tales. But myths are not fairy tales, and besides, they do not work in all fairy tales. mythical creatures; finally, everyone can't fantastic image consider mythical, for example the firebird.

1. Myth is the oldest literary monument

1.1 Origin of the myth

We rarely think about what has become the living basis of literary creativity. And this was “The Word”. Pronounced, “uttered” in ancient times, it seemed to people as a sign “from above,” a sign of “divine inspiration” that should be kept in memory and passed on to descendants.

Aspiration of this kind was manifested initially in the so-called syncretic form - in cult song and dance, reflecting the relationship of man with the forces of nature he deified. Gradually, during the work of people, their development of certain natural resources, in such “actions” from still disordered ideas about the world around them, a tendency arose for a more harmonious understanding and humanization of its powers - myths were born about gods, although they had supernatural capabilities, but very similar in their aspirations and actions on the unknown creators of these legends themselves. But the less in the process of development of society a person’s dependence on outside world, the more often he himself appeared in the epic as an increasingly strong, invincible hero. Usually such a character was the ruler of the earth, the king, - after all, now not only the forces of nature, but also the leaders determined the lives of ordinary people. This is how myths about heroes and heroic epics arose. These myths were first imprinted with the help of drawings on stones, dishes, fabrics, and with the advent of writing - in cuneiform form on clay tablets.

Myth tells about events occurring in space and time. In this narrative, philosophical and religious ideas are expressed in the language of symbols, the inner state of a person is conveyed, and this is the true meaning of the myth. A myth is not a “fiction”, not a “relic” of the past. And a certain primary language of description, in terms of which man, since ancient times, has modeled, classified and interpreted himself, society, and the world.

More on early stages In history, people not only cared about maintaining their existence, but also sought to preserve their tribe, their clan. And everything that contributed to the upbringing of a smart, strong, dexterous person became the content of lullabies, nursery rhymes, riddles, fairy tales... life experience, accumulated knowledge about the world around us, wise conclusions from all this from adults in the form of original teachings were presented to children in simple and forms that are understandable to them. Folklore testifies to this. Myth is the oldest literary monument.

Scientists believe that myths served as a kind of source for the development of scientific ideas, the emergence of philosophy, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theatrical art. The most ancient fairy tales reveal a plot connection with primitive myths. It is quite obvious that the myth was the predecessor of a fairy tale about a marriage with an enchanted creature, which then shed its animal shell and took on a human form (the plot of the well-known fairy tale “ The Scarlet Flower"), tales about a wonderful wife who gives her chosen one good luck in business, hunting, etc., but leaves him due to the violation of some prohibition ("The Frog Princess"). Popular fairy tales about children who fell into the power of an evil spirit, a monster, a sorcerer and were saved thanks to the resourcefulness of one of them (Sister Alyonushka and brother Ivanushka), tales about the murder of a mighty serpent, a dragon (3 snake Gorynych, Koshchei the Immortal) reproduce the motifs of certain rituals of ancient people.

Over time, with the development of human society, children “appropriated” most of these fairy tales, myths, and legends. Perhaps this happened because children's consciousness is somehow closer to those naive and at the same time deeply wise ideas about human nature, about good and evil, which peoples developed during their infancy and in the early stages of their history

1.2 "Mythological Tales"

In Russian science the term “mythological tales” is often used. It originates from the works of folklorists of the first half of the 19th century, for example from I.P. Sakharov. He was followed by P. A. Bessonov, O. F. Miller, fairy tale collector E. R. Romanov and others who called fairy tales mythological.

What is mythological in Russian fairy tales? Firstly, miracles that occur in fairy tales at the will of characters with magical powers, or at the will of wonderful animals, or with the help of magical objects; secondly, fantastic characters, such as Baba Yaga, Koschey, the many-headed snake; thirdly, the personification of the forces of nature, for example, in the image of frost, the animation of trees ( talking trees); fourthly, anthropomorphism is the endowment of animals human qualities- mind and speech (talking horse, gray wolf).

But all these are only traces of mythological ideas, since “the formation of the classical form of a fairy tale was completed far beyond the historical boundaries of the primitive communal system, in a much more developed society,” writes E.M. Meletinsky in the article “Myth and Fairy Tale”

The question of the direct origin of the fairy tale from myth remains controversial. EAT. Meletinsky believes that there was a transformation of myth into fairy tale. Many folklorists hold this point of view. But it still requires sufficient justification. The only correct opinion is that the mythological worldview provided the basis for the poetic form of the fairy tale, and that the poetic mythology of the fairy tale was created. The elements of mythology listed above, included in the fairy tale, acquired artistic functions.

The important point is that the plots of fairy tales and the miracles they talk about have a basis in life. This is, firstly, a reflection of the characteristics of the work and life of people of the tribal system, their relationship to nature, often their powerlessness before it; secondly, a reflection of the features of the feudal system, primarily early feudalism (the king is the enemy of the hero, the struggle for inheritance, receiving the kingdom and the hand of the princess for victory over evil forces). It is characteristic that capitalist relations are not reflected in fairy tales. Obviously, its development stopped before the formation of the capitalist formation.

The vital basis of fairy tales was the dream of power over nature, which, according to M. Gorky, is so characteristic of them.

In fairy tales, goblins, water goblins, and kikimoras are sometimes encountered. They replaced the real characters in a wonderful story. So, for example, in one of the versions of the fairy tale “Morozko”, instead of the omnipotent master of the winter elements, Frost, a goblin is presented, who gave his stepdaughter everything that a peasant girl could wish for.

2. The connection between fairy tales and myths

2.1 Fairy tale "White Duck"

Let’s also take the fairy tale “The White Duck” for analysis. One prince married a beautiful princess. I didn’t have time to talk to her, I didn’t have time to listen to her enough, and I already had to leave. “The princess cried a lot, the prince persuaded her a lot, commanded her not to leave the high tower, not to go to conversation, not to mingle with bad people, not to listen to bad speeches.” The prince left. The princess locked herself in her room and did not come out.

Whether long or short, a certain woman came to her. “So simple, heartfelt!” - adds the fairy tale. “What,” he says, “are you bored? If only I could look at God’s light, if only I could walk through the garden, it would relieve melancholy and refresh my head.” The princess made excuses for a long time, she didn’t want to listen to the stranger, but she thought: it wouldn’t be a problem to take a walk in the garden - and she went. The day is so hot, the sun is scorching, and the water is “cold” and “splashes.” The woman persuaded the princess to take a swim. The princess threw off her sundress and jumped into the water; she had just plunged into the water, and the woman suddenly hit her on the back: “Swim,” she said, “like a white duck.” And the princess swam like a duck. The dirty deed has been accomplished. The witch took on the image of a princess. The prince returned and did not recognize the deception.

In the meantime, the duck laid eggs and hatched babies, not ducklings, but boys: two good ones, and the third was a runt. The children began to walk along the shore and look at the meadow where the prince’s courtyard stood.

The mother duck tells them: “Oh, don’t go there, children!” But they didn't listen. The witch saw them and gnashed her teeth. She called the children, fed them, gave them something to drink, and put them to bed, and she herself ordered them to build a fire, hang the cauldrons, and sharpen the knives.

The older brothers sleep, but the little ones don't sleep. At night, a witch came to the door and asked: “Are you sleeping, children, or not?” Zamoryshek replies: “We are sleeping - we are not sleeping, I think that they want to cut us all up: they put red-hot fires, boiling pots hang, they sharpen damask knives!” “They’re not sleeping,” the witch decided. She came another time and asked the same question, and heard the same answer. The witch thought and entered. She circled her brothers with a dead hand - and they died.

“The fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it! Whoever learns, learns a lesson.”

To understand ancient tales and the meaning embedded in them, it is necessary to abandon the modern worldview and look at the world through the eyes of people who lived in ancient times, when the tales themselves appeared. The keys to tuning into ancient perception are the unchanging figurative roots of a particular fairy tale. For example, animals are the name of the palaces on the Svarog Circle, but when they help, this should be perceived as the help of ancestors, a totem animal.
As they write in the Slavic-Aryan Vedas, the first Great Flood occurred as a result of the destruction of the Moon Leli, one of the three Moons orbiting Midgard-Earth at that time.
This is what ancient sources say about this event:

“You are My children! Know that the Earth walks past the Sun, but My words will not pass you by! And about ancient times, people, remember! About the Great Flood that destroyed people, about the fall of fire on Mother Earth!”

"Songs of the Gamayun Bird"

“You have been living peacefully on Midgard since ancient times, when the world was established... Remembering from the Vedas about the deeds of Dazhdbog, how he destroyed the strongholds of the Kashcheis, who were on the nearest Moon... Tarkh did not allow the insidious Kashcheis to destroy Midgard, as they destroyed Deya... These Kashcheis, the rulers of the Grays , disappeared along with the Moon in half an hour... But Midgard paid for freedom with Daariya, hidden by the Great Flood... The waters of the Moon created that Flood, they fell to the Earth from heaven like a rainbow, for the Moon split into pieces and with the army of Svarozhichi descended to Midgard..."

"Santiy Vedas of Perun"

In memory of the salvation from the Flood and the Great Migration of the Clans of the Great Race, a unique ritual appeared in the 16th year - “Paskhet” ( P ugh Ace ami X odyasha E there is T verdot Kommersant– Co-creator), with deep inner meaning, performed by all Orthodox people. This ritual is well known to everyone. At Easter, colored eggs are hit against each other to see whose egg is stronger. The broken egg was called the Kashchei egg (they gave it to the dogs), i.e. the destroyed Moon Lelei with the bases of the Outlanders, and the whole egg was called the Power of Tarkh (they ate it themselves). And so that the peeled egg differs from the unpeeled one, they are painted. The tale of Kashchei the Immortal, whose death was in an egg (on the Moon Lele) somewhere on the top of a tall oak tree (on the world tree, i.e. actually in the heavens), also appeared in everyday use. And do not confuse - mortal and immortal, there used to be such a form of writing that meant eternity. And Lunacharsky started a complete “devilishness”. And note that neither Catholics, nor Judaism, nor Islam, although they all have the same roots, have such a ritual! Having become Orthodox, Christianity was forced to introduce this custom, presenting it in a new way and sprinkling it with the blood of Yeshua.
Christians not only distorted Slavic fairy tales, but also invented their own. Such tales mainly contain the eternal dream of the Christian people about a “freebie”. While in Slavic fairy tales the main characters always achieve their goals only through their labor.
One example of distortion is “The Tale of the Turnip,” known to everyone from early childhood. In the original Slavic version, this tale points to the relationship between generations, and also points to the interaction of temporary structures, forms of life and forms of existence.
The modern version of this tale lacks two more elements that existed originally - Father and Mother, without which we get seven elements, because Christians have a septenary system of perception, in contrast to the ninefold Slavic system.
In the original tale there were nine elements, each of which had its own hidden image:
turnip- the heritage and wisdom of the Family, its roots. It seems to unite the earthly, underground and above-ground;
Grandfather– Ancient Wisdom;
Grandma– home traditions, housekeeping;
Father– protection and support;
Mother– love and care;
Granddaughter– children, grandchildren;
Bug- prosperity in the Family, there is something to protect;
Cat– a good atmosphere in Rod, because cats are harmonizers of human energy;
Mouse- the well-being of a family where there is nothing to eat - and there are no mice.
But Christians removed the Father and Mother, and replaced their images with protection and support from the church, and care and love with Christ.
Initially the meaning was as follows: have a connection with the Family and Family Memory, live in harmony with relatives and have Happiness in the family. Maybe this is where the expression came from: “Give a turnip for enlightenment to come.”
Another of the many distortions is the fairy tale “Kolobok”.
Here is its original version:

This tale is a figurative description of the astronomical observation of the Ancestors over the movement of the Moon across the sky from full moon to new moon. In the Halls of Tarkh and, on the Svarog Circle, a full moon occurs, and after the Hall of the Fox there comes a new moon.
Thus, it was possible to gain basic knowledge in astronomy and study the star map of the world.
Confirmation of this interpretation of “Kolobok” can be found in Russian folk riddles (from the collection of V. Dahl):
“Blue scarf, red bun: rolls around on the scarf, grins at people.”
This is about Heaven and Yarilo-Sun. I wonder how fairy-tale remakes would portray the red Kolobok? Did you mix blush into the dough?
Let's take the description of the serpent Gorynych.
The image of a snake means round and long, like a snake, gorynych - because it is as tall as a mountain.
In this case, it is an explicit description of a tornado. The Gorynych serpent can be either three-headed (three funnels) or nine-headed.
Other ancient Russian fairy tales that describe the appearance of a snake say that it can fly, its wings are fiery. Clawed paws and a long tail with a point - a favorite detail of popular prints in fairy tales, as a rule, are absent. A constant feature of the serpent is its connection with fire: “A strong storm arose, thunder rumbles, the earth trembles, the dense forest bows to the ground: a three-headed serpent flies.”, “A fierce serpent flies at him, scorches him with fire, threatens him with death.”, “Then the serpent emitted a fiery flame from itself, wanting to burn the prince”.
This snake is recognized as the Kundalini serpent - the spiritual power of man. His constant threat: "I am your kingdom(i.e. body) I will burn with fire and scatter with ashes".
In Russian folk tales, the snake is the guardian of the border between Reality and Navy. The border itself is described as a river of fire, called (“mor” - death, “one” - one; that is, there is one death). A bridge called “viburnum” leads across it (in Sanskrit “kali” - ill-fated), that is, only those whose eggchore (“seed of the devil” - a drop of Causal Matter) has fully manifested themselves can step on this border. The one who kills the snake (yaytsechore), that is, defeats all his animal elements, will be able to cross the bridge.
If we decompose the word Gorynych according to the initial letters of the Old Russian language, we will receive confirmation of the above. G-OR-YNY-CH — GO p - path, YNY e - manifested into an unknown multitude, H- leading to a certain milestone, trait, bridge.
When meeting a snake, the hero faces the danger of sleep, falling asleep, that is, obsession - trouble: “The prince began to walk along the bridge, using his cane(the main ascending channel of the Kundalini force, running through the center of the human spine) tap, a jug pops out(mystical abilities that manifest themselves as Kundalini rises) and began to dance in front of him; he stared at him(became interested in mystical abilities) and fell into a deep sleep(i.e. “fell into delusions”). An unprepared person falls asleep, a true hero never: Storm - the hero didn’t care(not carried away by these abilities), nakharka l (brought them to “hara”, balanced) on it and broke it into small pieces.” The serpent is immortal and invincible for the uninitiated, it can only be destroyed by a certain hero: the eggchore can only be defeated by the one in whom it is located - “In the whole world there is no other rival for me except Ivan Tsarevich, and he is still young, even a crow will not bring his bones here.”.
The serpent never tries to kill the hero with weapons, paws, or teeth - he tries to drive the hero into the ground (i.e. into sin) and thereby destroy him: “The miracle of Yudo began to overcome him and drove him knee-deep into the damp earth.”. In the second fight “hammered waist-deep into damp earth”, that is, with each fight, the dirt (damp earth) of the egg chore begins to appear in a person to an increasing extent. The snake can only be destroyed by cutting off all its heads, that is, by defeating one’s senses. But these heads have a wonderful property - they grow again, that is, the power of feelings increases with their satisfaction: “I cut off nine heads of the miracle juda; Miracle Yudo picked them up, struck them with a fiery finger - the heads grew back again.”. Only after the fiery finger (lust) is cut off does the hero manage to cut off all the heads.
Knowing the dependence of spiritual development on mastering our feelings, our Ancestors gave us the following instruction:

Where feelings dominate, there is lust,
And where there is lust, there is anger, blindness,
And where is the blindness - the fading of the mind,
Where the mind fades, knowledge perishes,
Where knowledge perishes, let everyone know -
There a human child perishes in the darkness!

And the one who has achieved power over feelings,
Trampled disgust, knows no passions,
Who subjugated them forever to his will -
Achieved enlightenment, freed from pain,
And since then his heart has been immaculate,
And his mind is firmly established.

Outside of yoga, do not consider yourself intelligent:
Outside of clarity there is no creative thought;
Outside creative thought there is no peace, rest,
Where is human peace and happiness outside of it?
THERE IS REASON AND WISDOM,
WHERE FEELINGS ARE OUT OF WILL.

creative work

· Reflection of Slavic myths in fairy tales.

· Conclusion.

Introduction.

If you read or speak Russian, whether you want it or not, feel it or not - you are in the world Slavic culture.

But many customs originate from our pagan times. There, in this mysterious and incredibly interesting world, our worldview is rooted. Is it really true that we study the Egyptian, Greek, Roman Gods in every detail, but we don’t even know our own?

It was the desire to learn about the way of life and thinking of the Slavs, about the origins of Slavic mythology, that made me take up this work.

Working on data research project helped me not only familiarize myself in detail with primary sources on Slavic pagan mythology, but also prove the relevance and timeliness of my chosen topic: Ancients Slavic deities in Russian fairy tales. History and fiction.

As a result, it became necessary to set a specific goal for the project:

Introduce pagan mythology as the main way of understanding the natural and human world of the ancient Slavs, revealing history and fiction.

Effective implementation of this goal is possible only by solving the following tasks:

Show the pagan mythological system to understand the worldview of the ancient Slavs.

Introduce the Ancient pantheon and cult of the gods.

To get acquainted and compare the gods of the ancient Slavs with the folklore and ethnographic material of A.N. Afanasyev.

Demonstrate independent research skills in working with works of art.

The practical significance of my project is that this material can be used in lessons where students are deeply engaged in studying national history, literary creativity.

The structure of the world of the ancient Slavs.

The ancient Slavs were people of Vedic culture, therefore it would be more correct to call the ancient Slavic religion not paganism, but Vedism. The word “Vedas” is consonant with the modern Russian “to know”, “to know”. This is a peaceful religion of a highly cultured agricultural people, related to other religions of the Vedic root - Ancient India and Iran, Ancient Greece.

THE BEGINNING of Slavic culture dates back to the 6th century. In the early stages of development, the nature of the country left a huge imprint on the entire course of its history. Before the formation of the Kyiv state, they had a significant history, noticeable successes in the field material culture, knew the secrets of metal processing, and used agricultural tools. This people developed well-known ideas about the earthly and afterlife, strictly observed rituals developed, and when the process of ethnogenesis - the formation of the ancient Russian people - was completed, these cultural achievements the past have not been forgotten.

An important feature of the way of life and thought of the ancient Slavs is the idea of ​​​​the inextricable unity and kinship of those living with their forefathers and gods as a condition for the harmony of the worlds: earthly and heavenly. The fragility of such balance was felt by people and personified by them in the battle of Truth and Falsehood.

The opposition white - black is embodied in the pantheon - Belobog and Chernobog, fortune telling, and signs. White corresponds to a positive principle, black - to a negative one.

The worldview of the ancient Slavs was characterized by anthropopoteocosmism, i.e. were not divided into the spheres of the human, divine and natural, understanding the world as not created by anyone, eternal.

Orthodoxy began to displace the ancient culture and faith of the Slavs no earlier than the 11th century. - much later than other European nations. Before that, it existed for at least one and a half thousand years. The legacy of such a powerful layer of Slavic cultural archaism declared, continues to declare itself both clearly and gradually: in the way of thinking, style and phraseology of speech, facial expressions and gestures, unconscious movements of the soul in contact with the world of native nature. Its significance also lies in the fact that we become acquainted with the images of the characters of that distant world in early childhood when a person is most open to this universe.

Since ancient times, along with agriculture and cattle breeding, the population of Ancient Rus' was successfully engaged in trade. Under this condition, we can assume the early existence of cities, already in the 7th-8th centuries. The chronicle does not give the time of their appearance. They were “originally” - Novgorod, Polotsk, Rostov, Smolensk, Kyiv - all on river and trade routes. Cities were not only points of tribal defense and worship. By the 11th century. they are centers of political and cultural life and craft production. With the advent of private property and wealthy farmers, mansion towns (castles) appeared. In the Scandinavian sagas of the 9th century. Ancient Rus' was called “Gardarika” - the country of cities. The emerging culture of Kievan Rus was urban. Thus, until the second half of the 9th century, before the formation of the state, East Slavs already had a significant history and managed to achieve noticeable success in the field of material culture, which was the basis of social life.

Pagan religion occupied a central place in the culture of this period. The religious views of the ancient Slavs reflected the worldview of our ancestors. Man lived in a mythological picture of the world. At its center was nature, to which the collective adapted. Several stages in the development of pagan culture can be distinguished.

At the first stage, nature was inhabited by many spirits who had to be appeased so that they would not harm people and would help them in their work. The Slavs worshiped Mother Earth, and water cults were quite developed. Considering water to be the element from which the world was formed, the Slavs inhabited it with various deities - mermaids, mermen, sea creatures, and dedicated holidays to them. Forests and groves were revered; they were considered the dwellings of the gods. The god of the sun, Dazhdbog, and the god of the wind, Stribog, were revered. The Slavs thought that their ancestry came from the gods.

At the second stage in Russian-Slavic paganism, the cult of ancestors develops and lasts longer than other types of beliefs. They revered Rod - the creator of the Universe and Rozhanits - goddesses of fertility. The Slavs believed in the other world; they perceived death not as disappearance, but as a transition to underworld. They burned the corpses or buried them. In the first case, it was assumed that after death the soul remains to live; in the other, it was assumed that they continue to live, but in another world. After burning, the soul retained connections with the material world, taking on a different image, moving into a new body. The Slavs believed that their ancestors continued to live with them after death, constantly being nearby.

At the third stage of the development of pagan religion, the “God of gods” appears, removed from the world. This is already a heavenly being, the head of the hierarchy of gods. In the VI century. The thunder god Perun was recognized as the ruler of the Universe. In the contracts of the 10th century. with the Greeks, the Russian princes swore by two gods: Druzhinny - Perun (later - the princely god), and merchants - Veles - the god of cattle (later the god of wealth and trade). The Slavs had fairly developed forms of pagan rituals, i.e. an organized, orderly system of magical operations, the practical purpose of which is to influence surrounding nature, make her serve man. The worship of idols was accompanied by pagan rituals, which were not inferior to Christian ones in pomp, solemnity and impact on the psyche.

Pagan rituals included different kinds arts With the help of sculpture, carving, and minting, images were created, the possession of which, the Slavs thought, gave power over the forces of nature, protected from troubles and dangers (amulets, amulets). Pagan symbols appeared in Slavic folklore (images of birch, pine, rowan), and in architecture - images of birds and horse heads were carved on the roofs of dwellings.

The Slavs built multi-domed wooden pagan temples, but their temple was more of a storage place for objects of worship. The rituals were accompanied by the utterance of incantations, spells, singing, dancing, playing the musical instruments, elements of theatrical performances.

Levels of Slavic mythology.

What is mythology?

Myth (Greek word, legend) is a legend that conveys the ideas and beliefs of people in ancient times about the origin of the world and life on earth, about gods and heroes.

Slavic mythology can now be judged only from secondary sources - written, folklore and material sources. I think that a rich source for researchers of Slavic mythology is folklore - fairy tales, epics, ritual songs, conspiracies, etc., based on ancient myths and legends. Of course, the myths in this presentation have been greatly distorted, and the main problem of researchers is to isolate and reconstruct the most ancient ideas, to clear them of everything introduced later. Fairy tales, as well as epics, in some cases retain some plots of pagan myths about animals, gods, spirits and the world order.

· Highest level. The highest level included two Proto-Slavic deities Perun and Veles. These deities embody military and economic-natural functions. They are connected to each other as participants in a thunderstorm myth: the thunder god Perun, who lives in the sky, on the top of the mountains, pursues his serpentine enemy who lives below on the earth. The pursued Veles hides successively under a tree, a stone, and turns into a man, a horse, and a cow. During a duel with Veles, Perun splits a tree, splits a stone, and throws arrows. Perun's victory ends with rain bringing fertility.

· A lower level could include deities associated with economic cycles and seasonal rituals, as well as gods who embodied the integrity of closed small groups: Rod, Chur. It is possible that most of the female deities belonged to this level, revealing close ties with the collective, sometimes less human-like than the gods of the highest level.

The common Slavic word God was probably associated with the designation of share, luck, and happiness. You can compare the rich (having God, share) - the poor (not having God, share), in the Ukrainian language - non-god, non-god - unfortunate, beggar. The word “God” was included in the names of various deities - Dazhdbog, Chernobog and others. Slavic data and evidence from other most archaic Indo-European mythologies allow us to see in these names a reflection of the ancient layer of mythological ideas of the Proto-Slavs. Many of these characters appear in fairy tales in accordance with the time of the fairy tale and even specific life situations.

· Fairy tale characters, apparently, are participants in the ritual in their mythologized guise and leaders of those classes of creatures that themselves belong to the lowest level: such are Baba Yaga, Koschey, Miracle Yudo, the forest king, the water king, the sea king. Lower mythology includes different classes evil spirits, spirits, animals associated with the entire mythological space from home to forest, swamp. These are brownies, goblins, mermans, mermaids, kikimoras; of animals - bear, wolf.

Man in his mythologized form correlates with all levels of Slavic mythology, especially in rituals.

Pantheon of Gods.

Main gods.

Due to the need for internal unification, the princely god Perun becomes a national god. The supreme male deity of the Slavs was Rod.

There were also gods in the Slavic pantheon Slavic origin: Finnish goddess Mokosh, sun god of the peoples of the East - Horse. As a result, ordinary inter-tribal conflicts were consolidated in the religious sphere. In 980, Vladimir undertook the first religious reform, the essence of which was the merging of heterogeneous gods in a single pantheon, but it failed. The most ancient teachings against paganism of the 12th-13th centuries. they write about Rod as a god who was worshiped by all peoples:

The Hellenes began to serve a meal for the Family and the Rozhanitsa, as did the Egyptians, and also the Romans. It even reached the Slavs; these same Slavs began to put the meal before Roda and Rozhanitsa before Perun, their god. Another Christian scribe instructs: “God is the creator of everything, God, and not Rod.” With this contrast, the chronicler involuntarily makes it clear what a significant place was assigned to Rod in the pantheon of ancient Slavic deities.

Rod was the god of the sky, thunderstorms, and fertility. They said about him that he rides on a cloud, throws rain on the ground, and from this children are born. Rod is the ruler of the earth and all living things, he is a pagan god - the creator.

in Slavic languages, the root “genus” means kinship and birth, water (spring), profit (harvest). Such concepts as people and homeland, in addition - the color red (red) and lightning, especially ball lightning, called “rhodia”. Such a variety of cognate words undoubtedly proves the greatness of the pagan god.

Stribog and Svarog have a lot in common with Rod. “Stribog” means God the Father; the winds were considered his grandchildren. “Svarog” is translated as “heavenly”; in myths it is spoken of as a god who sent pincers to people, thanks to which they learned to process iron. Svarog is also associated with fire, which was called “svarozhich”.

Rod's companions were Rozhanitsy - nameless goddesses of fertility, abundance, and prosperity. Their image goes back to the ancient Deer, but Rozhanitsa are the guardians of life.

According to the most ancient idea Women in labor were thought of as two heavenly goddesses, givers of rain, but the belief in them lasted longest as protectors of young mothers and small children.

In honor of Rod and Rozhanits, ritual feasts were held during autumn holiday harvest and winter solstice. Offerings to the gods consisted of bread, honey, cottage cheese, and pies.

Gods of the agricultural era.

With the transition of the Slavs to agriculture, they began to play an important role in their beliefs. solar gods. The Slavs borrowed much of their cult from neighboring eastern nomadic tribes; the names of the deities also have Scythian (Iranian) roots. After reading many myths of the ancient Slavs, I realized that for several centuries one of the most revered pagan deities in Rus' was Dazhbog (Dazhdbog) - the god of sunlight, heat, harvest time, fertility in general (his name translates as “god of heat”). The Slavs called him “Sun King, son of Svarog”; the symbols of this god were gold and silver. The cult of Dazhbog especially flourished in Rus' in the 11th-12th centuries, during the era of state fragmentation, coexisting with Christianity (the religion of that time was called dual faith). Over time, the ancient meaning of the name, Dazhbog, was forgotten, and they began to talk about it as Daibog, “the giving god.”

Russian people revered Dazhbog as their protector, calling themselves his grandchildren. Dazhbog - the Sun-Tsar - was spoken of as the first ruler, founder of the calendar counting of days, and legislator. The Grand Duke of Kyiv Vladimir the Saint was called the Red Sun (it is noteworthy that the prince who brought Christianity to Rus' received a pagan nickname - this suggests that in the era of dual faith, Christian and pagan symbols were not separated in the popular consciousness).

Dazhbog was depicted flying on a chariot harnessed to griffins - dogs with bird wings, companions of the gods of fertility; in the hands of the god are ritual wands with images of fern leaves. Such wands (toyagi) were used by Bulgarian priests during summer prayers for rain.

Dazhbog was the god of sunlight, but by no means the luminary itself. Horse was the sun god. The idea that sunlight exists independently of the sun is common to many peoples;

Horse, whose name means “sun” or “circle,” embodied a luminary moving across the sky. This is a very ancient deity who did not have a human form and was represented simply by a golden disk. The ritual spring dance - round dance (movement in a circle) was associated with the Khorsa cult. The custom of baking pancakes on Maslenitsa, reminiscent of the sun's disk in shape, and rolling lighted wheels, also symbolizing the luminary.

The companion of the gods of the sun and fertility was Semargl (Simargl) - a winged dog, guardian of crops, god of roots, seeds, sprouts. Its animal appearance speaks of its antiquity; the idea of ​​Semargl - the protector of crops - as a wonderful dog is easily explained: real dogs protected fields from wild roe deer and goats.

Khors and Semargl are deities of Scythian origin, their cult came from the eastern nomads, therefore both of these gods were widely revered only in Southern Rus', bordering the Steppe.

The female deities of fertility, prosperity, and the blossoming of life in spring were Lada and Lelya. They are like the nameless Rozhanitsa - companions of the Family; comparison with the mythology of other peoples allows us to assert that the goddesses were mother and daughter.

Lada is the goddess of marriage and love, abundance, and the time of harvest ripening. Her cult can be traced among the Poles until the 15th century; in ancient times it was common among all Slavs, as well as the Balts. The goddess was approached with prayers in late spring and during the summer, and a white rooster was sacrificed (the white color symbolized goodness). Her name was repeated in the choruses of songs: “Oh, Lado!”

The image of Lada as the goddess of the harvest and weddings is most clearly reflected in folk game“And we sowed millet,” where first the entire cycle of agricultural work was listed, and then one of the groups of players “wooed” another, and the game-rite ended with a “wedding” -

the transfer of one of the girls to another group. This game was accompanied by a song, each stanza of which ended with the refrain “Oh, Did-Lado!”, i.e. the game was nothing more than a prayer for the harvest and marriage addressed to the goddess.

Lada was called “Mother Leleva.”

Lelya is a goddess unmarried girls, goddess of spring and the first greenery. Her name is found in words associated with childhood: “lyalya”, “lyalka” - a doll and an address to a girl; "cradle"; “leleko” - a stork bringing children; “cherish” - take care of a small child. Young girls especially revered Lelya, celebrating the spring holiday Lyalnik in her honor: they chose the most beautiful of her friends, put a wreath on her head, sat her on a turf bench (a symbol of sprouting young greenery), danced around her and sang songs glorifying Lelya, then the girl - “Lelya” presented her friends with wreaths prepared in advance.

The common Slavic veneration of Makoshi (Mokoshi) - the goddess of the earth, harvest, female destiny, the great mother of all living things - goes back to the ancient agricultural cult of Mother Earth. Makosh as a goddess of fertility is closely connected with Semargl and griffins, with mermaids irrigating fields, with water in general - Mokosh was worshiped at springs, as a sacrifice the girls threw yarn into her wells (hence the explanation for another spelling of the name of the goddess: Mokosh - from " get wet"; however, with this understanding of the name, the goddess turns out to be only the patroness of water and spinning, and not of the earth and harvest). Makosh was also a goddess women's work, a wonderful spinner.

Friday was considered the sacred day of Mokosh; Twelve Fridays a year were especially celebrated (every month), of which the most important are the ninth and tenth (end of October - November), when all work in the field ended and women's gatherings began, where they spun, weaved, and sewed.

On these Fridays, the girls invited the guys, treated them, sang songs, asked riddles. In honor of the ninth Friday, the girls wove an “ordinary veil” (i.e., fabric made in one day): having gathered together, they completed the entire annual cycle on that day work - fiddling with flax, spinning, weaving, whitewashing; this fabric was sacrificed to the goddess. In northern Russian embroidery, a female figure is often found among floral patterns. It is assumed that this is Makosh.

The male fertility deity associated with the lower world was Veles (Volos). His image and cult differed significantly from the image and cult of Rod, the heavenly god of fertility. The name Veles goes back to the most ancient root"ve1" meaning "dead"; Veles is the ruler of the world of the dead. But since the world of the dead was associated with ideas about magical power, the owner of which subjugates people, this same root means power and is found in the words “power”, “command”, “possess”, “great”. The owner of another world - the progenitor deity - in ancient mythology has the appearance of an animal, and the image of Veles goes back to the image of the Bear as a powerful deity: the god retains the features of the beast for a long time, appears shaggy (in the South Slavic languages ​​the name for wool - wave - goes back to the same root; another form of the name of the god is Hair).

The combination of these ideas about God gives the key to understanding the word “magician”; he communicates with another world, is endowed great wisdom and poetic gift.

He is a powerful magician and, possibly, a prophet (as you know, people often turned to the dead with questions about the future).

The cult of Veles among the Slavs changed greatly over time. The most ancient form of God is the Bear, which is the progenitor of wild animals that are hunted. With the transition to cattle breeding, Veles turned into the patron of domestic animals, the “cattle god,” while the veneration of the Bear became an independent cult and was gradually forgotten.

But the “bestial god” has not yet completely lost its bearish appearance: for example, Russian peasants before the twentieth century. They kept a bear's paw in barns as a talisman and called it “cattle god.” When performing magical acts designed to protect livestock, the owner put on a fur coat with the fur facing out. With the development of agriculture among the Slavs, Veles became the god of the Harvest, remaining still the god of the dead - the ancestors buried in the ground were patrons and givers of the harvest. The idea of ​​Veles as the god of the dead and the god of the harvest was reflected in the custom of leaving not the first, but the last sheaf of bread unharvested for Veles on his beard.

Since the time of the pastoral lifestyle, the Slavs revered Veles as the god of wealth (in ancient times they paid with domestic animals, the word “cattle” meant money). In Ancient Rus', Veles was also the patron saint of merchants.

The cult of Veles - the great underground god, giver of fertility and wealth, lord of wisdom, witchcraft, poetry, lord of the dead - was very widespread in Rus'. This, in particular, is evidenced by the abundance of villages and villages with the names Velesovo, Volosovo, Volotovo. .

In many ways, she is similar to Veles Morena (Madder) - the goddess of the world of the dead, her name has a common root with the words (“death” and “pestilence”) and the fertility of the earth. Traces of her cult among the Slavs were traced until recently: Mara or Madder was the name given to a straw effigy - the personification of the winter cold, which on Maslenitsa was torn up and scattered across the fields so that they would produce a rich harvest.

The idea of ​​Morena as the queen of another world, the giver of blessings, is also preserved in Russian fairy tales, where she is called the Elat-haired Princess Marya Morevna. She is usually kidnapped by Koschey (captivity of the goddess of fertility leads to hunger and troubles), Ivan Tsarevich frees her, and happiness, the flourishing of life (a symbol of victory over the winter cold and the arrival of spring) ensues.

Gods of war.

Among the common Slavic gods of fertility, a special place is occupied by the warlike gods to whom bloody sacrifices were made - Yarilo and Perun.

Despite the great antiquity, and therefore the wide popularity of these gods, they were little revered by most Slavic tribes because of their warlike appearance.

Yarilo, the god of grain dying in the ground to be reborn as an ear, was both beautiful and cruel. To the pagans he appeared as a young man on a white horse, in white clothes, in a wreath of wild flowers, with a sheaf of rye in one hand and a severed human head in the other. The root of his name - “yar” - is found in words associated with the idea of ​​​​fertility and the flourishing of LIFE: spring wheat; lamb - a young sheep; but the same root means anger, ardor: furious, vehement - angry or ardent; bright fire. To Yarila, as the god of death and resurrection, a young sheep was sacrificed, the blood of which was sprinkled on the arable land in order to make the harvest more abundant.

The Slavic thunderer was Perun. His cult is one of the oldest and dates back to the 3rd millennium BC. e., when warlike shepherds on war chariots, possessing bronze weapons, subjugated neighboring tribes. Perun was more of a warrior god than the embodiment of the spring thunderstorms that fertilize the earth, so it is not surprising that until the 10th century. - during the military campaigns of the Kievites - his cult did not occupy him central place, and in some areas of the Slavic world was not known at all. The main myth about Perun tells about the battle of the god with the Serpent - the kidnapper of cattle, waters, sometimes luminaries and the wife of the Thunderer. Both heroes of the myth are associated with stone: either the battle takes place on the mountain, or the Serpent is made of stone, or Perun strikes him with a stone weapon (the word lightning is related in origin to the word hammer and means “stone axe”; in the same way, the ancient people saw the firmament as stone, and clouds - colliding heavenly mountains).

Perun the serpent fighter, owner of the lightning hammer, is closely associated with the image of the magical blacksmith. Thus, in Russian fairy tales, the Snake is often defeated by blacksmiths by grabbing it by the tongue with pincers. Blacksmithing was perceived as magic. Young Vladimir Svyatoslavich proclaims Perun the supreme god of Rus' and sends his uncle Dobrynya to Novgorod in order to introduce a new cult there too. The warrior god was alien to the trading people of Novgorod; they resisted the Kyivians, but their indignation was suppressed, the idol of the Lizard was chopped up, and the idol of Perun was placed in its place.

Perun was called the “princely god” because he was the patron saint of princes and symbolized their power. Such a god was alien to the majority of communal Slavic farmers, and this indifference of the people to the god declared supreme has repeatedly led scientists to believe that Perun is a non-Slavic deity, borrowed from the Varangians. However, the name of God is of original Slavic origin; Scandinavian tales about the Thunderers bear little resemblance to the myths about Perun.

Household deities.

Spirits inhabited not only forests and waters. There are many known household deities - well-wishers and well-wishing people, headed by a brownie who lived either in the oven or in a bast shoe hung for him on the stove. IN new house The brownie was carried in a pot of coals from the old stove, while repeating: “Brownie, brownie, come with me!” The brownie patronized the household: if the owners were diligent, he added good to the good, and punished laziness with misfortune.

It was believed that the brownie paid special attention to the cattle: at night he allegedly combed the manes and tails of horses (and if he was angry, then, on the contrary, he tangled the animals’ fur into tangles); he could<отнять>milk from cows, but could make the milk yield abundant; he had power over the life and health of newborn domestic animals.

Belief in the brownie was closely intertwined with the belief that dead relatives help the living. In people's minds, this is confirmed by the connection between the brownie and the stove.

In ancient times, many peoples believed that it was through the chimney that the soul of a newborn came into the family and that the spirit of the deceased also left through the chimney.

Images of brownies were carved from wood and represented a bearded man in a hat. Such figures were called churam schura and at the same time symbolized deceased ancestors - great-grandfathers, ancestors. Expression: “Forget me!” meant a request:<Предок, охрани меня!>. The family's ancestors - grandfathers - were its reliable and caring protectors.

In Rus' they believed that the brownie's face was similar to the owner of the house, only his hands were covered with fur. In Belarus and its neighboring regions, the brownie is revered in the form of a real snake living under the stove; The housewives call him a gospodarnik and feed him milk. The custom of keeping snakes in houses has been known to all Slavs since ancient times: snakes were considered guardians of sowing grain, because mice are afraid of them.

Archaeologists find images of snakes on many objects, for example, on vessels with grain. In some northern Russian villages, there were beliefs that in addition to the brownie, the housekeeper, the cowman and the kutny god also took care of the household (these gentlemen lived in the barn and looked after the cattle; a little bread and cottage cheese was left as a sacrifice for them in the corner of the barn), as well as the barn - keeper of grain and hay reserves.

Completely different deities lived in the bathhouse, which in pagan times was considered an unclean place. Bannik was an evil spirit that frightened a person, almost leading him to suffocation in a bathhouse heated in black, i.e. with an open hearth inside and without a chimney. To appease the bannik, after washing, people left him a broom, soap, and water; A black chicken was sacrificed to the bannik.

In the bathhouse they also left sacrifices to navyam - the evil souls of those who died a violent death. Navya were imagined as huge black birds without feathers, flying at night, in storms and rain,<`на злых ветрах>. These birds screamed like hungry hawks; their cry foreshadowed death. Navy attacked women and children and sucked their blood.

To protect themselves from the wrath of the Navi, they always carried a head of garlic, a needle without an eye, or a silver amulet (These amulets protected against any evil spirits and witchcraft).

Cult<малых>deities, whether house spirits or nature spirits, did not disappear with the advent of Christianity. The beliefs persisted for two reasons. First, respect<малых божеств было менее явным, чем культ богов неба, земли, грозы. Малым божествам не строили святилищ, обряды в их честь совершались дома, в кругу семьи. Во-вторых, люди считали, что малые божества живут рядом, и человек общается с ними ежедневно, поэтому, несмотря на церковные запреты, продолжали почитать добрых и злых духов, тем самым, обеспечивая себе благополучие и безопасность.

In the consciousness of the ancient pagan, two worlds lived simultaneously - the real, human world and another world inhabited by deities (good and evil) and the souls of ancestors. Since animal deities were considered the most ancient relatives, they were thought of as masters of another world.

The other world was perceived, on the one hand, as very distant and inaccessible (located underground or in the sky). A powerful sorcerer who managed to penetrate it returned back wise, having learned magical techniques and bringing with him various wonderful objects. On the other hand, the other world was thought of as close, often visited by man, as if it were a familiar forest, swamp or mountains. The owners of the forest - the Bear and the Wolf - were simultaneously presented as the masters of another world. But the most formidable of the masters was considered the ruler of the underground and underwater world - the Serpent.

Deities-monsters.

The serpent, a powerful hostile monster, is found in the mythology of almost every nation. The ancient ideas of the Slavs about the Snake were preserved in fairy tales.

In them, the hero fights a multi-headed monster, usually near a river (the Serpent is associated with underground waters), defeating him, frees the princess, and the epic hero Dobrynya frees numerous captives.

The release of prisoners is an echo of an ancient myth, in which the hero-sorcerer, going to another world, found himself swallowed by the Serpent and discovered that the kingdom of death was in the belly of the monster. There he met dead ancestors, learned wisdom from them, accumulated strength, and then got back out. Over time, ideas about the Snake changed, he was perceived more and more hostile, and if in the ancient versions of the myth getting into his belly was considered a great success, then later such an event began to be perceived as a misfortune. The Northern Slavs (Novgorodians and others) worshiped the Serpent - the lord of underground waters - and called him the Lizard.

The Lizard's sanctuaries were located in swamps, the banks of lakes and rivers; the most famous of them was located in Peryn, not far from Novgorod, in the place where the Volkhov River flows from Lake Ilmen. The ancient sanctuary received the name “Peryn” when, by order of the still young Vladimir Svyatoslavich, the idol of the Lizard was defeated and replaced by Perun. The coastal sanctuaries of the Lizard had a perfectly round shape - the circle as a symbol of perfection and order was opposed to the destructive power of this god. As victims, the Lizard was thrown into the swamp with black chickens, as well as young girls, which was reflected in many beliefs (as if the merman carried women under their water or married drowned women). An echo of the same myths was preserved in the children's game of “Yasha,” that is, the Lizard waiting for his bride-victim. All Slavic tribes who worshiped the Lizard considered him to be a sun-sink: every day the evening luminary descends beyond the boundaries of the world and floats like an underground river to the east. This river flows inside the two-headed Lizard, swallowing the sun with its western mouth and spewing it out of the eastern. The antiquity of the myth is evidenced by the fact that the Lizard is not hostile to the sun: he returns the luminary voluntarily.

The most detailed myths about the Lizard have been preserved in the Novgorod region. Novgorodians called him “Prince of Volkhov.” The chronicler reported that the Lizard “blocked the waterway in that Volkhov River. And those who did not worship him he devoured, others... he drowned. Therefore, people, then ignorant, called him a real god of the accursed.” When the god was killed, his body went up the Volkhov, was thrown ashore at Peryn and buried there with great honors, as later chronicles report. Echoes of sacrifices to the Lizard in Peryn survived until the 20th century. Fishermen, sailing past the sanctuary, according to ancient tradition, made a sacrifice - they threw coins into the water.

I think that one of the most detailed expositions of the myth about the Lizard is the epic about Sadko, a guslar who delighted the underwater ruler with his playing (called the Sea King in the epic). Sadko received gifts from him and became fabulously rich. The second part of the epic tells that Sadko went to the bottom of the sea as a sacrifice to the Lizard King, but with the help of his daughter he got back out.

The custom of sacrificing a person to the underwater god existed for a very long time in the north in a transformed form: for example, on Onega at the beginning of the twentieth century. the old people made a stuffed animal and sent it into the lake in a leaky boat, where it sank. Another sacrifice made to the Lizard was a horse, which was first fed by the entire village and then drowned.

With the transition to agriculture, many myths and religious ideas of the hunting era were modified or forgotten, the cruelty of ancient rituals was softened: human sacrifice was replaced by horse sacrifice, and later - stuffed animals. The Slavic gods of the agricultural era are brighter and kinder to people.

Reflection of Slavic gods in fairy tales.

The world is like a fairy tale. Tales of the people

Their wisdom is dark, but doubly sweet,

Like this ancient mighty nature,

From infancy they sank into my soul.

Rulers of another world

In fairy tales, the ruler of another world appears in different guises, for example in the guise of Koshchei (the name comes from the word `bone and means “skeleton”).

Koschey, like the Serpent, holds the princess captive. He is called the Immortal, if only because the ruler of the world of death is himself a dead man invulnerable to conventional weapons. The description of the battle with Koshchei, especially the victory over him, could only have arisen in an era when faith in ancient myths about another world was shaken and communication with its rulers began to seem not a blessing, but a white one. Apparently, this happened when the pagans began to leave the forests and began to settle on the plains, and the hunting lifestyle was replaced by an agricultural one. The description of Koshcheev's death belongs to ancient times - his soul is stored outside the body and is an inanimate object (igloo). She is guarded by everything living and inanimate: water (the sea surrounding the island of Koshcheya), earth (the island itself), a tree (an oak tree on which a chest hangs), animals (a hare), birds (a duck). The egg in which the needle is stored is often a symbol of the entire universe in mythology - in other words, Koschey was considered the ruler of all things.

Even more ancient and complex is the image of the mistress of another world, known in fairy tales by the name of Baba Yaga. Her hut on chicken legs is depicted as standing either in the forest (the center of another world) or at the edge of the forest. But then the entrance to it is from the side of the forest, that is, from the world of death. The name “chicken legs” most likely came from “chicken”, i.e., smoke-fuelled pillars, on which the Slavs placed a “death hut” - a small log house with the ashes of the deceased. Inside (such a funeral rite existed among the ancient Slavs back in the 5th-11th centuries). Baba Yaga, inside such a hut, seemed to be like a living dead - she lay motionless and did not see the person who had come from the world of the living (the living do not see the dead, the dead do not see the living). She recognized his arrival by the smell - “it smells of the Russian spirit.” The hut's chicken legs can be simply animal or bird paws, and Yaga herself has some features of an animal, and sometimes a bear or a goat lives in the hut instead of Yaga. Yaga is the mistress of time: she is served by the Red, White and Black riders, i.e. morning, day and night. A person who encounters Baba Yaga's hut on the border of the world of life and death, as a rule, heads to another world to free the captive princess. And for this he must join the world of the dead.

Usually he asks Yaga to feed him, and she gives him food from the dead. There is another option - to be eaten by Yaga and thus end up in the world of the dead. Having passed the tests in Baba Yaga's hut, a person finds himself belonging to both worlds at the same time, endowed with many magical qualities, subjugates various inhabitants of the world of the dead, defeats the terrible monsters inhabiting it, wins back a magical beauty from them and becomes king. The name “yaga” - just like the name “witch” - is used by the villagers to insult old, grumpy and ugly women. Following the epic description of fairy tales, Baba Yaga, a bone leg, her head lies like a pestle in her hut from corner to corner, her nose has grown into the ceiling, her breasts are hanging over the garden bed. Fairy tales often mention three prophetic sisters - the Baba Yagas, depicting them, although grumpy, but kind, helpful old women: they foretell the wanderer what awaits him ahead, help him with wise advice, give him a heroic horse, a ball that shows the way to unknown lands, flying carpet and other curiosities...

TALES ABOUT ANIMALS.

Tales about animals took on forms of fiction that attributed to animals the ability to think, speak, and act intelligently. Under the early clan system, a kind of belief in family ties between people (most often of the clan) and some kind of animal was almost universally widespread. The animal was considered the ancestor - a totem. The totem could not be killed. He should have been revered, since he was the patron of the family. Thus, the nicknames of the bear among the Slavs reflect ideas about the consanguineous relationship between a person and a bear. Traces of totemism have also been preserved in superstitions. For Russians, a bear is “grandfather”, “old man”. They believed that a bear could help a person and lead a lost person out of the forest. It was believed that a mysterious power was hidden in a bear’s paw: the bear’s claws, drawn along the udder of a cow, seemed to make it milkable; the paw was hung in the yard from the brownie or in the underground - “for the chickens.” Archaeologists also found direct traces of the cult of the bear. In the burial grounds of the Yaroslavl region, drilled bear teeth and necklaces made of teeth, which in ancient times had the significance of talismans, were discovered. There were similar ideas about other animals.

Not all the stories and myths of antiquity have disappeared. There is a fairy tale about a bear who took revenge on a man and woman for their severed paw. The bear broke a linden tree, made himself a wooden leg and sang:

Creak, leg,

Creak, fake!

And the water is sleeping,

And the earth is sleeping...

The bear found a hut where the fire was burning and ate its offenders. He takes revenge according to all the rules of the tribal law. The tale "The Bear" retains traces of ancient ideas. Based on comparative observations of the nature of such mythical concepts and ideas, we can conclude that the appearance of fairy tales about animals was preceded by stories associated with beliefs. They featured the main characters of future fairy tales about animals. The stories did not yet have an allegorical meaning. It was animals who acted in the images of animals. The stories had a narrow practical purpose: they prescribed, advised, taught how to treat animals. This could be the initial stage through which fantastic fiction passed in its development, later assimilated into an artistic fairy tale. With the extinction of the cult of animals, an ironic depiction of the funny habits of animals entered the fairy tale. These stories depicted animals, not people. Allegorical meaning is still alien to these stories. . In the fairy tale “The Insatiable Wolf,” the wolf came to the “palace, the thatched porch” and howled:

Nice, nice palace.

Thatched porch.

The tale parodies the custom of caroling. The wolf song lists everything that a peasant has: seven sheep, a foal, a bull, a cow, a pig, a cat, a dog, a boy and a girl. The wolf first demands a sheep, then another, and eats them all. And he would have eaten the old man if he had not taken up the club.

In fairy tales, the bear, an animal of the “highest rank,” is also introduced. The bear is the most powerful forest animal. Its position in the animal hierarchy is explained in its own way by its connection with traditional pre-fable totemic legends, in which the bear occupied the highest place. At the time of the formation of the fairy tale as an artistic phenomenon, the bear was given the features of a sovereign - the ruler of the district, the holder of power over everyone. An indicative tale is about how a bear and a peasant shared the harvest. The man’s agreement with the bear was as follows: “I have a root, and for you, Misha, an inch.” The sown turnips sprouted and grew - the bear received the tops. The bear decided to be smarter. They sowed wheat, the bear said: “Give me the roots, and take the tops for yourself.” The bear was again left with nothing. He doesn't know what grows or how. He is alien to men's work. The stupidity of a bear is the stupidity of a powerful creature with little knowledge. The hare, frog, mouse, and thrush appear in fairy tales as weak ones. They serve on errands and are easy to offend. From animals and birds, storytellers made a cat and a rooster “positive heroes”. The cat is faithful in friendship and saves the rooster from death three times. The warlike rooster is ready to come to the aid of anyone who is offended.

MAGICAL TALES.

Not a single fairy tale is complete without the intervention of a miracle in a person’s life.

By comparing fairy tales, I was able to establish the similarity of their fantastic plots dating back to the ancients.

These stories were complicated by ritual, magical and mythological concepts and ideas. Predictive fables judged and talked about the most diverse phenomena of everyday life, insisted on observing everyday rules and orders. The predecessor of the fairy tale was a story that taught how to observe various everyday prohibitions, the so-called taboos (a Polynesian word meaning “impossible”). According to the conviction of primitive man, in the field, in the forest, on the waters and in the home - everywhere and constantly he encounters a living, conscious force hostile to himself, looking for an opportunity to send failure, misfortune, illness, fire, death. People sought to escape from the power of the mysterious force, surrounding their lives and behavior with a very complex system of prohibitions. Prohibitions were imposed on a number of human actions, on touching individual objects, etc. Violation of the prohibition, according to people, entailed dangerous consequences. Taboos have given rise to numerous stories about how a person violates some everyday ban and falls under the power of hostile forces.

Many fairy tales talk about the prohibition of leaving the house, leaving your home, eating any food or drink, or touching anything. Fairy tales, by tradition, have preserved plot points, which, although they have changed, have acquired a new meaning, but initially owe their origin to antiquity. The beginning of many fairy tales is typical. Parents leave home and punish their daughter: “Be smart, take care of your brother, don’t leave the yard.” My daughter forgot her order. Geese-swans swooped in and carried away the boy on their wings (“Geese-Swans”). Sister Alyonushka does not order brother Ivanushka to drink from a hoof print full of water on the road, but his brother did not listen - and became a kid (“Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka”). The princess violated her husband's order, went out into the garden, began to swim - and the evil witch turned her into a white duck (“White Duck”), etc. Prohibitions are violated, and misdeeds never go without consequences. The predecessor of the fairy tale - a story of an everyday nature - warned, instructed, and taught to observe taboos.

A voluntary or involuntary taboo violator could avoid the disastrous action of hostile forces if he took protective actions. Man came up with saving magic and endowed many objects with the power of “amulets”. The logic of protection underlies many of the actions of fairy-tale characters. A comb thrown over a shoulder grew into a dense forest, a towel spread like a river and saved a person from being chased by a monster. These and similar motifs, poetically developed in fairy tales, originate in ritual magic, in the belief in the saving power of amulets. The amulets included a ring, an axe, a scarf, a mirror, a belt, a broom, coal, wax, bread, water, earth, fire, an apple, grass, a branch, and a stick. Objects and substances work wonders. For example, water - a frequent part of a number of ancient rituals - in fairy tales restores sight, former appearance and well-being, bestows youth, heals from illnesses, revives, and makes the hero stronger than terrible monsters. There is also water in fairy tales that can turn a person into an animal or a bird.

The connection between fairy-tale fiction and magical action is also revealed when it comes to the magic word: after its utterance, everything obeys the will of man. With a single word, golden palaces are erected, crystal bridges are built, roads are paved, cities are erected, huge carpets are woven. There are also plots that involve the search for a treasured word that will protect from trouble caused by a carelessly escaped black word.

“The fairy tale will be born from the same sources as the incantatory songs of magicians with their inspiring, commanding and healing power...”

I. A. Ilyin Philosopher and cultural historian

The entire mythological story, the prototype of a later fairy tale, was permeated by an instructive thought about what a person should not do and what he should do if he, voluntarily or unwittingly, violated everyday rules. Unlike its distant ancient ancestor, the fairy tale as an artistic phenomenon was already free of mythical meaning.

The logic of the myth, discerned behind the traditional plot provisions, had to include a number of other components and the mythical logic associated with them. Before becoming the basis of fairy tales as a phenomenon of artistic creativity, the tradition of the elementary scheme of a mythological story had already become more complicated. The narrative basis early, and perhaps simultaneously with its emergence, included additional motifs, which were also well preserved in fairy tales. This is, first of all, a reproduction of an imaginary world dominated by forces that are disastrous for humans: an unknown land, a kingdom far away, the world of the depths of the sea, dense forests, sky-high distances, etc. This is, for example, the habitat of Baba Yaga. Her hut is located on the edge of the forest, and then there is no way - just pitch darkness. A living person meets the Dead Yaga in places where even a crow would not bring bones. The image was layered with features of medieval witches. This is how Yaga is known in later fairy tales, in which, as a rule, the hero defeats her and brutally deals with her.

The tale of Baba Yaga's ball dates back to the times of matriarchy. According to the famous folklorist V.Ya. Proppa, Baba Yaga, is a typical pagan priestess, the keeper of a “library of balls” in birch bark boxes. (Isn’t this where the expression “tell a big lie” comes from?) In addition, it has been suggested that in addition to the Greek, the Slavs also had their own original writing system: the so-called knotted writing. Its signs were not written down, but were transmitted using knots tied on threads that were wrapped in ball books. The memory of the ancient knotted script remained in language and folklore. We are still tying “knots for memory”, talking about the “thread of the narrative”, “the intricacy of the plot”. Continuous struggle and alternate. In the dead kingdom, monsters have power over everything. A mysterious, distant world is recreated with features and properties that are in every way hostile to the world of people. The imagination tried to lift the curtain separating the everyday world of people from the disastrous, alien. But the other world was involuntarily recreated in the imagination with the features of the everyday world. And in the otherworldly world, man found helpers for himself. These are animal totems and ancestors, recently deceased relatives. Wonderful helpers take part in the fate of people who find themselves in a mysterious, disastrous world. In the fairy tale about Khavroshechka, a cow becomes such an assistant, in the fairy tale about “Sivka-Burka” - a wonderful horse, which in other fairy tales invariably helps the hero. Falcon, eagle and raven become the husbands of three princesses, and the sons-in-law help their brother-in-law get a beautiful bride, and when she disappears, they help find her (“Marya Morevna”). A bear, a hare, a dog, a pike and other animals, birds, and fish constantly help the hero out of trouble. The motive for help provided to the hero is also connected with Yaga’s actions. She takes on the role of a giver of some wonderful object and gives advice and instructions on how to behave. Ivan receives a ball from her, which rolls and leads to the goal. A yaga or a nameless old woman can give a wonderful horse, on which the hero will cover thousand-mile distances in the blink of an eye and reach the unknown Far Away Kingdom. Yaga gifts Ivan with a towel, which you just have to wave and a strange bridge will appear. However, in a number of fairy tales, Yaga is endowed with the traits of a cannibal, a child abductor (“Tereshechka”, “Geese-Swans”), and the traits of an evil and insidious warrior, merciless to her victims (“Medvedko, Usinya, Gorynya and Dubynya heroes”). The continuous struggle and alternate victory of the light and dark forces of nature are most visibly captured in the Slavs’ ideas about the cycle of the seasons. Its starting point was the onset of the new year - the birth of a new sun at the end of December. This celebration received the Greco-Roman name from the Slavs - carol (lat. calendae - the first day of the new month). The complete victory of the new thunderer over winter - “death” on the day of the spring equinox was celebrated with the funeral rite of Marena (Marena (in Slavic mythology) is a goddess associated with the embodiment of death, with seasonal rituals of dying and resurrecting nature.). There was also a custom of walking with a may (symbol of spring), a small Christmas tree decorated with ribbons, paper, and eggs. The deity of the sun, seen off for the winter, was called Kupala, Yarilo and Kostroma. During the holiday, a straw effigy of these deities was either burned or drowned in water.

change from 01/14/2016 - (added)

To understand ancient tales and the meaning embedded in them, it is necessary to abandon the modern worldview and look at the world through the eyes of people who lived in ancient times, when the tales themselves appeared. The keys to tuning into ancient perception are the unchanging figurative roots of a particular fairy tale. For example, animals are the name of the palaces on the Svarog Circle, and when they help, this should be perceived as the help of ancestors, a totem animal.

Now let's take the description Gorynych's snake.

The image of a snake means round and long, like a snake, gorynych - because it is as tall as a mountain.
In this case, an explicit description tornado. The Gorynych serpent can be either three-headed (three funnels) or nine-headed.

Other ancient Russian fairy tales that describe the appearance of a snake say that it can fly, its wings are fiery. Clawed paws and a long tail with a point - a favorite detail of popular prints in fairy tales, as a rule, are absent. A constant feature of the serpent is its connection with fire: “A strong storm arose, thunder rumbles, the earth trembles, the dense forest bows down: a three-headed serpent flies,” “A fierce serpent flies at him, scorches with fire, threatens with death,” “Then the serpent emitted from itself the flame of fire wants to burn the prince.”

This snake is recognized as the Kundalini serpent - the spiritual power of man. His constant threat: “I will burn your kingdom (i.e., body) with fire and scatter it with ashes.”

In Russian folk tales, the snake is the guardian of the border to the Kingdom of Heaven. The border itself is described as a river of fire called Currant(“mor” – death, “one” – one; that is, there is one death). A bridge leads across it, called "Viburnum"(in Sanskrit “kali” - ill-fated), that is, only one who has the (“seed of the devil” - a drop of Causal Matter) fully manifested can step on this border. The one who kills the snake (yaytsechore), that is, defeats all his animal elements, will be able to cross the bridge.

If we decompose the word Gorynych according to the initial letters of the Old Russian language, we will receive confirmation of the above. G-OR-YNY-CH- the path of ORa, manifested into an unknown set (s), leading to a certain milestone, Trait, bridge.

When meeting with the serpent, the hero faces the danger of sleep, falling asleep, that is, obsession - trouble: “The prince began to walk along the bridge, tapping with a cane (the main ascending channel of the Kundalini force, running along the center of the human spine), a jug popped up (mystical abilities that manifest themselves as they rise Kundalini) and began to dance in front of him; he stared at it (became carried away by his mystical abilities) and fell into a deep sleep (i.e., “fell into delusion”). An unprepared person falls asleep, a true hero never: “The storm - the hero didn’t give a damn (was not carried away by these abilities), coughed (brought them into “hara”, balanced) on him and broke him into small parts. The serpent is immortal and invincible for the uninitiated, it can only be destroyed by a certain hero: the eggchore can only be defeated by the one in whom it is located - “In the whole world there is no other rival for me except Ivan Tsarevich, and he is still young, even the raven of his bones is here won’t bring it.”

The serpent never tries to kill the hero with weapons, paws, or teeth - he tries to drive the hero into the ground (i.e. into sin) and thus destroy him: “The miracle of Yudo began to overcome him, drove him knee-deep into the damp earth.” In the second battle, he was “hammered waist-deep into damp earth,” that is, with each fight, the dirt (damp earth) of the egg chore begins to appear in the person to an increasing extent. The snake can only be destroyed by cutting off all its heads, that is, by defeating one’s senses. But these heads have a wonderful property - they grow again, that is, the power of feelings increases with their satisfaction: “I cut off nine heads of the miracle juda; Miracle Yudo picked them up, struck them with a fiery finger - the heads grew back.” Only after the fiery finger (lust) is cut off does the hero manage to cut off all the heads.

Knowing the dependence of spiritual development on mastering our feelings, our ancestors gave us the following instruction:

Where feelings dominate, there is lust,
And where there is lust, there is anger, blindness,
And where is the blindness - the fading of the mind,
Where the mind fades, knowledge perishes,
Where knowledge perishes, let everyone know -
There a human child perishes in the darkness!
And the one who has achieved power over feelings,
Trampled disgust, knows no passions,
Who subjugated them forever to his will -
Achieved enlightenment, freed from pain,
And since then his heart has been immaculate,
And his mind is firmly established.

The third battle is the most terrible. A special condition of the last battle is that only the hero’s miraculous assistant, his spiritual body, can kill the snake: “The heroic horse rushed into the slaughter and began to gnaw the snake with its teeth and trample with its hooves. ...The stallions came running and kicked the snake out of the saddle. ...The animals rushed at him and tore him to shreds.” “One horse reared up and threw the snake on its shoulders, and the other hit its side with its hooves, the snake fell, and the horses oppressed the snake with their feet. Here are the horses! The battle, of course, ends in victory for the hero. But after the battle, one more thing needs to be done: the snake needs to be completely destroyed, that is, it is necessary to transform human bodies into (the body of Light) - pure virtue: “And the body rolled into the fiery river”; “He picked up all the parts, burned them, and scattered the ashes across the field”; “He lit a fire, burned the snake to ashes and sent it to the wind.” ()

In this way, fairy tales prepare children for the search for the Kingdom of Heaven - for achieving complete perfection through acquiring the body of Light.

To entertain you and take your mind off the firestorm a little, I will tell you an anecdote in the style of an epic:
“...Here it is, this huge field, on which countless hordes are already trampling. And here are the two strongest warriors who gather in the center. On the one hand, Peresvet is dressed in the sun, on the other, Chelubey is shrouded in darkness. They collide, so much so that thunder shakes the heavens and the earth, and their powerful horses fly to pieces. And having dismounted, Chelubey already deals such a blow to Peresvet’s head that Peresvet’s legs enter knee-deep into the Russian land of Mother. But Peresvet survived, threw aside the broken helmet, swung and hit Chelubey with a mace, so much so that Chelubey’s legs went knee-deep... into his belly. The Russian land did not accept the Tatar feet...".

Another mystery was needle. After all, the egg in which the needle was kept, if we take into account the most ancient cosmogonic ideas, signifies the embryo of the Universe. How can Kashchei’s fate be contained in it?

In a fairy tale "Crystal Mountain"(A. N. Afanasyev) there is an absolutely amazing image that allows you to shed light on this difficult topic. The hero saves the princess from the kingdom of death - the crystal mountain. Despite the fact that the ruler of the kingdom of death in this case is the Serpent, this plot is similar to the tales of Kashchei by the presence of a chest with a treasured egg, in which the fate of the kingdom of death lies. The serpent has already been defeated by the hero and the falcon. The chest is enclosed in the body of the Serpent. In the chest there is a hare, a duck, a fish, and in them there is an egg. Everything is like in the fairy tales about Kashchei. But in the egg there is not a needle, but a grain. It is the touch of this grain that destroys the Serpentine Kingdom of Death - the crystal mountain in which the princess is imprisoned. The grain, of course, is an older and deeper image than the needle. If the needle was used in ancient Rus' by healers against the evil eye and the evil witch, then grains and flowers meant the resurrection of life. And until the twentieth century, dishes made from grains were used in church and folk traditions during funeral rites precisely in this meaning. But why does the needle still replace the grain? In Sanskrit, which is related to the Slavic languages, “shilaa” means stone, rock, but at the same time “shila” means “ear” (Sanskrit). An ear is already, literally, a resurrected grain. What do an ear of grain and a rock have in common? Let's remember the Russian word "awl" - this is a needle inserted into a wooden handle. Sets of various stone awls have come to us thanks to archaeological research.

So, an awl is a thin stone point that can pierce fairly hard objects. The ear, like an awl, pierces not only the soil, but also stones and rocks, emerging to the surface from the underworld of death, from the grave in which the grain was buried. It is quite natural that, initially, in the egg - the image of the emerging Universe - the ancient storytellers placed precisely grain, as a sign of resurrection, and not a simple tool of labor.

As for the image crystal mountain, then there are several levels of meaning, one of which may be the image of winter-death, another – the image of an advancing glacier. And finally, the most profound meanings are the dedication of heroes belonging to the Military and Priestly classes; death and resurrection of the Deity (princess), in this case female.

When talking about the initiation of a hero into the kingdom Vodyanoy(or Leshy) and in the kingdom of Kashchei, we must not forget that these worlds are not unambiguous. If the first two personify the element or even the physical death of the hero in this element, then the kingdom of Kashchei can only conditionally, at the level of the hero’s initiation, mean such a death. Since the Vedic scriptures say that bodily death is only one of the types of manifestation of life. On deeper levels of meaning, the kingdom of Kashchei means spiritual death.

Remember Baba Yaga, either a bone or a golden leg. But originally there was Baba Yoga. And it was not for nothing that she got along with Leshiy, the owner of the forest, where her house stood surrounded by a high tyne, hung with skulls. But the skulls were of animals, because they retain the strength and wisdom of their species, creating a protective circle. Again the hut was on chicken legs, from which she flew out on an aircraft into one evil spirit. But kuryi means smoke, that is, the house stood above the ground and could turn wherever you wanted. Kuril Islands - do they raise smoking chickens there? Nothing like that! And one more thing: Whoever passes through the smoke will end up in another world. Very clear description. Haze- reflection of the changed space. Small on the outside - immense on the inside - this speaks of a changed matrix of perception.

Who has always been revered in Rus'? A young beautiful Goddess, whose name was Yogini Mother. And only Christians turned a pretty woman into a terrible old woman and called her first Baba Yoga, and then Baba Yaga, who supposedly devours children.

Think about it, Yogini is a connector. What did she connect? She traveled the earth and differed from other women in that she wore boots embroidered with gold. Hence the word “Baba Yoga golden leg”, that is, in golden boots. She gathered orphans and took them to her Skete, and the children were then dedicated to the Gods. And just imagine, a foothill monastery has a stone wall, inside is the cave of Ra, that is, the cave of Light, or as they say now “cave”. From there a stone platform extended, which was called a “lapata”. And now they changed the emphasis, and what happened? Shovel. The children were dressed in clean white clothes, decorated with flowers, given sleep herbs to drink, and laid in a niche. There were two niches there. The children were placed in the back alcove. Then the first niche was covered with fallen brushwood and the shovel was pushed inside Ra’s cave. But no one saw that when the paw moved, a stone wall lowered and it fenced off the brushwood from the children. And then the priest or Yogini Mother herself set fire to the brushwood, and for all the laity and those present, the brushwood burned. That is, through the fire, the children’s connection with the outside world was interrupted. And it was believed that the children were burned, roasted in the oven, and then some people speculated and said that they ate them. But in fact, these children were taken to rooms or cells in the rock and raised from them to be priests and priestesses. And when the time came, these orphans, boys and girls, were united into a family union so that they could continue their Family. But who, 10 or 20 years later, could recognize that little ragged orphan child in a young priest or priestess? And the expression “dedicate to the Gods” meant serving the Gods of one’s Family, one’s people.

Another facet, Yogini, helps to connect the bodies and shells of our Alive. Collects them into a nesting doll. She gave me something to drink and she strengthened her body; I steamed in the bathhouse - strengthened my hot body; put me to bed - new body, lucid dreams; gave a guiding ball - a ball's body; I talked to the sun - I strengthened the kohl's body; gave a magic horse - a marvelous body. And only after collecting all the bodies, the hero goes and defeats the Serpent Gorynych, his shadow side, that is, taking it under control.

Perhaps the most mysterious and even magical number in mathematics is the number zero. We encounter its special properties already in primary and secondary school. You cannot divide by zero. When you first get acquainted with the number line, it turns out that zero is not identical to the empty set. This number not only has its own coordinate on the number line, but the reference system of one-dimensional, two-dimensional and three-dimensional mathematical space is taken from it. We can say that zero is the boundary point separating positive and negative numbers, the directions up and down, right and left, forward and backward. In terms of its mysterious properties, zero can be compared to such a phenomenon in physics as vacuum (which is also not emptiness).

In a fairy tale, we meet a heroine whose characteristics remind us of the characteristics of this number. She always lives on the border of two worlds, being, as it were, a door between them. This essence is never an integral part of the worlds that it shares, but is always only a boundary. But the precision of this character turns out to be diverse. The point that it characterizes and denotes unfolds into itself with a huge space, and this happens through the number three: point, number three, space. The fact that this is the internal space of a point, that is, a space completely different from the one whose coordinates were shared by this point (in other words, external to this point), becomes obvious from the fact that the hero finds himself in a completely different space. In most fairy tales, the hero from the world of life (positive numbers) ends up in the world of death (negative numbers) - the kingdom of Kashchei, the Serpent-Gorynych, passing through the border point between these worlds - Baba Yaga's hut. But in “The Tale of Rejuvenating Apples and Living Water,” this border point suddenly unfolds into space. The hero finds himself not in the world of material life, but in the world of “death”. That is, without crossing the border point between life and death, he enters, as it were, inside this wonderful point. He finds himself in the kingdom of Sineglazka, the daughter of Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga herself unexpectedly triples, that is, from one point she turns into three points (rather, into three coordinate systems interconnected), between which there is a huge space that the hero overcomes on winged horses. Moreover, each horse belongs to a different Baba Yaga, which suggests that the assumption of the presence of a super coordinate system is correct. So, in Baba Yaga’s hut, an entrance to what is called the “fourth dimension” opens. More precisely, it is a whole system of measurements. The fact that the hero, leaving the hut and mounting a magic horse, goes out into a completely different space than from which he entered it, is confirmed by the fact that first he asks the hut to turn towards him in front, and towards the forest with its back (that is, to open in space to which it is usually closed). Consequently, the hostess, leaving the hut to visit her sisters, goes out into a different space than the one from which the hero came. But, at the same time, this is not the space of Kashchei or Zmey-Gorynych. This rotation of the hut from the forest to the person is not the usual rotation of an object in three-dimensional space, since, in this case, the hero himself could easily go around the building in order to enter the door, as is done in such cases.

So, Baba Yaga's hut– this is the point of initiation. Those unworthy are either not allowed in or die. Those worthy can cross this border and return back to the material world alive. Iriy, the kingdom of Sineglazka, opens as a separate one. The fact that this is Iriy is evidenced by the source of living water and rejuvenating apples.

Let us remember another fairy tale, where Baba Yaga has a turtledove daughter who can turn into a girl (“Go there - I don’t know where, bring that, I don’t know what.” “Russian Fairy Tales”). In another version of the same tale (“Fedot the Sagittarius”), the daughter of Baba Yaga - cuckoo girl. This girl, even after marrying the main character of the fairy tale, continues to live in the forest. She does not go to the city or village, that is, to the material world of people. In this way she is similar to the Frog Princess (aka Vasilisa the Wise, daughter of the Sea King, Beregina), who hides from people under the frog skin. The world of elements and animals is open and obedient to both, just as Baba Yaga’s hut is always open (turned) towards the forest. This is another mystery of this border point in the Russian fairy tale - the initiation point from which the road to Iriy opens; a point usually closed to the material human world, but at the same time open to the world of Nature and animals. Baba Yaga always has animals: horses, dogs, cats, eagle owls, owls. Her daughter herself turns into a bird. This once again emphasizes the fallacy of the superficial idea that Baba Yaga belongs to the world of evil. Otherwise, why does she need animals? After all, according to ancient beliefs, the spirits of evil are afraid of animals. That is why, in ancient times, fangs, claws, scraps of animal fur were worn as amulets, and later, until the twentieth century, a body belt made of woolen threads was worn. Even in Serbia, where, under the influence of Old Testament ideas about the dog, there was a negative attitude towards this animal, in the 18th century the belief continued to exist that the dog was able to see and scare away ghouls. The eagle owl, according to Iranian beliefs, is able to discern evil in the darkness. The belief about a cat's ability to see and scare away evil spirits is even now widespread and well known.

So, speaking in mathematical language, the point that characterizes this phenomenon (the image of Baba Yaga and her hut in a fairy tale) does not belong to either positive or negative numbers, where positive numbers characterize the world of material existence, and negative numbers characterize the world of death (the world changing the measure of affirmation of harmony).

However, it would be a mistake to think that this coordinate is frozen and without movement. She is as immobilized as a point in a flowing river, which, as we know, cannot be entered twice.

You can expand your understanding of this “point” by reading “The Righteous” and the works of Dewey Larson.

Of course, this whole topic is not exhausted by one number “zero”. Everyone will also remember the numbers 3, 7, 12, 33, repeatedly mentioned in fairy tales, the meaning and meaning of which in the Slavic Vedic system of ideas has yet to be truly explored. The difference between the number 0 is that it is never mentioned in direct text, but its presence is obvious.

Remember in Pushkin - mermaid she was sitting on the branches, and her hair was brown. She was a bird-maiden - wise and winged.

How do they write now? Anderson wrote about green-haired maidens, daughters of the merman, and they had nothing to do with mermaids. In Rus' they were called Mavkami.

Do you remember the fairy tale about Why are her parents never mentioned in modern versions? So why did she melt?

It is not easy to understand the Ancient Wisdom in its original interpretation, because it must be perceived with the heart, the Soul. This is well said in the fairy tale about chicken Ryaba. She laid a golden egg, which Grandfather beat but didn’t break, Grandma Biba didn’t break, but the mouse ran, waved its tail, the egg fell and broke. Here the golden egg bears the image of the hidden Ancestral Wisdom, which you cannot take in a swoop, no matter how hard you hit. At the same time, by accidentally touching it, this system can be destroyed, broken into fragments, destroying its integrity.

Therefore, if people have not reached the level that would allow them to understand the hidden, simple information in the form of an ordinary egg is sufficient for them to begin with, because a golden one can even blow the roof off. Like modern textbook compilers use fraction problems: “The Polish woman laid half a hen. How many eggs will one and a half hens lay?”

If we talk about Universal Wisdom, then the tale of the Ryaba Hen can be interpreted on a deeper level.

Firstly, in the fairy tale we are talking about a chicken and certainly a pockmarked one. But the pockmarked one is nothing more than a description of the matrix structure, the creative power of Navi. This, in the language of modern physics, is a cellular holographic infinite information field, the cellularity of which is indicated by the ripples of the chicken. The hen (information field) lays an egg. But the egg is not simple, but golden.

Secondly, among the Slavic peoples, gold has always been a symbol of the completion of some process. This is not difficult to verify if you remember other Russian, German or Celtic folk tales. In this tale, the golden egg indicates the finitude of the evolutionary process in the Universe. Because gold is the only metal on Earth that accumulates psychic and spiritual energy; upon reaching a certain “spiritual mass”, the egg of the Universe will begin to fold, thereby completing the evolutionary process of creation.

This means that the golden egg of the chicken is precisely the universe that has already set foot on the path of its completion or development. Then who are the grandparents? And why are they trying to crack the golden egg? A highly spiritual personality, no matter how old and weak, physically, going to Iriy or to the connection with the Rod, at the energetic level represents a young and powerful energy formation. The fairy tale directly says that the golden egg is cracked by old people. Consequently, these souls (and we are talking specifically about souls) are not the inhabitants of Iria. They are typical outcasts and their place is in Navi’s “energy spare parts” dump, as indicated by old age.

Their souls, realizing that the evolutionary path of the Universe is over and it is unknown when a new young Universe will appear in this place of the ocean of memory and peace, strive to get into Iriy, leaving them. That is, a desire to evolve arose in the souls of old people. As they say: better late than never. Before their eyes, in their understanding, the Universe, which has passed its evolutionary path, is dying.

The image of a mouse is precisely the same force of Navi that absorbs universes that have stopped in their development. Naturally, both grandfather and grandmother cry. But the creative forces of Navi - the hen Ryaba - console them: “Don’t cry, grandma, don’t cry, grandpa - I will not lay you a golden egg, but a simple one.”

For the psyche of a modern person, mired in the search for material gain, the chicken says absurdity: is it possible to compare a simple egg with a golden one? Yes, you can buy a whole basket of ordinary eggs with a golden egg. But the grandfather and grandmother are consoled by this and stop crying. This is understandable: the souls stuck in Navi await the next stage of evolution, already in the new young Universe.

Fairy tale “Kroshechka – Khavrocheshka”. The girl was left an orphan, but she had a favorite cow. And when the girl needed something, she would climb into the cow’s left ear, get out of the right ear, and get what she needed. It would seem that such a big girl cannot climb cow ears. But this cow - the Heavenly Cow Zemun or Ursa Minor, as it is also called - the rectangle is the cow's ear, and then there is Khara, Dara, where the Harians, Daarians come from. But in a fairy tale they won’t write: So the girl passed through the gates of Interworld, aimed at this cow’s ear, and received everything she needed. And mind you, she asked everything from her mother. Mom is like the image of a Zemun cow, and Ingard is also not far away. And the girl went through her ear to Dazhdbog of the Sun, to the Land of Ingard, communicated with the Ancestors, and came out through a completely different ear, according to the movement of the stars, in a different place, and made her way home again. That is, she constantly communicated with her Ancestors. At the entrance, one palace of the Svarog circle was used, and after visiting from another palace, she descended to Midgard through another palace. And her stepmother has three daughters: one-eyed, two-eyed and three-eyed, whom she sent to spy on the girl. And the girl, before leaving, sang and lulled herself to sleep: Sleep, little eye. The first sister fell asleep. The stepmother sent her second daughter to keep an eye on the girl. Girl again: Sleep little eye, sleep the other one. This sister also fell asleep. And only the third managed to spy on the girl, because she sang to her: Sleep the little eye, sleep the other, but did not take into account the third eye, which is between the eyebrows, energy vision. As a result, the cow was slaughtered, but the girl did not eat the meat, but collected all the bones, buried them, and grew up in one version of the fairy tale - an apple tree, in another - a birch tree.

A birch tree- this is also a generic image: when a girl was born, a birch tree was planted; when a boy was born, an oak tree was planted. And the children, playing, grew up between the trees, and received strength from these trees. Therefore, let’s say, if a son was wounded in a military campaign, the parents, judging by the condition of the tree – it was drying up, saw that their son was in trouble. And the parents began to care for this tree, feed it, treat it, and as a result, the tree blossomed and the son got better. The daughters did the same with the birch tree.

A Sivka-burka- Where does this phrase come from? If Sivka (light), then why Burka (dark)? This is not a zebra, which has a black stripe and a white stripe. The thing is that Burka's nickname originally sounded like Burka. And if you look at its origins, you will find clear traces of Boreas. Having turned into a dark-maned stallion, God, the patron saint of the North, impregnated twelve mares and became the father of twelve wonderful foals that could fly in the skies above the earth and seas. This is how Homer described them in the Iliad: Stormy, if they galloped through the grain fields, They rushed higher than the ground, above the ears of grain, without crushing the stems; If they galloped along the ridges of the boundless sea, Above the water, above the crumbling ramparts, they flew quickly. The flight of magic horses is described in the same way in Russian and Slavic folklore, where they are called Sivka-Borek, Burushka-Kosmatushka, which ultimately means Burki-Boreyki. It is no coincidence that the mythical flying horse of Altai legends is also called Buura. By the way: the Slavic surname Boreyko is still widespread.

In Russian folklore there is a fairy tale Storm the hero- Why not Borey? In Afanasyev's collection of fairy tales, Storm the Hero is not just a mighty giant - he is also the Cow's son: the cow licked the remains of the golden-winged pike, which was prepared for dinner for the childless queen. Storm the hero fights on the famous Kalinov Bridge in turn - with six-headed, nine-headed and twelve-headed snakes - the sons of Baba Yaga. There is also a magical apple tree, and Sivka the Burka, and a duck that calls out trouble, and a werewolf pig (and Storm the Bogatyr himself turns into a totem falcon), and the Sea King with a golden head, which is torn off and used to unravel evil machinations ( Let us remember the Titan Phorcys - the Elder of the Sea, who lived near Hyperborea). All this is Hyperborean coded symbolism - it is still waiting to be deciphered.

The most outstanding collector, systematizer and researcher of Russian folklore A.N. Afanasiev explains: on the island Buyans all the mighty thunderstorm forces are concentrated, all the mythical personifications of thunder, winds and storms; here are found: the elder snake of all snakes, and the prophetic raven, the elder brother of all crows, who pecks the fiery serpent, and the storm bird, older and larger to all birds, with an iron nose and copper claws (reminiscent of the wonderful Stratim-bird, to all birds the mother who lives in the Ocean-Sea and creates violent winds with her wings), the queen bee, the eldest of all queens. From them, according to the people, as from heavenly mothers, all earthly reptiles, birds and insects originated. According to conspiracies, both the maiden Dawn and the Sun itself sit on the same island. Buyan Island is the focus of all the creative forces of nature, their eternally complete and inexhaustible source. He is part of that original Earth, which was born by the Ocean - the mother and father of all seas.

An ancient fairy tale, when a young man goes to free his bride from Kashchei. A wolf helps him, a bear, who rolled up a tree with a chest, with a safe where Kashchei’s death was kept, a falcon or someone else: after all, when the young man was hungry, he wanted to shoot a bird or an animal, and they turned to him: Don’t touch me, I I'll still be useful to you. Even the pike brought an egg where the needle was kept, and at the tip of that needle was Kashchei’s death. Different interpretation options. Note that no matter how the Kashchei boasted, they were always defeated. Why? Because our Ancestors clearly defined that Kashchei is a demon and he is always mortal: a mortal demon. But because Previously, they wrote everything together, but over time they began to perceive it as meaning - without mortal. And only then Mr. Lunacharsky started the devilry: he actually introduced the word immortal. Although in the Russian language there were the concepts of “demon mortal”, which means: a demon who will die sooner or later, and “without mortal”, which means eternal. That's the difference.

And note, in any fairy tale, good always wins, and any action always has a complete figurative form. Please note that Kashchei always wore certain armor, that is, protective robes. Evil people have always loved to protect themselves. And a simple weapon, as in fairy tales: even a red-hot arrow does not take it, i.e. tempered, and the sword is tempered on herbs, it does not cut it, but only what kind of sword takes it? Kladinec. How was the Kladinets sword different from a tempered sword? And the fact that this is not just a sword, but a powerful energy-information weapon, why? But because there was a rune tie running along the sword, i.e. certain spells were cast along the blade. And sometimes even on the handle. And the rune knit also created a kind of special energy structure - the force around the sword. Those. Kladinets is a weapon with a kind of magical effect, or, as they would say, a magic sword. And he still broke through any negative energy protection. Because there is nothing more powerful than Slavic runes.

A antique mirrors, which, unlike modern ones, which have an aluminum coating, had a silver coating and a massive silver frame. The mirror provided an answer to any question, receiving information directly from, including the ability to look into both the future and the past. Well, how can one not remember Pushkin: “The mirror had the property of being able to speak. My light, mirror, tell me and tell me the whole truth.”. You can read about modern prototypes of fairy mirrors

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• The connection between Russian fairy tales and the mythology of the ancient Slavs. Mythological origins of Russian fairy tales. Not all the stories and myths of antiquity have disappeared. There is a fairy tale about a bear who took revenge on a man and woman for their severed paw. The bear broke a linden tree, made himself a wooden leg and