Review : The Slavic Myths

It's time to resume my extensive mythology review series with another outing from Thames & Hudson. This one, simply called The Slavic Myths (authors Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak), isn't part of their "Myths That Shape The Way We Think" series that first got me hooked on T&H, though it's pretty close. It doesn't quite examine how the myths have influenced our modern-day thinking, but it presents much the same sort of literary analysis : what the myths mean, how they originated, and a description of their variations. The format is to give chapters as pairs, with the first presenting a retelling of the myth using its major elements, and the accompanying second chapter giving the analysis.

As with the other T&H mythology books, this is excellent. The retellings are written in a modern, accessible way, with plenty of description of both the environment and the emotional states of the characters (a tad simplistic, but more than enough to get the job done). We also don't get laden with the endless hyperbolic "twee" that so often plagues so many early fairy tales : that is, we don't get a dozen castle fairer than man ever saw in the same story, nor dozens of chaste maidens* each more beautiful than the last.

* Often not-so-chaste by the end of the story, mind you.

The analyses are extremely clear, interesting, and without pushing any agenda except to convince the reader that Slavic myths are really cool. They also have the touches of humour that are quite frequent in T&H, e.g. "Koschei the Deathless was now Koschei the Dead". 

There are two things I especially like here. First, it points to a possible connection route between the Norse and Greek myths, which otherwise seem so similar yet so far separated from each other. Second, there's much more of a horror aspect than in other mythology books, which makes everything feel both familiar and novel. It's not that the other European folklore and mythology lacks its darker side, but here the intention is much more straightforwardly, and far more frequently, designed to scare the reader*. More on both of these below.

* Exceptions that prove the rule : The Dead of Winter (Europe) and Of Doves And Ravens (Wales) both have collections of horror stories (or rather legends), but both but both are deliberately curated as such. The point is that there's relatively little of the fear factor in other mythological collections more generally.

I'm giving this one a solid 8/10; I could easily be persuaded to bump this to 9 if it was just a bit longer.

Right then, here are my personal highlights. I'll try very, very hard to keep this concise.

Singing Slavs

The early Slavs were not your typical bunch of barbarians. They were described by some writers as monotheistic and democratic, preferring wailing to warfare... okay, maybe I'm pushing the alliteration too hard. But while large and muscular, they would rather sing and dance than fight anyone, which isn't your typical description of a heathen people from a late Roman source. Certainly this wasn't a universal, as Slavic kings were definitely a thing and they had a rich pantheon of gods, but maybe some local tribes were exceptional. It's otherwise a very strange thing to just make up.

The Slavs were also never a politically unified people. Being prolific, they spread out over a huge geographical area, merging with the locals as they went.  They were, in fact, sophisticated singing Slavs, highly cosmopolitan and multicultural. So much for some ghastly vision of early European racial purity a la Elon Musk's fascist idiocy.

They also persisted with paganism (aargh ! I can't stop it !) until at least the 9th century, in some cases into at least the 1400s or even very much longer. Not all of this meant harmony with nature and singing nice songs about flowers... some of the descriptions of temples adorned with animal horns and carved gods make them sometimes somewhat sinister.

Scary Slavs

The Slavs didn't have a monopoly on frightening folklore, but it does seem to have been more predominant than in other cultures. By far the best known examples are, of course, vampires and werewolves.

Vampires

While belief in both creatures go back to truly ancient times, like the Welsh beliefs in the gwrach ar rhibyn, such ideas persisted into the much more recent past. The craze that would eventually become the fully-formed modern idea of the vampire seems to have begun in 18th century Serbia. The earliest versions concern commoners, not nobles, who would rise from their graves to kill the living, but it took longer for them to develop blood-drinking attributes and the host of other supernatural powers that are the mainstay of modern vampire lore.

What they did already have was a vulnerability to crosses (in the retelling here, the cross actually bursts into flame when they confront the vampire), holy water, and of course a stake through the heart. But not because it would make them explode Buffy-style, because they couldn't be truly killed at all. Drowning the corpse in holy water, staking it, and burying it under heavy rocks didn't kill it because it was truly already dead : all these measures could do was stop it escaping. And it must be pretty scary if you really believe that the corpse you just faced is still writhing underground at night, hoping for a release to resume its hunt for the living.

Other dramatic elements include a report where the stake couldn't penetrate the corpse, or, conversely, where doing so caused the whole grave to fill with blood. One other key aspect of the early legends was the idea of vampires as contagion : if the first rumours didn't include vampire propagation by bite, they they were certainly associated with plague and illness. It's easy to see how the association could itself become personified, with a supernatural explanation for viruses filling in the gap of germ theory.

Werewolves

These seem to have been much closer to their modern incarnations from the word go. Originally, vampires and werewolves may even have been two words for the same monster, and hence the attributes of one eventually merged with that of the other. Werewolves were from the outset creatures that had to feed on blood to survive, couldn't enter a home unless invited, could control the weather, and were also vulnerable to stakes. They differed from vampires in their shapeshifting abilities, their familiar aversion to silver (less widely know is that other metals could kill them, but only if left in the body), and that they were very much still alive : they were notionally immortal and extremely hard to kill, but not because they were already dead.

Some werewolves seem to have been the familiar near-demonic monsters, but others were suicidal over what they'd become; the very earliest were just shape-changers with no other connotations. They had associations with the Moon, but also the Sun, with the whole "must transform under the full Moon" business being a much later invention, and most early werewolves were dangerous the whole time. Some particularly grisly tales include cannibalism, incest, infanticide, and mutilation. It's hard to escape the feeling that the Slavic myths could be a lot nastier than some of the other European stories... which makes them all the more fascinating.

Whereas vampires (in this relatively modern era) started in Serbia and spread outwards, werewolves were much more widespread. One of the stranger things, to me, is that while investigators of the same time had no issue with the reality of vampires, witches, ghosts and other supernatural creatures, they usually took great exception to the idea that a man could physically transform into a wolf. The same people that believed in blood-sucking undead demons would suddenly turn positively woke, deeming supposed "werewolves" to be the product of deranged minds in need of mental health assistance. Quite why this should be the point where people finally decide that this is all getting a bit silly is not at all clear.

Sexist Slavs

Well... partially. I don't think you can really spin one single coherent narrative on gender issues here. There are mermaid-like creatures living in freshwater who lure men to their deaths with the promise of sex, but there are also male versions who seduce women; more rarely, the lucky "victim" gets to rule the underwater realm. Perun, the supreme god, is largely associated with thunder and lightning but also fertility – but more in the harvest sense rather than sexual. Female goddesses seem to be just as complex as their male complex.

The retelling of the story of Libuše, the fairytale founder of Prague, encapsulates this complexity. In the story she's a wise and revered ruler, but because she makes one mistake that a single man can't tolerate, she's forced out in favour of an "iron king". One the one hand, female rule seems genuinely admired here, but on the other, she's still usurped for no good reason :

"You want a man to rule you. You want someone to drag your children away from you to serve him, to kill and die for him. You want a man who will tax you the way you deserve to be taxed, taking your best cattle and horses. You want to serve a harsh master and to pay for you. None of this I have asked of you, and yet... you want to be dominated rather than shamed by having a woman ruler."

And yet even here, the "iron king" they get is strictly a metaphorical one who uses his iron ploughshare as a table, not because they actually do want a man's man to tell them all what to do. He turns out to be quite a nice chap, in fact.

Then of course there are female monsters, which are far from gender-focused. There are witches that are yet another variant of the undead, rising from their graves to eat children (in Slavic belief they are distinctly creatures, being always old – you can't learn to be a Slavic witch). There are Baba Yagas, sometimes hideous and hostile cannibals – in the story here she lives in her hut on hen's legs inside a fence of human bones – but sometimes helpful. Baba Yaga is not a straightforward monster like an ogre : even when hostile*, she must obey certain rules rather than skipping straight to dinner time. As with the Norse, then, there are definitely sexist tendencies present, but it's nothing whatever like the modern notion of a simpler past when men were men and women were ornaments.

* And she can be as terrifying figure as any vampire. Huge and hideous, she flies through the forest in a mortar and pestle, the trees opening up to let her pass. 

Supernatural Shamanic Slavs

The pantheon of Slavic gods is easily as complex as those of the Norse or the Greeks. Like them, these were not personified forces like the early Roman gods, but distinctly human, and could have multiple, unrelated associations. Veles, a devil-like figure, was associated with swamps, caves, and dark places, but also the god of music (well, the devil has all the best tunes), wealth, and poetry. A strict good and evil dichotomy appears to be absent. Perun's status as supreme god, and his associations with thunder, give him similarities to both Thor and Zeus, but his lack of sexuality also makes him very much his own entity. 

There's also a character to Slavic beliefs which is distinctly primitive and primal. Like the Norse, they believed in a world tree, though of oak* rather than ash and a simpler structure of three worlds (the underworld, the middle earth, and the heavens) rather than the much more complex version of Yggdrasil. This also seems to have been mirrored through a three-headed god; like the Celtic mythologies, the connection to nature feels more prominent than in Graeco-Roman myths.

* Or sometimes hawthorn, more on which below. It was also gnawed on by a great dog, much as Yggdrasil was attacked from below by dragons, causing it to shake.

Similarly, the shamanic nature of Slavic belief is seen in the idea of a human-animal continuity. Much more on this when I (eventually) cover Neil Price's PhD thesis, but the basic idea was that humans and animals were fundamentally similar, each being thinking entities with non-corporeal souls. But there's also an aspect of something even more mystical, a sort of life-force of the world that could be drawn on for power that's nothing like praying to a god for assistance. This is the old magic.

Shamans could tap into the elemental forces in a variety of ways, some positive, some negative. They could defend their own tribes against other supernatural foes, but they could also amass in groups and war with each other. One of the more bizarre aspects consisted of them using cadaverous crampons : using human veins and arteries and tendons to give them sinewy snowshoes for climbing. Other shamans were believed to have dragon-like wings and superhuman strength, while others could do battle by sending out their souls (in one case even from a barber's shop). Even Saint Nicholas – yes, that one, Santa – may have shamanic tendencies in his battles with wind and thunder.

The landscape itself also formed a key part of belief. While water presents entrances to another realm as it sometimes does in Greek myth, this is considerably more frequent in Slavic and Celtic myth : here the protagonists can, and frequently do, wander into other worlds accidentally, whereas for the Greeks and Romans this required extreme effort. In Slavic tales specifically, water could hold the souls of the dead, with offerings made to appease the souls and mirrors covered after a death to prevent the deceased from watching the living.

Finally, plants also play a major role in Slavic sorcery. Stakes to incapacitate vampires and kill werewolves need to be of hawthorn, not just any old pointy stick. Hawthorn trees would be planted on the graves of such creatures to help hold them down. The hawthorn tree itself, say the authors, was seen as a liminal space, a boundary between the living and the dead (possibly in part due to its blood-red berries). It could be inhabited by demons who needed to be propriated with small offerings, or bound in the tree with metal horseshoes. Walnut and pear trees, on the other hand, were the abode of witches, while linden trees could travel by magic, and others conveyed the wisdom of medical knowledge. Cabbage, oddly, was seen as a phallic symbol. 

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So that's my first brief foray into Slavic lore. Like the mythologies of other cultures I've been reading, it has elements of the bizarre and the fantastical, some striking similarities to other traditions and some aspects which are all its own. It feels like this is a whole European subculture which is far too often overlooked; even Neil Price, who goes to considerable lengths to draw associations between Viking beliefs and shamanic practises, barely even mentions Slavic culture. And this is unfair, because the stories here are easily as sophisticated as anything else in Europe. 

When I describe them as primitive, I mean not that they're stupid, but their base appeal to the blood : the imagery of the dead rising, or of ripping out arteries for climbing gear, is one that resonates viscerally. You can't contemplate a man becoming wolf without a physical sense of fear of the animal within, just as a cannibal witch with a garden of bones is a symbol too potent to be easily dismissed. This does not mean the stories were simple. True, they did not have the vast, pseudo-history like structure of Greek myth, but only because the Slavs were so much more spread out; individual stories, were easily as complex as anything in any other mythology.

Charney and Slapšak's stated goal is to introduce readers to Slavic folklore and encourage further reading. For me they've succeeded : I'm already reading Flame Tree's much longer Slavic Myths & Tales. I just hope that darker edge isn't just the result of this particularly careful curation... give me a single bloodsucking vampire over any number of ornamental princesses any day of the week. Sod the nondescript castles and wish-fulfilment and give me something scary.