Perun

Two Oaths and a Demolition

First attested
945 CEThe oath before the statue of Perun at the ratification of Igor's treaty with Byzantium, placed under the annal 6453 (945) in the Primary Chronicle; Svyatoslav's oath on "Perun and Volos, the god of flocks" under 6479 (971); the idol of wood with a silver head and a golden moustache under the combined annal 6486–6488 (978–980); the demolition under 6496 (988). None of this is a contemporary document as it stands. The Chronicle was compiled at Kiev about 1113, a century after the conversion it narrates, and survives in the Laurentian Codex of 1377 and the Hypatian of about 1425; the treaty texts within it are generally taken to render genuine tenth-century Greek–Rus' instruments, which is an inference, not a surviving original. The Chronicle also puts an oath on Perun and Volos under 6412–6415 (904–907), in a treaty whose historicity is doubted. The one witness composed within living memory — Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio ch. 9, compiled about 948–952 — describes live cocks sacrificed at a gigantic oak on the island of St Gregory, arrows pegged round it and bread and meat set down, lots cast over the cocks, and names no god at all. It is contemporary in composition only: the complete text survives in one manuscript, Parisinus gr. 2009, copied towards the end of the eleventh century.
Claimed
around 3000 BCEasserted by Not a tradition but modern comparative linguistics: Roman Jakobson and, systematically, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov in Issledovaniya v oblasti slavyanskikh drevnostey (Moscow, 1974) place the name among an Indo-European family of storm gods alongside Lithuanian Perkūnas and Latvian Pērkons, which projects the figure back to a Proto-Indo-European stage conventionally dated to the fourth or third millennium BCE. Separately and quite differently, the Vlesova kniga (Book of Veles), published by Yuri Mirolyubov and Alexander Kur from 1957, asserts a pre-Christian Slavic scripture of the ninth century on wooden tablets; it is rejected by Slavists without significant dissent and the tablets have never been produced. The era scale is used because neither claim offers a date a Slavic source ever stated.

The claim runs about 3.9 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

Almost all that survives of Perun is the account of his demolition in 988; the famous duel with Veles is Ivanov and Toporov in 1974, resting on their own equation of the chronicle's Volos with Veles, and no Slavic source records the combat.

Known almost entirely from the account of his destruction, by the church that destroyed him.

Two oath-scenes and a demolition are close to the whole record. The Primary Chronicle, compiled at Kiev about 1113 and surviving in a manuscript of 1377, has the unbaptised Rus' lay down shields, swords and gold ornaments before a statue of Perun at Igor's treaty with Byzantium in 945, and Svyatoslav's men swear by Perun and Volos in 971. Under 980 Vladimir raised an idol of wood, head of silver and moustache of gold, beside Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl and Mokosh; in 988, baptised, he had it bound to a horse's tail and dragged down Borichev, with twelve men appointed to beat it, and pushed off the bank until it passed the rapids and grounded on Perun's sandbank. Constantine VII, writing about 950, records Rus' sacrificing cocks at a great Dnieper oak — and names no god.

Light

The one thing the sources show him doing is holding men to a promise. Swearing Svyatoslav's treaty in 971, the Rus' named him witness and staked their own destruction on keeping it — "slain with our own weapons".

Shadow

Everything known of him comes through the church that destroyed him: the chronicler explains the twelve men with sticks as an affront to a demon. The gap was filled — Rybakov's reconstruction of 1981, rejected by most specialists, and the Vlesova kniga forgery of 1957.

Sources and verification8 sources · 6 links

Primary source

  • trans. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, 1953, Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America; s.a. 6453 (945), pp. 77–78; s.a. 6479 (971), p. 90; s.a. 6486–6488 (978–980), p. 93; s.a. 6496 (988), pp. 116–117The four passages that carry nearly the whole record: the unbaptised Rus' laying down shields, naked swords and gold ornaments before a statue of Perun at the 945 ratification while Christian Rus' swore in the church of St Elias; the 971 curse invoking 'Perun and Volos, the god of flocks'; Vladimir's 980 idol of wood with a head of silver and a moustache of gold beside Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl and Mokosh; and the 988 destruction — bound to a horse's tail and dragged down Borichev by the horse, beaten by twelve appointed men, pushed off the bank until it passed the rapids, and cast ashore at Perun's sandbank.
  • Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus; ed. Gyula Moravcsik, trans. R. J. H. Jenkins, De administrando imperio, rev. ed., 1967, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks; ch. 9, pp. 57–63; critical introduction pp. 15–16That the one description of Rus' cult on the Dnieper composed within living memory of it, about 948–952, though itself surviving only in a late eleventh-century copy (Parisinus gr. 2009, per the edition's own introduction), reports sacrifice of live cocks, with arrows, bread and meat set round, at a gigantic oak on the island of St Gregory, and lots cast over the cocks — and names no deity. Cited for what the text does and does not say.

Scholarship

  • Lev S. Klejn, Voskreshenie Peruna: k rekonstruktsii vostochnoslavyanskogo yazychestva (The Resurrection of Perun), 2004, St Petersburg: Evraziya; pp. 152–157; scanned at archive.org, details/Kleyn_The_Resurrection_of_PerunKlejn's case against both dominant twentieth-century reconstructions of East Slavic paganism — Rybakov's, and the Ivanov–Toporov 'basic myth' — argued from within a third reconstruction of his own, which reads Perun as a dying-and-rising god. Cited for the critique, not as a neutral survey. It includes his report (pp. 152–157) that the circular ditched platform V. V. Sedov excavated at Peryn near Novgorod in 1951 and published in 1953 as Perun's sanctuary is read by V. Ya. Konetsky (1995) as the levelled remains of sopka burial mounds.
  • Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel, Slavic Gods and Heroes, 2019, London and New York: RoutledgeThe minimalist case that the Kievan list of 980 is shaped by the discursive strategies of Christian authors describing a suppressed religion, and that only a minority of the attested Slavic divine names survive scrutiny as authentic — the ground for treating any tabulated 'Slavic pantheon' as modern construction.

Where this claim originates

  • Yuri Mirolyubov and Alexander Kur (publishers of the claim), Vlesova kniga (The Book of Veles), 1957, serialised from 1957 in the émigré journal Zhar-ptitsaThe claim, and only the claim, that a pre-Christian Slavic scripture survived on wooden tablets into the twentieth century. Cited as a documented modern forgery — the language is a linguistically impossible mixture and the tablets have never been produced — and as an object of belief in nationalist and neo-pagan circles.
  • V. V. Ivanov and V. N. Toporov, Issledovaniya v oblasti slavyanskikh drevnostey, 1974, Moscow: NaukaThat the combat of Perun with a serpentine Veles — the single best-known 'Slavic myth' in circulation — is their reconstruction, assembled in 1974 from Baltic and Belarusian folk material and Indo-European comparison, and resting on their own equation of the chronicle's Volos with Veles. Cited for what they argued, not as evidence any Slavic source records such a combat.
  • B. A. Rybakov, Yazychestvo drevnikh slavyan (1981) and Yazychestvo Drevney Rusi (1987), 1981, Moscow: NaukaThe source of the confident, systematised picture of Slavic paganism that circulates in English — a supreme god Rod, the Zbruch idol read as a cosmological diagram, embroidery motifs traced to the Bronze Age. Cited for what he claimed; most specialists reject the method as circular and nationally motivated.

Further reading

  • Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 1989, Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. SharpeWhat the East Slavic folk record actually holds at village level — the domovoi, leshii, rusalka, vodianoi and bannik, with translated belief-legend texts — against which the scale of the documentary gap for the tenth-century gods can be judged.

Linked entries

  • Set againstÒgúnAttested

    Ogun is carried by living practice and a memorised oral corpus that can still be consulted. The East Slavic cult was broken in 988 and transmitted nothing, which is why every modern account of Perun is reconstruction rather than testimony.

  • Set againstYggdrasilAttested

    Perun's evidence is thinner still — the Russian Primary Chronicle, compiled around 1113, lists Vladimir's idols of 980 and little else — so both figures reach us only through Christian writers describing a religion their own church had already displaced.

  • Set againstOghamA modern connection

    Both sit where the documentary base is thin and the invention is easier to find than the record — the Book of Veles, published from 1957, for Slavic religion, and Graves's tree calendar of 1948 for ogham.

  • Set againstThe Trial of Anders PoulsenAttested

    Almost everything said about Perun comes from Christian monks compiling a chronicle about a cult their own church had put down; Poulsen's drum is the rarer case where the practitioner speaks for himself, and it is still the suppressor's document, taken down by the court prosecuting him.

  • Set againstThe Descent of InannaA modern connection

    What an attested myth about a god looks like: the Sumerian descent survives on Old Babylonian tablets in its own words. No narrative of any kind survives for Perun — the combat with Veles that fills the gap was assembled by Ivanov and Toporov in 1974.

  • Set againstVelesAttested

    The record has the two named in a single breath as joint guarantors of the same oath, in 971 and again in the Oleg entry; the reading that makes them adversaries is Ivanov and Toporov's of 1974, and Lev Klejn's objection starts exactly there - a pair in utter enmity who can nevertheless be prayed to together and stand surety for the same treaty is, he argues, an extremely improbable religious system.

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