Veles

Sworn By, Never Described

Earliest record
971 CEThe oath clause of the Rus'–Byzantine treaty of 971, in which Svyatoslav swears that 'if we do not maintain any of these stipulations I and those under me will be cursed by the gods in whom we believe, in Perun and in Volos, the god of tribute, and we will be yellow like gold, and slain with our own weapons' (Donald Ostrowski's rendering of PVL 73,11–73,16; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor give 'the god of flocks' for the same Slavonic epithet here, and 'the god of cattle' for it in the Oleg entry). The text survives only inside the Russian Primary Chronicle, compiled at Kiev by Christian monks writing more than a century after the conversion they narrate — Ostrowski dates the composition between 1114 and 1116 — and known from six manuscript witnesses, the earliest the Laurentian Codex of 1377. The treaty documents within it are generally taken to render genuine tenth-century Greek–Rus' instruments, which is an inference, not a surviving original. The same oath formula stands in the Oleg entry, placed under 907 by Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor and related by Ostrowski to the treaty entered under 912; there it sits in the chronicler's narrative of the agreement rather than inside a treaty document, which is why the 971 clause is given here. The treaty entered under 945 names Perun alone. No sanctuary or liturgy survives. The later Life of Vladimir reports that his idol was thrown into the Pochaina at the conversion, a hagiographic report, not a description of the god.
Said to date from
around 3000 BCEasserted by Not a tradition's claim but modern comparative philology. Roman Jakobson, in 'The Slavic God Velesъ and His Indo-European Cognates' (1969), treats Veles and Volos as one name, derives it from a root he glosses *vel- 'to see', and compares Lithuanian Vėlinas/Velnias, Latvian Velns and Vedic Varuṇa — reading Volos, like Varuṇa, as a guarantor of oaths who afflicts the violator with disease rather than as a god of the dead; Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov, in Issledovaniya v oblasti slavyanskikh drevnostey (Moscow, 1974), make him the thunder god's adversary in a myth they reconstruct as Proto-Indo-European. Both projections place the figure at a stage conventionally dated to the fourth or third millennium BCE, a date no Slavic source ever states, which is why the scale is 'era'. Separately, the Vlesova kniga published from 1957 by Yuri Mirolyubov and Alexander Kur asserts a ninth-century Slavic scripture under his name; Slavists reject it without significant dissent.

The claim is about 4,000 years older than the evidence.

The Primary Chronicle gives Volos one epithet, skotii bog, which Ostrowski in 2011 rendered 'god of tribute', not 'god of cattle'. His duel with Perun is Ivanov and Toporov's 1974 reconstruction, told in no Slavic source.

Donald Ostrowski, 'Pagan Past and Christian Identity in the Primary Chronicle', in Historical Narratives and Christian Identity on a European Periphery, ed. Ildar H. Garipzanov (Brepols, 2011), pp. 240-241; Vyacheslav V. Ivanov and Vladimir N. Toporov, Issledovaniya v oblasti slavyanskikh drevnostey (Moscow: Nauka, 1974).

East Slavic god named beside Perun as skotii bog in tenth-century treaty oaths.

More context

Volos is named in two Rus'–Byzantine treaty oaths in the Russian Primary Chronicle, compiled at Kiev in the 1110s. Oleg's men swear by Perun and by Volos, skotii bog. So, in 971, do Svyatoslav's. The epithet is usually translated 'god of cattle', and skotŭ covered herds and money alike. But Donald Ostrowski renders it 'god of tribute'. He calls the one etymology he discusses for that sense, Old Norse skattr, isolated. He is missing from Vladimir's six idols of 980. The form Veles belongs to the Tale of Igor's Campaign, about 1185, where Boyan the singer is 'Veles's grandson'; late-medieval Czech used it for a devil. That is nearly the whole record. The duel — serpent, stolen cattle, lightning — is Ivanov and Toporov's of 1974, from Indo-European comparison, and contested since by Lev Klejn; no Slavic source records it.

Light

He guarantees a promise made to an enemy: breakers will turn 'yellow like gold' and be 'slain with our own weapons'.

Shadow

His name now carries a forgery: the Vlesova kniga, published from 1957 as pre-Christian Slavic scripture, which Slavists reject without significant dissent.

Sources9 sources

Primary source

  • Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Tale of Igor's Campaign), 1185, the apostrophe to the singer BoyanThe text that attaches Veles to song, and that uses the form Veles rather than the chronicle's Volos: Boyan is called Velesov vnuk, 'Veles's grandson'. Dated on internal grounds to about 1185-1187. Its single manuscript was destroyed in the Moscow fire of 1812 and its authenticity was contested through the twentieth century; Andrey Zaliznyak's linguistic study of 2004 persuaded most specialists that an eighteenth-century forger could not have produced its grammar.
  • trans. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, 1953, the annals 6415 (907), 6453 (945), 6479 (971) and 6486-6488 (978-980)The whole East Slavic documentary record for Volos: the oath clauses in which the Rus' swear by Perun and by Volos on concluding terms with Byzantium; the treaty entered under 945, which names Perun alone; and the list of six idols Vladimir raised in 980 - Perun, Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl and Mokosh - from which Volos is absent. This translation renders the same Slavonic epithet 'the god of cattle' in the earlier entry and 'the god of flocks' under 971. The Chronicle was compiled in the 1110s by Christian monks writing about a paganism their church had suppressed, with a political purpose.

Scholarship

  • Roman Jakobson, 'The Slavic God Velesъ and His Indo-European Cognates', 1969, reprinted in Selected Writings VII: Contributions to Comparative Mythology (Mouton, 1985), pp. 33-48; first published in Studi linguistici in onore di Vittore Pisani (Brescia, 1969), pages not checkedThe philological argument for treating Velesъ and Volosъ as one name, from a root Jakobson glosses *vel- 'to see' and compares with Lithuanian Vėlinas/Velnias, Latvian Velns and Vedic Varuṇa. What he presses is not a chthonic reading but an oath-keeping one: Volos and Varuṇa alike guarantee treaties and punish the violator with disease, which is how he reads the 971 curse - 'may we become golden as gold' as jaundice. He also collects the Czech proverb sending a thing 'to Veles beyond the sea'. An argument, not an attestation: his *vel- 'to see' etymology is not generally accepted, and the equation of the two name-forms is itself part of what critics of the reconstruction dispute.
  • Lev S. Klejn, Voskreshenie Peruna: k rekonstruktsii vostochnoslavyanskogo yazychestva (The Resurrection of Perun), 2004, St Petersburg: Evraziia; the section on the conception of the basic mythThe named critical case against the basic myth. Klejn argues that a pair of gods in utter enmity, who could nevertheless be prayed to together and stand surety for the same oath, would be an extremely improbable religious system; that nowhere is Veles, or Volos, called a serpent outright; that Veles and Volos are not variant readings of one name but names of different deities of different origin; and that Volos is himself a Russian full-vowel transformation of the Christian saint Vlasii - which puts him, on that last point, on the same side as Kalik and Uchitel. The standard reference for the critical side of this argument in Russian. Cite for the objections he makes, never as proof that the reconstruction is wrong.
  • Donald Ostrowski, 'Pagan Past and Christian Identity in the Primary Chronicle', in Historical Narratives and Christian Identity on a European Periphery, ed. Ildar H. Garipzanov, 2011, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 229-253, with the Slavonic quoted at PVL 32,4-32,7 and 73,11-73,16The oath texts in Slavonic with an English rendering; the Oleg oath at PVL 32,4-32,7, which closes the 907 entry and which Ostrowski relates to the treaty entered under 912; the absence of Volos from the 945 treaty and from the 980 idol list; the dating of the Chronicle's composition to between 1114 and 1116, against rival proposals of 1110, 1112, 1113 and 1116; its six manuscript witnesses, the earliest the Laurentian Codex of 1377; and the translation 'the god of tribute' for bog skotii. Ostrowski notes Nora Kershaw Chadwick's further proposal (The Beginnings of Russian History, 1946, pp. 83-90) that the epithet's second element renders Old Norse skattr, tribute, and describes it as an isolated theory. He is also the source for the judgement that little can be concluded about these gods' functions with confidence.
  • Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel, Slavic Gods and Heroes, 2019, New York: Routledge; the chapter on Volos (Veles)The minimalist case, which runs the opposite way to the familiar one: that several names taken for Slavic gods entered the record from Christian and foreign sources rather than from pre-Christian cult, and that Volos belongs among them - derived from St Blasius (Vlasii), Byzantine patron of flocks, rather than absorbed by him. A radical position within a live argument, not a consensus.
  • Milorad Ivanković, 'New Insights on Slavic God Volosъ/Velesъ from a Vedic Perspective', 2019, Studia mythologica Slavica 22 (2019), pp. 55-81, DOI 10.3986/SMS20192203What Jakobson actually argued, quoted and page-referenced throughout (Jakobson 1969: 33-43): that Volos and Varuṇa both guarantee treaties and punish the violator with disease (p. 41), that the 971 curse da budemъ zoloti jako zoloto means jaundice (pp. 35, 38), and that the Czech proverb sends a thing 'to Veles beyond or upon the sea' (p. 36). Ivanković rejects Jakobson's *vel- 'to see' etymology as unknown to Indo-Iranian, preferring var- 'to cover' after M. L. West (2007: 146), and holds that no Vedic source has anyone swearing by the demons Vala or Vritra, against Ivanov and Toporov. His own Vedic reconstruction of the god is a further argument, not a record.

Where this claim originates

  • Yuri Mirolyubov and Alexander Kur (publishers of the claim), Vlesova kniga (The Book of Veles), 1957, published serially in the emigre magazine Zhar-Ptitsa, San Francisco, from 1957The claim, and only the claim, that a pre-Christian Slavic scripture on wooden tablets survived into the twentieth century under this god's name. Rejected by Slavists without significant dissent - the language is a linguistically impossible mixture and the tablets have never been produced - and an object of belief in nationalist and neo-pagan circles.
  • Vyacheslav V. Ivanov and Vladimir N. Toporov, Issledovaniya v oblasti slavyanskikh drevnostey (Research in the Field of Slavic Antiquities), 1974, Moscow: NaukaThe publication that set out the 'basic myth': a reconstructed combat in which the thunder god pursues an adversary identified with Veles, who has taken cattle, waters or wife, hides behind tree and stone and in animal shape, and is struck by lightning so that the waters are released. It is built from Indo-European comparison - Vedic Indra and Vritra, Hittite Illuyanka, Baltic Perkunas - together with later Baltic and Belarusian folk material, not from any medieval Slavic narrative. Cite for what they proposed and when, never as evidence that Slavs told this story.