Veles
Sworn By, Never Described
- First attested
- 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. Nothing survives of a cult: no image, no sanctuary, no liturgy, and no description of the god beyond the single epithet.
- Claimed
- 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 runs about 4 thousand years ahead of the evidence.
Veles is known from two treaty oaths and one epithet — skotii bog, which Donald Ostrowski translates 'god of tribute' rather than 'cattle god' — and almost everything else attached to his name is modern: the duel with Perun is Ivanov and Toporov's reconstruction of 1974, and the scripture published under his name from 1957 is a forgery.
East Slavic god sworn by beside Perun as skotii bog; read since 1974 as the serpent Perun strikes down.
Volos is named in two Rus'–Byzantine treaty oaths in the Russian Primary Chronicle, compiled at Kiev in the 1110s: Oleg's men and, in 971, Svyatoslav's swear by Perun and by Volos, skotii bog. The epithet is usually translated 'god of cattle' — skotŭ covered herds and money alike — but Donald Ostrowski renders it 'god of tribute', calling 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
The oath clauses have him do one thing: hold men to a promise made to an enemy, on pain of turning 'yellow like gold' and being 'slain with our own weapons'. Jakobson read that curse as jaundice — Volos, like Vedic Varuna, sickens the oath-breaker.
Shadow
His name now carries a forgery. The Vlesova kniga, published from 1957 by Yuri Mirolyubov and Alexander Kur as a pre-Christian Slavic scripture on wooden planks nobody has produced, is rejected by Slavists without significant dissent. It circulates anyway.
