The Kiev Pantheon

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A short walk uphill from the river, behind the prince’s hall on the high ground the chronicles call the hill of Kiev, six wooden figures stood in a row in the open air. One of them was taller than the rest. Its head was sheathed in silver and its moustache worked in gold, and it faced east, toward the rising sun and the slope down to the water. The Rus who climbed the hill to it knew it by name. It was Perun, the thunder. The five beside it were the gods a victorious prince had decided his people would keep.

The pantheon at Kiev existed for eight years. It is the single clearest statement of what the religion of the Rus officially was — a list compiled not by a priesthood but by a ruler, set down in stone and timber on the most visible ground in his capital, and then, by the same hand, destroyed. Almost everything known about it comes from one source, written more than a century later by Christian monks who counted its overthrow among the great mercies of God. That source is at once the only window onto the hilltop and a hostile witness against it.

The hill and the reform of 980

The man who raised the idols was Volodymyr Sviatoslavych, prince of the Rus, known in the later Russian tradition as Vladimir and in the Ukrainian as Volodymyr. He was the son of Sviatoslav and, by his father’s housekeeper, a child of uncertain standing among the princely line. In the fratricidal wars that followed Sviatoslav’s death he defeated his brother Yaropolk — the chronicle dates the seizure of Kiev to 978, and the consolidation of his rule to the years just after — and took the city as sole prince. His victory had been won with a war-band of Varangians, the Norse-descended fighting men whose presence runs all through the early history of the Rus, and the new prince attributed his success to the favor of the gods.

The act that followed is recorded in the Russian Primary Chronicle, the Povest vremennykh let or Tale of Bygone Years, compiled at Kiev in the early twelfth century and surviving in copies a further century or two younger. Under the year 980 the chronicle states that Volodymyr set up idols on the hill outside the palace court: Perun in wood, with a head of silver and a moustache of gold, and beside him Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, and Mokosh. The same passage records that the people brought offerings, “and they brought their sons and their daughters and sacrificed them to the demons” — the chronicler’s word, besy, devils — and that the land was defiled with blood.

This is the event modern scholarship calls the pagan reform. Its logic is political before it is theological. A prince ruling a sprawl of Slavic tribes, Finnic peoples, and Norse retainers, each with its own cult, gathered the chief gods of his realm into one official assembly on his own ground, headed by the god of his war-band, and made worship at the hill an act of loyalty to himself. It is the nearest thing the religion of the Slavs ever produced to a state creed, and it was assembled top-down, in a single decree, by a man who would abandon it within a decade. Whether the six were ever worshipped together before 980, or whether the reform yoked unrelated cults into an artificial pantheon for reasons of state, is a question the single source cannot settle.

The Zbruch idol, a four-faced limestone pillar from the lands of the Rus, ninth-tenth century; the fullest surviving sculpted image of a Slavic deity, though not from the Kiev hill itself. Photograph, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The six gods

At the head stood Perun, god of the storm and the thunderbolt, patron of the prince and his sworn men. The chronicle’s care to record the silver head and the gold moustache marks his precedence; he alone is described, the others merely named. In the oaths sworn by the Rus in their treaties with Byzantium, recorded in the same chronicle for earlier reigns, it is by Perun and by Veles that the warriors bind themselves — the storm-god of the war-band and the god of cattle and wealth standing as the two poles of the oath. On the hill, Perun stands without Veles. The cattle-god of the merchants and the herders had his place lower in the city, by the river market, not on the princely height; the pantheon of 980 is a warrior’s roster.

Of the five who flanked him, two were gods of the sun. Khors carried a name that scholars trace to an Iranian root for the sun-disc — the Persian khorshid lies behind it — and may have entered the religion of the Rus from the Iranian-speaking peoples of the steppe. Dazhbog, the “giving god,” was a solar figure also, and in the twelfth-century Lay of Igor’s Campaign the Rus are called the grandchildren of Dazhbog, a phrase that makes the sun-god an ancestor of the people. Why two sun-gods stood in one short row is unresolved; some read Khors as the disc itself and Dazhbog as the light-giving power behind it, but the texts do not say.

Stribog is named only here and in the Lay, where the winds are called “Stribog’s grandsons” — the one line that has led most readers to make him a god of the wind, though the chronicle itself assigns him no domain. Simargl is the most obscure of the six. The name has been connected to the Senmurv or Simurgh of Iranian myth, a winged hound or dog-bird that guarded the tree of seeds, and on that thread Simargl is reconstructed as a guardian of grain and growing things, perhaps borrowed wholesale from the same steppe-Iranian world as Khors. The reconstruction is plausible and far from secure; the figure remains a name with a foreign shadow behind it.

Mokosh stood alone among them as the one goddess. Her name is bound to moisture and to the damp earth — mokrый, wet — and the later folk tradition makes her the patroness of women’s work, of spinning and weaving and the wool on the distaff, and of the fate of women. She is the only one of the six whose worship can be traced living for centuries after the hill was cleared, surviving in north Russian peasant belief as a household spirit who watched the spinning, and shading at last into the figure of St Paraskeva, the Friday saint of women’s labor. Of the pantheon’s six, hers is the cult that outlived the chronicle.

The sacrifices

The grimmest passage the chronicle attaches to the hill concerns human offering. Under the year 983 it tells that Volodymyr, returning victorious over the Yatvingians, resolved to give thanks to the gods, and his elders and boyars proposed that lots be cast for a youth and a maiden, and that the one chosen be sacrificed. The lot fell on the son of a Varangian who had become a Christian in his time at Byzantium. When the prince’s men came for the boy, the father refused, standing in the doorway with his son and declaring — in the chronicle’s report — that the gods of the Rus were not gods but wood, made today and rotten tomorrow. The crowd pulled down the porch beneath father and son and killed them both.

This is the tradition-internal frame of the hill as the chronicle preserves it: a place where, when the gods had given victory, blood was owed and paid. The two killed in 983 entered the Christian calendar as the first martyrs of the Rus, commemorated as Theodore and John, father and son, and a church was later said to stand where their house had been. The historian must hold the account at the distance its authorship demands. It is written by the victors of the conversion, for whom every cruelty of the old cult was an argument for the new faith, and the motif of the heathen mob destroying the steadfast Christian is a standard of hagiography. That sacrifice of some kind was offered on the hill is consistent with everything known of the surrounding pagan world, from the groves of the Baltic Slavs to the temple at Arkona; that the episode of 983 happened precisely as told, with its eloquent dying speech, belongs to the register of the saint’s life rather than the record.

Klavdiy Lebedev, “The Baptism of the Rus” (c. 1900); at the far left, the overthrow of Perun’s idol. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The stone on the hill

The hill itself has been dug. The Kiev archaeologist Vikentiy Khvoika, excavating on Starokyivska Hill in 1907 and 1908, uncovered amid the workshops and the remains of a stone palace a curious structure he read as a sanctuary: a foundation of unmortared stone with projections, or ledges, oriented to the points of the compass, and around it a quantity of ash and animal bone. He took the stone for the base on which the idols had stood and the central setting for an altar. The find has been cited ever since as the physical trace of Volodymyr’s pantheon, the very sockets that held the six.

The reading is contested, and the register here is the cautious one of disputed archaeology. Khvoika’s methods belonged to the early days of the discipline; the dig left few drawings and almost no photographs, and the dating of the stone structure has been argued back as far as the sixth or seventh century, long before the reform of 980. Whether the foundation is the idol-base of the chronicle, an older sanctuary, or some structure of another purpose altogether cannot be settled from what survives of the excavation. The same uncertainty hangs over the better-known riverside shrine at Peryn near Novgorod, where the circular ditch with its lobes that Valentin Sedov excavated in the 1950s has been read both as a sanctuary of Perun and as a burial mound. The Kiev hill, dug too early and recorded too poorly, gives the pantheon a possible footprint and no certainty.

The throwing-down

Eight years after the idols rose, the prince who raised them ordered them destroyed. The chronicle frames the years between as a search: envoys sent to weigh the faiths of the neighboring powers, the famous report of the Greek liturgy at Constantinople — that the Rus envoys, standing in Hagia Sophia, did not know whether they were on earth or in heaven — and Volodymyr’s choice of the Byzantine church. He was baptized, the chronicle says, in 988, taking the Christian name Basil, and married Anna, sister of the emperor; the conventional date 988 marks the baptism of the Rus, though the events around it stretch over several years. Returning to Kiev, he had the people of the city brought down to the river and baptized in its water.

First the hill was cleared. The chronicle’s account of Perun’s end is its most vivid scene. The idol was bound to the tail of a horse and dragged down from the hill, while twelve men beat it with rods — not because the wood could feel, the chronicler explains, but to mock the demon that had deceived the people through it. It was dragged to the river and thrown in, and Volodymyr ordered that men walk the banks and, wherever the floating idol came to shore, push it off again with poles, until it had passed beyond the rapids and out of the land of the Rus. And the people, the chronicle adds, who had not yet received baptism, ran along the bank weeping after it. The river here is given in some readings as the Pochaina, the tributary where the baptisms took place, and in others as the Dnieper into which it flowed; the floating idol carried downstream toward the rapids is the image that fixed itself in memory.

On the cleared ground, near where the idols had stood, Volodymyr raised a church — the Church of the Tithes, the first stone church of the Rus, built through the 990s and named for the tenth of his revenue he assigned to it. The high place of the old gods became the high place of the new God. The substitution was literal: the hilltop that had carried Perun now carried the cross, the sacrifice of blood replaced by the sacrifice of the altar.

Ivan Eggink, “Grand Prince Vladimir Chooses a Religion” (1822); the prince weighs the envoys of the faiths. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Afterlife

What was thrown into the river did not entirely sink. The baptism of 988 became the founding act of a civilization — the moment from which Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus alike date their entry into Christendom, and around which each has built an account of its own origin. The hill at Kiev is, in that telling, the place where the East Slavic world turned from one order of the sacred to another, and the dragging of Perun down to the water is its hinge. Volodymyr himself was canonized; the prince who raised the idols and the prince who drowned them is honored as a saint and called equal-to-the-apostles.

The gods went under but not wholly out. The phenomenon Russian scholarship names dvoeverie, double faith, describes the long centuries in which the baptized peasantry kept the old powers alive beneath the new — Perun’s thunder passing to the prophet Elijah, who rode the storm-clouds in his fiery chariot; Veles, by one common reading, shading into St Blaise the protector of cattle; Mokosh enduring at the spinning-wheel and in St Paraskeva. The conversion that cleared the hill in a day did not clear the imagination of the land it ruled, and the gods of the row survived in altered dress far longer than the eight years their idols stood.

The pantheon also survives as a problem. Because the chronicle is the only roster, and because it names some of the six only once and elsewhere not at all, the identities of Stribog and Simargl, the doubling of Khors and Dazhbog, and the reasons for the whole assembly remain matters of reconstruction rather than knowledge. The native Slavs committed no scripture to writing; what is known of their gods is pieced from the writings of their conquerors and converters, from late folklore, and — a hazard to be named plainly — from the romantic forgeries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of which the so-called Book of Veles is the most notorious and must be set aside entirely. Against that thin and tilted record, the hill at Kiev offers something rare: six gods, named on a single dated day, by an enemy who had no motive to invent them and every motive to record their fall. The list is hostile, and it is nearly all there is.

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