Mokosh

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A confessor’s manual, copied out in Muscovy in the sixteenth century — six hundred years after the Rus had been baptized — instructs the parish priest to put a question to the women who knelt before him. Had she, the priest was to ask, gone to Mokosh? The name belonged to no saint. It belonged to a goddess the church had spent half a millennium trying to bury, and the question is itself the proof that the burial had not taken. Somewhere in the villages of the north a woman might still slip out to a spinner’s spirit with loose hair, leave her a tuft of wool, and keep the old Fridays — and her priest knew it well enough to ask.

Of the gods the Slavs raised on their hilltops, she is the one who would not die. The thunderer was thrown in the river; the smith faded to a name; but the goddess of the wet ground and the women’s thread went underground into the daily life of the peasant household and stayed there, half-Christianized, into the lifetime of the folklorists who came to write her down.

The one goddess on the hill

Mokosh enters the written record in a single, decisive sentence. Under the year 980, the Russian Primary Chronicle — the foundational narrative of Kievan Rus, surviving in its earliest copy in the Laurentian Codex of 1377 — records that Prince Volodymyr, newly master of Kiev, set up idols on the hill outside his hall: Perun first, in wood with a silver head and a golden moustache, and then Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, and Mokosh. Six gods, and Mokosh the last of them — and the only female name in the row.

This is the bedrock fact, and almost everything else about her is built outward from it. Among five male powers — a thunder-god, two solar or sky figures, a wind-god, a winged guardian whose very nature is disputed — stands one goddess. The chronicler names her without comment, as though her place there needed no explanation. To Volodymyr’s Kiev she was evidently a power of the first rank, worth a carved post on the prince’s own hill, set among the gods he meant to bind his tribes together under. Eight years later the same prince would have all of them dragged down and the chief of them, Perun, flogged and floated down the Dnieper; the Kiev pantheon of 980 lasted less than a decade as state religion. But Mokosh, alone of the six, kept a second life the others were denied.

The Slavs left no scripture of their own — no hymn, no myth set down by a believing hand. What is known of their gods is reconstructed from hostile witnesses: Christian chroniclers, the sermons of monks who despised the old cult, and the folklore collected centuries after the conversion. Mokosh is, by the standards of that thin record, unusually well attested, because she is named not once but repeatedly — in the chronicle, in the anti-pagan sermons, in the penitential questions, and in living village practice. She is the rare Slavic deity whose worship can be traced as a continuous line, from a carved idol in 980 to a spinning-taboo recorded in the 1890s.

Line drawing after a nineteenth-century North Russian embroidery, interpreted by some folklorists as a goddess figure (after a motif published by B. A. Rybakov). Drawing by Vladimir Lobachev, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

The wet name and the work of women

Her name points down, into the ground and the water. The dominant reading, which the philologists Vladimir Toporov and Vyacheslav Ivanov called all but indisputable, derives Mokosh from the Proto-Slavic root mok-, “wet,” with a suffix yielding something like “she who is moist” — kin to the ordinary Slavic words mokry, “wet,” and moknut, “to get wet.” On this reading she is, at root, the damp itself: the goddess of the moisture in the soil, of rain and dew and the springs that the later folk would venerate. A minority reading, traced to the philologist Ilinsky, took the second half of the name from a root for spinning and twisting of thread — but most scholars have judged spinning too narrow a thing to name a deity for, and the etymological dictionaries mark it hypothetical. (One should set aside firmly here the tidier-sounding “Makosh, Mother of the lot,” ma- plus -kosh, proposed by the archaeologist Boris Rybakov; it has no philological support and belongs to his larger and much-criticized reconstruction of Slavic religion.)

Yet whatever her name first meant, the two senses — the wet and the spun — converge in what she actually governs. Mokosh presides over the whole sphere of women’s labor: the shearing of the sheep, the carding and spinning of the wool, the weaving of the cloth, and beyond these the water and the moist earth from which the flax itself was drawn. And because spinning, across the old religions of Europe, is the work by which fate is made — the thread drawn out, measured, and cut — she is at once a goddess of the distaff and a goddess of destiny.

This is the place to mark a seam in the picture. That Mokosh spins, and that she governs the wet earth, are both reasonably attested. That she is therefore a single, coherent figure who unites earth-mother and fate-goddess into one theology — a Slavic counterpart to the Greek Moirai, the Norns of the Norse, the Baltic Laima — is a modern synthesis, drawn by comparison and inference. The Slavs themselves left no statement that their goddess wove the lots of men. The fate-spinner Mokosh is a reconstruction, persuasive but reaching past the evidence, and she should be read as such.

What the record does hold firmly is the practice. Across the East Slavic countryside the spinning-room ran on prohibition. One did not spin on certain nights, above all the nights tied to Friday; in the Polesian villages Friday was called the “bloody day,” and the woman who broke the ban risked a visitation. Wool was left for the goddess: a folklorist working in the Olonets province in the 1880s recorded that during the Great Fast a being called Mokusha came to spin at night and to shear the sheep, and that the offering made to her was a piece of wool left in the shears overnight. The unshorn tuft, the night one must keep the wheel still, the dish of porridge or the strand left out — these are the small, exact observances by which a household kept the goddess of thread satisfied.

Mokosh (“Mocossi”) engraved for Georg Andreas Schleusing’s “Die alte und neue Religion der Moskowiter,” 1698 — an outsider’s Christian rendering of the goddess. Public domain.

Moist Mother Earth

Behind Mokosh, or beside her, stands the greatest and least personal of the Slavic powers: Mat Syra Zemlya, the Moist Mother Earth. Most who have studied the matter take the goddess of the chronicle and the earth of the folk religion to be two faces of one thing — Mokosh the named idol on Volodymyr’s hill, Mat Syra Zemlya the same damp maternal ground worshipped without a face for centuries after. The identification, again, is a scholarly bridge and not a Slavic doctrine; but the figures rhyme too closely to keep wholly apart.

The earth, in this frame, is not a symbol. It is a living and holy body, the cradle that bears and nurses the living and the grave that opens to take them back. The Slav swore by her: oaths were made binding by touching the ground, by eating a clod of it, or by laying soil on the head so that the earth herself stood witness and no vow so sealed could be broken without her vengeance. Where no priest could be had, the dying confessed their sins into the earth — spoke them into a hole in the ground, or asked Moist Mother Earth’s forgiveness in the last hour, a practice the ethnographers still found in the Russian provinces in the nineteenth century. The funeral laments called on her to open and receive the dead back into the cosmic womb from which they came, a faith in return to the ground that sits close to the broader Slavic sense of the soul and its passage.

And because she was a body, she could be hurt. There were seasons when the earth was pregnant and must not be struck: when one did not drive a stake or an iron tool into her, did not plow or harrow, until the proper spring day had loosed her — the ground kept inviolate through the cold as a mother near her term is spared rough handling. To wound the earth out of season was not bad husbandry. It was an assault on a goddess.

This is the deepest stratum of the Slavic sacred, and Mokosh is its named edge — the point where the formless holy ground acquired a name, a row of idols, and a place in a prince’s pantheon. Where Perun belonged to the warband and the open sky, Mokosh belonged to the women, the household, the wet field, and the dead beneath it.

The night spinner with loose hair

In the folk memory the goddess shrank and went abroad at night. She became a spirit who walks the spinning-rooms in the dark to see whether the rule is kept — and the descriptions are vivid and consistent. The 1890s folklorist’s Mokosha was a being with a great head and long arms who liked to spin the unfinished flax in the night. In the Polesian belief the spinning-spirit took the form of a woman with her hair loose and unbound, who would punish the woman that spun on the forbidden day by pressing the breath out of her in her sleep. A nineteenth-century Ukrainian rite called the Mokrid represented the same power as a woman with loosed hair.

The loose hair is the telling detail. A respectable Slavic woman bound and covered her hair; loose hair marked the uncanny, the unmarried, the dead, the otherworldly. The goddess who keeps the women’s law appears, fittingly, in the one form a living woman of the village must not — hair down, abroad after dark, fingering the thread on a wheel that should by rights stand idle. She is the patroness of women’s order glimpsed as its shadow-side, the watcher who comes when the rule is broken.

The long survival and the holy Friday

The conversion of Rus is conventionally dated to 988, when Volodymyr received baptism and ordered his people into the Dnieper. The idols came down. But the sermons of the centuries that followed are a long admission that the gods had not. A homily known as the Sermon of the Christ-Lover, set by most scholars in the eleventh century, rebukes those “who believe in Perun and Khors, in Mokosh and Sim and Rgl and the Vily,” and who bring their offerings to the vily and to Mokosh. A fifteenth-century sermon attributed to a Saint Gregory still names Christians who pray “to the accursed Perun, and to Khors, and to Mokosh” in secret. And the sixteenth-century penitentials put the matter to the individual conscience: the confessor’s rule asks whether the penitent has prayed with the impious women to the vily, to Rod and the rozhanitsy, to Perun, Khors, and Mokosh — three years’ penance for the woman who said yes — and a second manual asks, flatly, whether she had “gone to Mokusha.” That a Muscovite priest of the 1500s needed that question in his book is the measure of how long she lasted.

She lasted, in the end, by changing dress. The cult of women’s work, of the forbidden spinning-day, of the water and the wool offering, found a Christian patroness ready to hand: Saint Paraskeva, called Pyatnitsa, “Friday” — the holy day personified as a maiden, patroness of spinners, of the marriage-market, and of the wells. The older scholars, Toporov among them, took it as plain that Mokosh’s cult had simply passed to Paraskeva-Friday: the same prohibition on spinning, the same Friday, the same offerings of thread and wool and coin thrown into sacred water. The fit is genuine, and through it much that had been Mokosh’s lived on under a saint’s name.

But the equation has lately been pressed hard, and honesty requires the qualification. The historian Eve Levin has argued that much of the Paraskeva cult is Christian at its root, not pagan repurposed: that her tie to spinning comes from her own legend as a maiden, her tie to water from the late-medieval travels of her relics through the Balkans — and, decisively, that Paraskeva is venerated across Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania, in lands that never knew Mokosh, whose name appears only in East Slavic sources. The two figures may have flowed together in the Russian village without the saint being merely the goddess in disguise. The safe statement is the modest one: Mokosh and the holy Friday came to share a great deal, and where the peasant woman kept Friday and would not spin, she was keeping a rule older than the saint whose name she gave it.

A modern artist’s arrangement of the Slavic deities, Mokosh included — an image of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century recovery of the pantheon rather than a medieval source. Maxim Sukharev, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Recovery

The folklorists who fanned out across the Russian and Ukrainian countryside in the nineteenth century did not invent Mokosh; they found her already there, in the spinning-taboos and the wool left in the shears and the night-spirit with loosened hair, and they were the first to set her name beside the chronicle’s and see one figure across nine hundred years. Out of their collecting came the modern Mokosh — gathered up by comparative mythologists into the family of European spinning fate-goddesses, and read by Toporov and Ivanov as the great feminine pole of a reconstructed Slavic theology.

From the scholars she passed to the believers. The Slavic Native Faith movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, recovering the old gods for a living worship, made Mokosh again what Volodymyr’s Kiev had made her: the one great goddess, the Slavic mother, set beside the thunderer and the sun. The embroidered cloths of Ukraine and Russia — the ritual rushnyk with its goddess-figure flanked by birds and rising plants — are read in this revival as her image, woven by the very women’s hands she was thought to govern, though the scholars who first proposed that reading have since had it disputed.

What is past dispute is the duration. No other Slavic god can be followed so far. The thunderer’s idol went into the river in 988 and the man-shaped gods receded into philological argument, but the goddess of the moist ground and the women’s thread was still being asked after by name in a confessor’s book five centuries on, and still leaving her tuft of wool in the shears a thousand years from the day Volodymyr raised her on the hill. She was the deity of the small holy things that the conversion could not reach — the wet field, the turning wheel, the earth one swears by and is buried in — and those things did not stop.

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