Veles

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In the year 971, the prince of Kiev set his name to a treaty with Constantinople, and the chronicle preserves the curse the Rus called down on themselves should they break it. If we transgress, the oath runs, may we be cursed by the god in whom we believe — by Perun and by Volos, the god of cattle — and may we become yellow as gold, and be cut down by our own weapons. Two gods stand at the head of that oath. One belongs to the prince and his sword. The other belongs to the herds, the wealth, and the slow gold of trade, and his name is Volos, or Veles: the god of the lowlands, of the waters and the dead, set against the thunderer of the high sky.

He is among the best-attested of the Slavic gods, and that is a low bar. The Slavs left no scripture, no priesthood that wrote, no Hesiod to order their heaven. What is known of Veles is reconstructed from a handful of treaty oaths copied into the Christian chronicles, from anti-pagan sermons, from the place his idol stood in Kiev, from late folklore, and from a comparative philology that reaches across the Indo-European world to fill the silences. The result is a figure of real depth and genuine uncertainty in equal measure — and, in the twentieth century, the target of one of the most successful forgeries in the history of religious literature.

Idealized drawing of Veles (Volos), god of flocks and pastures, from The Mythology of All Races, Vol. III (Boston, 1918). Public domain.

The cattle god of the lower town

The name comes down in two forms, Volos and Veles, and the philology of it opens onto his whole nature. Roman Jakobson divided the name into an Indo-European root *wel-, “to roll, to turn,” and a second element marking a ruler or god, and set Veles in the company of the Vedic asura and the god Varuna — the dark, binding lord of the cosmic order, the keeper of oaths. The same *wel- root runs in three directions at once, and each direction names a face of the god. It turns toward the rolled meadow and the pasture, and so toward an otherworld field where the dead are grazed. It turns toward the will, the choosing. And it turns, through the Baltic cognates — the Lithuanian vėlės, the Latvian veļi — toward the souls of the dead themselves. To the Balts the vėlės are the shades, and Veles is, at the root of his name, the lord of them.

The Slavs held him god of cattle and of wealth, and in their world the two were one thing. Cattle were wealth; skot, the word for livestock, also meant money and property, and the chronicle’s title for him — skotij bog, the cattle god — carries both senses at once. He is the god of the herd in the byre and the herd of the dead in the underworld pasture, the god of increase and of what increase comes to. Where Perun is the god of the prince and the armed retinue, the druzhina, Veles is the god of the husbandman and the merchant, of the slow accumulating substance of the land rather than the sudden glory of the sword. The two oaths in the treaty fall along that line. Perun, the warriors’ god, punishes the oath-breaker with the weapon, with death in the field. Veles punishes him with sickness — turns him yellow as the gold he swore by, a jaundice of the body answering a corruption of the word.

His place in Kiev says the same thing in stone. When Prince Vladimir raised his pantheon in 980, six idols stood on the hill before his hall — Perun with his silver head and golden beard, and Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, and Mokosh about him. Veles was not among them. His idol stood below, in the lower town, the Podol by the river, among the wharves and the cattle and the trade goods. The geography is the theology. The thunder-god belongs on the height with the prince; the cattle-god belongs in the lowland with the merchants, by the water, near the boundary where the world slopes down toward the dead.

The serpent at the root of the tree

Out of these scattered attestations, two Soviet philologists built the central myth of the Slavic world — and the building of it is itself part of the story. In a study published in 1974, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov proposed what they called the basic myth of Slavic paganism: a cosmic duel between the storm-god Perun and his serpentine adversary, reconstructed by comparison with the Vedic combat of Indra and Vritra, the Hittite storm-god and the dragon Illuyanka, and the wider Indo-European pattern of the dragon-slayer.

In their reconstruction the adversary is Veles, and the shape of the story is this. Veles, in the form of a great serpent, lies coiled at the root of the world-tree, in the wet dark at the bottom of things. He climbs the tree, or he comes up out of his caverns, and he steals — the cattle, the waters, and in some tellings Perun’s wife or son. He withholds the rain. Perun answers from the sky, hunting him with the lightning, and the serpent flees, hiding behind a tree, behind a stone, behind a man, behind an animal, taking each shape in turn. Wherever the lightning splits a tree or shatters a stone, that is Perun striking at Veles hidden inside it. At last the bolt finds him and drives him back down below the world, and in his fall the stolen waters are released, the rain breaks, the herds are restored, and the order of the world is set right — until the cycle turns again with the next season’s drought and the next storm.

It is an arresting story, and it organizes a great deal: the lightning-struck tree, the rain after thunder, the polarity of high and low, the very pairing of the two gods in the oath. It has also been heavily contested, and honesty about its status is essential. The reconstruction drew sharp criticism almost at once, and the modern scholarly consensus does not accept that Veles was Perun’s mythic enemy. The decisive objection is the absence of evidence: there is no native text, no folktale, no chronicle line in which Veles fights Perun. The duel is assembled entirely from outside the Slavic record, by analogy with India and Anatolia. Toporov himself, late in his work, came to read Veles not as the dragon-demon Vritra at all but as the figure of Varuna — not the adversary the storm-god kills, but the dark sovereign of law who stands beside him, the very pairing the treaty oath suggests. The cosmic duel is thus best held at arm’s length: a brilliant and influential hypothesis, the frame in which most modern readers meet the two gods, and not a securely attested Slavic myth.

The Zbruch Idol, a four-faced stone pillar from the river Zbruch in Ukraine; the crouching figure at its base has been read as the chthonic underworld god. Reproduced in E. H. Lewinski-Corwin, The Political History of Poland (New York, 1917). Public domain.

The herdsman of the dead

Whatever his relation to Perun, the chthonic Veles stands on firmer ground. He is the god of Nav, the Slavic land of the dead, the wet shadowed underworld beneath the roots; and the dead are imagined as his herd, grazing in an otherworld meadow under his keeping, as the living cattle graze the upland pastures under his protection above. The god of the byre and the god of the grave are the same god, because to the Slavic eye the herd that goes down into the earth and the souls that go down into the earth move through the same gate. He is the shepherd on both sides of it. Something of this survives in the harvest custom recorded across the East Slavic lands of leaving a last unreaped tuft of grain standing in the field, twisted and bent to the ground — “Veles’s beard,” the god’s portion, left for the lord of the field and the dead.

He is also the god of veles in the older sense the Baltic cognate preserves: of the souls, and so of all that touches the boundary between the worlds. The Old Russian volkhvy — the sorcerer-priests of pagan Rus, who in 1071 led famine-revolts against the new Christian order and were hunted down for it — carry a name that many have linked to his. The connection is etymologically debated and cannot be pressed, but the field of meaning is right: Veles is the god of magic, of the seers and shape-shifters who cross between living and dead, of the knowledge that comes from the dark side of things.

And he is the god of poets. The single most evocative line of his patronage comes from The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, the great Old East Slavic epic of the late twelfth century, which opens by invoking the bard Boyan — a singer of the previous age, at the court of Yaroslav the Wise — and names him Velesov vnuk, the grandson of Veles. It is not a genealogy. It is the poem’s way of saying that the singer’s art comes down from the god of song and magic, that the maker of verses works in Veles’s gift. In the same poem Boyan ranges in his singing as a wolf over the field, an eagle under the clouds, a gray weasel along the ground — the shape-shifting of the inspired bard, which is also the shape-shifting of the serpent who hid in tree and stone and beast. The poet and the god move the same way through the world.

Saint Blaise and the false book

When Vladimir was baptized in 988 and the idols of Kiev were thrown down — Perun lashed to a horse’s tail, beaten with rods, dragged to the Dnieper and thrust out past the rapids while the pagans wept on the bank — Veles’s image in the lower town fell with the rest. But the cattle-god proved harder to bury than his idol. The Slavic countryside kept its old shape under the new faith, the condition scholars call dvoeverie, the double faith, in which the saints took over the offices of the gods.

Veles passed into Saint Blaise. The Greek martyr-bishop Blaise of Sebaste — Vlas, Vlasiy, Vlaho in the Slavic tongues — had nothing to do with cattle in his original legend, but his name rang close to Volos, and that nearness was enough: he became the protector of the herds, the saint to whom one prayed for the byre and the flock, his February feast inheriting the season and the function of the old god. At Yaroslavl, the chronicle of the local church records plainly that a Christian shrine was raised on the site of Veles’s sanctuary precisely because the saint’s name resembled the god’s. The substitution was nowhere more exact. The god of cattle became the saint of cattle, the same office wearing a new name.

That is the true afterlife of Veles. There is also a false one, and it must be named for what it is. In 1953 a Russian émigré named Yuri Mirolyubov, then living in the United States, passed to a colleague a transcription of what he claimed was an ancient Slavic scripture — texts said to have been copied from wooden planks covered in an unknown script, planks supposedly found in 1919 in a looted manor house by a White Army officer, Fyodor Izenbek, and lost again after Izenbek’s death in 1941. Published in an émigré magazine between 1957 and 1959, the Book of Veles purports to record the pagan history and religion of the Slavs across some fifteen centuries, their migrations and their wars with Goths and Huns, in the words of the old believers themselves.

It is a forgery, and the scholarly judgment on it is as close to unanimous as such judgments come. Specialists in Slavic philology — among them Boris Rybakov, the linguist Andrey Zaliznyak, and the archaeologist Leo Klejn — have shown the language to be impossible: a tangle of several modern Slavic tongues run together, with invented forms and no consistent grammar of any real historical stage, the kind of thing a twentieth-century enthusiast produces and a ninth-century scribe could not. The wooden planks have never been seen by any scholar; only photographs of a single one survive, and Mirolyubov’s transcriptions are the sole source. No genuine tradition stands behind it. And yet, carried by an aggressively promoted Russian edition in 1992, it has found a wide and durable audience in Slavic Neo-Pagan and nationalist movements across Russia and Ukraine, where it is read as a recovered native bible — a manufactured antiquity answering a real hunger, in a tradition whose actual records are so thin that a convincing fake could fill the void.

Abraham of Rostov destroys the idol of Veles; seventeenth-century fresco, Church of Saint John the Apostle, Rostov Kremlin. Public domain.

The god rebuilt

The Veles who circulates today is largely a modern reconstruction, and worth seeing as such. The neat opposition of sky-god and underworld-god, the serpent at the world-tree, the tidy duel — these are the gifts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, of Ivanov and Toporov and the comparativists, as much as they are the inheritance of pagan Rus. The contemporary Slavic Native Faith movements that have raised altars to Veles again, and the painters who have given him a face he never had in antiquity, work from this rebuilt figure, and sometimes from the forged book on top of it.

But the rebuilding is not built on nothing. The treaty oath is solid, copied into the chronicle from a tenth-century document: two gods at the head of a sworn promise, the thunderer and the cattle-god, the high and the low. The lower-town idol is attested, the harvest beard left in the field is documented, the saint who took the god’s office is no invention, the bard who called himself the grandson of the god of song is there in the manuscript. From these — and not from the wooden planks — a true outline can be drawn: a god of the herds and the wealth and the binding word, of magic and the singer’s art, who keeps the dead in his pasture as he keeps the cattle in the byre, and who waits at the foot of the world where it slopes down into the dark.

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