Perun - Slavic God
Today, I am borrowing from my book - Chasing Dragon's in Moravia….
I want to introduce you to Perun - the slavic God of Thunder….
I had been reading Alan Richardson’s Dark Magery book and he gave me an idea. One that I thought fit quite well with what I was interested in and also in helping to build a connection to this foreign and Slavic land. By now, I was reading avidly about the Slavic Gods and also a lot of Slavic fairytales, myths and legends. If you overload on these things, they begin to invade your psyche anyway so what better than to do some rudimentary God form work? I had never really tried it before. Well, not in a consistent and deliberate fashion. So why not give it a try?
From what I can gather, Slavic mythology and the Slavic gods originate from Proto-Indo-European mythology and emerged in the 2nd to 1st millennium BCE. As may be expected then, they bear some resemblance to Norse, Celtic and other mythologies and pantheons.
The Slavic gods were probably most widely worshipped just before the adoption of Christianity in 988 BCE. However, I had already determined that the conversion to Christianity was mainly at the level of the aristocracy and that belief in the old gods continued among the commoners for many, many more years. This is seen at Hostyn[1] where baby Jesus is depicted as a baby Perun in what I believe to be a nod to the locals. Pagan stalwarts survived around the region for a long time.
Another thing to note is that there were three Slavic areas including the East Slavs (Russia), South Slavs (Bulgaria, Croatia and parts of Bosnia) and West Slavs (Czechia, Poland etc.). Some of the Slavic deities were known only to one or two parts of the Slavic region.
The Slavs also did not build or use churches or temples. Rather, their religion was a part of daily life and they felt the gods could be venerated anywhere. Mostly it seems this veneration and worship took place in nature and outdoors. Since little was written down and few sites preserved, a good deal of guessing and conjecture has taken place along with forgeries like the Book of Veles, for example.
For a few days then I began knocking on Perun’s door. Perun is the Slavic God of thunder and one of the most important in the pantheon and I will come back to him shortly in more detail. I must say, at first, I got nothing much at all and was rather disappointed but then one night, I had some very strange dreams and then in short session where I took on the form of Perun in my imagination, some very strange thoughts.
These ‘thoughts’ or insights arrived in my mind as a seed thought and then exploded into a number of strands. In a meditational state, it is possible to follow all of the strands all at once but on coming back to normal consciousness, these quickly fade unless written down.
What I sensed, or received, was that the Slavic culture of that time was really quite alien in terms of its concepts of life and death compared to now. I got the idea that death was not that much of an issue as for them the shadow side of life existed in balance and harmony with that of the living. Life and death were two sides of the same coin and the transition between them was subtler somehow. I could see how, for them, the ancestors were a real and shadowy presence in their daily lives. Suddenly, my shaman started to make sense. He was working this subtly and maybe, just maybe, showing me the way?
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