Kurenti in Slovenia Dondolashi in Croatia Bushari in Baranja Koledari in Serbia Kukeri in Bulgaria Mechkari in Macedonia Kolednicy in Poland Kolyadniki in Ukraine Okrutniki in Russia
Important part of the Slavic winter solstice celebration were masked processions. Younger men, clothed in animal fur, carrying horns and bells would march from village to village throughout the region, making an extraordinary amount of noise, fueled in part by the wine provided by the locals. Their primary task is to scare away evil spirits, and bring fertility to household. In this zoomorphic costumes they would represent ancestors, who came from otherworld to celebrate beginning of the new cycle with the living. In the time of winter solstice cult of ancestors and cult of vegetation are heavily intertwined.
Ooooh, we love this! There are veeeery similar costumes, characters and celebrations that still survive in very different zones of Europe, that are clearly remains of a very ancient and common religion or rite.
See how similar masked characters we have in Euskal Herria:
In mainland Greece, too, we have similar “monsters” and rituals in various areas!
Sometimes the bride (usually played by a man) is abducted and it’s said to be a remnant of a re-enactment of the abduction of the goddess Persephone by Hades.
In other areas, the Dionysiac character of the festival is accentuated by the presence of a man who pretends to be the god of wine, vegetation, happiness, Dionysos.
The idea that Valhalla is the Norse pagan version of the Christian “heaven” and Hel is the Norse pagan version of the Christian “hell” is a projection of Christian ideology onto a non-Christian ideology. Unlearn that shit.
If Helheim is the bad place where Hel invites you to a large family dinner and asks to hear your life story because she truly cares about your experiences and wants to live vicariously through you and it brings her joy to see you express your happiness and then moves her to tears to hear when you were sad. Then you know in that moment that you finally found someone who will truly care about you and welcome you home and make you feel like you belong because she knows how it feels to not belong and she just wants to make sure you’re comfortable and don’t have to fight anymore because she knows how tiring that can be too and she doesn’t want to make you feel unwelcomed…. I honestly hate to imagine the truly bad place.
*spies Niflheim off in the distance* yeah…. Those bastards deserved it.
I think Niflheim is the closest we get to Christian hell but even that is just a barren wasteland that’s so cold you can’t think straight and are forced to just slowly freeze into a state because you did something absolutely terrible and deserve to just be constantly cold. You have to have done something truly irredeemable to not go to any of the halls of the gods. I mean even if you don’t like Helheim there’s so many other places to go. I think dechristianifying is the first step to understanding Norse paganism because the two just are so different thinking there’s one good place and one bad place just won’t work.
Seriously Valhalla sounds like such a worse punishment, I’ve said it so many times until I get emotionally exhausted: I don’t want to go to Valhalla. It sucks! Why spend every day fighting every night drinking then wake up and do it all over again… Oh and you can still die in Valhalla but don’t worry you’ll be bright back for the cool after-party… That’s torture! I don’t need to watch my ancestors flex over who can throw the most accurate spear that does me in. Can’t I just sit there sipping sweat tea and reading a good book?
Christian hell: the hottest place to ever exist where you find torment for all eternity
Norse Helheim: pretty fun dinner party but no pressure to participate just chill and be yourself we are all friends here.
Norse Hel: pretty cool skeleton girl who knows what it’s like to not be welcomed so she doesn’t want anyone to ever feel that way in her domain.
Christian Devil: some fallen angel with daddy issues that wants to openly damn your soul and actively works against you to make sure you’re not happy. (May have tossed in supernatural cannon and not Christian cannon because I don’t fucking care about Christianity anymore)
People really need to learn that the places where the dead go after they pass on from one mortal life in religions around the world aren’t their versions of the Christian hell. “Good people go here and bad people go there” is very much a Christian concept.
I was raised in the Slavic pantheon in a tiny village in the Czech Republic and even now it is so frustrating to see online resources equating Veles with the devil simply because of the words ‘underworld’ and ‘serpent’.
Veles is the god of water, music, medicine and cattle. He can take the form of a snake or a bull. As a snake, he travels between this world and the underworld through the dark roots of the world tree.
The underworld is a lush place of rolling green hills and meadows and gushing streams. The soft grass is cropped by the cattle the Slavic people have sustained themselves on for hundreds of years. Hunted deer and rabbit dart from place to place. Songs drift on the breeze, old ones, ones someone just made up. There is laughter. It is full of peace and contentment.
The twin nature of the snake (some venemous, some not) reflects the twin nature of many things - that which can kill can also cure. It has nothing to do with bad, evil devil-guy.
Being underground is not wrong. Snakes are not somehow morally deficient. They’re snakes. Stop adding Satan to every religion you meet.
Our violent god that is most like to your old testament God is Perun and he lives at the top of a mountain and tries to destroy all mankind but that’s a different post.
