The word "pantheism", considered the most mark and complete characteristic of the Slavic faith, is an indispensable companion of any reasoning of official science about the ancient faith of our people.
This word has a fairly large volume of meanings and meanings, but for some reason its ambiguity is sharply reduced when it comes to the native faith of the Slavs.
You can talk as much as you like about the complexity of European pantheistic philosophy or about the profundity of the pantheistic myths of ancient Greece, but in relation to "pagan" pantheism, it can mean only one thing: blind worship of natural elements.
Why did the Slavs consider themselves "Dazh God's grandchildren" and were crowned "the circle of the bush bush"?
When you meet something equally incomprehensible, you get the feeling that this is all either too ingenious to be understood by an ordinary modern person, or too stupid.
The Church and official science, of course, settled on the latter option, believing that the pantheism of the ancient peoples was completely devoid of any meaning and was based only on worshiping the soulless forces of nature.
In general, the church did not develop a relationship with pantheistic philosophy from the very beginning: the personification of "natural" pantheism is "paganism" hated by Christianity, and most of the pantheistic philosophers are very far from the Christian vision of the world.
The Church believes that pantheism is just an unsuccessful attempt to mix the pure, light Deity with our “rough”, “dirty” material world: by dissolving God in the Universe, pantheists supposedly make the belief in God itself completely meaningless for a person, and, plus everything, equate good and evil, making the word "sin" (especially the so-called original) an empty sound.
Promotional video:
However, all the charm of objective criticism was experienced only by European pantheistic philosophy, and the inconsistency of "pagan" pantheism seemed so obvious to many that the opinion about the primitiveness of many ancient faiths was accepted by official science completely unproven.
The word "pantheism", with all its harmless meaning (according to the famous philosopher E. Radlov, pantheism is "a doctrine that identifies God in a certain relation with the world"), has become for ethnic religions something like a hint of their primitiveness.
The a priori conviction in the infinite earthiness of the Slavic faith has reigned in the Russian scientist Olympus for so long that a feeling arises that this conviction was not built on the idea of the Slavic Gods, but just the opposite.
Max Müller wrote: "Not many delusions have spread so much and so deeply rooted in us as delusion, as a result of which we confuse the religion of ancient peoples with their mythology."
If you look closely, you can see that it is on this delusion that the generally accepted idea of the faith of the Slavs is based for the most part.
Veles, for example, is considered the god of cattle in most official scientific publications: sometimes (quite rarely) they write that He had something to do with wisdom, art and religion, but the main function of Veles is usually called patronage over cattle breeding.
His connection with art, probably, would not have been written at all, but the author of The Lay of Igor's Host, fortunately, had the imprudence to call Boyan Velesov's grandson, and Boyan, as you know, was a poet, not a shepherd.
Official science found this evidence the following explanation: “The god of trade turned out to be the god of culture in general, which is why Veles was represented in the 12th century. the scribes were the ancestor of all ancient culture and art, in particular, and songwriting."
How can it be that Veles became the patron saint of songwriting only at the end of the XII century?
The idea of Him as the God of wisdom and creativity, undoubtedly, appeared much earlier and was original, as evidenced, for example, by Vleskniga: there is no need to go deeper than the cover of any of its publications, the name itself says a lot.
"The Book of Veles" does not tell about cattle breeding at all, it tells about the history of Russia and the Slavic faith.
Why dedicate a scientific and religious work to the God of cattle breeding?
Over the long history of its existence, the ancient image of Veles fell into two halves: Veles proper, the patron saint of arts and sciences, and Volos, the "bastard of God."
Veles belongs to the Slavic religious philosophy, and Volos, apparently, is the result of its refraction through the prism of popular consciousness.
It is difficult to say whether the official science was right or wrong, combining these two Gods into one, but to call Veles primarily the patron saint of cattle breeding is already superfluous (however, this is not the worst thing that can be achieved by taking their mythology as an example of the native faith of the Slavs) …
Almost all Slavic Gods got into a similar unpleasant situation together with Veles.
Perun, the God of battle and strife (not only physical, but also spiritual), whom our ancestors metaphorically called the Thunder God, through the efforts of modern scientists turned into a lightning thrower, an arsonist God.
Svarog, God the Creator, who was considered by the Slavs to be the heavenly Father of all that exists - in the heavenly blacksmith, Belobog became the personification of good, Chernobog - evil, etc.
Alas, at such a pace, official science is unlikely to ever understand what the Slavic faith is.
Unfortunately, the question that occasionally comes across in various studies about "paganism" is quite natural: did our ancestors have their own religion at all, was not their culture limited only to primitive, mundane mythology?
Let us assume that the Slavs did not have any religion; what to do, in this case, for example, Kolyada, Lada, Lada, Chisloboga?
These gods, even in the popular perception, did not personify the elements of nature and did not have a direct relationship to Reveal, the material world.
Kolyada is the Deity of the annual circle, "Kola Vremyan", Lad is the God of order, harmony, inner peace, Lada is the personification of love in all its many manifestations, and Chislobog, as it is said in Vleskniga, “counts our days and recites all numbers to God - yes be the day of heaven or be the night and fall asleep."
Divine images do not arise spontaneously, separately from the rest, therefore, where there is one abstract Deity, others will surely be found - and, most importantly, there will be a religious philosophy, the absence of which among the Slavs so much complained of official science.
The philosophy of religion is the framework on which the constituent parts of faith are attached, the order in which it "works."
It is not surprising that scientists who did not see or did not want to see this order in the native faith of the Slavs, thought it was down-to-earth, aimed exclusively at satisfying the everyday, earthly needs of man.
It is believed that our ancestors did not even have a single divine pantheon: the Gods were allegedly born, died, changed their character in accordance with the way of human life or the political position of the Russian state.
Vleskniga looks at the Slavic Gods in a completely different way, who says:
“And be a whore that will count those Gods, separating them from Svarog, will be expelled from the clan, because we have no Gods except Vyshnya. Both Svarog and others are many, because God is One and Many. Let no one share that multitude and say that we have many Gods."
In other words, every facet of God is God. The gods of the Slavs are manifestations of a single Origin, a single Primary Cause, which Vleskniga calls the Most High (the Most High), but this does not mean at all that the Slavic faith belongs to monotheistic religions.
The image of Vyshnya is in its essence very far from the monotheistic God-Creator, who once created the world and controls it from the outside: Vyshen, rather, is the world itself - a single world organism, the personification of the Universe. The Pigeon Book says:
Despite the fact that the Pigeon Book has undergone many revisions and distortions throughout its life, it will not be difficult for an unbiased person to notice in the above passage the main idea, which, it seems, has changed little since the Aryan times: God is everywhere and in everything, Nature and God are one, inseparable whole.
The Slavic faith teaches that the Universe is God, but it cannot be argued that for our ancestors, God was exclusively the Universe - the concept of God in the Slavic faith is much broader.
As the famous Russian philosopher N. O. Lossky, “If the world is a systematic unity, permeated with relations, then the Super-systemic principle,“Divine Nothing”, stands above the world, as its basis."
Vyshen is something like a principle according to which the world "works"; Above can not enter into the world system, and, at the same time, He Himself is this system.
It seems that the word "down-to-earth" in conversations about the Slavic faith would be much more logical to replace the word "realism".
A person who professes the native faith of the Slavs is in constant communication with the Gods, he does not so much believe in them as he senses, feels: not feeling the Divine next to him is the same as not feeling the living World around him or not noticing his own soul.
Interestingly, even at the time of the planting of Christianity in Russia, none of the "enlighteners" allowed themselves to deny the very existence of the Slavic Gods: they were considered demons, devils, evil spirits, children of Satan - but, one way or another, they did not doubt their existence at all.
We will not argue that the Slavic faith is pantheistic in its essence, but this is not at all the pantheism that official science imagines when discussing the native faith of the Slavs.
You can see God in Nature - feel His presence in it, and you can see in the nature of God - to deify the elements of nature.
The Slavic faith certainly belongs to the first case.