Painting by A. Fantalov. "Fire serpent".
The collector and researcher of Russian folklore Ivan Petrovich Sakharov (1807-1863), who published three volumes of Legends of the Russian People about the Family Life of Their Ancestors, wrote: “Everyone in Russia knows what a miracle a fiery snake is. Everyone knows why he is and where he flies, but no one dares to talk about it out loud. The fiery serpent is not his brother, he has no mercy: certain death from one blow. And what to expect from evil spirits! It would seem that he has no need to fly to the red maidens, but the villagers know why he flies, and they say that if the fiery serpent falls in love with the maiden, then his sweetheart is incurable forever. Nobody undertakes to reprimand or dissuade such a sweetheart …"
The transformation of a fiery serpent into a man, according to Sakharov, is as follows: “Everyone sees how a fiery serpent flies through the air and burns with unquenchable fire, but not everyone knows that, as soon as he descends into the chimney, he will find himself in a hut as a young man of unspeakable strength. Without loving, you will fall in love, without praise, you will praise, the old women say, when a girl of such a young man envies. He knows how to spoil the soul of a red maiden with greetings, the villain. He, the destroyer, will delight the young youth with his speech. He will play, ruthless, with a zealous girlish heart, he will melt, a barbarian, his lips are scarlet with honey and sugar. From his kisses the red maiden is burning with a ruddy dawn, from his greetings the red maiden blooms with a red sun! The villagers often noticed those huts where fiery snakes fly, and suspect women of fleshly coexistence with a demon.
But people also noticed something else - the consequences of sinful relationships with undead, when women became pregnant from such intercourse and even gave birth to someone unknown …
Here is what IP Sakharov writes about this: “He dries, he chills the red girl to languor. From that unclean force, a non-cat child is born in the girl (unclean, devilish, satanic, worthless - according to the dictionary of Vladimir Dahl). From melancholy, from the rupture, the heart of the father and mother breaks, which was born in the red maiden's brainchild. They swear, they scold the brainchild that is not a cat with a great oath: he will not live in this world, he will not be like a human! He would burn for a century in ebullient tar, in an unquenchable fire! With that oath, that sworn brainchild, without a pore without time, disappears from the womb. And he, the accursed one, is carried away by the unclean to the distant lands, to the thirtieth kingdom. And even there, the sworn brainchild in exactly seven weeks is called Kikimora. Lives, grows Kikimora with a magician in the stone mountains …"
Now, in hindsight, we, ufologists-researchers, already know that some of the alien species use terrestrial women as surrogate mothers or a kind of incubators, and after about three months the embryo is removed from the woman's uterus so that cultivation can be continued in special laboratories with the creation of all the necessary physiological conditions for growth. But now we know something. From eyewitnesses, from doctors, according to hypnosis, according to ultrasound data … However, to read about the same in the testimonies of our ancestors … This fact suggests difficult thoughts. And the conspiracies and vows, most likely, had nothing to do with it: this is just the technology of growing hybrids - they, as it is now becoming clear, are born exactly three months old. _
Sometimes, folklore testifies, "non-cat children" were born with their own eyes. They were supposedly with a big head and a big belly, ugly, stupid, unsociable and usually disappeared somewhere in the forest.
Do not those old stories remind us of the situation with the birth of a baby from Valia Solovey from Kazakhstan? After all, according to the testimony of the woman in childbirth, "aliens took away", and the young woman does not even remember under what circumstances it happened.
In Russian settlements, in addition to the "fiery serpent", this same phenomenon was often called "Maniac". "The maniac flew by!" - said the then peasants, seeing a fireball. “This is how the villagers call the shooting stars …” Sakharov explains. - Our villagers tell different stories about the Maniac. Some say that Maniac always falls from the sky into the courtyard where the girl has lost her innocence. Others claim that unclean spirits fly in his form, visiting single women when their husbands embark on a long journey to work. Then at the sight of the Maniac they say: "Amen, crumble!" Still others with fear assured that these were accursed people wandering and that they wandered from place to place until they were forgiven …"
Another famous Russian collector of fairy tales and legends A. Afanasyev did not pass by this topic either. He writes: “The serpent, the common people say, flies through the skies, breathing flame; over the hut familiar to him, he scatters sparks and through the pipe appears in front of his chosen friend and turns into a young man … Extraordinary children are the fruit of wives' ties with snakes, and heroes are magicians and kikimors."
My colleague in the research of the anomalous Aleksey Konstantinovich Priima believes that the legendary fire snakes are nothing more than modern UFOs, and the "red fellow" is a "flying saucer" operator, or an enlonaut (11). In his book "Encounters with Inhumans" Priyma cites a story told by the inhabitants of the village of Peshkovo, Chita Region, to the folklorist Zinoviev in the sixties of the last XX century. Allegedly, a fiery kite flew to their fellow villager Lydia, and, by the way, she did not deny this fact, and before that, during the Second World War, he also visited a woman named Pasha. The newcomer appeared to her in the guise of her husband Yakov, who had gone to fight the Nazis.
Pasha was very afraid that her husband would die in the war, every day she cried, was killed for her husband. And soon, according to local residents, the kite began to fly to her. Lzheyakov appeared only at night. He laid down next to Pasha. and demanded female affection.
At first, Pasha was overjoyed at the return of her husband. She decided that he had deserted and was hiding in the taiga from the authorities. But then she suspected something unkind. Once she stroked her “husband” on the head and found many large bumps on it. She even told her Lzheyakov about it, but he kept silent. And the woman recalled the stories of her countrywomen that they saw the flights of a fiery serpent over the village, and just recently …
The alarmed Pasha told her brother's wife Elizaveta Maksimovna about everything. She agreed to spend the night in her hut to make sure of the reality of what was happening. And so both women, having put three of Pasha's young children to bed, settled themselves on the Russian stove. After some time, a bright flash illuminated the hut, and Lzheyakov appeared in front of the women. Not paying any attention to Lizaveta Maksimovna, the demon began to scold Yakov's wife with the strongest words: they say, it was impossible to tell anyone about his visits to her, he de sternly warned about it … Having poured and swelled, the newcomer suddenly disappeared - melted into thin air.
And the women heard a terrible rumble in the entryway … In the morning, as soon as it was dawn, they realized that they could not get out of the hut: the door did not open. They raised a shout, Yakov's brother Ivan and other neighbors came running … And they were amazed: a huge stack of firewood, piled near the hut under a shed, was in the hallway all the way, to the last log … So the whole village learned about this event, there were a lot of witnesses of what happened.
Lyudmila Lavrenyeva and Tatyana Shchepanskaya, Candidate of Historical Sciences, employees of the Moscow Academy of Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences (20), undertook their own investigation of the legendary legends about the fiery snake - the Serpent Zmeevich.
This character of folk demonology, it turns out, is very common in Russian villages from the Volga region to Polesie, as well as in other places of the country, right up to Siberia. They say that these undead fly in, scattering sparks, to lonely women yearning for a husband or lover. Pelageya Mikhailovna, a resident of the Vyatka village of Vorobyova Gora, told the folklorist-researcher Tatyana Shchepanskaya that she herself watched when she went out of the hut in winter, how “the fire flies like a sheaf, and suddenly crumbles, sparks flew out … and another time I saw the same when threshing bread.
Eyewitnesses usually testify that IT looks like a sheaf, bunch, broom, fireball, or a snake with a tail of golden sparks. As a rule, they saw him flying into a chimney and for some reason it was precisely in the houses where single women lived who were left without a husband (he died, went to work, joined the army and disappeared, without making himself felt for a long time). The story is the same in different places: “And people see how a fiery serpent flies across the sky - and straight into the pipe. And he will go down into the house and appear as a man, like her husband …”As if he was walking into the room, hugging, kissing a waiting woman, going to bed with her, treating her to gingerbread … Such visits could, according to popular beliefs, have a tragic outcome: one young Vyatka young woman was a fiery guest, they say he took her to the bathhouse and put her on a hot stove, after which she died. Another lost weight and wasted for a long time, abandoned the house, the children ran around the village, ragged and dirty,begging in other people's homes. After a while, a fire broke out, and she herself burned down in the house. For this reason, in some villages in the villages they looked after single women and, if they noticed something was wrong, performed a ritual to scare away the intruder.
People also noticed that the fire flyers were especially active during the period of Stalin's repressions. The arrested village peasants perished in the GULAG camps, leaving their young wives to grieve. “I had a sister-in-law,” says Pelageya Yakovlevna from the same Vyatka village. “They took a peasant from her - a Trotskyist, or something, did they find him?.. But she was longing: she would go to the fence, sit there… They ask her:“Why did you go there?”And she says:“Yakov came. He gave me a hotel, crackers … “I slowly began to go crazy. Then, - the narrator continues, - my husband says: “It’s not Jacob who comes to you, the long one (this is how the devil was called in those places for his tall stature) walks.” They began to convince her not to go into the fence. They were guarding her, they did not let her in …”Sometimes this guest showed himself too materially for a ghost: he ate pancakes baked by the hostess in the evening,then in the morning after his visit, the neighbors saw bruises on her arm. At night, she chased the children away from herself so that they slept separately, and the children heard their mother talking to someone at night, laughing, whispering. In Polesie, the birth of illegitimate children is still sometimes explained by the visits of fiery undead, and therefore they are not too surprised at the disappearance of such children, who should apparently be ghostly, like their parent.
To discourage the enchanting guest, relatives and neighbors performed various magical actions: they stuck rowan branches at the door (there seem to be crosses on rowan berries that scare away evil spirits), nailed a collar and a horseshoe, drew crosses with coal … In the old book "Abewegue of Russian superstitions", published in 1786, its author MD Chulkov wrote that in the beliefs of the 18th century, fire serpents are "devils who fly and tempt women." It is believed that this creature is much more ancient and more complex than, say, the image of the same devil …
Folk mythology is, in fact, the testimony of eyewitnesses who came across inexplicable things and interpreted what was happening in their own way. However, there is no need to dismiss, to deny some events, even incredible from a modern point of view. We ourselves are now confronted with even more amazing and mysterious phenomena that leave quite material traces. And the reader in the future will have the opportunity to be convinced of this on the facts of this study.
Needless to say, it is perhaps no coincidence in fairy tales that snakes are often abducting princesses and "red maidens", that good fellows and the same princes are fighting with them. Apparently, something like that was noticed by people. Even in serious literary works that have been left to us in the heritage from the XIV-XV centuries, they speak of a similar thing, but not in a fabulous form, but in the form of a tradition, historical evidence. Such is, for example, "The Tale of Peter and Fevronia of Murom" - a monument of the literature of Ancient Rus (21).
The story begins like this: “Behold, in the Rusyist land of the land, the city called by Mur. In it, there is an autocracy and a blessed prince, as I say, by the name of Paul. From time immemorial, hate the good of the human race, the devil instilled the hostile flying serpent to the wife of that prince for fornication."
If we translate into modern language the story with the snake, which is difficult to read due to the antiquity of the language, then it turns out that the snake took the form of the husband of an unfortunate woman and made intercourse with her. But the princess suspected something of this situation and told everything to her legal spouse. By order of Pavel, Fevronia managed to trick the secret of the death of the serpent from the "hostile adorable" by cunning, and that "crack the secret to her, verb": "My death is from Peter's shoulder, from Agricova's sword!" Agricom in Russia was the name of a fabulous hero who possessed a myriad of weapons, among which was the sword-kladenets. Since Prince Peter was Paul's brother, and the miraculous Agrikov sword was walled up in the wall of the Vozdvizhensky monastery, everything was decided simply. Peter got the cherished sword and lay in wait for the serpent, chopping it into pieces. But … the serpent was spattered with blood and covered with scabs and ulcers,from which I could not recover for a long time.
The narrative ends with the message that both Peter and Fevronia, after all these upheavals, went to the monastery, donning "monastic vestments." "And the blessed prince Peter was named in the monastic rank David, while the Monk Princess Fevronia was named in the monastic rank Euphrosinia."
It is interesting that the legend told in the story of Peter and Fevronia has similar plots in Western European literature. Researchers find much in common in the Russian story with the song about the battle of Zigurd with the serpent Fafnar and about the alliance of this hero with the maiden's things. Particularly much in common in individual episodes and the storyline is observed in the story of Tristan and Isolde, which gave world-famous opera and theatrical performance. In the later records of folklore collectors, an oral legend about Fevronia was preserved, but not from Murom, but from the village of Laskovo, Ryazan region. Researchers have suggested that the name Peter should mean Prince David Yuryevich, who reigned in Murom from 1204 to 1228. However, there is another opinion - that the prototype of Peter was the Murom prince Peter, who lived at the beginning of the XIV century, the ancestor of the Ovtsyn and Volodimerov boyars.
But I’m thinking: what to do with the snake, or rather, with persistent stories about this creature? A very widespread, quite recognizable image is guessed behind him. Why are the folklore of different countries, myths, fairy tales, and finally the Bible abound with episodes with giant snakes? Why has this strange character been accompanying humanity since time immemorial?
After all, nowadays many admit that any myths, traditions and legends often had a very real basis, only slightly altered, half-forgotten in some details …
Without delving deeply into the essence of the question, I easily found some works related to the hypothesis of the possible existence of a serpentoid civilization that preceded human civilization. The possible existence of a civilization of reptiles is directly indicated in the chapter of the Mahabharata - "The Burning of Snakes." There it is a question of the existence of a serpentine state. It is possible, as follows from the "Mahabharata", that the civilization of snakes could fly in unusual ways beyond the control of man. For example, when the serpent Takshaka, as follows from the description of the Mahabharata, killed with its bite the king of people Parikshit, he flew into the sky, leaving a trail of a reverse jet, like in jet planes:
Then a mighty Takshaka soared into the sky, Like a living fire-breathing cloud
And a lotus in color reminding, behind him the strip stretched straight, Similar to a woman's hair to the parting …
And, punishing the death of his father, his son Janamejaya performs the sacrificial burning of snakes.
In Greek mythology, images of snakes and snake-like ones, for example, gigantomachies, are also found. Suffice it to recall the famous sculptural group "Laocoon", created by ancient masters back in the period before our era based on ancient Greek myths.
Biblical testimonies speak of the intelligence and cunning of the tempting serpent: “The serpent was more cunning than all the beasts of the field that the Lord God created” (Genesis 3: 1). Apparently, for the man created by God, the serpentoid civilization was hostile, and people entered into a struggle with giant snakes.
In connection with the persistent mention of snakes in many myths and religions, the Russian researcher Anatoly Stegalin put forward a hypothesis about the existence of a serpent-like civilization in the distant past of the Earth. At the same time, the main instrument of labor of snakes, as Stegalin believes, was not a stone and a stick, but … psychic abilities. Over the millions of years of its existence, such a creature could master the possibility of superfine manipulation of the consciousness of lower animals. It is not for nothing that they talk about the hypnotizing gaze of snakes, especially such large ones as, for example, a boa constrictor.
_ Quite likely, giving way to man, the serpentoid race passed into another dimension, and the memory of it remained in myths, legends, tales and in the Bible. But it is possible that serpentoids, if desired, can appear in our three-dimensional world.
Traces of serpentoid activity can be traced in mythology on all continents. Everywhere you can find a mention of snakes, dragons, creatures both good and evil, but in any case, very wise and long-lived. Their list is impressive: the feathered serpent of the Aztecs, the fiery serpent of the Russ, Chinese dragons, European dragons that abducted beauties, and finally the well-known biblical snake.
In Russian folklore, there is also a serpent named Gorynych, which left a deep mark in the memory of the people through poetic tales and legends.
If you take M. Zabelin's book “Russian people. His customs, rituals, traditions, superstitions and poetry "(22), then among the prayers and conspiracies there is also" Conspiracy from the serpent flying into the house. " "… You, Lord, from the servant of God (name) and from her house drive away the flying fiery serpent and the spirit of the unclean commanding day, night, noon and morning, and evening, hour and minute, all the unclean power, turn him away from all her thoughts and thoughts, visions and dreams, actions and will … "- appears in that conspiracy.
If it was read, passed on by the people from generation to generation, then there were facts! But the help from prayers, it seems, was also there, otherwise they would have been forgotten as ineffective.
By the way, there are legends about snakes in almost all European countries. In Bulgaria, in the village of Zmeyovo, not far from the town of Stara Zagora, local residents claim that their ancestors were people of "fathom height", that is, 2.13 meters, because in the old days one woman from the village married a snake. They called her the Snake for this. Moreover, it was believed that it is easy to find out when a woman conceived "from a snake": she bears the fetus not 9, but 10 or even 11 months!
Belimov GS Proximity with aliens. Secrets of contacts of the 6th kind