Before the Mongol-Tatar invasion, lunar pendants were the favorite adornment of the Slavs. They came in various shapes, were worn as a single pendant or made into necklaces. With the advent of Christianity, they continued to be worn, sometimes combined with a cross.
Ancient necklaces with moonworms.
Christian pastors actively fought this cult:
(From the "Commandment" of Metropolitan George.)
Thus, month worship was seen as a serious threat to the new faith.
But excuse me, where did the Slavic god (or goddess) of the Moon disappear?
And here we take a closer look at the god Khors, one of the most mysterious gods of the Slavic pantheon. From book to book, historians repeat the version that this is a solar deity, and his name is borrowed from oriental languages, in particular from Persian (for some reason, almost not recognizing the similarity of the name "Hor (o) s" with the words "round dance", "Mansions", "good").
I was personally surprised by the following statement of the famous historian Toporov about the famous place in the "Tale of Bygone Years", where the gods of the Slavs defeated by Vladimir are mentioned:
Promotional video:
To be honest, this is too bold a statement. It turns out that there is a solar god Dazhbog, and Khors is his acting? Although, of course, there are similar heaps in mythology: Helios-Apollo, for example.
But still, making such a conclusion only from the absence of a punctuation mark is somewhat strange. After all, such a situation can mean anything - from a blot (of course, this is unlikely, but still) to a pairing on a different principle: the sun and … the moon.
Alas, since the functions of Khors were obvious to everyone in antiquity, none of the chroniclers left us either footnotes or notes about what exactly Khors is in charge of, but in the “Lay of Igor's Host” there is only one line that can shed light on the mysterious god:
So, a certain prince Vseslav leads a double life: during the day he fulfills his princely duties, and at night he turns into a wolf, moving in space almost at the speed of a jet liner, but this is not about his superpowers, but about the fact that he "sprinkles" the road to "the great Horse ". Since the text twice emphasizes that the prince makes his promenade at night, "before the roosters," there is almost no doubt that Khors is still a lunar deity. And his name is rather associated with the word "choros", which means "circle".
Nevertheless, the controversy does not subside, and the version of the "Persian solar god" wanders through the pages of monographs. Who really likes which version. Although then Vseslav, in order to cross the path of the "sunny" Khors to the Kiev roosters, would have needed to "look up" to the States, and not to Tmutarakan.
Read more in the book: Ya. E. Borovsky, "The mythological world of the ancient people of Kiev"