The current state of disputes about the essence of the Slavic faith recalls the well-known parable of the three blind men and an elephant, which tells how one day three blind men began to share with each other their knowledge about this animal: one of them, feeling the elephant's leg, convinced his comrades that the elephant was like a pillar. the second had a chance to feel the tail, and he said that the elephant, on the contrary, looked like a rope, and the third, who felt the trunk, considered elephants to be the closest relatives of snakes.
The dispute, of course, did not lead to anything, and every blind man remained unconvinced.
In the case of the Slavic faith, the situation is complicated by the fact that there are much more "blind" people, and the "elephant" has come down to us in an unnatural, unrecognizable stained form.
A lot of all kinds of theories and assumptions have accumulated about the essence of the Slavic faith - one is more beautiful than the other; to be convinced of the abundance and diversity of existing views, it is enough, for example, to try to count the names of the Slavic faith offered from everywhere (only the most common names are about seven).
All this disorder in modern science comes from exactly the same disorder in historical sources about the Slavic faith.
For example, in the ancient work "About the history, about the beginning of the Russian land …" it is said that the famous Prince Volkhov (son of Prince Sloven) loved to turn as a crocodile and swim along the Volkhov River, sometimes drowning people, for which he was nicknamed by the people Perun and later deified …
And in the "Word and Revelation of the Holy Apostles" Perun is considered a man who served as an elder among the Greeks and for his exploits began to be revered by the Slavs as a god.
Whom to believe?
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It is clear that both of these testimonies are unsuccessful attempts to humiliate Perun in front of the people, but official science argues differently: if both passages are taken from reliable historical sources, then it turns out that there were several ideas about Perun among the people at once.
A similar fate befell every facet of the Slavic faith: there is no question concerning it that would not cause a whole bunch of conflicting opinions.
For a long time, official science tried to grasp with a glance everything that was written in the past about the faith of the Slavs, to create at least some system of all true and false testimonies about it, but soon realized the futility of its efforts and came to the "final and irrevocable" conclusion: Slavic faith is not a faith at all, but a heap of primitive superstitions.
As D. S. Likhachev, expressing the opinion of the official science about the faith of the Slavs, “Paganism was not a religion in the modern sense … It was a rather chaotic set of various beliefs, cults, but not teaching. This is a combination of religious rites and a whole heap of objects of religious veneration.
Therefore, the unification of people of different tribes, which the Eastern Slavs so much needed in the X-XII centuries, could not be carried out by paganism. Paganism was not united. This thought … should also be understood in the sense that in paganism there was a “higher” mythology associated with the main gods, and a “lower” mythology, which consisted mainly in connection with the beliefs of an agricultural nature."
In a word, "paganism" is presented as the fruit of the unbridled children's imagination of the people.
The ancient people sat after the hunt and pondered about the sky, clouds, lightning and everything else that surrounded them, endowing the objects of their fantasy with will and reason, these tales gradually accumulated, and, in the end, a kind of heap of fairy tales gathered, which they decided to name "Paganism".
And when statehood appeared, the princes found it convenient to use fairy tales in order to frighten and persuade the people - this is how the process of politicizing "paganism" began, which, it is believed, led to its division into two loosely connected parts: the overly politicized "upper" and too primitive "lower ".
But, as they say, the games are over - the people have matured, and "paganism" has left their native spaces forever.
Here, in general terms, is the official version of the biography of "paganism".
From the outside, everything looks logical: a person should feel that there is something higher than him in this world, and where can an ancient man look for this Something, if not in nature, if he is not yet able to cognize the real God?
The ability-inability to know the "real" God, apparently, is the key point of the above theory of modern scientists and ancient preachers.
This ingenious consideration invariably accompanies almost every scientific and church treatise on the Slavic faith, and what is meant by it is difficult to understand.
Is it possible that the properties of the human soul depend on the volume of the brain? Not. From the historical era? Also no!
Meanwhile, the church has preached such an unfounded humiliating and condescending attitude towards ancestors and their heritage from time immemorial - in the Bible (Deuteronomy, ch. 7, verse 5), for example, it says:
"Deal with them (with the" Gentiles "- AV) in this way: destroy their altars, crush their pillars, and cut down their groves and burn their idols with fire."
It would not be worth paying attention to: it is clear that such attacks towards the "unbelievers" are the fruit of the sick thinking of fanatical clergy working on the Bible, but the Christian idea of ancient people and their faith, as something primitive and primitive, very organically blended into the technocratic Western consciousness, which, imagining history as a systematic movement exclusively forward, from simple to complex, believes that bygone times are waste material, passed a stage in development, from which there is nothing to learn.
During the times of the Russian emperors' craze for German culture, much, in particular, the above vision of history, migrated from European science to Russian - alas, far from always bringing benefit.
A. S. Khomyakov quite rightly remarked that "the connection between the preceding and the following in the spiritual world is unlike the dead dependence of an action on a cause in the physical world."
Deity is not a binomial of Newton, one does not need to commit violence against oneself in order to feel it, there can be no right or wrong concept about it.
Max Müller, one of the founders of Comparative Linguistics and Comparative Religious Studies, wrote about this:
“As soon as a person begins to be conscious of himself, as soon as he feels different from all other objects and persons, he immediately realizes the Supreme Being … We are so created without any merit that as soon as we wake up, we immediately feel our dependence on all sides from something else. This first sensation of the Divine is not the result of thinking or generalization, but a representation as irresistible as the impressions of our senses."
The feeling of oneness with the Divine is not the end point, but the starting point; it is with this feeling that every faith begins, and primitive myths, the simplification of initially abstract images, etc. - an inevitable consequence of the maturation of any religion, for, as Max Müller said, poetry is older than prose.
The above understanding of the development of religion appeared in the works of M. Müller, A. S. Khomyakov and A. N. Afanasyev: in their writings they described practically the same mechanism of the formation of faith, which has three stages.
1). At the first stage, a person is simultaneously aware of himself and the Divine, sensual communication is tied between the Divine world and man.
The gods of our ancestors were not man-made idols, as it is now believed, but abstract, abstract images: as M. Müller wrote, “let us not be mistaken … as to the fact that there was then a natural and idolatrous veneration”.
2). At the second stage, a prolonged "illness of religion" begins - a general oblivion by the people of the divine images and metaphors with which the ancient man tried to depict the Gods.
A. N. Afanasyev said: "… As soon as the real meaning of the metaphorical language was lost, the ancient myths began to be understood literally, and the gods gradually lowered themselves to human needs, worries and hobbies, and from the heights of airspaces began to descend to earth"
3). The third stage is the time of partial healing of faith, associated, first of all, with the growth of a person's spiritual needs.
“New ideas caused by the historical movement of life and education,” wrote A. N. Afanasyev, - they take possession of the old mythical material and gradually spiritualize it: from the elemental, material meaning, the representation of the deity rises to the spiritual ideal."
The disease and recovery of religion, according to Max Müller, is a constant dialectical movement, in which the whole life of religion lies.
Stopping this movement will certainly lead to the emergence of a living faith instead of an unviable extreme: a tricky philosophy or a heap of fairy tales that by themselves can give society equally little.
Any religion is initially dual: both abstract and concrete. This duality reflects the duality of social life itself.
Sciences, growing out of religion, were at first supported by the ministers of the cult; the clergy, freed by the people from worldly problems as much as possible, made progress fairly quickly in both religious and scientific knowledge of the world.
It does not take much time to form a religious movement - its foundations are laid in two or three centuries, and the further development of faith is aimed more at understanding and improving the old than at inventing the new.
At the same time, the entire philosophy of faith could hardly be clear to a simple, mostly illiterate population.
Trying to understand religion, the people created their own interpretation of religious revelations, wrapping abstract divine images into more understandable earthly ones.
The initially abstract system of faith gradually began to grow into fairy tales, traditions, and legends.
It is they who are a reflection of religious philosophy, and not vice versa, and the richer, more diverse the reflection, the more plural popular ideas about the world of God, the richer the source that gave rise to them.
The fate of folk mythology is much happier than the fate of Slavic religious philosophy.
During the Christianization of Rus, the main blow, of course, fell on the very "crown" of the Slavic faith, its cult component: the Byzantine "enlighteners" executed the Magi, burned liturgical books, destroyed temples, trying to destroy the essence of faith and hoping that the orphaned folk culture in search of "food for the brains "will be forced to come to Christianity.
Slavic religious philosophy went underground, and its popular rethinking remained in plain sight, and therefore it seemed to many researchers that it was in this rethinking that the whole essence of the faith of the Slavs was.
Some of them sincerely tried to find an abstract part of the religion, but, apparently, they could not or did not want to understand the ancient metaphors and came to the conclusion that it either died or never existed at all.
This is where the apple of discord lies, which has given rise to long and heated debates in the scientific community about the essence of the Slavic faith.
However, to see the truth, you need not so much - to treat the faith of your ancestors without prejudice, and then, I think, everything will certainly fall into place.