Modern humanity lives in an era of religious slavery. Canonical religions are very intolerant of any manifestation of dissent. Give them free rein, everything would return to the times when the fires of the Inquisition were burning, and any look other than the "general line" was immediately called heresy, all his followers cursed and so on …
A completely different picture was observed in the civilized world before the hegemony of monotheism, and sometimes it is observed even today, in those places where the light of civilization has not yet penetrated. Polytheistic paganism is much more religiously tolerant than any monotheism. Therefore, it is not surprising that the pagan cultures of different continents differ significantly. Even among related peoples, polytheistic cults had not only differences, but, at times, completely different interpretations of certain events, phenomena and actions in which the gods were somehow involved. At times it came to very funny things: in Ancient Egypt, one and the same god was “good” for the inhabitants of one city, but “evil” for another.
Considering this diversity, cases of repetition of religious motives among peoples inhabiting different territories have always aroused a certain interest of religious scholars and ethnographers. It's one thing when images common to all people are repeated (for example, the gods of the Sun, water, wind, etc.) - this is understandable and quite understandable. But how to explain the presence of the same objects of worship not only among peoples living in different territories, but also having completely different origins? One such phenomenon is the cult of the Golden Woman, in which the female goddess was the supreme deity. Her image was the subject of worship.
Traditionally, the Golden Woman is considered a deity of the Mansi, a small people living in the northeast of the Ural Mountains. It was known about her for a long time. How many adventurers were looking for a giant statue of an idol, according to legend, made of pure gold. The Vikings, the Ermak warriors, and the missionaries of the Orthodox Church were looking for the statue of the idol …
Although, everyone perfectly understood that several tons of gold cannot just be in the forest and be the subject of worship of dark peoples, that this simply cannot be, if only because the cost of the gold from which the idol is made was several times higher than the balance of some countries.
Nevertheless, the search for this idol did not stop. It even got to the point that on the maps of Keller and Geberstein - classical cartographers of the New Age, on the map corresponding to the modern Northern Urals, a sculptural object was designated, which was called "Slata Baba".
However, the unreality of the accumulation of such an amount of gold in one place is a very conditional concept. Stephen, Archbishop of Perm, who was engaged in the Christianization of the Urals and Eastern Siberia in the 16th century, described in monastic books his exploits, how he and the Cossacks attached to him destroyed pagan altars and erected Christian churches in their place. So, Stephen says that during the destruction of three pagan temples, cult statuettes of gold were found, with a total weight of several pounds. Naturally, the gold was melted down and used for church needs. So the ancient peoples of Siberia had gold at least. That is, if it were not enough to cast the entire Golden Woman, then at least it could be covered with a layer of gold. By the way, the same Stefan Permsky in his writings regrets that he could not find an idol. Well,it can be understood - in this way the archbishop would have killed two birds with one stone: he would have destroyed a pagan cult, which is extremely unpleasant for Christians, and would have fabulously enriched the Orthodox Church.
The strangest thing was that the cult of the Golden Woman was worshiped not only by the Mansi. Traces of this cult (worship of a golden female idol with characteristic features) are found among three large ethnic groups - Finns, Buryats, and Yakuts. It is interesting that all three large peoples have completely different origins (Finno-Ugrians, Mongols and Turks) and live in completely different places. But that's not all: the Golden Woman is present in the culture of about a dozen smaller nations.
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What were these features? One of the most educated people of his time, the man who discovered the Russian kingdom for Europe, the first Russian ethnographer, Sigismund Herberstein, describes her as a statue of a woman who has one child in her arms, and the second is in her womb. The image is very characteristic of matriarchy, which is also unexpected, since practically all peoples who believe in this cult no longer had matriarchy. And one more detail - the deity is clearly * unkind *, rather even * neutral-evil *, which is kind of strange for the image of a mother.
Semyon Remezov, the famous cartographer and explorer of Siberia, studied the phenomenon of the Golden Woman for a long time. He came to an interesting conclusion: it turns out that this cult existed, as it were, parallel to the usual cults of the peoples inhabiting Siberia. Its external origin was evident. Remezov, perhaps for fun, called the Golden Woman “Siberian Pharaoh”.
A scientist who lived in the early 18th century, his joke hit not the eyebrow, but the eye. The fact is that when they began to study the cult of the Golden Woman and collect scattered information about it from representatives of the small peoples of Siberia, the picture emerged almost completely clear. The fact is that in the entire cult of worship of the golden idol, practically one to one repeated the ancient Egyptian cult of worship of Isis, the mother of Osiris, naturally diluted with local flavor.
A closer study showed that in one form or another the cult of the Golden Woman was reflected in more modern works. The same Mistress of the Copper Mountain is a heavily altered Golden Woman of Mansi. In any case, her methods of "upbringing" are exactly the same as those applied to people by the Hostess: "For a thin man to meet grief, and good joy is not enough."
But a reasonable question arises: how the cult of Ancient Egypt could get so far to the North and spread there? Who were the people who brought him there? And they not just brought, but carried out quite serious work to adapt it to the beliefs of the aborigines. These questions are still awaiting their answers. In any case, traces of the ancient Egyptians were found relatively recently in the Altai mountains. Who knows, perhaps there was once a kind of "religious migration" of the cults of Egypt to the northern regions. Future research will shed light on these mysteries.