Mistress of the Copper Mountain or otherwise malachitnitsa. A mysterious woman (or girl) living in the bowels of the Ural mountains. Malakhitnitsa has superpowers - it influences the fate of people, gives rich gifts or, on the contrary, punishes with death, changes the quantity and quality of the mined ore and (most importantly) - it never gets old.
She is the patroness of miners and miners, who owns all the riches of the Ural Mountains: if she wants, she will let the good worker down a vein with rare stones and rich ore, she gets angry - she will collapse the adit or flood the mine. And if someone annoys her strongly, then revenge can be completely terrible (see the tale "Prikazchik's soles"). But in general, she is more likely the patroness of poor and honest people, and although strict, she is not evil. She is very good at herself: a dark-haired green-eyed beauty in a dress made of "malachite silk": it can be malachite, lapis lazuli, and whatever - and in her chambers, where each room is lined with its own ornamental stone, the dress can change from room to room to the room. And of course she wears gemstone jewelry. The second guise of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain is a green lizard in a crown;these lizards have patterns on their backs that really resemble malachite.
The possession of the Mistress extended to the entire district, while the Azov Mountain in the vicinity of the village of Polevskoy was considered the place of her permanent habitation. Hence one of the names of the Hostess - Maid Azovka. Among her other names, common in the old days in the Urals, are the Mountain uterus, Kamennaya wench (woman), Zolotaya woman, Malakhitnitsa.
The main qualities of the Mistress of the Underworld are severity and justice, favor for good people and ruthlessness for evil. Or, in the words of Bazhov himself: "It is not enough for a thin person to meet her, and for a good one, it is not enough joy."
She is subject to the elements, the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms.
In the tale "The Stone Flower", the Mistress of the Copper Mountain appears to the master Danila near the Snake Mountain and takes him to her underground palaces. In other words, the Mistress's property is underground everywhere. But the most significant place has always been Mount Azov. There is a certain invisible force in it that has attracted people here for many centuries and millennia. After all, it was here that the first ore was discovered, about which they reported to the capital to Tsar Peter himself. However, the archers who found the ore found it in the old mines, where the bones of old miners were scattered among the remains of ancient tools, which in itself testified to the antiquity of mining in the Urals.
Already in the 20th century, archaeologists found traces of copper-smelting production on Mount Azov, and shortly before the Patriotic War, in 1940, a group of teenagers found a stunning treasure at one of the rocky outcrops, consisting of forty bronze objects (mostly bird-like creatures). Five items were lost (stolen) even before the find was handed over to the museum. For half a century, some episodic additions were made, but in full the unique treasure became available for public viewing only in the 21st century: in 2001 it was exhibited in the Yekaterinburg Museum of Local Lore, in 2002 - in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The origin of the treasure and its subsequent fate still remain a mystery.
The very name of the Azov Mountain is no less mysterious. There is no doubt the consonance of this oronim with the ancient self-name of the Sea of Azov and the city of Azov, located on the banks of the Don near the confluence of the latter into the Taganrog Bay. The coincidence of toponyms is clearly not accidental and is associated with the ethnolinguistic community of peoples who once lived here. The linguistic kinship of the names just proves the former kinship of ethnic groups, or rather, their past unity.
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With regard to the Indo-European peoples, this can be proved relatively simply. Not long before his death, the world famous Norwegian traveler and explorer Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002) was engaged in solving this problem. In the course of the archaeological excavations organized and financed by him, he intended to discover in the Azov region the ancestral home of the Vikings and the place of residence - no more no less - of the Scandinavian gods! In his research, Heyerdahl relies on a geographical and historical encyclopedia compiled in the 13th century by the great Icelander Snorri Sturluson and named by him "The Circle of the Earth". It is here that it is said that the lord of the Scandinavian pantheon Odin lived with his people in the south of Russia in the city of the gods Asgard, the first syllable of which coincides with the name of Azov (and the Sea of Azov),if this toponym (and hydronym) is read as Asov. Then, according to Heyerdahl, the leader of the proto-Norwegians took his people away from these places, fearing the invasion of the Romans in order to settle in Scandinavia. This happened around the 5th century AD. Somewhere near the Don was the most ancient sanctuary of the Scandinavians, which they called As-Hof. It is As-Hof that Thor Heyerdahl considers identical to the name Azov.
As can be understood from some Scandinavian sagas, the Thunderer Odin was once an ordinary person, only later deified. And he brought the future Vikings to Scandinavia, apparently from the Azov region. However, this migration of the ancient Scandinavians from South to North is secondary. Long before that, as a result of a global cosmoplanetary cataclysm, the same ancestors of the Norwegians (and other northern peoples) had already once migrated as part of an undivided Indo-European ethno-cultural community, but in a different direction - from North to South (which happened at least five thousand years ago). Subsequently, relying on ancient tribal legends and secret knowledge about the optimal route (after many centuries it turned into a path "from the Varangians to the Greeks"), the Scandinavians returned to their historical (Hyperborean) ancestral home.
But Hyperborean migrations caused by a cosmoplanetary cataclysm and a sharp cooling in the northern latitudes also passed through other regions of modern Russia, and in particular through the Ural region. There are also many toponymic traces left by the Hyperborean settlers, who subsequently gave all the ethnic diversity of modern peoples. One of them is Mount Azov.
Legends about a gigantic cave about which Bazhov told in the tale "Dear name" are also associated with it. That cave occupies the entire space inside the mountain, is endowed with a supposedly secret witchcraft power, and the entrance to it was closed for the time being, only a groan and cry sometimes comes from the ground. It is believed that no one will be able to penetrate there in the near future. Meanwhile, a colossal library is stored in the sacred underground space, in which all the ancient knowledge accumulated long before the appearance of modern people is concentrated. There are ten such libraries in the Urals.
The question of the sacred symbolism of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain and her attributes is rather complicated and has several levels of comprehension. Even if we restrict ourselves to only symbols associated with key concepts, then already here striking parallels and mutual correspondences of the original mythologemes are found. For example, from the ancient Greek myth about Danae it is known that the Argos princess was imprisoned by her father deep underground in a copper palace, where Zeus entered in the form of a golden rain. There is a symbolic triad - "copper - gold - the underworld", easily and organically projected onto the domain of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain. The image of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain (undoubtedly, but ultimately) goes back to the global mythologeme of the Great Mother Goddess,it is not possible to put an equal sign between the Ural mistress and the White Goddess, if only because of the discrepancy between their color characteristics: Malachitnitsa, of course, is green, not white. But the analogy immediately suggests itself between the bearer of the malachite robe and the Green Tara - one of the two main hypostases of the "Lamaist Mother of God", a compassionate savior, intercessor and consoler who took on many features of the ancient Great Goddess.
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It is clear that the Mistress of the Copper Mountain was announced everywhere in the Urals, and not only in the old Sysertsky mining district, which included Sysert - the birthplace of Bazhov - and Polevskoy, near which Copper Mountain was located (otherwise the Gumeshkinsky mine). And in general it is known wherever there are mountains (and even where they are not). For the image of the Mistress of the Mountain is not a specific Ural phenomenon, but a phenomenon of a global order. It runs through different historical epochs and milestones of world culture in a continuous line and in its various forms. Sometimes the mythologeme is visualized in the most unexpected guises, not immediately recognizable under the masks veiled by time.
For example, Tannhäuser is the hero of a medieval German legend (ballad), well known from the opera of the same name by Richard Wagner (1813–1883). The plot of the saga and the libretto, written on its basis by the composer himself, is well known. The young knight-minnesinger falls into the love snares of not just anyone, but the goddess Venus herself. He forgets about the flourishing earthly life in its lifeless underground palaces. I did not make a reservation - precisely underground, because the scenes corresponding to the folklore basis of "Tannhäuser" take place not somewhere in a luxurious valley or on the shore of a radiant sea, but in a deep and gloomy cave inside Mount Gerselberg (which means "not extinguished fiery ash"), which with its outlines resembles a giant tomb. It was here, according to ancient Germanic ideas, that the underground possessions of the ruler of winter and blizzard Holda were located. In the Middle Ages, she was identified with ancient Venus, and her mountain refuge was popularly nicknamed Venusberg.
People living in the 21st century have to learn many mythological images and plots through later fiction. If the latter is a classic, and not a modern handicraft, then you can be quite sure that you are dealing with a solid base that reflects the true national worldview. The same applies to the Masters of the mountain world. Take, for example, the classic work of the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) - the dramatic poem "Peer Gynt", entirely based on the material of Norwegian folklore. An extensive episode here (voiced in a well-known musical miniature by another great Norwegian - Edvard Grieg) takes place in a deep mountain cave and is connected with the story of the daughter of the Mountain King - an unnamed Green Princess, in her status, like her father, who is the Mistress of the Mountains.
By the way, motives similar to the Ural and European folklore can, if desired, be found in very distant countries, for example, in Japan. Here, the familiar features of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain are found at the goddess of the sacred mountain and the symbol of the Land of the Rising Sun - Fujiyama. The name of the underground mistress who lives in a deep cave with the dragon is Sengen-sama. In Japanese medieval legends, the samurai Tadatsune met her. In some moments, this narration resembles the plots of Bazhov's tales.
Then you can move to another continent, for example, to sultry Brazil. Legend-fairy tale "Agreement with the Lizard". Here, too, a sorceress from a deep cave, who can turn into an ugly old woman, now a seductive girl, or even a lizard (do you feel a familiar flavor?), Endows the poor young man with untold wealth, albeit in a somewhat unusual form: just one gold coin, which by no means it is impossible to spend - another immediately appears in its place. The rest in this Brazilian fusion of Indian, Negro and Portuguese folklore is almost like in the underground halls of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain or in the cave of the Mountain King:
“Now the gaucho (the Portuguese-speaking equivalent of the Spanish-speaking“gaucho”- the so-called mestizos born to Indian women from fathers of European descent. - VD) saw right through the mountain, as if it were transparent. He saw everything that happened in her bowels; its inhabitants: jaguars, skeletons, dwarfs, beautiful girls, a rattlesnake - all entwined into one ball, all circled, all wriggled in a red flame that flared up and went out in all underground corridors, from which smoke came, went thicker and thicker; roars, screams, squeals, howls, groans merged into a hum that stood over the ridge of the mountain. The wrinkled old woman turned into a lizard, the lizard into a Moorish princess, and a Moorish princess into a beautiful Indian woman from the Tapujas tribe.
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A specific matriarchal type - however, now the Mistresses are not of the Underworld, but of the South Ural steppe expanses, where mountain and rocky spurs of the Ural ridge are also indicated everywhere - can be seen in an ancient drawing found in the Kyshtym region (Chelyabinsk region), from where, however Bazhov's places - Sysert and Polevsky - are at hand. Nude young maiden with two swords in her hip sheath.
The masculine masters of the mountains are no less colorful in the perception of the Siberian peoples. In the center of Kuzbass, in the spurs of the Kuznetsk Alatau, Mountain Shoria is located, where from time immemorial the ancient people of Shors have lived, speaking one of the Turkic languages (close to Khakass). They worship not the Mistress, but the Master of the mountains - with green hair, the same eyes and in stone boots. The meeting with him is told in the legend of the Iron Mountain (Temirtau). Once a poor hunter got into the underground palace of the Master of the Mountains and was gifted with a full bag of precious stones. And among them was one completely inconspicuous stone - heavy and brown. They decided to test it with fire, threw it into a hot fireplace, and suddenly a fiery liquid flowed out of a white-hot stone. Once frozen, it turned into a hard and malleable metal. So iron was discovered.
All over the world mythological stories about the spirits - the masters of the mountains - are spread. And not only among the peoples-inhabitants of large mountain systems and massifs, such as, for example, the Urals, Altai, Sayan, Caucasus, etc.