Deputy Director for Science of the Vologda Regional Scientific and Methodological Center of Folk Art, Candidate of Historical Sciences, ethnographer. Member of the scientific and public movement "Northern Tradition". For more than 20 years he has been researching Hyperborea, collecting information bit by bit, restoring the appearance of an amazing country, no less legendary than the famous Atlantis and Shambhala.
Every researcher who studies the history of Orthodoxy in Russia stops before an inexplicable phenomenon, a sharply negative attitude towards such a seemingly harmless musical instrument as a gusli. So even the preacher of the 12th century, Kirill Turovsky, threatened with death torment those "who bewitches, hums in the harp, tells fairy tales." In the 16th century missal, among the questions in confession, there are the following: "Did the yasi sing a song of demons, did the yasi play the gusli?" And hegumen Pamphil scolded the Pskovites for the fact that "during the Kupala night they played tambourines and snuffled and hummed with strings." Historical documents indicate that during the time of Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov, gusli were confiscated from the population and burned by carts. Why? Today, apparently, we can answer this question.
But let's start with the fact that back in 1903, in the Indian city of Bombay, a book by the outstanding Indian scientist and public figure Tilak was published, "The Arctic Homeland in the Vedas." Having devoted his whole life to the study of his native people, he analyzed for a long time and carefully ancient traditions, legends and sacred hymns, born in the depths of millennia by the distant ancestors of the Indians and Iranians. And those strange phenomena that were described in the sacred books of the Rigveda, Mahabharata, Upanishads, Tilak came to the conclusion that these texts were created in the north of Europe, somewhere near the Arctic Circle. It was here that the ancestral home of the Indo-Iranians was located, or as they called themselves the Aryans. Some of them 4-5 thousand years ago went to the territory of India and Iran. Tilak's book, translated into all European languages, was first translated into Russian only in 2000. Natalia Romanovna Guseva and was published in Moscow in 2001. In the mid-50s of the 20th century, the outstanding Sanskritologist Rahula Sankrityayana described these movements in his book "From the Volga to the Ganges" and introduced a new term into scientific circulation - the Indo-Slavs. Note that back in 1964, one of the largest Sanskritologists in India, Professor Durga Prasad Shastri, wrote "If I were asked which two languages of the world are most similar to each other, I would answer Russian and Sanskrit without any hesitation."which two languages of the world are most similar to each other, I would answer without any hesitation Russian and Sanskrit. "which two languages of the world are most similar to each other, I would answer without any hesitation Russian and Sanskrit."
Thus, the ancient Vedic rituals, rituals, sacred texts are directly related to the North Russian folk tradition, the researchers of which have repeatedly noted that it is characterized by the conservation of rudiments of the most archaic phenomena, sometimes not reflected even in the Vedic tradition. It is well known that great importance was attached in Vedic mythology to a water bird - a goose, a swan, a duck, where it symbolized: sky, light, fire, sun, as well as the embodiment of the Creator and the Universe. So in Sanskrit hamsa - goose - a swan soul that has cognized the highest Truth, the highest spirit, light, fire, sacred musical Rome, the music of the Universe.
But in the Russian folk tradition, the images of waterfowl play an exceptional role. Often it is the goose, the swan, the duck that mark the sphere of the sacred in the ritual songs of the calendar cycle. And in the same songs, it is the gusli that is an obligatory component of the scoring of the sacred text. An example is the pre-wedding song recorded in the Arkhangelsk province: “Where were the geese, where did you spend the night, where did you sleep, you visited. We slept with the princess, visited the first-wed woman. And what is the princess doing? He plays the harp, equips gifts."
The psaltery was buzzing, and here it is worth remembering that in both Russian dialects and in Sanskrit, “gu” means to sound. No hooke - no sound, no buzz, that is, no sound. But besides this, the term "gu" in Sanskrit also means to go, to move. Let's remember the Russian word to walk. We are walking a holiday, we are walking a wedding, that is, we both sound and move. And here we come, perhaps, to the most important thing.
In the ancient Vedic texts, in the books of the epics Mahabharata, Adiparva and Ashvamedhikaparva it is said that the creation of the Universe took place as follows. By the thought and the word, which is the voiced thought of the Creator, a kind of huge egg appeared, “eternal as the seed of all beings. In him, the real light was the eternal Brahmo - wonderful, unimaginable, omnipresent. He who is the hidden and imperceptible cause of the real and not real. Brahmo as a combination of masculine and feminine principles, that is, something in between. He had only one property, and that was sound. In Ashamedhikaparva, Brahmo is called superluminous light, ether. It was this superluminal light that created space and produced the basis of personality, which is inherently heavenly. Note that superlight light is the name of the background of our Russian icons. Brahmo in the ancient Aryan texts is called ether. And it is affirmed that ether is the highest of the elements. It has only one property, and it is called sound. Ether produces seven sounds and a chord. Then the sounds of the ether give rise to movement or wind. And he already has two properties, sound and touch, that is, inertia. Moreover, inertia is an intrinsic property of wind and motion. As a result of the reduction of speed in excess of light or ether, due to touch - inertia, visible light appears, consisting of seven colors of the spectrum, which is correlated with seven primary sounds. The properties of light are sound, touch and image. Moreover, the image is its own property of light (visible light). Everything that we see in this world is that which has an image. Born out of sound and movement, it is the visible light that is on the border, referring as light to the world of divine Rule and as an image to the manifested world of Revelation.
Note that in the teaching against paganism in the X11 - X111 centuries in "The Word about the Creature and the Days of the Recommended Week", it is said that Russian pagans worship on the first day of the seven-day week (resurrection) not the sun, claiming that the sun is only a material embodiment of light, but white light, that is, the universal light. As Boris Alexandrovich Rybakov wrote, this light, having no visible source, not tangible and inscrutable, like an emanation of the deity creating the world, was the object of worship of the medieval pagans. The sacred texts of the Upanishads say that the universal light is a golden-flowered bird that dwells in the heart and sun. Fire is called a white bird that carries light. In Sanskrit, "purifying, purifying" fire sounds like pavana, and pavaka is pure, bright fire. In addition, pavana is a fresh breeze, and pavana manna is the name of many hymns of praise. But in the North Russian ritual songs, the waterfowl goose-swan is called pavanka, pava, pavana. Thus, fire and a hymn of praise in Sanskrit directly correlate with the North Russian name for a goose - a swan - pavanka, pava, pavana. And here it is worth remembering that the ancient Slavic ritual bonfires of the V1 - V century BC looked like the figures of flaming swans. As evidenced by the ash-pan found by archaeologists - the remains of these bonfires. Knowing that in the most ancient tradition, the musical mode associated with geese and swans creates the music of the cosmos, that playing the harp is comparable in this mythopoetic series with the weaving of world harmony, one can understand why the author of The Lay of Igor's Host connects into a single image a herd of swans and living strings - a gusel, along which the fingers of the prophetic Boyan move, like along the threads of the warp of wefts, creating the weave of an epic song.
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In the Rig Veda, the hymn-making of sages (Rishi or Rasha) is a process in which the highest creative power of the word (voiced thought) creates the cosmos, weaves it. Such a Sanskrit term as "prastava", which has an analogy in the North Russian dialect of "prastava", "prastavka", testifies to the unity of the concepts of pattern of fabric and pattern of song, weaving fabric, expressing a song. But the North Russian "prastavka", "prastava" is a strip of fabric embroidered or filled with a woven pattern that adorns shirts, aprons, the ends of pious towels, tablecloths, wedding sheets, that is, sacred things. The Sanskrit prastava is a sacred text, a hymn of praise. Thus, in the hymns of the Rig Veda, the poet-singer asks for help in weaving the work, and says that illuminated poets are weaving a new and new thread to the sky and into the ocean. Moreover, within the text of the hymn itself, the term "prastava" has many meanings: "prastava" is fire, sun, rising sun, time after sunrise, air space, rain, wind, summer, speech, human skin, love call, three worlds. Thus, singing the sacred hymn, the poet-singer-musician united all three worlds into one whole. With a voice, ritual singing, like a duck weaves from threads - words, on threads of the base - strings the fabric of the universe. In this structure, the musical instrument is virtually identical to the loom. It is no coincidence that the Vedic texts, many thousand years ago, speak of three threads of the basis, along which the goose-light-fire moves, creating the material world. Thus, singing the sacred hymn, the poet-singer-musician united all three worlds into one whole. With a voice, ritual singing, like a duck weaves from threads - words, on threads of the base - strings the fabric of the universe. In this structure, the musical instrument is virtually identical to the loom. It is no coincidence that the Vedic texts, many thousand years ago, speak of three threads of the basis, along which the goose-light-fire moves, creating the material world. Thus, singing the sacred hymn, the poet-singer-musician united all three worlds into one whole. With a voice, ritual singing, like a duck weaves from threads - words, on threads of the base - strings the fabric of the universe. In this structure, the musical instrument is virtually identical to the loom. It is no coincidence that the Vedic texts, many thousand years ago, speak of three threads of the basis, along which the goose-light-fire moves, creating the material world.
The ancient three-stringed wing-shaped gusli is a musical instrument extremely close to the ideal - a divine instrument. Ponder the words of the ancient Veda of conspiracies hymns - the Adharva Veda - which tells about the preservation of harmony in the universe: “Two youths scurry about the base, two scurrying on six pegs, one stretches the other yarn and does not tear it, do not interrupt. Here are the pegs - they are the basis for the sky, they became voices for weaving by shuttles. " The 6 pegs mentioned in the hymn, three on each side, on which three strings are stretched - the threads of the warp (guna) are sacred pillars, about which the Rig Veda says: “Like geese lined up in rows, pillars dressed in light came to us, raised in front of fire poets, the gods enter the path of the gods."
Guslars from year to year, from century to century, from millennium to millennium, constantly in the process of creative enlightenment repeated the act of creating the Universe. They are buzzing, which means that from the sound gu and the movement of gu, they create a third component - visible light, which creates everything manifested in the Universe, the entire material, illusory world. They feed the cosmos with light, preventing chaos from destroying it, preserving our world and the highest law of being. And it is no coincidence that they, who were also called buffoons, and "skomrat" in Sanskrit means a messenger, a messenger, they said "walking with the light in the world." And in the struggle for spiritual power that went on in Russia for a millennium, apparently, they remained undefeated, since even at the end of the 20th century, an archaic form of a living gusl tradition was preserved in Russia, which was found by an expedition of the Leningrad Conservatory in Pskov,Novgorod and Kirov regions.
Author: Zharnikova Svetlana Vasilievna