The last act, which ends the earthly life of a person, is full of mysterious significance. The inexorable death, constantly taking away new sacrifices, does not reveal anything for the surviving generations about the unknown country where it had carried away their predecessors. But man, by the very nature of his sublime nature, thirsts to know what will happen to him beyond the grave. The idea of ultimate destruction is so hostile to the instinct of life, felt by man, that in the deepest antiquity it was alienated by him in the name of hope for life beyond the grave, which is one of the most important questions in all religions.
Holidays in honor of the dead, offerings and libations on their graves, belief in the appearance of the dead and many other legends clearly testify that, along with other pagan tribes, the Slavs were convinced that there - behind the grave a new life begins, and had their own rather detailed, although not strictly defined ideas.
First of all, let us note the significant fact that the Slavs recognized in the soul something separate from the body, having its own independent existence. According to their beliefs, which agree with the beliefs of other Indo-European peoples, the soul, even during a person's life, can temporarily part with the body and then return to it again; such removal of the soul usually occurs during sleep hours, since sleep and death are related concepts. Montenegrins and Serbs are convinced that a spirit, which they call "vedogon", dwells in every person, and that this spirit can leave the body, enveloped in sound sleep. Vedogoni often quarrel and fight among themselves, and the person, whose vigilance dies in a fight, no longer wakes up: he immediately suffers a quick death. It is said about sorcerers and witches that they, falling into sleep, can release an airy demonic creature from themselves, i.e. That is, a soul that takes on various images and wanders around in one place or another, and the body left by it lies completely dead. And during the deceit or lethargic sleep, the soul, according to Russian belief, leaves the body and wanders in the next world. Thus, the body is, as it were, the dwelling of a living spirit, that temporary shell in which it is enclosed at the birth of a child and which it leaves at the death of a person, when, in the words of an ancient preacher, “the soul needs a terrible soul from the body and becomes possessed. body, as if someone had dragged himself out of his robe and then would have been in vain for it. "the body is, as it were, the dwelling of a living spirit, that temporary shell in which it is enclosed at the birth of a child and which it leaves at the death of a person, when, in the words of an ancient preacher, “the soul needs a terrible soul from the body and becomes obsessed with the soul that sees its body, as but whoever dragged himself out of his robe and then would have been in vain for it. "the body is, as it were, the dwelling of a living spirit, that temporary shell in which it is enclosed at the birth of a child and which it leaves at the death of a person, when, in the words of an ancient preacher, “the soul needs a terrible soul from the body and becomes obsessed with the soul that sees its body, as but whoever dragged himself out of his robe and then would have been in vain for it."
The human soul, according to ancient pagan legends, was represented in the most diverse forms:
1. In the form of fire. The Slavs recognized in the human soul the manifestation of the same creative power, without which no life on earth is possible: this is the power of light and warmth, acting in the flame of spring thunderstorms and in the life-giving rays of the sun. The soul is actually a particle, a spark of this heavenly fire, which gives the eyes shine, blood - heat and the whole body - inner warmth. The people designate various spiritual movements by likening to fire: they give feelings hot, warm, ardent epithets! about love, enmity and malice it is expressed that they are kindled or extinguished; in the epic language of the Serbs, anger is called living fire, and Belarusians say about irritable, hot-tempered people: “odzin with fire, another with sex”. In close connection with this view are myths that ascribe to the thunder god the creation of the first man and the bringing down of fire to his home,the gift of childbearing to wives (= kindling of fiery souls in newborn babies) and the device of a family union.
Even now, among the common people, wandering, swampy and glowing on the graves, due to phosphoric vapors, are recognized as the souls of the departed.
2. The soul was represented by a star, which has the closest connection with its representation by fire; for primitive man considered the stars to be sparks of fire, shining in the heights of the sky. In folk legends, the soul is likewise compared to a star, as well as to a flame; and death is likened to a shooting star, which, being lost in air spaces, seems to be extinguished. Such an assimilation, when its original basis was forgotten and the metaphor began to be understood in its literal sense, served as the source of the belief that connected human life with the celestial stars. Each person received his own star in the sky, with the fall of which his existence ceases; if, on the one hand, death was signified by the falling of a star, then on the other, the birth of a baby was to be signified: by the appearance or kindling of a new star,as evidenced by the legends of the Indo-European peoples.
3. As fire is accompanied by smoke, as a lightning-fast flame is kindled in smoky clouds smoking in vapors, so the soul, according to some indications, emanated from the body in smoke and steam. In the Sofia periodical about the death of V. book Vasily Ivanovich said: "and in the sight of Shigon his spirit departed, like a small smoke." Skt. dhûma moving smoke, Greek. ΰμα, δύος - smoking, incense, lat. fumus (with the replacement of dh by the sound f), glory. smoke, lit. dumas, Old German. toum, taum from sncr. dhû - agitare, commovere (= Greek δύω). From the same root, words were formed indicating mental abilities: gr. δυμός - soul and movement of passion, glory. thought, think, lit. duma, dumoti, dumti. The word steam [to soar - becomes stuffy before a thunderstorm and rain, to sweat, parun - heat, stuffiness] has the following meanings: steam, spirit and soul; a couple out, that is, soul out!
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4. Further, the soul was understood as an airy being, like a blowing wind. Language brought both of these concepts closer together, which is clearly evidenced by the following words originating from one root: soul, breathe, cart (s) -breathe, d (s) whine, spirit (wind), blow, blow, in spirit - quickly, soon, cart -breathing, air-breathing, breath-toх4. In other languages, names are also given to the soul from air, wind, storm: from SNCR. root an - to blow formed: ana, ana - breath and breath of life, anila - wind, anu - man, that is, living, animated, lat. animal - animal, animus, anima, rpen. άνεμος - spirit, soul, Irl. anail - breath, breath, kimr. anal, armor. énal - breath, Irl. anam, kimr. en, enaid, enydd, ener, enawr, root enef, armor. éné, inean - soul, life, goth. complex uz-anan - breathe out, die, Old German. unst - storm, blizzard, scandal. andi - spiritus, önd - soul,Persian. ân - spiritual ability, Armenians, antsn - mind, soul. In the deepest antiquity, they believed that the winds are the breath of a deity and that the Creator Rod, creating a man, breathed a living soul into him. The winds acquired the power to call the dead to life, to spiritualize corpses and bones. Leaving the body, the soul returned to its primitive, elemental state. When a whirlwind tears off leaves from trees and they vibrate, rush through the air, - the fault of this, according to the Montenegrins, is the vedogon fighting among themselves; if the wind is blowing in the chimney, the Belarusians take this as a sign that a soul has appeared in the house, sent to earth to repent; in the howling of the winds, sailors hear the weeping and groans of the drowned, whose souls are condemned to remain at the bottom of the sea. Such a representation of the soul is completely in accordance with the physiological law according to which a person's life is conditioned by breathing air into himself. In southern Siberia, the chest and lungs are called puffs; Commoners believe that the soul is trapped in the windpipe, the cutting of which ends life!.. The verbs to breathe, choke, choke, choke means: die, that is, lose the ability to breathe air into oneself, without which existence becomes impossible. They say about the deceased: "he breathed his last breath" or "the last spirit!" On the contrary, the verb to rest (rest) is used in folk speech in the sense: to recover, to return to life. To come to such conclusions, our ancestors had enough simple, for all equally accessible observation: at the moment when a person was dying, the first thing that should have amazed the relatives around him was the cessation of breathing in him; before them lay the deceased with the same bodily organs as those of the living; he still had eyes, ears, mouth, arms and legs,but breath has already disappeared, and with it the vital force that controlled these organs has disappeared. From this arose the conviction that the soul, separated from the body, flies out into the open mouth, together with the dying man's last breath.
5. In the distant centuries of paganism, lightning was given the mythical image of a worm, caterpillar, and the winds - a bird; the human soul became related to those and other natural phenomena and, parting with the body, could take the same images that were given to the thunderous flame and blowing winds. The following thought also joined this view: after the death of a person, his soul began a new life; besides natural birth, when a person is born with a living soul, this last, at the mysterious moment of his death, as if again, another time, was born into another life - a sepulchral one. Leaving her body shell, she incarnated into a new form; with her, in the opinion of the observant pagan, the same metamorphosis should have taken place as is seen in the animal kingdom. Fantasy used two illustrative comparisons:
a) once born caterpillar (worm), dying, resurrects again in the form of a light-winged butterfly (moth) or other winged insect;
b) a bird, born initially in the form of an egg, then, as if reborn, hatches from it as a chicken. This circumstance was the reason why the bird is called twice-born in Sanskrit (dvidza); We meet the same look in our folk riddles: "move will be born, and once you die"
These are curious echoes of that ancient belief, according to which a fiery soul, brought down from heaven, dwelt in a human body as a luminous worm or larva, and at the moment of death it flew out from there like a light-winged butterfly from its cocoon.
6. The folk language and legends speak of souls as flying, winged creatures. According to our villagers, the soul of the deceased, after being separated from his body, remains under his own roof for up to six weeks, drinks, eats, listens to the statements of grief of his friends and relatives, and then flies off to the next world.
Speaking of the flight of souls, they hint at the oldest representation of them by birds. Such a hint receives special strength with the positive testimony of other beliefs preserved among the Slavs. The Kashubs are firmly convinced that the souls of the deceased, before the burial of the bodies they left behind, sit in the form of birds on chimneys and that children's souls are dressed in gentle fluff.
Along with other Indo-European peoples, the Slavs have preserved many touching stories about the transformation of the deceased into light-winged birds, in the form of which they visit their relatives. As soon as the soul leaves the body, it, depending on the nature of its earthly life, takes the form of one or another bird, mainly a white dove or a black raven. Ukrainians, for example, think that the soul of a deceased person flies with an angel in an unknown world for forty days, appearing every night to his house, where she, in the form of a dove, bathes in specially supplied water.
7. Understanding the soul as a flame and wind, the Aryan tribe had to make it akin to the elemental beings that inhabit the sky and air. This relationship is attested by language: soul and dyx = geist (from gîsan - to blow, blow), anima and άνεμος. According to Indian beliefs, crowds of elemental spirits, personifying heavenly rays, lightning and winds (ribhus, bhrigus, angirasen, maruts), did not differ in any way from pitris = patres, fathers, ancestors, that is, from the dead, who are called parents and grandfathers among the Slavs … The Vedic religion recognizes the sky and the air world as two separate areas. Light abides in the boundless spaces of the sky as an eternal, creative force; between this land of light and the earth stretches the kingdom of air, in which clouds and clouds float, carrying the living water of rains and blocking the path of the sun's rays. The souls of the ancestors live there.
According to the testimony of the hymns, the fathers rush about in the clouds, sparkle with lightning, extract rain from the clouds and pour it on the fields of their descendants; they put darkness in the night, and in the morning they find the hidden light and call the beautiful Zorya to awakening, that is, catching up with black clouds, they darken the sky with night-like covers, and scattering them in a thunderstorm, they bring the radiant sun out of the darkness. Thus, the outdated ancestors were mixed and identified with stormy and thunderous spirits.
The host of winds (marut), according to the Hindus, was constantly replenished with the souls of the dead. The spirits of ribhus, whose elemental nature is manifested in the brilliance of the sun's rays and flashing lightning, were also recognized for the souls of the blessed; they stood in the same close relation to Indra as the maruts: they took part in thunderstorm flights, sang a stormy song, brought down streams from the sky, helped earthly fertility and were famous as skilled blacksmiths. The same double meaning of elemental spirits and deceased ancestors belongs to the Angiras, who only differ from the lightning ribu that accompany the god Agni and all their activity is limited by the element of fire; but we know that Agni was originally the god of the thunderous flame. The Angirasses were recognized by their ancestors on the same grounds on which, among all Indo-European peoples, house penates were both representatives of the hearth and deified grandfathers. Among the Germans, the spirits of the frantic army and the mâren correspond to the maruts, and the ribhus is literally the same as the (light) elves. Maruts and mars (moras, maruhi) are the names of one root !; the latter are equally known to both the Germans and the Slavs; on the one hand, they were mistaken for dark or night elves, and on the other, for the souls of the dead. Raising the winds, the Maruts catch up dark clouds on the firmament and knock them down with curls and hair; from these thickened and swirling clouds, father Marut Rudra was called shaggy, which reminds us of the matted hair of the mar - mârenlocke. Hence it is understandable why elves, maras and zwergs mix with folk legends with the shadows of the dead and why souls were represented by the German-Slavic tribe as flying babies, elf-like Karls. Elves are considered by the people for people from the other world; their body is not the same as that of living people: it cannot be grabbed,not touch! they penetrate everywhere without the need for doors and openings, and disappear as quickly as a breath of wind. The deceased enter the circle of elves, and therefore the death of a person is celebrated by them, like a wedding or the arrival of a dear guest, with music and dancing.
That the souls of the Slavs seemed to be elven creatures, dwarfs, the most important evidence of this is offered by the Old Russian Nav, Navier. From sncr. paç - to die occurred lat. infantry - death, Greek. νέχυς, Gothic. naus (pl. naveis), navis - dead, navistr - grave, scandal. pa - dead body, corpse, Latvian. nahwe - death, nahwigs - deadly, poisonous, nahweht - to kill; in the Old Bohemian language unawiti meant: to destroy, to kill ("mlatem čvrtého unavi"), a naw, nawa - death, grave, dwelling of the dead: "Krok ide do nawi".
The word nav, navier is in affinity with the Scandinians. nâr (nâir, nâinn) - gloomy dwarf, miniature. The chronicler, talking about the appearance in 1092 of invisible spirits that roamed on horses and struck the Polotsk people with death, adds that at that time they said: "As if the Polotsk people are beating navye," that is, the dead punish the people with plague arrows (= lightning). In the Pereyaslavl list, we find an interesting variant: "they are (people) deciding: children eat us out of the wind."
Thus, we can see that the Slavs had truly peculiar, unique and rich in description ideas about the soul, which were associated with constant observations of nature and its laws. The ideas about the soul were multidimensional and completely harmoniously fit into the overall picture of nature.
According to ethnographic materials Afanasyev A. N.