Descending to Hades

One of my favourite frescoes: Christ's descent into Hades, fresco from the 12th c. Church of St. George, Kurbinovo, Macedonia... 

Stunningly beautiful, it is also super unusual and interesting. Here is why:

Christ is depicted in a globe of light, pulling Adam by his wrist out of Hades...Literally...As Hades is depicted as a mountain with human face...

Here is a Hades's head detail enlarged. Hades is depicted as an old man with a long beard with his mouth opened and an expression of pure terror. He is facing away from Christ, but he seems to be trying to get a glimpse of what's happening behind his back...

You can read analysis of this fresco in the paper by Dejan Gorgievski entitled "The mysterious mountain of Kurbinovo"...

Very good analysis. But there are few bits that he missed...

This depiction of Hades as an anthropomorphised mountain is very strange...Because Hebrew Sheol, Greek Hades and Christian Hell were all believed to be located "under the surface of the earth, below"...

Yet the dead were depicted on this fresco to be "inside of a mountain"...I know, I know...We could say that this is technically "under the surface of the earth, below", but...

Have you ever heard of Ekur? Ekur, "the mountain house of the dead" from Sumerian mythology?

Ekur is one of the names for the earth, but is applied more particularly to "that part of the mountain"...where the gods were born...And from where they came to Sumer...

These mountains are actual, real mountains, north east of Sumer, where the first civilisations arose, where grain agriculture was invented. I talked about this in my post about "How grain came to Sumer"... 

And in the earliest Sumerian mythology, it was on this mountain that the gods were supposed to dwell. 

Hence Ekur became also one of the names for "temple", as the seat of a god, temple which was shaped to look like a mountain...

And it is inside this holy mountain that we find the land of the dead...And guess who is the God of the Dead in the Sumerian mythology? The Sun...

The Sumerian poem "Enki and the World Order" exclaims: Young Utu (the sun), father of the Great City (the realm of the dead, underworld)...I talked about it in my post "Soul bird"...

And until today it never occurred to me why it was "Young Utu/Shamash" who was the "God of Ekur"...

The Holy Mountain, Ekur, The mountain of gods and mountain of the dead, is also the source of Tigris and Euphrates...

It is the snowmelt runoff from these mountains that is the main source of the Holy Rivers...

Snowmelt which is the result of the spring sun getting higher and higher in the sky, and heating higher and higher ranges of the mountains, melting more and more snow...Which creates bigger and bigger snowmelt runoff...Which causes water level in Tigris and Euphrates to rise...

And so, symbolically 🙂, it is Young Utu/Shamash, Spring Sun, who every  spring climbs up the Holy Mountain to release Enki/Ea, (god of) fresh water, from (his) it's icy prison...

I talked about this in my post "Shamash young and old":

And poetically 🙂, in "Enki and Ninhursanga" we read that "When Utu [the sun god] steps up into Heaven (Holy mountain), fresh waters shall run out of the ground for you"...

I talked about this in my post "When Utu steps up to heaven"...

Sun, brings water which in Sumer literally resurrects life...At the moment when sun (solar year) is about to enter "the land of the dead", hot dry season...

The domain of the Old Utu/Shamash...Old Sun, Sun at the end of Summer, Sun in Leo...Nergal, God of Death...Who was because of that depicted as a lion-man...I talked about this in my posts "Winged superhuman hero", "Angra Mainyu", "The king killing Angra Mainyu", "Achaemenid lion boar seal"...

Oh, BTW, Leo (Jul/Aug) marks the beginning of the main mating season of Eurasian lions...Hence Leo...

Anyway, this is why it is "Young Utu", Spring Sun, who is the god of "the mountain house" of the dead...

Compare that to Christ, Son of God, going into the mountain of the dead as an orb of light, in Spring...

Interesting...

BTW, Slavs believed this: "...the souls of our ancestors shine every morning from Iriy (Slavic Paradise)..."

There are two worlds, the world of the living and the world of the dead. The sun spends the day in the world of the living and the night in the world of the dead...

And there are two gates that stand on the border between these two worlds: the eastern gate and the western gate...

Every morning the eastern gate is opened by Danica, the day star, which is in the morning called Zornjača, the morning star, and the sun comes from the world of the dead into the world of the living...

And every evening the sun goes from the world of the living into the world of the dead through the western gate, which is then closed behind him by Danica, the day star, which is in the evening called Večernjača, the evening star...

The souls of the dead follow sun to the western gate, which is where the entrance into the land of the dead is...

And there they enter Iriy, the ever green land of eternal spring, full of cattle...Raj..Paradise. And every morning, when the eastern gate of the world of the dead is opened, they smile on us...

Also: In Ireland there was a belief that the souls of the dead departed westwards over the sea with the setting sun...

And Serbs believed that their Supreme god Dabog, Giving God, was both Sun God, Rain (water) God and God of the Dead...

Where does the sun come from in the morning and where does it go back in the evening?

The same observation resulted in Dabog, Serbian Sun god, Serbian ancestral deity, having all the characteristics of the god of the dead, and having the cult which is in its essence a cult of the dead...According to Serbian ethnographers...

People are logical...

This is also the reason why the dead play such a huge role in Slavic agricultural cult...Not only that the life literally grows out of the dead...But Dabog, The Sun, the father of the living, and the dead, resides among the dead...

And if the dead are not happy with the living, and if they complain to "Their Father", Dabog, about the living...Then the living are basically fucked...I talked about this in my posts "Diduch", "Julenek", "White feast"

Hittites forgot about their dead, and look what happened to them: 

"...humiliation of the Hittite kingdom is the result of the fact that the living Hittite kings and their subjects have forgotten to respect the sacred bond with their dead..." - From the letter of the last Hittite king, Suppiluliuma II...

I talked about this in my post "House of bones"...

So, Dejan Gorgievski thought this was a very interesting fresco...I think it's even more interesting than he was aware of...

PS: Kurbinovo monastery is located on the southwest slopes of Baba Mountain...This is the highest peak on the Baba mountain, Pelister...

Now the word Baba means Mother, Grandmother, Midwife...Birth Giver...Among South Slavs, Baba was also the name used for Mother Earth...There are many mountains, peaks, crags, bedrock outcrops all over Balkans with the names whose root is Baba. And there is a whole belief system linked to Baba/Mother Earth, preserved in the local folklore...I talked about this in my post "Living stone"...

So I don't think it was a coincidence that we find the fresco depicting living mountains, in the church located on the Baba mountain...

There is another interesting monastery in Macedonia, built on the summit of Babuna (Evil old woman) mountain...I talked about it in my post "Treskavec"...

Hope you enjoyed this...

White Cross

This is the reconstruction of the Beli križ (White Cross) shrine which was once located in the valley southeast of the village of Prelože, Slovenia...

The shrine was destroyed during the First World War. But the locals preserved a vivid memory of it and of the rituals performed around it. These were collected by ethnographers during the middle of the 20th century...

As you can see, it was "a cross in a circle" made of stones, with four stones in each quarter of the circle and four pointy rocks on the ends of cross hands...

Basically this is a so called "sun cross", which symbolises a solar year with four season. Ever spinning solar wheel. This is confirmed by the fact that a bonfire was lit in the field near the shrine on Kresovanje (Bonfire night, Midsummer night)...

In the center of the "shrine" was a stick on which young green tree branches were attached, symbolising a young green tree. Or maybe this cross was rebuilt every year around a real young tree. This is not clear from the original text...This tree symbolically grew during the fertility ceremony which was performed around the cross in the spring "when the foliage turned green", which in the Prelože area happens in April...The carpet of crocus flowers across the slopes of Velika Planina in Slovenia, April...

It is quite possible that this ceremony took place on Jurjevo (St. George’s Day), the old Jarilo (Slavic Young Sun God) day...The field where the White Cross shrine once stood is linked to St George...I talked about him and why he is "The Dragon Killer" in this article "Letnitsa treasure"...

A very interesting metal plaque from the so called "Let­nit­sa Treas­ure", a 4th c. BC Thracian hoard discovered near Let­nit­sa, Bulgaria...This one depicts one of the most common themes from Balkan fairytales: a princess being kidnapped by a dragon...

Jarilo (Jura), whose name means both "the brightly burning one" (sun) and "the young one, the green one" (bringer of spring, summer, The Green Man) was in other Jurjevo rituals from Slovenia represented by a living walking tree.

Zeleni Jura (Green Yura) walking the earth. Part of Jurjevanje, celebration of the return of Jarilo, Jura, The  Young Sun God who brings spring...Today performed on St George's day...Tells you a lot about the true Identity of St George...

This ritual is performed Bela Krajina, area inhabited by descendants of Serbians who migrated here during Turkish invasions of the Balkans. Today split between Croatia/Slovenia...This is the original Green Man...

The Sun God's name Jarilo (pronounced Yareelo) comes from the root "jar" (yar) meaning: young, green (Life giving warm sun of green spring), but also brightly burning and raging, furious (Life destroying burning sun of yellow summer)...

Interestingly, in Sanskrit, har (cognate of jar, yar) can also mean green and yellow... 

So the fact that a (symbolic) young green tree, symbol of the sun god Jarilo, was "growing" in the middle of the shrine shaped like a sun cross, points at the symbolic meaning of this shrine: solar year and the climate which it creates...

And it is this climate which people of Prelože were trying to control...As part of the ceremony at the White Cross, four young girls span around the circle interconnected by ivy branches, singing prayers for "sun, rain and abundant crops"...

They prayed to "Dajbogec" (Giving god), another name for Dabog, the old Slavic Sky God...

In Serbian the expression "On vedri i oblači" means "he rules", "he has absolute control, absolute power". Literally this expression means "he makes the sky clear and cloudy"...I talked about this in my post "The power of the thunder giant"...

Dabog, Dajbog was also another name for Triglav, Trimurti, the Supreme god...I talked about Triglav in several of my posts: "Lugus or Triglav", "When the bride dies soon after the wedding", "Sun thunder fire", "Riddle", "Krkava Triglav stone", "Triglav, Trojan, Trinity, Trimurti, Agni"...

This is what Triglav is, one God with three faces: Sun, Thunder, Fire...

It is very interesting that the "shrine" contained pointy upward stones and that at this shrine girls (women) prayed to Dabog for good weather (just enough rain and sunshine) so that their crops would yield abundantly...

Because this is not the only place where we find large stones used in weather rituals involving Dabog and performed by women...

In his 1925 paper "The Ring of Nestor", Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of Knossos, mentions a curious rain-making ritual which was performed in Ibrahimovci, near Skoplje, Macedonia, during droughts. 

Pic: Altar dedicated to Jupiter, Juno und Minerva, Macedonia

This is 1925 we are talking about. At least 1500 years since Jupiter was officially a god of rain...And yet, uneducated, illiterate SLAVIC villagers in Macedonia still remembered him in times of desperation...

What is very interesting is that this altar "was lying face down normally but was lifted when the rain was needed". Compare this with this Slavic rain making ritual from Belarus in which Dabog's stone is ceremonially lifted...I talked about this in my post "The last megalithic ritual in Europe"...

And compare this with other weather controlling Slavic rituals involving sky pointing "weather stones"...See, these weather stones have the same shape as the stones from the White Cross...I talked about them in my post "Weather stones"...

Source of info about the shrine and related rituals:

Pleterski, A. 2015, Preplet 3 in 4, preloška "Beli Križ in Triglavca ter Zbruški idol", in: Nesnovna krajina Krasa

Lords of divination

In Serbian the expression "On vedri i oblači" means "he rules", "he has absolute control, absolute power". Literally this expression means "he makes the sky clear and cloudy"...

I talked about this in my post "The power of the Thunder Giant"...

This expression was obviously originally applied to the sky god, The God, The Lord of the early agricultural societies and the peasants, particularly the wheat farmers, whose lives depend on the climate being just right...

The sky god, the sky father, was over time split into Sun god (Svetovid) and Storm god (Perun)...

But the fact that these were just two faces of the old Sky god was preserved in Serbian folklore in Dabog (Giving God, The Sky Father)...

You know that you are dealing with someone powerful when his name is "Giving god"...This means that he can also not give if you piss him off..

Dabog was seen as both the sun god, and as the rain god...

Serbs also preserved the notion of the Sun and Thunder god being one and the same in their "thundering saint" Elijah the Thunderer...

He is seen as the burning sun of the late summer and as the cooling rainstorm of the early autumn...

Elijah the Thunderer is celebrated at the end of summer and start of autumn, on the old day of Perun's victory over Veles...But Elijah is both Veles, The Dragon (Drought) who steals Perun's "heavenly cows" (clouds), and Perun, The Dragon Killer...

I talked about this in my post "Dragon that stole rain"...

The other day I thought that I guess you could say that there is only one God in the sky, and that is The Sun...It is The Sun that both takes away the heavenly cows (causes drought) and mercifully returns them...If you pray enough...

I think that the Ancient Sumerians had the same view of heaven and who's the boss up there...

This is "dingir" symbol, which means "god" and is placed in front of every god's name to indicate that we are dealing with a deity...Originally though, it was an ideogram for the Sumerian word an ("sky" or "heaven")...People say it looks like a star. To me it looks like The Sun.

It is An, The Sky Father and Ki, The Earth Mother, who gave, and continue to give birth to everything...Including all the "gods" and all life. 

Father (sky) + Mother (earth) = Life...It is their union, their interplay, their intercourse, that creates that life...Interestingly, when you put the names of the Sumerian father sky and mother earth together you get AnKi...

Strangely similar to ankh...

I talked about this in my posts "Etemenanki", "Square and compasses" and "An Ki - Ankh"...

Anyway eventually The Sky god, The Sky Father, was split into Sun god and Storm god... In Akkad, Sun god Shamash and Storm god Adad...And interestingly, Shamash and Adad became in combination the gods of oracles and of divination in general...

Of course, because if you are a farmer, it is the will of these two, that determines whether you eat or starve, live or die...Which is why you turn to the sky in your prayers...

And so the main duty of diviners was to figure out what Shamash and Adad were up to. Basically what is Sky God, Sky Father up to...

In the annals and votive inscriptions of the kings, when oracles are referred to, Shamash and Adad are always named as the gods addressed as "lords of divination".

And it was the main duty of the priests to figure out what were Shamash and Adad pleased with and what were they pissed off with...What The Sky God, The Sky Father wanted...In return for "Giving" life and not "Taking" life...

And to put that into religious laws and make everyone obey these laws...And make everyone practice what pleases the Sun god and Storm god (Sky God or just God who are in...) and abstain from what might piss "The Lord" off...

Cause "On vedri i oblači" (he makes the sky clear and cloudy) and you don't mess with someone so powerful...

Jupiter from Ibrahimovci

Altar dedicated to Jupiter, Juno und Minerva, Macedonia

In his 1925 paper "The Ring of Nestor", Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of Knossos, mentions a curious rain-making ritual which was performed in Ibrahimovci, near Skoplje, Macedonia, during droughts.

This is 1925 we are talking about. At least 1500 years since Jupiter was officially a god of rain...And yet, uneducated, illiterate SLAVIC villagers in Macedonia still remembered him in times of desperation...

What is very interesting is that this altar "was lying face down normally but was lifted when the rain was needed". Compare this with this Slavic rain making ritual from Belarus in which Dabog's stone (Dabog was Slavic Sky god) is ceremonially lifted during droughts...

I talked about Slavic "Weather stones" rituals in my posts "The last megalithic ritual in Europe" and "Weather stones"...

Diduch

This is Diduch or Did, the most important decoration made in the Carpathian villages in Western Ukraine during the traditional winter holidays, originally Winter Solstice, now Christmas...

It is a decorated sheaf of grain (rye or wheat) made from a the first and the last stalks of grain reaped that year and brought home ceremonially from the fields by the queen of the harvest...

I talked about the end of harvest rituals in my post "Wheat wreath"...

In the Boykivshchyna, agricultural tools were stuck in Didukh: a sickle and a rake. Today dried flowers and ribbons are aded...

Diduch was made on the morning of the Christmas Eve by the man of the house and was left in the barn. Then in the evening, with the rising of the first star, the man of the house, or if he had sons, his eldest son, would go to the barn to bring Didukh to the house...

He would bring Didukh solemnly to the house door, and crossing the threshold, he would take off his hat and greet the woman of the house, as if seeing her for the first time:

May God give you health!

God help us. What are you carrying?

Gold, so that you live wealthy life!

Then the man bringing in the Diduch would bless the house wishing everyone peace, good health, good luck, good harvest, fertile women, animals, fields...

Now, "Diduch" (Didukh, Did) literally means "Grandfather" and is believed to contain "the spirit of the dead ancestors" who gather in and around it during the time Diduch is in the house...

In the past, every family in the Ukrainian Carpathian knew, remembered and honored all the ancestors up to the seventh generation. At least...

And throughout the Christmas week, Carpathian Slavs "invited" all the dead ancestors every night to a feast. Funeral dishes were left on the tables for the night for the them, and the food and drink were not remove from the table until the morning...

It was believed that the souls of the dead are in constant contact with the family, help in the household, protect the home and the field from fire, flood, hail, make sure that the family was in order and peace, healthy and happy...

It was also with the help of the dead that all living things grew and multiplied. 

I talked about this Slavic belief in the dead governing the lives of the living in few posts: "Thirst", "Blood red wine", "Wolf feast", "House of bones"...

Which is why I believe that this is why the man bringing Diduch into the house was greeted as a stranger...He wasn't bringing Diduch (The ancestor). He was Diduch (The Ancestor)...One of many or all of them together...

Or maybe even the ancestral deity himself, Dabog, the Giving God...And the blessing the Diduch bringer uttered wasn't his blessing. It was Diduch's (The Ancestor's, God's) blessing...

People believed that the ancestors helped only those families in which they were honored by their descendants. And making Diduch and bringing it into the home and making him part of the family feast was considered to be one of the best ways to show this respect...

Interestingly, when Diduch was brought into the house, he was placed in the "Sacred corner", the holiest place in the house, where the holy icon was kept...And where once Slavs buried their dead, or more precisely reburied the bones and particularly sculls of their dead...

But this is an amazing story in itself and deserves a separate post...Soon...

By the way, it is this life giving power of the dead, which Pluto (Hades), the giver of wealth, appropriated for himself. And this is why Hades and Persephone are depicted sitting on their throne in the land of the dead, with sheafs of wheat and flowers...

I talked about this in my post "Pluto"

This is also why Hades is depicted holding Cornucopia, the horn of plenty... 

Again something he appropriated...Well maybe...Maybe not...You'll see why further down in this article :) I wrote about the origin of Cornucopia and why it is a "goat's horn" in my article "Cornucopia"

It is the ancestors and the ancestral deity Dabog who are the givers (or takers) of wealth, health, luck...Dabog has all the characteristics of the god of the dead, which is how he was interpreted by the Serbian ethnographers...This is of course true. He is "The Giving God"...

But what these ethnographers forgot is that Dabog is also explicitly described as The Sun God and The Rain God, basically Sky God...Whose house is underground...In the land of the dead...From where he comes at sunrise and to where he returns at sunset...

I talked about this in my post "Day star"...

A lot of Winter Solstice, New Year, Christmas "beliefs" and "rituals" from across Europe now feature "scary demons and ghosts" who "descend on" people's houses at this time of the year, and which need to be "expelled" from the houses to protect the living...

The same good, venerated dead and ghosts, which were once invited in by their descendants...This is another great example of the suppression of the old beliefs by the Church and their inversion into their opposites...

Also I think that Diduch explains a lot of things about the end of the harvest rituals, the last sheaf rituals, and winter sheaf rituals...

It is now obvious why the Irish called the last harvested sheaf of wheat "Cailleach" (Old Woman, Grandmother)...

I talked about this in my post "The old woman of the mill dust"...

And it is now obvious why the Irish called the Corn Dolly made from the last harvested sheaf "Cailleach" too. And whose spirit was the "spirit of grain" that inhabited the Corn Dolly...

I talked about this in my post "Corn dolly"...

Diduch also explains which god Slavs talk about when they call this particular type of wheat ornaments made from the last harvested sheaf of grain "Good's beard"...It's Dabog, the Giving God, who was also known as Djed, Did (Grandfather), The Ancestor...

Diduch also explains why "On Christmas morning in Scandinavia every gable, gateway, or barn-door, is decorated with a sheaf of grain fixed on the top of a tall pole, wherefrom it is intended that the birds should make their Christmas dinner"...

I talked about this in my post "Nav"...

Slavs believed that the souls of the dead are ferried to and from the otherworld by birds...So birds feeding on Diduch, The Ancestor is kind of symbolic, right? Did Scandinavians once had the same belief, but they forgot it and kept making Diduch as "one ought to"?

Diduch also explains why "wheat sheafs" roam the streets of many towns in Europe...Like these "skeklers", children dressed in straw suits, who would in the past go round the houses at Halloween (Gaelic new year), New Year, on Shetlands islands, asking for food, apparently "to bring the sun back from the grip of winter and ensure good crops"..

I talked about this in my post "Walking sheafs of wheat"...

Diduch also explains the "old Christmas prank" that people in Scandinavia played with each other: In Sweden in the past, people would make a figure of a goat from the last harvested sheaf of wheat and call it The Yule Goat...

People regarded The Yule Goat as a "spirit that would appear around Christmas to make sure that the Yule preparations were done right" 

Interesting right? Diduch, The Ancestor, The Ancestral Deity, making sure the old ways, which the dead ancestors represent, are still respected.

But then: "In the past in Scandinavia, a popular Christmas prank was to place this Yule goat in a neighbour's house without them noticing. The family successfully pranked had to get rid of it in the same way..."

Bringing of the symbolic representation of the dead into the house, basically inviting the dead to come and celebrate the Winter Solstice, New Year, Christmas day with the living, was originally a sombre ceremony with huge real (for out ancestors at least) implications...

And again this was turned on its head. It was replaced with a "prank" where the symbol of the ancestors and the ancestral deity was brought into the house "against the will of the hosts". And the hosts tried their best "to find the cursed thing and get rid of it"...

All part of the conversion process...Turn old good gods into evil devils...Old good symbols into bad omens...Old positive rituals into negative...Eventually people forget...What's left is Krampus...And such abominations...

I talked about this in my post "Krampus"...

By the way, the reason why goat features prominently in winter agriculture fertility rituals is because in the areas where agriculture was developed, the beginning of the rain season, and winter, coincided with the beginning of the mating season of the Ibex goats (Oct/Nov)

So Ibex goat became "The goat of rain" and "Bringer of fertility"...I talked about this in many articles on my blog, starting with this one about "Goat riding thunder gods"...This is also why Cornucopia is made from an Ibex goat horn...

Anyway, back to Diduch...On the eve of St. Basil's Day (sometimes before the Epiphany), Didukh was taken out of the house at midnight. It was believed that the souls of the dead ancestors also left the house with it...

In some areas of the Carpathian mountains, like in Pokut, Didukh was burned, usually on a crossroad, one of the favorite hangouts of "evil spirits and vampires" (read good ancestral spirits). Diduch's burning symbolically announced the birth of the New Year...

In the villages of the Halyts'kyi district Diduch was threshed  by the first footer. The threshed Diduch grain was then thrown on neighbor's and friend's houses for happiness and good luck...

And that's it...I'll leave you with this image of children carrying Diduchs. The future carrying the past in their hands and their hearts...

Because there is a sacred bond between the living and the dead...