Secrets of the ancient Aries
Digest of articles
S. V. Zharnikova

Editor Алексей Германович Виноградов

Translator Алексей Германович Виноградов

Photograph Алексей Германович Виноградов

© S. V. Zharnikova, 2025

© Алексей Германович Виноградов, translation, 2025

© Алексей Германович Виноградов, photos, 2025

ISBN 978-5-0065-4517-5

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Book scientific articles outstanding scientist S. V. Zharnikova devoted to the study of culture and ethnography of the Indo-Europeanpeoples. The birth of their rites and traditions. Reveals the secrets of Vedic history.

Thread of knowledge

The Russian North is an amazing, fabulous land. He is sung in our ancient songs, epics, traditions and legends. And not only in them. The most ancient myths of Greece tell about the distant northern side of Hyperborea, which lies near the coast of the cold Cronian Ocean. They told us that it was here, behind the harsh northeastern wind of Boreas, that there is a land where a wonderful tree with golden apples of eternal youth grows. At the foot of this tree, feeding its roots, a spring of living water gushes – the water of immortality. Here, for the golden apples of the maiden-birds of the Hesperides, the hero Hercules once went. In the far north, in Hyperborea, at Tartess – «the city where the wonders of the whole world sleep until the time comes for them to be born and come out to mortals on earth», the golden boat of the Sun was waiting for Hercules. And this is not surprising, because Hyperborea is the birthplace of the solar Apollo and here, according to the ancient Greek myth, snow-white winged swan horses brought him here every summer.

But not only had the ancient Greeks glorified the distant northern land in their legends.

From the depths of millennia, this hymn sounds to the land lying at the northern border of the world, near the shores of the Milky (White) Sea: «That country rises above evil, and therefore it is called the Ascended! It is believed that it is in the middle between the east and west… This is the ascended Golden Bucket road… In this vast northern land, a cruel, insensitive and lawless man does not live… There is a murava and a wonderful tree of gods… Here the Great Ancestor strengthened the Pole Star… The northern land is known as „ascended“, for it rises in all relationship». With such heartfelt words, the ancient Indian epic «Mahabharata» tells about the far circumpolar north.

The Russian North – its forests and fields were not trampled by hordes of conquerors, its free and proud people, for the most part, did not know serfdom, and it is here that the most ancient songs, fairy tales, and epics of Russia have been preserved in purity and integrity. It is here, in the opinion of many researchers, that such archaic rituals, rituals, and traditions have been preserved, which are older than not only the ancient Greek ones, but even those recorded in the Vedas, the most ancient cultural monument of all Indo-European peoples.

Paleolithic. Golden Age of Matriarchy

Among the many unresolved problems of the history of the peoples of Eurasia, one of the most interesting is the problem of the ancient history of the European North of that distant time, in which we must look for the origins and roots of a peculiar and unique North Russian culture.

«The fairy tale of the North is deep and captivating,» wrote Nicholas Roerich about this land.

The northern winds are cheerful and cheerful. Northern lakes are brooding. Northern rivers are silvery. Darkened forests are wise. The green hills are seasoned. The gray stones in the circles are full of miracles. We are all looking for beautiful Ancient Russia.»

«The people do not remember that he ever invented his own mythology, his language, his laws, customs and rituals. All these national foundations have already deeply entered his moral being, like life itself, experienced by him during many prehistoric centuries, as the past, on which the present order of things and all future development of life firmly rest. Therefore, all moral ideas for the people of the primitive epoch constitute their sacred tradition, the great native antiquity, the sacred testament of the ancestors to the descendants "– and these words of the outstanding Russian folklorist of the 19th century. F. I. Buslaeva, pronounced by him at a solemn act at Moscow University in 1859, has not lost their relevance today. Turning today to the depths of folk memory, captured in legends and fairy tales, epics and blades, legends and conspiracies, in songs and dances, rituals and rituals, in the traditional art of embroidery, weaving, carving and painting, we willingly or unwillingly plunge into the darkness of centuries and millennia, we are leaving in that distant time when all these forms of folk culture were just emerging. When did this happen?

N. A. Krinichnaya believes that the prototypes of the characters depicted in the legends and the motives associated with them are formed already in the myth of the totemic ancestor, «the formation of which belongs to the period of early clan society (this is approximately the Middle Paleolithic), that is, 100,000 – 50,000 years ago.

What time was it and how is it remarkable for the territory of the north of Eastern Europe?

H. E. Bader, in his work From the Depths of the Paleolithic, writes that already in the Mousterian era, the settlement of human collectives covered vast areas in the north. He believed that it was at this time, during the so-called «Mikulinsky» or Ries-Wurm interglacial, characterized by a relatively warm climate, that people probably first met the Arctic Ocean in northeastern Europe.

«All the sites of the Middle Paleolithic Mousterian tools stretched along the Western Urals, along the banks of the ancient Pra-Kama River (now the Volga) from Volgograd to the mouths of the Chusovaya, Obva and Vishera, outlined the path along which the ancients traveled, settling in Eastern Europe.»

And this conclusion seems to be quite logical in the light of the latest paleogeographic data indicating that in the Mikulinskoe interglacial (130,000 – 70,000 years ago) there was no tundra at all in the European north of our country. Up to 65° N mixed spruce and birch forests with hornbeam included, and up to 60° N. there were broad-leaved forests of linden and oak. That is, a wide strip of birch and coniferous forests with the inclusion of oak and elm stretched to the far north along the western tip of the Northern and Subpolar Urals. The average winter temperatures in northern Europe were then much higher than modern ones: in Scandinavia by 7° C, and in the northeast of the Russian Plain by 7—8° and even 11° C.

Paleogeographers, soil scientists, paleoclimatologists came to the conclusion that «130,000 – 70,000 years ago, conditions typical of the western Atlantic regions of Europe were spread over Eastern Europe. The differences in the climate of Western Europe at present and the Mikulino interglacial, in contrast to Eastern Europe, were small. Moreover, in the Mediterranean-Black Sea zone at some points in winter the temperatures were 1—2° lower than in our time.

«The warm Artika of the Mikulino interglacial, when January temperatures were 4—8° C higher than modern ones, suggests that the influx of warm waters of the Gulf Stream at that time 3 was much more powerful than now (with a higher temperature),» the authors of the atlas believe – monograph «Palaeography of Europe over the last 100,000 years».

They note that pine forests were typical for the White Sea region (within the eastern part of the North European archipelago) in the interglacial period, and then mixed birch with spruce and broad-leaved species, and at the end of the interglacial the dominant position passed to birch forests. During the Mikulinsky interglacial period up to about 60° N, and in the basin of the upper reaches of the Northern Dvina and Vyatka up to 57° N. birch and spruce forests were widespread with more or less participation of oak, hornbeam and elm. Therefore, there is nothing unrealistic in the development of the north of Eastern Europe by ancient human communities already in the Mousterian time.

Archaeologists believe that people inhabited the Pechora River («Krutaya Gora» camp) 70 millennia ago. Moreover, «primitive archeology now possesses massive and indisputable materials proving a long prehistory of agriculture, which began at least at the end of the Middle Paleolithic era», i.e. archaeologists determine the time of the birth of primitive agriculture, 50 or 70 millennia from us.

For its emergence in the form of gathering, a necessary condition was the presence of herb and cereal steppes. And those were not only in the traditional zone – in the south of the Russian Plain, but also in the north, where, for the time 45210 +1430 years ago, pine-birch forests with a herb-grass cover are noted in the basin of the Vychegda and Pechora rivers. 44 millennium BC – the time of new, in comparison with the very warm Mikulinsky interglacial, climatic conditions – Molo-Shcheksninsky interglacial.

About 70 thousand years ago, the Mikulinsky or Ries-Wurms interglacial, which lasted about 60 thousand years, ended. The next Ice Age began, which was named Valdai in Eastern Europe. This name is very arbitrary, because this entire period is divided into two unequal parts: 70 – 24 thousand years ago – the glacial Valdai and 24 – 13 thousand years ago – glacial Valdai.

Moreover, during the ice-free Valdai, a slow increase in cooling alternated with periods of warming.

One of such warmings, very long, was the Mologo-Sheksna interglacial, which lasted with short periods of cooling from 50 millennia to 24 millennia to the present day, and the time from 32 to 24 millennia ago was the warmest.

So, broad-leaved forests spread on the Don, the so-called Kostenkovo-Streletskaya Paleolithic culture develops here, part of the population of which during the Mologo-Shcheksnin interglacial period advanced along the Russian plain to the Oka basin.

A number of archaeologists suggest that the tribes of the Strelets culture at this time inhabited the banks of the Pechora. Researchers note that: «In the north-east of Europe, which includes the vast areas of the Volga and Ural regions, outstanding monuments of the early Paleolithic period have been found in recent years, and a turning point has already been outlined towards intensifying work on their study. Certain areas of the Russian Plain (northwest) in the Molo-Sheksna time may not have been inhabited. It should be emphasized that from the south to the north of the Russian Plain, during the formation and development of the Upper Paleolithic, it was not wandering lipstick hunters who advanced, but the sedentary tribes who built long-term dwellings of various types, leading complex household activities based on hunting and gathering… The hunt for herds of horses and reindeer required the improvement of throwing weapons and, probably, led already at such an early time to the invention of the bow and arrow.

In the same period, spiritual culture was formed and developed.»

Monuments of the spiritual culture of the ancient Stone Age – Paleolithic have been preserved in places of long-term habitation, at the ancient sites of Paleolithic man.

Apparently, in the near future on the territory of the Russian Plain and, in particular, the Russian North, first-class monuments dating back to the Molo-Sheksninsky interstadial, the warmest time of the Valdai glacier, will be opened.

On the territory of Wormwood and Germany, all the monuments of the Ancient Stone Age are concentrated south of the 52nd parallel in the basin of the upper Vistula and in the Silesian Mountains. On the territory of Eastern Europe, they are distributed unevenly. In the western part, such monuments can be traced only up to the 52nd parallel.

In the central part of the Russian Plain, Mousterian sites are known up to the 54th parallel, and the Upper Paleolithic Byzovaya site (in the middle reaches of the Pechora River) is located north of 64° N, about 175 km from the Arctic Circle. Its age is 25450 ± 380 years ago, the Sungir site on Klyazma – just north of 56° N. – its age is 25500 ± 200 years ago. In addition, by the 24th millennium BC include such sites in the northeast of the Russian Plain as Bear Cave in the upper Pechora, Ostrovskaya site, Smirnovskaya and Buranovskaya caves. In the northwest, monuments of this time are unknown.

The cultural traditions of the population of the northern part of the Russian Plain of that distant time are very well represented by the burials of the Sungir site near the city of Vladimir, dating back to the end of the Mologo-Sheksna period. Here, observing a long-established ritual, people who lived in the 24 millennium BC, before burying their dead, sprinkled the bottom of the grave with hot coals, cleaning it, perhaps, with the remains of a funeral feast. Then chalk or other white substance, similar to lime, was poured onto the bottom, and then red ocher was thickly sprinkled over the white layer.

White and red are symbols of purity and blood, snow and fire, already at that distant time, was together, escorting a person to another world. The dead were placed in the grave in richly decorated clothes, with numerous stone and bone tools and weapons; they were covered with fur cloaks and abundantly covered with red ocher.

So in Sungir, in one of the graves, a tall, broad-shouldered man of 55 – 56 years old was buried, lying on his back with his hands folded on his stomach, his head turned to the northeast.

He wore a suede or fur shirt, leather pants and leather moccasin shoes. All the clothes of this man of the 24 millennium BC was embroidered with 3,500 beads carved from mammoth tusks.

On his hands he wore over 20 bracelets made of thin plates cut from mammoth tusks, as well as bracelets made of strung beads. The entire headdress was embroidered with beads and ended at the back of the head with arctic foxes. On the shoulders of the man lay a short fur cloak embroidered with larger beads.

A girl of 7—8 years old and a boy of 12—13 years old were buried next to the man. Their burials were also accompanied by a large number of mammoth bone artifacts. Spears made from split and straightened tusks are of particular interest: 2 m 42 cm for a boy and 1 m 66 cm for a girl. Today it is not yet clear how our distant ancestors straightened and split three-meter tusks, how long, straight; hard and sharp spears were cut out. The children’s clothes were embroidered with beads even richer than the clothes of the man. A total of about 7,500 beads were sewn on it, and the children wore bracelets and rings made of mammoth bones. In addition, the clothes were decorated with graceful ornamented slotted discs, hairpins, fasteners. Archaeologists suggest that the burial of children was not simultaneously the burial of a man and was done much earlier.

This testifies to the fact that before us is not an accidental rich burial, but a stable tradition that has evolved for a long time and has been preserved for thousands of years.

The abstract thinking of a man of the Upper Paleolithic of Eastern Europe was significantly developed, as evidenced not only by the burials of the Sungir, but also by the numerous ornamented articles of that distant time, which are highly perfect examples of Paleolithic art. So on the Don (Kostenki), on products made of bone and flint – female figurines – as a rule, mites-belts on the chest and waist are graphically depicted. Of the decorative elements, the most common is the oblique cross. M. D. Gvozdover writes: «Obviously, this ornament should be considered the most characteristic of the Kostenko culture, especially since rows of oblique crosses are almost unknown in other Paleolithic cultures… The choice of ornament and its location on the object is not caused by technological reasons or material… the placement of ornamental elements and their choice is not due to technological reasons, but to cultural tradition.»

M. D. Gvozdover believes that «the archaeological culture is characterized both by the elements of the ornament, and the type of their location on the ornamental field and the grouping of elements», another type of ornament appears – the meander and swastika motif.

Outstanding Russian researcher V. A. Gorodtsov wrote in 1926, analyzing the North Russian peasant weaving and embroidery: «Until recently it was believed that the meander and the ova are the fruits of the ancient art of Greece, and the swastika is the art of India, but all this turned out to be incorrect, since it was documented that the swastika, meander and oves were the favorite motives of the ornament of the ancient centuries of the Bronze Age, when, perhaps, there were no Greeks or Indians hiding in one Indo-European family, and when these motifs managed to spread not only to all continents of the Old World, but also to penetrate into the Middle America. And this is not surprising, because the swastika and meander were earlier and those remote from us: they were found in Russia on objects of art from the Mezin Paleolithic site, the time of which, as geologists believe, is many tens of millennia from us. And in what amazingly developed form they are there! And what is most surprising of all is the fact that even there they were associated with figurines of birds, undoubtedly having the same cult religious meaning as they have in our time, i.e. the meaning of the symbol of the spring sun and related ideas of happiness, well-being and joy. Thus, in the charming complex of swastika signs, in the patterns of the northern Russian skilled craftswomen, there is reminiscence (living memory) of the most ancient common human religious symbols. And what a fresh, what a solid memory!»

What was the initial model for the most complex rhombo-meander and swastika ornament of Mezin is still a mystery.

Paleontologist V. I. Bibikova in 1965 suggested that the meander spiral, broken meander stripes and rhombuses on objects from Mezin arose as a repetition of the natural dentin pattern of mammoth tusks.

From this, she concluded that such an ornament for the people of the Upper Paleolithic was a kind of magical symbol of the mammoth, which embodied (as the main object of hunting) their ideas of wealth, power and abundance.

I. G. Shovkoplyas, who published the materials of the Mezinskaya site, notes that the meander patterns characteristic of the monuments of this Upper Paleolithic culture have no direct analogies in the Paleolithic art of Europe and can be put «on a par with the perfect geometric ornament of later historical eras, for example, the Neolithic and copper-bronze». In the division of V. A. Gorodtsov of European Upper Paleolithic cultures of the 25—20 millennium BC into three separate regions – Western European, Central European and Eastern European in terms of the nature of art monuments, the unique ornament of Mezin served as the basis for distinguishing the Eastern European region.

Thus, Mezin in the Chernihiv region is famous for its geometric meander ornament on the bone. In the rest of the Old World, the meander appears only in the Bronze Age. True, in connection with the origins of this ornamental motif, various researchers have developed very different points of view.

V. I. Bibikova considers it possible to deduce the Mezinian meander and the swastika from the repetition of the natural pattern of the dentin of mammoth tusks.

A. A. Formozov comes to the conclusion that: «the meander, characteristic of the antique vase painting, was adopted by the ancient Greek potters from the weavers, and they only copied the pattern from threads that they got involuntarily in the manufacture of clothes.

For the Paleolithic hunters of Eastern Europe, who were not familiar with weaving, the meander appeared, most likely, as a result of the complication of the zigzags, often engraved on their bone products.»

It seems that both the first and the second assumptions of A.A. Formozov it is difficult to agree. Ancient Greek potters could also adopt a different pattern of weaving of threads, as long as their weavers were so virtuoso that they received meander patterns in the structure of the fabric. After all, it is impossible to obtain a meander by «involuntary» interweaving of threads, this requires mastering the most complex multi-thread weaving technique, so, probably, both antique weavers and potters sought to decorate their products with a meander pattern not accidentally, but quite deliberately, linking it with a certain complex of ancient ideas… As for the Paleolithic hunters, they hunted mammoths not only in Eastern, but also in Western Europe, however, there the «complication of zigzags», also engraved on bone products, did not occur.

Probably, nevertheless, B. A. Frolov is closer to the truth, who, deciphering the ornament of the Mezin bracelet, came to the conclusion that this reflects a complex of the most complex ideas of Paleolithic man about the movement of time, about the change of seasons of the year, about the lunar calendar, i.e. we are not dealing with a simple imitation of a natural pattern and not with the «complication of zigzags», but with the complication of thinking, with a complex worldview system. He writes: «Analysis of the Paleolithic graphics of Eurasia now indisputably testifies: certain patterns, a kind of algorithms for constructing the first ornaments really existed.

The number of elements in the groups of the ornament, the intervals between homogeneous groups repeats the cycles of the most frequent and visible for the inhabitants of the Earth cosmic phenomena associated, first of all, with the movement of the Sun and the Moon».

It should be noted that A. A. Formozov believes that it was «with the development of the thinking of our ancestors, who managed to move from a concrete-figurative perception of life to complex abstractions, that the change in the appearance of art in the Neolithic and Bronze was connected, when the ornament experienced a true heyday».

The fact that the world of Paleolithic man was much more complex and spiritually richer than we imagined before is evidenced by the extremely developed and specialized industry of stone, and the complex structures of bone-sod houses, and thousands of drilled polished beads, spears and bracelets from mammoth tusks in the burials of Sungir, musical instruments and statuettes of Mezin and much more.

As noted earlier, already in the Upper Paleolithic we meet with a peculiar contrast between red and white: the whiteness of the bone was contrasted with the rich color of the engraved ornaments worn with red ocher. In the Sungir graves, the bottom was covered with white matter (chalk or lime) and «already over the white layer of the grave, they were thickly covered with bright red ocher».

The researchers noted that it was the red color that played a huge role in the cult rites and aesthetics of this period. Red dyes were used even in the Mousterian (even before 50 millennium BC), and for a very long time there was a belief that ancient people used only natural dyes. As a result of the research, it was found that by firing ferruginous nodules in different modes in the Upper Paleolithic, red dyes of various shades were obtained. N. D. Praslov notes that «in general, it can be stated that more than 20 thousand years ago primitive people used a wide range of dyes, at least four primary colors: white, ocher, red and black. Red paint is presented in a particularly rich range.» It should be noted that in the textile decor of many peoples of Eurasia, such a traditional combination of red and white survived until the beginning of the 20th century. And this is especially typical for East Slavic ornamentation in general and North Russian, in particular. It is in such a strict and ancient red-and-white color scheme that the ornaments of the «lovely complex of swastika signs in the patterns of the North Russian skilled craftswomen» are made, in which, according to V. A. Gorodtsov, «there is a vivid memory of the most ancient universal (or rather, common Indo-European) symbols. And what a fresh, what a solid memory!» – exclaims the researcher.

This is not surprising. I. G. Shovkoplyas, who studied the Mezin Upper Paleolithic site, believed that the common ornamental assemblages indicate the kinship of the groups using these assemblages. He believed that the population of Kostenki II on the Don, the Mezinskaya site in the Dnieper region, and the East Siberian sites of Malta and Buret were closely related. He notes that: «the very distant migration of individual groups of the East European Late Paleolithic population, possibly also originating from the Middle Dnieper basin (the Middle Dnieper ethnocultural region), probably should also explain the presence of the sites Malta and Buret in Eastern Siberia, which are extremely close and even identical in many manifestations material and spiritual culture (flint tools, bone products, the nature of dwellings, etc.) with the sites of the Middle Dnieper basin, primarily with the same Mezinskaya. It is not excluded that the inhabitants of the sites of the Mezin culture in the Middle Dnieper basin, on the one hand, and the named Siberian sites, on the other, had a common origin and even constituted for some time one group of the population at an early stage of their history.»

It should be added that the inventory of the Upper Paleolithic Byzovaya site, located 175 km from the Arctic Circle, 25—29 thousand years away from us, has much in common with the complex of the lower layer Kostenki I, 12 on the Don and belongs to the same time as, according to the conclusions of I. G. Shovkoplyas, it testifies to the genetic relationship of the human collectives that left these sites. At present, for most researchers, the population of the Urals and the Urals at the end of the Molo-Sheksna time seems to be indisputable.

The exceptional development and perfection of the forms of ornaments, sculptures, and reliefs belonging to this time convinces us that their roots should be sought in the more ancient Mousterian era, in that period of the Mikulinsky interglacial (130 – 70 thousand years ago), when human collectives were already mastered the Pechora basin and the coast of the Arctic Ocean, and when the climate of northern Eastern Europe did not differ from the modern climate of England and southern Germany. The discovery in the last decades of first-class Paleolithic monuments in the north of the European part of our country (Bear Cave is located at 65° N), with a large number of flint implements and even wall paintings, is an outstanding event. It once again testifies to the fact that in the ancient Stone Age, human groups widely settled in the north of Eastern Europe, i.e. the territories of the future Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Kostroma, Vyatka regions and the Komi Republic.

The warm Mologo-Shcheksninskoe time was replaced by a sharp cold snap about 20—18 millennia ago, when the overgrown Scandinavian ice sheet reached its maximum development.

The data of modern science indicate that the limiting boundary of the distribution of the Valdai glaciation was in the latitudinal direction from Vilnius to Smolensk, and then to the northwest to the Rybinsk reservoir, Lake Kubenskoe and Nyandoma. Further to the northeast, the border has not been reliably established.

At this time, the Atlantic tundra and subarctic meadows stretched across the glacier-free territory of England and Ireland. Sparse birch forest (park tundra) was widespread in the western part of Europe, and light forest with birch and birch-pine stands occupied most of Central Europe and then followed a relatively narrow strip along the coast of the future Baltic Sea, and then the Baltic Glacial Lake, to the northeast. True forests, or as they are called «typical forest boreal formations», in the western and middle parts of Europe at that time were very few, and they were mainly in the valleys of large rivers and intermountain basins.

Within the Russian Plain, forests occupied, in contrast to Western Europe, a large area in the form of a wide strip crossing it in the direction from southwest to northeast. These were birch, pine, spruce and fir forests. Paleogeographers note that: «in a number of regions there already existed forests with the participation of such broad-leaved species as oak and elm; in the southern part of the Russian Plain, steppe vegetation was widespread.» It is interesting to note that during the maximum of the Valdai glaciation, when almost the entire territory of England was covered with glacier, and habitable areas were tundra and arctic meadows, primitive people and animals such as wolf, cave bear, woolly rhinoceros, reindeer, bull and the mammoth lived only 50 km from the edge of the glacier. At the same time, meadow steppes with spruce-birch and pine forests were widespread in the Upper Volga basin. In the Oka basin, during the maximum glaciation, spruce-pine forests of the north-taiga type rustled. In the area of the village of Pokrovskaya on the Puchka River (near Lake Kubenskoye, at 60° N), about 38 species of flowering and spore plants grew directly at the edge of the glacier, and the open forest consisted of birch, spruce, and larch.

It should be noted that the actual tundra type of vegetation in Eastern Europe was a relatively narrow strip running along the border of the Scandinavian ice sheet. But in Central Europe, the tundra occupied, apparently, «the entire strip between the Scandinavian ice sheet in the north and the Alpine glacier in the south, and in the Atlantic part of their distribution was even greater.»

So, if during the period of the maximum stage of the Valdai glaciation (20—18 thousand years ago), almost the entire territory of Western Europe, with the exception of the south-west of France, the upper reaches of the Danube and the foothills of the Eastern Carpathians, was occupied by subarctic meadows and tundra with birch and deciduous sparse forest, then on the territory of Eastern Europe from the upper reaches of the Dniester began a wide strip of meadow steppes with pine, larch and birch forests, passing through the Pripyat basin, the Middle Dnieper, the middle course of the Oka. Expanding in the direction from the southwest to the northeast, it reached in the northwest to the Upper Volga (in the Yaroslavl region) and the middle Vychegda in the north. The entire southeast of Eastern Europe was at that time occupied by cereal steppes, reaching 55° N in the northeast; in a number of regions there were forests with the participation of such broad-leaved species as oak and elm. Thus, the vegetation zones were located in the submeridian direction, «sharply different from the mainly latitudinal zonation of the modern vegetation cover of Eurasia», which «can be considered as one of the most characteristic features of the nature of Europe in the era of glaciation.»

On most of the European territory of our country, there was no glacier, even during the maximum of the Valdai glaciation. And of course, given the natural conditions that existed then, it is unlikely that the population left these lands.

Moreover, experts believe that during the peak of the Valdai glaciation, during the period of the greatest cooling, the outflow of the population from the territories bordering on the edge of the glacier went «south to the mountains, to the southwest to the territory of the Massif Central of France and along the Sudetenland and the Carpathians towards the Russian Plain», with its meadow steppes and forests, and therefore with an abundance of food.» However, it should be noted that the entire territory of the Baltic States, Northern Belarus, the North-West of the Smolensk, Leningrad, Novgorod and a significant part of the Tver region wer e covered glacier and their settlement occurs only at the end of the Late Glacial, at the turn of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic.

It remains to be assumed that with the climate change towards the worsening, and then with the arrival of the glacier, the population that left these territories, to a large extent, moved to the east of the Russian Plain and the Urals. Archeology confirms that «by the beginning of the cold snap, vast settlements existed in the center and north of the Russian Plain… these monuments allow us to draw a certain conclusion about the significant population of the periglacial zone of the Ostashkovsky glacier during the period when the climate became more and more severe. The population was sedentary and provided itself with supplies of livelihood for the winter.»

It should be noted that in the «strong and long-term dwellings of the population of the Russian Plain» of that time, there are a large number of «grater pestles and real grain-grinding slabs of granite, quartzite and Shoksha sandstone». «The authors of the» Paleolithic of the USSR «note that only on the Russian Plain, these devices for obtaining flour» by ordinary methods similar to those used in agricultural crops «are found» in such quantities, starting with the Mousterian industries (i.e., no later than 50 millennium BC) and passing like a red thread through almost all the different cultural and different times of the late Paleolithic industries.»

P. P. Efimenko back in 1958, speaking about the outstanding monument of the Paleolithic era – the Kostenki site on the Don, wrote that «the oldest cultural horizon Kostenok I …, which still retains the living features of the Mousterian technique, belongs interglacial. If this is really so, then the upper horizon of the site… can be attributed with a high degree of probability to the end of the same interglacial or the early stages of the Wurm», i.e. to 70—50 thousand ago. P. P. Efimenko, the remains of a large ground dwelling (31 m long and 8 m wide, i.e. 248 square meters) with eight hearths and a complex heating system were uncovered in layer I of Kostenki.

There were grain pits – storage rooms next to the dwelling. Apparently, these pantries were filled with precisely those grasses that made up the meadow cereal steppes that stretched during the Valdai (Ostashkovsky) glaciation up to the Middle Pechora. These were barley, rye, oats, wheat and flax in their wild sowing forms, which L. S. Berg called «plants of long daylight hours», since they need at least 18 hours of indirect solar radiation per day for normal vegetation, an abundance of moisture in the soil and lack of overheating from direct sunlight. Such conditions are south of 55—56 N just missing.

Note that even Academician I. Lepekhin, a student of M. V. Lomonosov in the 18th century, discovered wild sown rye and wild flax in the Kaninskaya tundra, and in 1861, ears of this wild Kanin rye, flour and bread were presented at an agricultural exhibition in Arkhangelsk, baked from it. Moreover, it was noted that «the Lapps, roaming the tundra, knew nothing about rye or flax and did not use them in any way.» Speaking about the Paleolithic East European proto-agriculture, it should be noted that the people of that era that was far from us were closer to nature and much more observant than the inhabitants of the megacities of the early 21st century, pampered by civilization. And they, of course, should have noted for themselves the fact that if the straw left in the field after harvesting the grain burned for any reason, then the next summer the grain grew more than such repeated observations were enough to quite consciously set fire to this straw and thus fertilize the soil. Apparently, this is the very source, the starting point, from which the real cult of straw later grew. Hence the custom to burn straw fires on Christmastide, Kupala, to burn a straw effigy on Shrovetide, which marked the beginning of a new agricultural year – traditions that have come down to our days.

In the Paleolithic era, the type of economic activity and division of labor took shape, in which it was women who were engaged in the collection, storage and processing of grain, as evidenced by the preserved in the Russian folk tradition until the middle – end of the twentieth century very archaic «stubble» ritual songs, in which only «girls, young men» were charged with the obligation to harvest, dry and grind grain. Moreover, perhaps, the alarming closeness of such words as «muka-flour» and «muka- torment». It was in the Paleolithic that, together with the idea that «bread is the head of everything,» the cult of the Mother, the giver of life and the keeper of grain, the mistress of the harvest, water and fire, the Great Goddess, took shape. This vast epoch is often called the «Golden Age of Equality of the Matriarchy».

It ended 13 millennia ago, when a global catastrophe changed both the landscapes and the Earth’s climate.

Mother-in-law – as a character of Shrovetide

Turu-turu, shepherd, do you sound far off?

From the sea to the sea, to the Keiev city

There is our homeland, in the homeland there is an oak tree,

An owl is on the oak, an owl is my mother-in-law, and she grazed horses One of the most difficult and mysterious in the Russian calendar rites, of course, is a holiday called Maslenitsa. All ethnographers, without exception, noted and note the strange circumstance that Maslenitsa (or Maslyanitsa) is the only major pre-Christian holiday that was not timed to coincide with a Christian holiday and did not receive a new interpretation. And really why? After all, if we look at the ritual cycles of the so-called «cross of the year», that is, the winter and summer solstices, the autumn and spring equinoxes, then there is a paradox. The winter solstice (Christmastide or Kolyada) is associated with the Nativity of Christ. Summer solstice (Kupalo) is the Nativity of John the Baptist. The autumnal equinox (Oat tree) is the Nativity of the Virgin. And spring – nothing. Have you forgotten the spring equinox?

In order to deal with this strange phenomenon, we will have to plunge into the depths of millennia. And remember that during a huge time interval – from 7 thousand BC. until the middle of the 1st millennium BC in the north of Eastern Europe (from 69° N to 55° N), the average summer temperatures were 4—5° C higher than at present. Spring began a month earlier than now. Accordingly, the arrival of autumn shifted, the winter pattern changed, in which the temperatures were close to 0° С, winter was very mild.

Since spring practically began already at the turn of February and March, the rituals of meeting spring, which lasted in antiquity (like the winter Christmastide) month, began at the end of February and ended on the day of the vernal equinox – March 22 (more precisely, on the night of March 21—22). It was from this day that a new agricultural year began, marked by the rites of Maslenitsa – «the only major pre-Christian holiday not timed to coincide with a Christian holiday.» Judging by the Western European and Slavic traditions, in which dressing was, adopted everywhere for these days, and zoomorphic masks were mainly used, the addition of these traditions can be attributed to the common Indo-European period, i.e. no later than the turn of 4—3 thousand BC. The fact that Maslenitsa, as a holiday of the beginning of the agricultural year – spring, took shape in the common Indo-European period is evidenced not only by the traditions of European peoples, preserved up to the present day, but also by the traditions of India, which came from ancient times.

In ancient Indian rituals, many elements of Maslenitsa (and subsequent Easter) are traced in one of the brightest holidays on the border of winter and spring – Holi, which is celebrated in February – March (the end of the cold season). N. R. Guseva emphasized that «all ritual actions of the holiday are inseparable from the magic of fertility and historically go back to the pre-Indian period of the life of the Aryans». The ritual and magical manifestations associated with the vernal equinox are extremely close to the Easter ones, going directly back to paganism, which passed into the Easter rituals of the Slavic peoples.

The common ceremonies of Maslenitsa and Holi included: performing obscene songs of an erotic content, drinking alcoholic beverages, preparing ritual food from dough and cottage cheese. In India, during the Holi festival, the effigy of Holiki, which is made from straw, is necessarily burned. For the ritual bonfire collect: brushwood, straw, old things, cow dung.

In Russia, fires were also burned on Shrovetide. Moreover, the material for the fires was hay, straw, old things. Cow dung was also used. And they also burned an effigy of Maslenitsa, which was made of straw.

In Indian tradition, there is a custom during Holi to sprinkle the ash from the fire on the floor of the house and sprinkle it on each other. But in the Vologda province, for example, at Maslenitsa, mummers often poured ashes and ashes on the floor of the hut and danced on them, and also smeared with soot and sprinkled ashes and ashes on all participants in the ceremony.

We should especially note that in the East Slavic tradition one of the main elements of the Maslenitsa ritual, a holiday associated with the commemoration of the dead, was ritual food – pancakes. Being a very ancient ritual food by origin – fresh cakes baked on hot stones – pancakes are in no way associated with the cult of the sun, but are a common Indo-European symbol of the moon – «the sun of the dead». Russians, for example, baked pancakes on «parental Saturday». In some villages, the first pancake was smeared with honey, butter and put on the goddess – «parents». Sometimes the first pancake was carried to the churchyard and laid on the grave. Note that pancakes are a must (along with oatmeal jelly), and the latter is food for funerals, funerals and weddings. And another interesting circumstance is that the dough for pancakes on Shrovetide was necessarily created by the oldest woman in the house, and in secret from family and strangers and always in the light of the month. And if she was the mother of adult married daughters, then her name was Mother-in-law. It was to the mother-in-law (and not to the father-in-law and mother-in-law) that they went «for pancakes». Mother-in-law – as a character of Maslenitsa, is, in our deep conviction, the greatest interest of everything connected with this archaic ritual complex.

Why? We will try to answer this question. First of all, let us note that the text of the Veles Book (translated by Valentina and Yulia Gnatyuk) contains a list of the main holidays of the year.

These are Kolyada, Yaro, Krasnaya Gora and Ovseni (Great and Small). Kolyada, of course, is our Winter Christmastide with ritual songs – «kolyadki» and performing those mummers – «kolyadniki», «kolyadovshchiki». The very term «Kolyada» (that is, «kolyada» – giving a circle) is directly related to the end of the divine day, when the Night of the Gods, which ends on the night of December 21 to 22, is replaced by a new Divine Day, starting from December 22. The entire period of Winter Christmas (December 19 – January 19) is dedicated to the worship of the Divine Light – the Creator of the Universe, whom our ancestors called the Immutable Law – Grandfather. During this month, those who were able to comprehend the Cosmic Law in earthly life and after death acquired a light body («holy») returned to the world of people, that is became a Saint.

Thus, Winter Christmas is a period of worshiping the Light – the Creator, summing up the results of the annual circle and meeting the new Kolo – the Sun.

Yaro or Yarilin Day (Kupalo) – June 22 – the summer solstice and the beginning of the Divine Night. Note that this is a celebration of youth, those who were to find a mate and pass the test of Divine Fire on the right to enter into marriage with a chosen one or chosen one. And after marriage, to fulfill the cosmic law of reincarnation, giving life to new people. It is no accident that our ancestors said: «To be born to death. To die for life». And again: «Children eat us from the nave (dead)», i.e. in the form of newborns bring us back to this world.

The next most important holiday in the list of the «Veles Book» is Krasnaya Gora, followed by Ovsen (Avsen, Usen, Tausen), i.e. the holiday of the autumn equinox. But here we stop at a paradox – today’s Krasnaya Gorka has nothing to do with the vernal equinox. We don’t have a holiday close to this calendar date – March 22. Krasnaya Gorka today is a holiday of the Easter fortyda.

In most cases, Krasnaya Gorka is called either Fomino’s Sunday (the next after Easter), or the first three days of Fomin’s week (including Sunday), or the entire Fomin week. B. A. Rybakov, analyzing the ancient Slavic calendar ritual, wrote in «Paganism of the Ancient Slavs»

that: «The church calendar, which in many cases has adapted to the old pagan times of prayers and festivities, greatly shattered these dates in cases where the church used a movable Easter calendar, at which the amplitude of fluctuations of the „great day“ (Easter) exceeded a month – from March 22 to April 25 according to the old style, or April 4 to May 8 according to our Gregorian style. A seven-week great fast was associated with Easter, drowning out all pagan festivity: the Trinity day also depends on the period of Easter. For these reasons, the ancient pagan holidays were shifted in one direction or another. The ancient Shrovetide was supposed to be celebrated in one of the solar phases – on the days of the vernal equinox, March 20—25, but in reality a wild spring holiday… moved away to February».

So, apparently, the ancient name of Shrovetide is «Red Mountain». And many facts confirm this. First of all, the presence of the appeal «Krasnaya Krasigorka» to the deceased mother, recorded at the beginning of the twentieth century in the Arkhangelsk province (White Sea coast). Here, the bride is an orphan, going out to the crossroads, just like this: «My Red Krasigorka», addressed the deceased mother. We have good reason to believe that the mountain (be it a grave mound, a pyramid or an ice mountain that was built on Shrovetide) was a symbol of the mother’s womb of Mother Earth, Foremother or Mother-in-law.

There are enough grounds for conclusions. Recall that the wife of Zeus – «blonde Hera» – the supreme Olympic goddess, daughter of Kronos and Rhea, whose name means «guardian», «mistress», is called «Mother-in-law» in ancient hymns. Researchers note that in her image «features of the great female deity of the pre-Olympic period are seen» and indicate her connection with the chthonic forces. This great matriarchal Deity had a zoomorphic incarnation – a cow, and was called «drawing.» And her ancient fetish in the temple of Hera of Samos on the island of Samos was a wooden carved spinning board. We also note that the famous love scene of Zeus and Hera from the Iliad takes place among fragrant flowers on the top of Mount Ida. But Ida Mountain and the Ida River are in the north of Russia, in the Subpolar Urals.

Thus, «mother-in-law» in the archaic tradition, judging by the above, was called not only and not so much the wife’s mother as the oldest woman in the family or the Foremother. Here I would like to cite a number of ritual songs recorded by folklorists in the Vologda and Vladimir regions. The Vologda version was recorded in 1978 by a Leningrad folklorist (A. M. Mekhnetsov) in the village of Karmakino, Totemsky District:

Turu-turu, shepherd, do you sound far off?

From the sea to the sea, to the Keiev city (option «Kiev») There is our homeland, in the homeland there is an oak tree, an owl is on the oak, an owl is my mother-in-law, she grazed horses The «Keyev City» of this song is of unconditional interest. So in the ancient Greek tradition, the inhabitants of the north of Eastern Europe – Hyperboreans were considered the descendants of the titans – «who grew out of the blood of the most ancient titans.» But in the same tradition, Kei is the titan, the son of the heavens of Uranus and the land of Gaia. His daughters are Asteria (Star) and Leto. The first (Asteria), taking the form of a quail, rushed into the sea and turned into the wandering island of Delos. It was on Delos that the second sister, Leto, gave birth to Artemis and Apollo of Hyperborean, the great Olympic gods of Ancient Greece. Thus, the titan Key, who lived on the shore of the Kronian (Arctic) Ocean and owned the «Keyev city», where «our Motherland» of the Vologda ritual song was located, was the grandfather of the ancient Greek Apollo and Artemis. As for Leto, she was married to Zeus in the form of a quail (Zeus accordingly took the form of a quail). It makes sense to cite the ritual Kupala song recorded in 1969 in the Smolensk region:

And I’m from a kind

And I’m from a good kind,

And I’m from a kind.

And I’m dad,

And I’m a rich dad

And I’m dad.

And my dad,

And my dad – the month is clear,

And my dad.

And my mom,

My mom is a red sun

My math.

And my brothers,

My brothers are nightingales in the forest

My brothers.

And my sisters,

My sisters are in the life of the quail,

My sisters.

The month is clear

The moon shines at night,

The month is clear.

Red sun,

The red sun warms in summer

Red sun.

Siza nightingales,

Nightingales are singing in the summer,

Gray nightingales.

In the quail field

In the field, quails are calling for the harvest,

Quail in the field.

Let us return to the Vologda ritual song recorded in 1978, which refers to the «mother-in-law». In the Vladimir version, it sounds as follows:

Tutu-turu, shepherd boy,

Viburnum podozhok,

Where do you graze?

– From sea to sea,

From sea to sea

To the city of Toev.

There is my homeland.

An oak stands at home.

An owl sits on an oak tree.

The owl is my mother-in-law.

(Vladimir region, Murom district, Popolutovo village)

The second option:

Tutu-turu, shepherd boy,

Viburnum podozhok,

Are you chasing a breakaway? —

From sea to sea

To Chiev city?

An oak stands on the city.

An owl sits on an oak tree.

The owl is my mother-in-law

The little calf is motley.

(Vladimir region, Gorokhovets district, Bykosovo village).

Third option:

The man went on the water

To Kiev city.

There is my homeland.

There is an oak at home

An owl sits on an oak tree

The owl is my mother-in-law.

(Vladimir region, Melenkovsky district, the village of Levino).

The Tale of Tsar Saltan. I. Bilibin

As we can see, despite the considerable distance from Srednyaya Sukhona to the Vladimir region, the texts are almost identical. And what is most interesting – everywhere is an owl – Mother-in-law. In the Vologda text, she «grazed horses», and in the Vladimir text she is also called «the motley little heifer.» And here it is pertinent to recall that in the ancient Iranian (Avestan) tradition, the motley cow is a symbol of Mother Earth, she is the magic cow Bermaie in the Iranian epic. Khlopin notes that: «The image of the Bermaye cow is very interesting: firstly, it was spotted, and secondly, it symbolized Khvanirasa – the land of the ancient Aryans».

Consequently, the drawings of a spotted cow and her sculptural images of the Eneolithic time (ie 5—3 thousand BC) can be considered as a symbol of the middle world, inhabited by people and livestock of the land.» Note that in the ancient Greek Orphic hymns about Earth-Gaia it is said: «You are the basis of the immortal world, the all-motley virgin», i.e. is no longer a «motley little calf», but Virgo. Thus, the Vladimir text, recorded in the second half of the 20th century, is actually more archaic than the ancient Greek one.

In the Vologda text, «Owl – mother-in-law grazed horses». But E. E. Kuzmina notes that

«the horse played a large role in the cult of the goddess – the mother.» In the Indo-European tradition, the image of the goddess, the mistress of horses, was widespread. «She was represented standing between two horsemen», personifying the opposite elements – life and death, over which the Goddess – Mother, is in control. Sometimes, instead of horsemen, just two horses were depicted.» On Shrovetide, the newlyweds, who got married last year, went «to their mother-in-law for pancakes» in a sleigh, which rushed horses decorated with bells, ribbons, and paper flowers. Moreover, it was on Shrovetide that the horses were dressed most richl Horses in the Indo-European tradition are symbols of the Sun. So in the ancient Russian ritual practice one of the names of the Sun was «Khors». But in English «Khors» is a horse, and in Sanskrit «hara» or «hari» is golden, sparkling, and an appeal to a deity. We emphasize once again that the Indo-European peoples had a widespread idea of the Goddess – the Foremother as the Lady or Lady of the horses. Suffice it to recall the images of the goddess with two horses on the sides, so widespread in embroidery and weaving in the Russian North, and found in a vast territory – from Scandinavia to India. Here it is worth remembering our «Baba Yaga» – the mistress of horses, holding in her hands the threads of life and death. And when she is the mother of Vasilisa the Wise or the Beautiful, (i.e. the Lady of wisdom or the Lady of beauty), she is also a mother-in-law. And the birds of Baba Yaga, besides the geese-swans, were owls.

Turning to the «owl» hypostasis of Mother-in-law – Pramateri, we note that in the ancient Greek tradition, in the esoteric Orphic hymns, which have preserved the deepest archaic, «Tovis» is called the wife of the Ocean. But Tethys or Tefida is one of the most ancient deities of ancient Greek mythology, the Titanide, the daughter of Gaia and Uranus. Her name is derived from the Indo-European teta – «mother», «grandmother». We note here that in the archaic Indo-European tradition, horses (whom the owl – mother-in-law grazed in the Vologda song) are associated not only with the sun, but also with the waters (seas, oceans, rivers) and the cosmic heavenly Ocean), whose wife in the hymn is called «owl» Tethys.

Among the characters of Hellenic mythology, having a zoomorphic version of the image of an owl, of course, Athena should be called. «Powerful, scary, scythe goddess of archaic», she was conceived as fate and the Great Goddess – Mother, who is known to archaic mythology as «the parent and destroyer of all living things.» This image originates in the ancient period of development of Greek mythology – matriarchy.

The «bright-lighted Athena» of the Greek archaic is very close, as it may seem strange at first glance, the Old Testament Lilith. She was also called the «Foremother» or «The Great Mother», «The Holy Ruler». Lilith is associated with the Etruscan goddess Leith, who met the dead at the gates of the Underworld. She, like Athena of the archaic, is the parent and destroyer of all living things.

But the most interesting – her name «Lilith» is translated as «nocturnal,» nocturnal ghost “, „nocturnal owl. The Sumerian bas-relief of the beginning of 2 thousand BC is known with the image of Lilith with owl wings and paws, and on her sides – two owls.

«Folk etymology connects the name Lilith with the Jewish lyl – night… the names of Lilith herself – Batna (aram.» Womb»), Odem («redness»), Amorpho (Greek.«Without form») – reports the Encyclopedia of Myths.» Thus, Lilith is the first wife of Adam, who gave birth to him «sparkling sons and radiant daughters», whose attributes were an owl and a snake – the twin sister of Greek Athena, whose attributes were also an owl and a snake.

Well, now it’s time for us to return to the Russian ritual song about «owl – mother-in-law».

Remember:

At home – that oak

On the oak there is an owl,

An owl is my mother-in-law…

It is worth recalling that the head of the pantheon of the gods of Ancient Greece – Zeus (Dyaus) in the archaic tradition is represented by an oak by the water (Zeus Dodonsky).

According to the myth, the goddess of wisdom, sacred knowledge, the maiden warrior Athena emerges from his head. That is, returning to phyto and zoomorphic codes, we get an oak tree, on top of which an owl sits. Moreover, elevated to the rank of the eternal virgin by the patriarchal tradition, which replaced the matriarchy, Athena, even in late antiquity, was surrounded by Kurets, who were sometimes called the «children of Athena.» Interestingly, earlier they were surrounded by the Great Mother of the gods Rey-Cybele and were considered children of the Earth (Gaia).

The Orphic hymn «Kuretam» says about them:

You were the first to institute sacraments among mortals,

You, oh immortal kuretes, you who are in the armor of Ares,…

You pestun deities, but you are destroyers too.

…kuretas, lords… children of the highest Zeus!

Pestun souls, invisible, everlasting spirits…

But since ancient Greek mythology, already at the level of Homer’s poems, fixes the stage at which Athena is only a virgin – a warrior and mother cannot be, because of her eternal virginity, we must emphasize that in the Vologda and Vladimir ritual songs, preserved in the Russian folk tradition almost until the end of the 20th century, the image of the Great Mother – «owl-mother-in-law» is much more archaic than the ancient Greek. She is not a virgin here, but the Foremother and her hypostasis – an owl – a nocturnal bird associated with the most ancient maternal lunar cults.

In the Russian North, in the archaeological sites of the Neolithic (6—4 thousand BC), there are images of women made of stone, bone and wood, ending with an owl’s head. S. V. Oshibkina notes that among the anthropomorphic images at the Kubenino site (basin of the Sukhona River, west of the Vologda Region), a bone figurine was found; one leg of which (the other was lost) ends with a hoof. She has an extended head and in general «there is a similarity of anthropomorphic figurines with an owl.» We repeat, this is the Neolithic, the new Stone Age.

There is no future Ancient Greece yet. The Indo-Europeans did not come to the territory of Western Europe yet. The palace of the Minotaur has not yet been built in Crete, which was guarded by an owl and a snake. The book of Job has not yet been written. And in the north of Eastern Europe, images of women are created – Mothers with the head of an Owl. The same goddesses with owl heads and wheat grains in clay stomachs are also characteristic of the sacred plastic art of the Trypillian culture (4—3 thousand BC). Owl – Foremother (Mother-in-law) is a symbol of divine wisdom, the one that embodies this wisdom in the manifested world, i.e. reflects. And to reflect is the function of the moon. Let us recall that the main ritual food and the symbol of Maslenitsa were pancakes associated with the world of the Ancestors and the Moon.

We have already noted earlier that in ritual pre-wedding texts in the Russian North, an orphan bride turned to her deceased mother, who became part of the Universal Feminine Principle, with the words «My Red Krasigorka». But it was on Maslenitsa that Ice Mountains were built, from which every young couple, after a three-time kiss, had to move down. The mountain (hill) has been a symbol of the Great Goddess – Mother Earth since ancient times.

«The mountain is often perceived as an image of the world, a model of the universe, which reflects all the basic elements and parameters of the cosmic device. The mountain is in the center of the world – where its axis runs. The continuation of the world axis upward (through the top of the mountain) indicates the position of the North Star, and its continuation of the North Star, and its continuation downward indicates the place where the entrance to the lower world is located», – the «Encyclopedia of Myths» reports. Suffice it to recall the first hill of Egyptian mythology, which rose from the universal waters, on which the «great Gogotun» laid an egg, from which the sun appeared. The Great Goddesses – Mothers of many nations were presented to the archaic consciousness as a certain first raise rising from Chaos. Such a first mountain was the ancient Greek Gaia – the Earth «from itself, which gave birth to Uranus – the sky and took it as a spouse.»

The mistress of the mountains of Cybele. The symbol of Mother Earth was the grave mounds of our ancestors. And we note here that in the ritual text Mother, who has gone to another world, i.e. merged with the eternal universal principle, with Mother Earth, is naturally called the «Red Krasigorka».

Turning again to the image of Lilith, let us recall that her names Batna and Odem meant «womb» and «red», «redness». In the North Russian tradition (as, indeed, in the Hebrew), the Foremother is called «Red» and «Red Mountain». Why exactly «Red»? Beautiful? Hardly. We will find an explanation of this phenomenon in the oldest texts of the Indo-Europeans – the epic Mahabharata, the main block of which, apparently, was formed on the circumpolar ancestral home of the Aryans.

In the first book of the epic «Adiparve» it is said that according to the Almighty, (which in another book – «Forest» is called «the Creator of Light dispersing darkness», «Those who Exist, Was and Will Be», «The visible eternal God, the Immutable Law»), and to His Word (which is voiced by thought)», a huge egg appeared, forever, like the seed of all creatures… In it the true light was the eternal Brahmo, wonderful, unimaginable, omnipresent, the one who is the hidden and elusive reason for the real and unreal and unreal».

In the book «On the Sacrifice of the Horse» («Ashvamehikaparva») Brahmo is called «ether». The text reads: 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 waves of the ether or the «heavenly Ocean» generate «wind» or movement, which already has two properties «sound and touch». Moreover, the intrinsic property of movement is «touch», i.e. inertia. Then visible Light is born, which already has three properties – «sound, touch and image.» The property of Light, which carries in it (as a visible image of the seven first sounds) the seven colors of the spectrum, is the Image, i.e. the entire visible material World. But the first color in this process of manifestation is precisely red. Hence, the «Sun is red» – as an image of materialized light or, as they said back in the 12th century: «A thing is more sun to Light.» And the first, as the prototype of the Earth, is also «Krasnaya Krasigorka».

But why are Old Testament Lilith and «Owl-Mother-in-law» born, seemingly so far from each other, so close to each other?

As it turns out, this distance is only apparent.

Thus, at the end of the 19th century, the first rector of Boston University, William Warren, spoke about the correlation of the image of the World Mountain «with the axis of heaven», i.e. with the North Pole and wrote about that «the Akkadians, who were the forerunners of the most ancient empires of the Tigris and Euphrates, also knew a similar World Mountain, unlike all other mountains, since the sky rested on it and revolved around it. They called her Harsak Kurra.» He also stressed that the Harsak Kurra of the Akkadians is the north-polar «mountain of life» of the Egyptians. He writes: «Joachim Menard believed that» the mythological Akkad was a circumpolar native, in memory of which the Akkad of the Tigris-Euphrates Plain was named».

He supports this assumption with the following facts: «Both names, Akkad and Sumer, are not Assyro-Babylonian, but borrowed from an older prehistoric language; the etymological meaning and common noun of the name «Akkad» clearly brings it closer to a distant country on the north-polar peak of the Earth. «W. Warren also notes that according to the Jews, «Heaven, the refuge of the supreme God, was in the north, in the circumpolar part of heaven, that is, in the sacred region… Job claims that» God makes in the North», in Ezekiel the true God appears from above and from the north (Job 37:22). «Bright weather comes from the north and around God terrible magnificence.»

Speaking about the ideas of the ancient Jews, recorded in the Old Testament, W. Warren cites the words of the prophet Isaiah, addressed to the ruler of Babylon: «How you fell from heaven, dear woman, and son of the dawn! Crashed to the ground, trampling on the peoples. And he said in his heart: «I will ascend to heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, and I will sit on a mountain in the doubt of the gods, at the edge of the North; I will ascend to the cloudy heights, I will be like the Most High». Thus, the place and time of the birth of the images of «Owl-Mother-in-law» – «Red Beauty» and «Lilith – Night Owl», apparently, were the same.

Moreover, the very name Lilith raises a number of questions. So the proximity of the Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages is well known. Back in the 19th century, K. Zeiss, A. Kuhn, F. Bopp noted the special ties of the Aryan within the Indo-European with Slavic, Greek and Armenian.

E. A. Grantovsky in his «Early history of the tribes of Asia Minor» wrote that «the supporters of the predominant Aryan-Slavic or Aryan-Balto-Slavic affinity refer the contacts of the predecessors of the Slavs (and the Balts) and the ancestors of the Aryans to the era of the Indo-European community that did not completely disintegrate (and in absolute dates to a very early period», at least 5—4 thousand BC.

Back in the 50s of the twentieth century, the outstanding Indian Sanskritologist R. Sankrityayana introduced the term «Indo-glory» into scientific circulation, and Professor D. P. Shastri said in 1964: «If I were asked which two languages of the world are most similar to each other, I would answer without any hesitation: Russian and Sanskrit.» The numerous similarities in the modern Russian language and Sanskrit were repeatedly written by N. R. Guseva.

My book «The Golden Thread» gives examples of analogues in the North Russian dialects and classical Sanskrit, as well as the names of the rivers of Russia, which can be explained only through Sanskrit.

Based on the above, it makes sense to remember that in Russian ritual songs such chorus as «lyuli-lyuli», «leli-leli», «leli-leli» is quite often encountered. Turning to Sanskrit, we learn that «li» literally means «to touch, caress, stick, sink, sit down, melt, melt, and dissolve.» Hence «lila» – «game, fun, beauty». In the Hindu tradition, the «love pastimes of Krishna and the cowherd boys fascinated by him» are called «lila». Here «lul (lolati) means» to move here and there, to rush, move, worry, sway, and disappear.» But in the same row there is the word «lulita», which has the same meanings – «to rush, move, worry, and wobble.»

«Lulita» and Lilith – isn’t it too similar both in sound and in meaning? And the folk etymology connecting the name Lilith with the Hebrew lul – «night», apparently, is close to the truth. After all, night is the time of lulita – or lul (to move here and there, rush, sway, etc.), i.e. carnal love. In any case, the Laws of Manu (text 175) directly states that «a twice-born man who has intercourse (sexual) … in the daytime must completely wash himself in clothes to atone for his sin. This is, firstly.

And secondly: remember that Lilith is associated with children, i.e. with those who are legally conceived at night. She gives them, but she can take them away. After all, this is the mistress of Life and Death, the Great Mother of matriarchy. Perhaps that is why in Russia since ancient times (and even today), when they put them to bed, they rocked small children in a cradle (lul), singing «lyuli-lyuli». After all, sleep is an intermediate state between life and death. The cradle «moves here and there, sways, hesitates,» and the child «plunges» into the night, into sleep, in order to return to this world in the morning.Thus, a close connection is being built between three ethnic traditions: Russian, Indian and Hebrew, where a common block of ideas associated with the term «lul, lulita» is preserved.

In the ancient Indian tradition (Sanskrit) this is a term denoting the concept of «moving here and there, rushing, stirring, swaying, and disappearing.» In addition, and this is very important, the active principle of Brahma – Shakti – is called «lolita» or «lulita» and represents the «feminine» principle of the universe. In Hebrew – Lilith is the name of the «night Goddess», whose symbol was the Owl.

In the Sumerian-Babylonian texts, Lilith is «The Holy Ruler», «The Great Mother and Mother», giving and taking life. The Hitto-Huritic goddess of love and fertility, the chthonic goddess who combines the male and female principles of Shavushka (Russian. Shovushka – Sovushka), also correlates with her.

And, finally, in the Russian tradition, this word «cradle» is a baby cradle and the chorus «lyuli-lyuli», «leli-lely», inherent in both lullabies and calendar ritual songs.

All this, taken together, testifies to the fact that the above-mentioned traditions have one source and, consequently, one Ancestral home – the North of Eastern Europe – the Polar region.

And the birth of this single tradition goes back thousands of years.

The question of what caused the Old Testament tradition to turn Lilith from the Great Goddess and the All-Mother into a bloodthirsty demon, an evil spirit that abducts newborns and drinks their blood, corrupts pregnant women and rapes sleeping men in order to give birth to children from them, remains open. Perhaps the answer lies in the legend of Cain and Abel – the farmer and the shepherd and their antagonism, which ended in the murder of Abel – the «shepherd of the sheep.» Is this not too similar to a split in the Indo-Iranian unity, when mutual hatred led to the fact that even the previously common gods were turned into demons. The «Asuras» of antiquity – radiant and blissful, became symbols of evil in ancient Indian mythology and good in ancient Iranian mythology. «Devas» are demons of ancient Iranian mythology, in ancient Indian they were deities. But before, everything was the same. And the Russian language testifies to this. We are still shouting «Urra!» invoking the light. And in Russian villages, a girl can still be called «devka», which is analogous to «ancient Indian (Sanskrit) devika» (daivika) – «divine, or even «deva "– (daiva) “ deity, divinity, fate, fate, destiny».

Here it is appropriate to recall again Greek mythology, in which there is a shepherd Lilai or Lily, «who revered of all the gods only Selene (ie, the Moon – the Goddess of the night) and sent her a night cult. The gods sent two lions on him, which tore him to pieces, but Selena turned Lily into a mountain.» The name of this «shepherd» sounds like a dull echo of the ancient mother cult.

And two lions are also appropriate here. Indeed, in the Sumerian image of Lilith (2 thousand BC) with owl wings and paws, and two owls on the sides, she stands on two lions.

And the mountain into which the shepherd Lilai (or Lily) has turned is also a symbol and embodiment of the Great Mother of matriarchy. It is hard to say where this boundary of mutual rejection passes, and the power of Mother Earth is replaced by the supremacy of the Patriarch-Shepherd. But the fear of freedom and independence of a woman is already recorded in the «Laws of Manu» which says: «Neither day nor night should men allow women to be independent and free in their actions: women inclined to worldly pleasures should always be under the control of men. In childhood, a girl is under the protection of her father, in her youth – under the protection of her husband, in old age – under the protection of her son, but she should never be left to herself, in other words, a woman should not have independence. But all the different hypostases of the ancient Mother Goddess, be it the Akkadian Ishtar, the Sumerian Inanna, Lilith, the ancient Greek Gaia, Hera, Aphrodite, Athena, etc., were distinguished by one main quality – independence. Therefore, it is not surprising that in a patriarchal society, Lilith turned into an evil demon.

Returning to Sanskrit, we note that among the many analogues of Russian words, the Sanskrit terms of kinship are of undoubted interest.

Russian – Sanskrit: mater’ – matr’ (mother), pramater’ – pramatr’ (foremother), mat’, mama – mata, ma (mother), syn – suna (son), tyatya, tata – tata, tyatya (daddy), dever’ – devr’, devar (brother-in-law), zhena – dzhani (wife), svoyak – svaka (brother-in-law), svat’ya – svatva, svata (matchmaker), zyat’ – dzhata, dzhati (son-in-law), snokha – snusha, snukkha (daughter-in-law), vdova – vidkhavva (widow), svokor-svakar (father-in-law).

Going deeper into the meaning, you understand that in essence it is all about the same thing in Sanskrit «papu, dad» – «protector», but should not «papa, dad» be the protector of his children. «Svakha, Matchmaker» in Sanskrit is an exclamation made when a new fire is ignited.

And the name of the wife of the god Agni (Fire). But does our «Svakha, matchmaker» not incite new family hearths, connecting the bride with the groom.

By the way, the word» nevesta, bride» is also in Sanskrit («nivesta») and it means «shell, packaging, case, tire», and the word «nivesaya» – «soothe, marry.»

In this rather extensive series, for some reason there are no sounds close to the Russian term «toshcha, mother-in-law».

But, knowing how it sounds in Russian, we will try to find an analogue in Sanskrit. It turns out he is – «tesu». And this term means literally the following: 1) that, that, that, 2) this, this, this, 3) he, she, and it.

Indeed, the Earth is indeed the Great Mother of God, which is on it. That, that, that, that, that, that, he, she, and it – everything is born by her and everything returns to her! So much for Maslenitsa – «Krasnaya Gora» of the Veles book! The great ancient holiday dedicated to Mother – Earth, the Eternal Universal motherly principle, whose awakening was celebrated on the day of the vernal equinox – March 22. Waking up for a whole month (from February 21 to the night of March 21 to 22), she woke up completely to give birth to all living things. And she was asked about the offspring of livestock, about healthy offspring, about a rich harvest. They asked, riding on luxuriously decorated horses, whose mistress she was – «The Lady of the Horses.» They asked, rolling on spinning wheels from the icy mountains dedicated to her. And here it is appropriate to recall the wooden fetish of the ancient Greek Hera, which was a spinning-like wooden carved board that stood in the temple of Hera on the island of Samos. Note also that the same carved board was a symbol of the Great Mother Goddess of the inhabitants of the Hindu Kush (Afghanistan).

In the Russian tradition, it was women, girls and girls on the spinning wheels, who were holding pancake in the apron’s pocket, from the mountain to Shrovetide. But the spinning wheel in Russian ritual practice was by no means a simple tool for obtaining a thread. She was the embodiment of the Tree of Life, with which the Goddess – the Mother of God is directly connected. This tree carried the Eternal Time on its branches – past, present and future.

The spinning wheel was a grave monument and connected the world of the living and the world of those who passed away, ancestors and descendants. As the embodiment of the original deity, combining both feminine and masculine principles, the spinning wheel was a symbol of fertility and contributed to an increase in the fertility of everything living on Earth. And the threads obtained on a spinning wheel are not so simple. The very word «niti» in Sanskrit means literally «correct behavior, life wisdom, custom», and nitka – «musical melody, song».

And here it is appropriate to recall the ancient Egyptian goddess Neith (Nit), who was worshiped as «the father of fathers and mother of mothers», «All-Creator», combining both male and female principles, «Lady of the Waters» at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC during the first dynasties of the kings of Egypt. Her hypostases later became Hathor, Isis, Nephthys and Serket. Herodotus identified Neith with Athena, the owl Goddess, the Mother of matriarchy. It is worth emphasizing that the sacred city of the goddess Neith was called «Lunyt» (Lunit), and the ancient Greeks called it Latopolis (city of Lato), Polis Laton (city of Latona) or simply Lato.

Together, they personified Mother Earth, which cannot be loved or praised. Awakening from a long winter sleep, she was glorified by songs, and bonfires, and violent merriment. People asked Mother Earth for happiness, abundance and a rich harvest, burning a scarecrow from the straw left after threshing last year’s grain. And giving this symbol of the past year the elements of fire, they returned to the Earth ashes and ashes so that they would be reborn with new breads (note that in the Lithuanian tradition, Sauvius is the founder of the tradition of corpse burning and the guide of souls).

Everything returned to the eternal mother’s beginning. And the women who gave birth, raised and married their daughters, represented this Universal and Eternal Mother in the world of people, calling her by the most ancient name Mother-in-law.

Great Mother Avina

Even in the era of Paleolithic proto-farming, people already clearly realized that the straw burnt in the fields, remaining after grain collection, increased soil fertility.

This is probably the very source, the starting point from which the widespread straw cult subsequently grew. On straw (in the Russian folk tradition): they gave birth to children, danced on Christmastide and Shrovetide, the bride had to stand in front of the crown, washed, washed the dead, laid them on the table for Christmas and only after that they laid the table with an abusive tabletop, and it was supposed to die on the straw. Sheaves of straw and a straw effigy that were burned on Shrovetide, in this context, were symbols of fertility, happiness, abundance – the very «dead body» of last year’s harvest, which was given to the elements of fire and, having turned into soot and ashes, gave rise to new life, a new harvest.

And since in the Paleolithic antiquity, the collection, storage and processing of grain «were occupied by women -" girls, young men», and the earth itself was associated with the image of a woman -" Mother Earth "– there is nothing surprising in the fact that the Maslenitsa straw effigy was given female features. And this rite does not at all testify to the «bestial manners» of our ancestors, as some modern «intellectuals» claim, being horrified at the burning of a scarecrow and believing that its place before, before the adoption of Christianity, was occupied by a living woman, during the burning of which everyone around her people sang, danced and rejoiced.

Such a terrible picture could only be born in a very sick imagination. Indeed, even during the numerous auto-da-fe (burning of heretics) in Christian Western Europe, there was nothing like this (songs, dances and violent fun).

During Shrovetide, participants in the ritual sprinkled ashes and soot from a fire on each other and even on the floor in the huts, thus joining in fertility, abundance, happiness, wealth.

And here’s what’s interesting. In the ritual songs of Christmas fortune-telling (submarine songs), we meet the image of the Owl precisely in connection with smoke, ash, soot or a hole in the barn through which the sheaves were transmitted. So in a sublime song (recorded by P. V. Shein at the end of the 19th century), predicting poverty and widowhood, it says:

«Sitting owl

Over the boot.

Wonderful or lyadu!

Who sang

Good for that!».

But almost the same song foreshadowed the wedding:

«And the owl sits

Before the dry

The falcon has arrived

He tore off the crest!».

Here «sapushka, sopuha» is:

1) an air vent near the stove;

2) soot in the pipe;

3) a carved hole in the wall, which throws hay;

4) smoke in a chicken house.

And, what is no less interesting, «sipukha» is the North Russian dialect name of the owl itself.

Among the songs foreshadowing death, one of the attributes is the barn (or threshing floor):

«A woman sits on a barn

The canvas tears.

Ilea, Ilea!».

Or:

«I walk around the humenets

I lay a towel.

Holy evening!».

In turn, the girls complain in sacred songs that they are forced to «ram the sheepskin» or «threshing floor» (Notes of P. V. Shein in the Oryol and Simbirsk provinces).

Where does such a more than strange attitude to the barn (threshing floor) come from and what does it have in common with the stove (soot, ash, ash) and, ultimately, with the owl?

Let us turn for the answer, first of all, to the «East Slavic Ethnography» by D. K. Zelenin, which says that: «In the swamps and forests where the North Russians and Belarusians live, the drying of the sheaves in the barn is still preserved, although now this is rarely done. Until the beginning of the 20th century, barns existed here everywhere, and only the widespread use of threshers led to their rapid disappearance… The simplest variety of barn for drying sheaves is called Shish… A real barn… it’s a rough log building. According to popular beliefs, in the pit of the barn lives the barn or the barn, the barn’s father. His appearance is uncertain».

It is worth emphasizing that the archaic form of Shisha is a cone made of poles or logs, under which a hole is dug, where a fire is made to dry the sheaves, and extremely resembles the shape of a grave mound, mound or pyramid.

B. A. Rybakov noted that the Northern Russian barn is a place of the cult of fire – Svarozhich, which in various forms survived until the beginning of the 20th century everywhere.

«Fire Svarozhitsu pray.» Fire is called «god», «holy fire»; while blowing up the fire, prayers were recited. The fire is transferred from the old dwelling to the new… «We honor fire as a god,» said the inhabitants of Podolia. Ancient sources speak of the cult of Svarozhich under the barn, where a fire should burn, drying the sheaves. The Belarusians, making a fire under the barn, threw an unmilled sheaf of rye at it as a sacrifice to the fire.» In one of the sermons of the 12—13th century those who pray «fire under the barn» are sharply condemned. Very often, the «barn» (or Ovinnitsa) was perceived in the early 20th century as a spirit of fire. It should be noted that in the Vilnius province the Belarusians washed in barns, and in the Russian provinces they gave birth in barns. The barn was also directly related to the wedding ceremony. So there is evidence that on the first day of the wedding they drank beer in the barn. Then, during the wedding, the bride’s parents «drank the barn.» And, finally, at the end of the wedding, the ceremony of «pouring the barn» was performed, when a fire was lit in the barn, shouted «fire» and ran to fill the fire with beer (information of L. A. Tultseva).

The deceased was brought to the barn to be put on straw (wheat or pea). The idea that the souls of the dead (navi) leave bird tracks was widespread until the early 20th century. Therefore, on Thursday of Holy Week, in the bathhouse or barn (which served as a bathhouse), the floor was sprinkled with ashes so that the «navi» left a bird trail. In Bulgarian folklore, the «navi» have left a trail of birds. In Bulgarian folklore, «navi» are the birdlike souls of the dead, flying at night and frightening with their cry. But mostly only owls and eagle owls fly at night, i.e. representatives of one family.

In the folk tradition, there were special holidays in which it was forbidden to heat Riga.

They were called «the name of the barn.»

These included:

Exaltation (September 14),

Thekla Zarevnitsa day (September 24),

Feast of the Most Holy Theotokos (October 1).

It is interesting that at the end of the threshing process, pancakes are baked, brought to the barn and put on the oven there. Pancakes, as you know, in the Russian folk tradition are associated with the cult of ancestors and the moon – «the sun of the dead», and in the archaic version they are unleavened cakes baked on hot stones in ancient hearths.

Ovinnik (or barn) seemed to our peasants the most powerful of all the spirits around them -«experienced owners begin to drown the barn in no other way than by asking the “ owner ” for permission. When the last sheaf is removed, they turn to the barn with their faces and with a low bow they thank the barn». And, finally, «barns», like baths, are a favorite place for girls’ fortune-telling. They come here on Vasilyev’s evening, at midnight, between the second and third roosters (the most convenient for conspiracies).»

Earlier, grain pits were used as warehouses for communal grain, which were arranged in the threshing floor. Ovin (or threshing floor, riga) is a place where grain was dried and stored.

And where grain is stored, mice will appear. And where mice appear, owls appear. And in this case, owls are welcome guests.

The owl that flew to the granary is still a gift for the farmer today. She saves the crop by killing the mice. No cat can compare to an owl here. In general, even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the attitude towards the barn and the owl in the Russian folk tradition was special.

And here are some examples.It was believed that if an owl flies into a village, sits under the roof of a house and screams, then a big fire will happen in this house, or even in the whole village.

But at the same time, the owl screams to the newborn.

A. V. Gura in his work «Symbols of animals in the Slavic folk tradition» noted that «in the Owl they see the embodiment of the devil… According to the ideas of the Poles and Serbs, witches often turn into Owl. Poles have a belief that an owl is dead during the day and only comes to life in the dark. Everywhere, by its appearance near the house, the Owl portends death… There are known beliefs about the Owl as the embodiment of the soul of the deceased…

With its cry, the Owl cries out the souls of the dead (among the Poles), lures children out of the house and deprives them of life (among the Serbs). The owls guarding the treasures are the souls of the longtime owners of buried treasures (among the Poles).»

But with all this, «the scream of an owl is also perceived as a prediction of the birth of a child… The image of the newborn in connection with Sova appears in some Belarusian reaping songs in which women urge each other to catch the Owl in life. «An owl appears as a celibate, widow, or dissolute (unfaithful wife, promiscuous girl).» And here it makes sense to recall Lilith – Ishtar – Astarte – the Goddess Owl of ancient Sumer (2 thousand BC).

«Cry of the Owl and some subtle songs about the Owl, writes A.V. Gura – promise the birth of an illegitimate child from a widow or a girl. The Belarusian abusive expression «Smaked Sava» is addressed to the girl who gave birth before marriage… The Russians called the owl a «dissolute» inn «woman».

The image of the Owl develops erotic symbolism. In Polish riddles, the Owl is directly related to the female genital organ. Marriage and erotic symbolism is inherent in the image of the Owl in the wedding ceremony. For example, in Ukrainian songs performed before the wedding night, the Owl symbolizes the bride. «And, finally, «as a talisman for the people of the city, the Owl is nailed to the door of a house to ward off illness and misfortune. For Poles – to the gates of the barn, to frighten mice, for Ukrainians they hang Owl in the stable so that the brownie does not torture the horses».

And how can you not remember the «Owl-Mother-in-law», which herded horses in the Vologda ritual song:

Turu-turu, shepherd, do you sound far off?

From sea to sea, to Keyeva town

There is our homeland, in the homeland there is an oak tree,

An owl is on the oak, an owl is my mother-in-law, she grazed horses.

And further. «The owl has extraordinary properties. If the heart of this bird is put together with the left leg or at least one claw on a soundly sleeping person, he will immediately tell what he thinks to do in the future, and will reveal all his innermost secrets».

Researchers of the «owl question» also note the following about the Owl: «Since she is afraid of daylight and flies out only at dusk or at night, lives mainly in old or destroyed buildings, she is credited with demonic significance… takes the form of an owl (here it is appropriate to recall the Russian: «I went to the devil’s grandmother!»)…

An owl feather is worn by people who roam at night and want to get rid of the fear of darkness. Obviously, the owl was once a symbol of the ability not to feel fear and move freely even in the dark, that is, to be initiated into the secrets usually hidden for mortals».

For all the vices and virtues attributed to the patriarchal Sowa, in the Vologda and Vladimir ritual songs that survived until the 80s and 90s of the 20th century, she appears before us as:

«Owl – Mother-in-law», that is, the Foremother;

«Lady of the Horses», that is, the Great Mother Goddess of Indo-European peoples;

«Little telly motley», that is, Mother Earth of Indo-Iranians (Aryans).

B. A. Rybakov in «The Paganism of the Ancient Slavs» speaks of the essence of the worldview of primitive farmers «in the form of the formula: grain + earth + rain = harvest and the reflection of all links of this formula by means of a female figure… Woman and earth are compared and equalized on the basis of the ancient idea of fertility, fertility… supposed to sculpt a female figurine, then grain and flour were added to the soft clay, merging the agrarian and female principles».

Draga Garashina, and after her Maria Gimbutas, expressed the idea that in the Eneolithic figurines (such as the clay goddesses of Tripoli), the Great Bird Goddess appears before us. B. A. Rybakov writes the following about this: «one should warn against some insufficiently substantiated propositions of M. Gimbutas. These include, first of all, the hypothesis of the great Bird – Goddess. The author often relies on the primitive stylization of sculptures, but the avian features attributed to them do not seem convincing. Perhaps a retrospective analysis should also be applied: from the later winged sirens – Sirins, to go deeper into the origins of this image».

Our North Russian ritual song about «Owl-Mother-in-law», recorded by A. M. Mehnetsov in 1974 in the Vologda Oblast, seems to have put an end to this discussion. The favorite plot of M. Gimbutas was confirmed.

But to talk about where, the origins of this image, should be based not only on the Neolithic images of women with owl heads found in the Russian North (6—4 millennia BC), and Trypillian owl-headed goddesses of the Eneolithic (4- 3 millennium BC). We will have to descend into those depths of millennia when agriculture was born on the territory of the Russian Plain (and the Russian North, in particular).

50 – 48 millennia BC is the beginning of the warm Mologo-Sheksninsky interglacial. As the atlas monograph «Paleogeography of Europe for the Last Hundred Thousand Years» (1982) and «Paleolithic of the USSR» (1984) testify, this was a time when in the territory of most of Western Europe it sharply became colder. The Wurme (Valdai) glaciation led to the prevalence of the tundra with birch-spruce woodlands on these vast expanses. But unlike Western Europe and Siberia, the territory of Eastern Europe was warm. And this warm Mologo-Sheksninsky interglacial period lasted, with small intervals, almost 27 thousand years – up to 23 millennium BC.

For those who find this unbelievable, I advise you to refer to the «Paleolithic of the USSR» (Publishing House «Science») published in 1984 in the series «Archeology of the USSR» Here on page 30 is placed «Comparison of the development patterns of the natural process of the Valdai (Wurm) time of Western Europe (A), Eastern Europe (B) and Siberia (C).

Authors write: «The relatively mild climatic conditions of the Molo-Sheksna interglacial allowed the population to spread widely throughout the Russian Plain, up to the Urals and the Pechora basin… In the north-east of Europe, which includes the vast expanses of the Volga and Ural regions, outstanding monuments of the early Paleolithic period have been found over the last mountains, and a turning point towards intensifying the work on their study. Certain areas of the Russian Plain (northwest) in the Molo-Sheksna time may not have been inhabited. It should be emphasized that from the south to the north of the Russian Plain, during the formation and development of the Upper Paleolithic, it was not nomadic hunters who moved, but the sedentary tribes who built long-term dwellings of various types, leading complex household activities based on hunting and gathering… The main object of hunting for the population of the southwest of the Russian Plain in the Molo-Sheksna period was the horse… Hunting for herds of horses and reindeer required the improvement of throwing weapons and, perhaps, at such an early time led to the invention of the bow and arrows».

By this time, such archaeological sites as: Byzovaya (northeast of Europe, Pechora region, right bank of the Pechora River), Sungir (near Vladimir), Bear Cave (upper reaches of the Pechora River, foothills of the Northern Urals), Ostrovskaya (500 km to the south Bear Caves), Kapovaya Cave with wall cave painting (upper reaches of the Belaya River, mountainous region of the Southern Urals), and, of course, Kostenki on the Don River.

Archaeologists note that they all belong to the period of the Molo-Sheksna interglacial period, which lasted practically from 50—48 millennia BC. up to 24—23 millennia BC).

«Kostenkovo-Streletskaya culture of the early period of the Late Paleolithic, leading its beginning from the Mousterian era» (which ends with the end of the Mikulinsky interglacial), reached by the beginning of the Ostashkovsky glaciation (24—23 millennia BC) «an amazingly high degree of development, not inferior to in many respects to later archaeological cultures.»

Thus: «Achievements of the material and spiritual culture of the population of Eastern Europe during the Molo-Sheksna interglacial period underlie, in turn, the highest flowering of the late Paleolithic culture of this region, which took place in the early period of the Ostashkov glaciation.»

Archeology confirms that by the beginning of the cold snap, vast settlements existed in the center and north of the Russian Plain, which «testify to the complex domestic and economic activities, the high level of culture, reflected not only in numerous remarkable works of art, but also in a highly developed and varied homebuilding technique. These monuments allow us to draw a definite conclusion about the significant population of the preglacial zone of the Ostashkov glacier at a time when the climate became more severe. The population led a sedentary lifestyle and provided itself with stocks of vital resources for the winter.»

Archaeologists speak of «long ground dwellings with hearths in the center, surrounded by small dugouts in combination with storage pits.» In these «strong and long-term dwellings of the population of the Russian Plain» there are a large number of «grater pestles and real grain-grinding slabs of granite, quartzite and Shoksha sandstone. Cooking plant foods in ordinary ways, similar to those used in agricultural crops, in the Paleolithic is a rather rare phenomenon, but not exclusive».

The authors of «Paleolithic USSR» emphasize that «Finds of pestles-blackfishes are known in the Late Paleolithic monuments of other regions, but, perhaps, only in the south-west of the Russian Plain, they are found in such quantities, starting from the Mousterian industries and passing like a red thread through almost all the different cultural and different times of the Late Paleolithic industries».

They testify that: «In recent decades, important data have been obtained that already in the Middle and especially in the Late Paleolithic (recall that this is the ancient Stone Age from 70 thousand BC to 12 thousand BC) forms of complicated gathering began to be widely used related to the processing and preparation of plant foods. Primitive archeology now possesses massive and indisputable materials proving a long prehistory of agriculture, which began at least from the end of the Middle Paleolithic era. In the south-west of the Russian Plain, for three or four tens of millennia, peculiar stone, sandstone pestles-grains in the form of small tablets, usually found together with stone slabs, developed and improved… The wide distribution of these tools indicates that the emergence of agriculture is preceded by various forms developed, complicated gathering associated with the preliminary complex processing of the collected plant food in the form of edible roots and grains».

40—50, and maybe 70 thousand years ago, the population of the Russian Plain (our ancestors, by the way) collected cereals and ground them with grater pestles on stone graters, getting flour. Then the question arises – what were these cereals? The answer is given by the atlas-monograph «Paleogeography of Europe over the last hundred thousand years», where on the territory of the Russian Plain, during the Valdai glaciation, along with forests of birch, pine and spruce, stretching from the Carpathians to the Middle Pechora along the south-west-north east, there are huge meadow grass steppes stretching far to the north. It must be assumed that the grasses in these steppes were endemic to these latitudes, which require 18—20 hours of indirect solar irradiation and an abundance of moisture in the soil for normal vegetation. Such «plants of long daylight hours» (according to academician LS Berg) are rye, barley, oats, wheat, flax and peas. It is they who, apparently, made up the ancient meadow grass steppes of high northern latitudes.

And if this is so, then the grain had to be collected. And women, of course, did this, since even at the beginning of the 20th century, as «stingy songs» testify, this work was performed by

«girls, young people» (recording by Shane P. V., late 19th century):

«Wheat in the field

Ripe stood.

May, may,

Mayu, green!

Ripe stood

Waving a spike

Waving a spike

Her voice was hooting.

«Girls, young men,

Come out, reap!

I cannot stand, wave a spikelet!».

Or:
«We reaped, we reaped
Reaped, reaped, —
Young reapers
Sickles gold».

Or:
«Petrova’s wife
On your own
I went out early
Daughters-winches
Quail Daughters
I took it out with me.
«Reap, daughters-in-law,
Reap, daughters!
Winch daughters
Quail Daughters!».

And, finally, a full description of the process, which, apparently, has not changed in its structure from the Paleolithic to the present day, since this record was made in 1964 in the Pskov region (from E.F. Razumova):

«А я, молодЕнька, рожь топчУ.

Рожь топчУ, рожь топчУ.

Травку-муравку вытопчУ,

ВытОпчу, вытопчУ.

ЗеленОе жито вырастёт,

ВырАстет, вырастёт.

А я, молодЕнька, буду жАть,

БудУ жать, буду жАть.

И да в снОпочки вязАть,

Да вЯзать, да вязАть.

И в сарай буду возИть,

Да вОзить, да возИть.

Да на раЮ буду садИть,

Да сАдить, да садИть.

Да сАдить, да садИть.

И цепами буду молотИть,

МолОтить, молотИть.

У печи буду сушИть,

Да сУшить, да сушИть.

В квашне буду творИть,

Да твОрить, да творИть.

И рабочих всех кормить,

Всех кОрмить, всех кормИть».

Note that the Pskov dialect word «ray, paradise» is a barn (riga, threshing floor). In Sanskrit, «rai, paradise» is abundance. But in ancient times, the idea of abundance was most likely associated with grain, and therefore with its storage – the barn. After all, it is no coincidence that we still say that «bread is the head of everything», we call a generous person «hospitable» and greet guests with «bread and salt»».

It must be thought that in the Paleolithic of the Russian plain, grain collected by women in meadow grass steppes, consisting of wild sowing rye (found in the 19th century in the Kanin tundra), wild sowing wheat (a wild type of sowing spelled found in the Middle Urals), wild sowing oats, wild sowing barley, wild peas (found in the 18th century by academician I.

Lepyokhin in the Kanin tundra) and wild flax (found in the 18th century by academician I. Lepyokhin in the Kanin tundra, in the 19th century – on Timan), had to be dried and stored.

The ears were dried in sheaves, most likely in that archaic type of barn, which survived in the Russian North until the beginning of the 20th century and was called «shish». Indeed, even in the «stubble» song, recorded in the Pskov region in 1964, it is said that the sheaves should be «plant in rai», that is, placed on top of the barn’s poles, in the buried hole of which a fire was burning at that time.

It is worth paying attention to the fact that they bring the rune «Ir», which looks like a schematic representation of an ancient barn (shisha), and emphasize that the rune «Ir» is a sign of the feminine, and «in one ritual spell, the rune» Ir «is understood as» Comprehensive.»

So, after the «rai» – the barn, the grain had to be saved. Let us once again recall the long ground dwellings «of the Paleolithic inhabitants of the Russian Plain. These were very impressive structures. So in the 30s of the 20th century P. P. Efimenko, the remains of a large ground dwelling, 31 meters long and 8 meters wide, with eight hearths along the central axis and a complex heating system were uncovered in layer I of the Kostenki 1 site. Near the dwelling there were small dugouts and pits – storerooms. Let us remind you that back in the late 19th – early 20th centuries, such pits were arranged in the barn (in the barn, in the barn). They were coated with clay, then burned with straw, and covered with straw or sheaves from above.

Probably, the structure of communal grain pits came from the depths of thousands of years of Paleolithic antiquity without any significant changes.

But where there is a lot of grain, as noted earlier, mice always appears, the number of which grows exponentially over time. And in order to preserve the grain for themselves, our ancestors had to make every effort. They attracted the natural enemies of mice – owls – to the barn. How this was done, we do not know. Most likely, the owls flew in on their own. After all, mice are their natural food. And people, in gratitude for the saved harvest, began to worship owls. And women – grain collectors and housewives – gradually merged with the image of an owl – the keeper of the barn, and hence the harvest. And since it was women who were responsible for the fertility of the fields, burning straw, drying grain on fire and cooking food on fire, the duet woman – owl naturally turned into a trio: woman – owl – fire. And all this was connected with the barn. But even at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in barns: they washed like in baths, gave birth, they brought the deceased there and put straw (corn or pea) under his head.

Therefore, the image of a woman – an Owl, already in ancient times, united not only with fire, but also with water, straw, ash and ash, life and death. Already in the cultural layer of the Upper Paleolithic Mezen site in the Chernihiv region, there are figurines made of mammoth bones, which «some researchers call «birds», and others – «emale figurines». Neolithic images of women with the head of an owl found in the Russian North (6—4 thousand BC) were mentioned earlier. In Tripoli (Eneolithic 4—3 thousand BC), female figurines with owl heads were sculpted by adding grain and flour to soft clay, and such images of goddesses were found at every grain mill in the «sanctuary of bread» found by archaeologists. And here it makes sense to cite one of the mysteries that existed in the Totemsky district of the Vologda province at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (materials of the Ethnographic Bureau of Prince V. N. Tenishev):

«The owl flew out

From the red window

Sela Owl

Four pillars».

Here, the owl symbolized the «rug of bread taken out of the oven».

In Tripoli, the belly of the owl-headed goddess of bread is sometimes guarded by two snakes. Goddesses with snakes will also go through millennia, reaching the beginning of the 20th century in North Russian embroidery. Summing up the above, we can say after Robert von Ranke Graves: «Ancient Europe did not know any gods, there was only one Great Goddess, and only she was revered as immortal and unchanging.» The only addition to this text will be – Eastern Europe, since Western Europe until the turn of 4—3 thousand BC the Indo-Europeans with their Great Goddess Mother Sova did not know, and they, in turn, did not live in Western Europe.

Over time, the ancient deity of earth, abundance, fire and water, life and death Owl-Mother-in-law received many different names: Gaia, Aditi, Rhea, Cybele, Astarta, Ishtar, Lilith, Ma, Divia, Rato, Lato.

Academician B. A. Rybakov wrote: «The area of ethnographic veneration of mother Lada is very wide: it completely includes the entire land of the Balts – Hyperboreans (both in the Latvian-Lithuanian and Slavicized Great Russian part), the entire territory of the Proto-Slavs and all areas of later Slavic settlement. In the Bronze Age, the cult of Lato reached Greek Crete, where it met with the local cult of Demeter and Persephone. It is possible that the primitives knew the cult of Lato (Latona) – Lada.»

It was already noted earlier that the two daughters of the titan Kay, whom ancient Greek mythology placed on the shores of the Kronian (Arctic) Ocean and whose city the Vologda ritual song calls «our homeland», Leto and Asteria were embodied in the images of quails. It was in the images of a quail and a quail that Zeus and Leto were married – the parents of Artemis and Apollo of Hyperborean.

But here we have a Russian Christmas song recorded in the middle of the 20th century in the Kirov region:

Dil-dil, quail,

Yes Lada, young!

Yes there, yes I flew here,

Yes dil-dil, quail,

Lada, young!

Yes, yes, yes, I gave wings to this,

Yes dil-dil, quail,

Lada, young!

Lada-quail, probably at a later stage of plow farming, became another image of the bird goddess associated with the Earth and the live.

But she still could not replace the Owl-Mother-in-law until the end. The owl Mother Goddess, in the process of migration of the peoples who worshiped her, had new names: the Sumerian-Akkadian Ereshkigal, depicted with an owl in his hand; Lilith – Ishtar – Astarte with owl quills and paws, standing between two owls; Egyptian Neith with her later hypostasis – Nephthys, whose most ancient name sounds like Lun (that is, Owl); The Great Mother of the Gods Rhea – Cybele, on the armrests of the throne of which were placed two owls; «Owl-eyed» Tethys-Tefida, wife of the Ocean; Hera – «Mother-in-law», according to one of the versions of the myth – the granddaughter of «owl» Tethys; and, of course, «owl-eyed» Athena, about which they write the following: «Athena is one of the most important figures not only in Olympic mythology, she is equal in importance to Zeus and sometimes surpasses him, rooted in the most ancient period in the development of Greek mythology – matriarchy. In power and wisdom, she is equal to Zeus… her place is closest to Zeus… The ancient zoomorphic past of the goddess is indicated by her attributes – a snake and an owl. Homer calls Athena „owl“, the Orphic hymn – „motley snake“ … Athena goes back to the image of the goddess with snakes of the Cretan-Mycenaean period. An owl and a snake guarded the palace of the goddess with the shield of the Mycenaean time – the prototype of the Olympic Athena… Athena herself was thought of as fate and the Great Goddess – the mother, who is known in archaic mythology as the parent and destroyer of all living things.»

Recall that in the tradition of Russian Christmas-time fortune-telling about the fate of the Owl heralds both death and the birth of a child.

Speaking of ancient Greek Athena, the Encyclopedia of Myths notes the following: «The powerful, terrible, owl-eyed goddess of the archaic… she demands sacred reverence for herself, no mortal can see her.»

Note that the most ancient Egyptian goddess of the first dynasties (beginning of 3 thousand BC) – Nate (Neath) was an analogue of Athena. Recall that it was her image in the temple of Sais that was always covered with a veil. The name of Nate’s late hypostasis, Nephthys, sounded like «Lun.» Nate herself was the patroness of the city of Lunit, which the ancient Greeks also called Latopolis – the city of Lato (Lunit).

Let us specially repeat that Herodotus identified Neith with Athena, and that the Hittite-Hurite goddess «Shavushka» (Owl) is close to Neith. In connection with the city of Lunit, we present the text of a Russian ritual song, which became by the beginning of the 20th century children’s nursery rhyme»:

Owl is an owl, big head,

Sits on an oak tree, turns his head.

Little owl, little owl – a big head,

Where have you been, who have you seen?

I flew, owl, a big head

To a feast, to a gazebo.

They saw me as a little owl – a big little head,

Two white moon, two lovely friends.

Loonies are also owls, one of their varieties. Apparently, their name directly unites these birds with the Moon, with lunar cults.

In this context, it is interesting that the image of the Sumerian Ishtar (Lilith) with owl’s wings and paws, standing between two owls (beginning of the 2nd millennium BC), is perceived as a direct illustration of the above «nursery rhyme».

Perhaps it was this structural scheme, born in deep Paleolithic antiquity, then, with the development of cattle breeding and the domestication of the horse, was replaced by the one we know well – the Mother Goddess with two horses or two riders on the sides.

Note that Athena was called: Pandros (All-Moist), Aglavra (Light-Air), Agravla (Poleborozdnaya).

Agricultural holidays were dedicated to Athena: Procharistoria (sprouting of grain), Plinteria (the beginning of the harvest), Arrephoria (giving dew for crops), Scriphoria (aversion to drought).

Summarizing the above, we can conclude that Athena as a whole retained the main features of the ancient Mother Goddess, the Owl-Mother-in-law.

Interestingly, Athena’s name is not derived from Greek. Its pre-Greek origin is suggested.

Let us assume that this name originated from the term «Owina».

There is good reason to believe that in a patriarchal society, many of the sacred terms of matriarchy have been recoded into a masculine version. So the name of the barn «Shish» clearly replaced a completely different term meaning the female genital organ (the symbol of which in Polish riddles was the Owl).

Here it makes sense to recall again that in the Russian folk tradition, the «name day of the barn» was celebrated on the days of Thekla Zarevnitsa (September 24) and the Most Holy Theotokos (October 1), and the Ir rune, which looks like a schematic representation of an ancient barn, was a sign of the feminine principle and was understood as «Comprehensive». Then Ovina or Avina will be the same as Ovinnitsa, that is, «The Mistress of Ovin.»

Another argument in favor of such an assumption is the fact that Athena (as the Great Goddess – Mother) gives and takes life. But in Sanskrit, the term «avi» means «pain, suffering, and labor pains». Recall that in the Old Russian folk tradition it was customary to give birth in a barn.

Since Sanskrit is extremely close to the Russian language, we use its terms to clarify this situation.

Av (avati, ava, avit) —

1) contribute

2) saturate

3) protect

4) desire, love.

Ava – to rush, descend, favor.

Avata – pit, burrow.

Avati – earth, soil, base.

Avi – pain, suffering, labor pains.

Avinacin – eternal, everlasting.

Of no less interest is the word «Sova».

We look close to him Sanskrit phonemes:

Sava —

1) revitalization, excitement

2) sacrificial rite

Sava – squeezing soma.

Savana – 1) revitalization, excitement

2) a sacrificial rite.

And here it is appropriate to recall the wedding ceremony, preserved in the Russian tradition, where beer was prepared and drunk in the barn.

Savana – wooded

Savana —

1) fire

2) hell.

Savitri —

1) producer

2) mother.

Sva – his, her, them, to have.

Saviman —

1) setting in motion,

2) awakening,

3) an indication,

4) direction.

Savidya is endowed with knowledge.

Savicesana – endowed with special properties

Apparently, Mother-Sva of the Vlesova book is the Mother-Owl of deep Paleolithic antiquity, the Goddess of life and death, the Owl-Mother-in-law of the Vologda and Vladimir ritual songs.

But there is also:

Sauva – heavenly (about sound),

Suvari – giving birth to someone

Savega – fast, impetuous,

Savisa – poisonous, poisoned.

It makes sense here to remember that in the zoomorphic incarnation Athena, Neith, Lilith is not only owls, but also snakes that the palace of the Minotaur in Crete was guarded by an owl and a snake. That the plot of the goddess with snakes in her hands was preserved in the North Russian embroidery until the 20th century. And that snakes eat mice too, and owls hunt snakes.

And an owl carrying a snake in its claws is a common sight, so it’s okay to call an owl a poisonous one.

In the North Russian dialects there is such a name for an owl as «Guha», supposedly repeating the cry of this bird. But if we again turn to Sanskrit, it turns out that: Guh – shelter, cave.

Guhya – to be hidden, hidden, mysterious.

Guha-caya – living in a secluded place, in a cave, kept in secret, intimate.

Guha – heart (remember that it is the heart of an owl that is considered to be what can make a sleeping person talk about his innermost dreams and secrets).

And finally, guha is an epithet of God Shiva – the Creator and Destroyer of the Universe.

In addition, Sanskrit has its own name for the Owl – Kaucika (literally «having clawed paws»). Based on the terms of Sanskrit, we can assume the following semantic series: the sacrificial rite (sava or savanna) associated with fire (savana) consisted of squeezing out soma (sava) and reviving, arousing (sava). Soma (beer) is strained through a straw grate (kauca), standing on a bed of straw (kusa) in a barn, warehouse, granary (kucala). This drink made from grains (barley, rye, wheat) and hops gave health, dexterity, intelligence, experience, happiness and goodness (kaukala). And all this was possible thanks to the Owl (kaucika), which protected the grain from mice.

Speaking of beer in connection with the barn and Sova, we should turn to the second half of the ancient Paleolithic matriarchal society – men who, of course, played an important role in this society. Beer was prepared for them, and it was men who drank it. This is also evidenced by the North Russian tradition, which survived until the first third of the 20th century.

In the 80s and 90s of the 20th century, old people told folklorists that the general drunkenness, which today is attributed by some to the Russian people as their specific «genetic» quality, was completely absent in the North Russian villages back in the 30s of the 20th century.

On holidays (Shrovetide, in particular), men drank no more than 3 glasses (the size of a thimble) of vodka, but they were not limited in beer. However, this beer, prepared according to ancient technologies, has nothing to do with the so-called «beer» that our «breweries» produce today. As for the women and children, they never drank beer, let alone vodka. They drank pivtso, a weak, almost non-alcoholic beverage. As for men, consuming beer brewed according to tradition, they could hardly sleep. And they did not have free time for constant drinking in the ancient matriarchal society. The men built houses, prepared firewood for the winter, hunted and fished.

And they also did very important work – they mined salt, the deposits of which are quite widespread in the North of Eastern Europe.

Note that even today, paying tribute to the ancient tradition, we meet guests with bread and salt, where the loaf is a female symbol, and salt, apparently, is male.

Turning again to Sanskrit, we find in it such terms as:

Lavana – salted, salted, plus:

Lavana – salt (sea)

Lavanya – salinity, salt, beauty, beauty

Lavanata – salinity

Lavanita – salty

Lavana-Jala – containing salt water, sea

Lavanoda (Lavana-Uda) – sea (salt – water).

But there is also in Sanskrit:

Lavana – cutting, mowing

Lavaka – reaper

Lava – cutting, plucking (fruits, berries)

Lava – the harvest

Lava is the cut, shearing, piece, piece, drop and name of the son of Rama and Sita.

In the Vologda and Arkhangelsk dialects there is the word «lavina», which means «mowing, cutting». In the Kostroma and Nizhny Novgorod regions, the word «rama» is «border, border, and end of arable land near the forest.» And in the Cherepovets district of the Vologda region, «ramenye» is «meadow grasslands among the forest. As for the term «Sita», in Sanskrit it is a furrow, a wrinkle, a fold and the name of Rama’s wife, but also – white, light. In Russian, there is such a concept as sieve (white) flour and sieve (white) bread, as well as the name of the device for sifting flour – a sieve. Thus, already at the linguistic level, a complex of connections is being built, where «rama» (one of the names of a wooden harrow) and «furrow» in the field give an opportunity for subsequent harvest, as a result of which «flour» will appear, in combination with salt, giving birth to bread.

This complex of concepts will arise later, after millennia, when the harvesting of wild cereals will be replaced by slash-and-burn agriculture. At the early stage of proto-agriculture, we can assume the participation of men in some important harvest rites, possibly related to the salt they mine.

Here it makes sense to refer to another Sanskrit term Lu (Lunati, Lunite, Lulava / Lu, Ulava / Lu Luve, Lavitum, Luna), which means:

Cut, separate,

Divide, divide,

Tear off, tear off,

Harvest, harvest.

And now we recall the city of Lunit, whose patroness was the ancient Egyptian goddess of the first dynasties of the kings (beginning from the 3rd millennium BC) – Nate. Herodotus considered her an analogue of the ancient Greek Athena. And the fact that the Greeks called this city Latopolis Laton, that is, the city of the goddess Lato (Leto-Summer, Lada). And here we mention a term such as Lavitum, associated with Lavana – mowing, harvesting, harvesting and with Lavana – salted, salted, and salt.

Apparently, the place and time of birth of such images as Owl – Mother-in-law and Lilith were the same. It is possible that the appearance of fair-haired (red-haired) and light-eyed Levites, the descendants of Jacob’s third son from Leah, named Levi, is also associated with the same «space-time» characteristics. Note that it is the third son (Ivan Tsarevich, Ivan the Fool) in Russian folk fairy tales, which are distinguished by the deep archaism of their plots, who possesses certain sacred abilities. He marries the Frog Princess, takes out rejuvenating apples, receives the magic horse Sivka-Burka the Prophetic Kaurka, etc.

But, the same thing happens with the descendants of Levi – the Levites. They were excluded from the 12 tribes of Israel and the only ones from all were not endowed with land.

That is, in fact, they led the lives of the Brahmins, not possessing property and receiving tithes from the people for their existence. But they also performed priestly functions, being singers, musicians and guards in the portable temple of the Tabernacle. It remains for us to conclude that the Levites (Lavites) in the deepest matriarchal antiquity in the north of Eastern Europe took part in the holy ceremonies of harvesting with salt, music, singing and ritual libations with beer. This is also evidenced by such an ancient text as «Mundaka Upanishad», one of the most authoritative Upanishads of Atharva Veda, the second chapter of which says:

«Whose agnihotra is not accompanied by the sacrifices of the new moon, full moon, four months’ offering of the first and is performed without guests, Deprived of libation, offerings to the visvadevas are not performed properly, destroys his worlds, up to the seventh.

Black, terrible, fast as a thought, very red, the color of thick smoke, The sparkling one and the goddess in all forms are the seven tongues playing.

Whoever, while these shine, performs and makes offerings on time, That they are the rays of the sun, lead, where is the abode of the one lord of the gods».

Of course, the texts of the Atharva Veda, and even more so the Mundaka Upanishad, were canonized thousands of years after the end of the era of matriarchy. But, nevertheless, here are preserved relics of that distant time when not God the Father, but the Great Goddess Mother was incarnated in seven tongues of flame and not solar, but lunar cults played a leading role.

It is also significant that the terms of classical Sanskrit «deva» – heavenly, divine, god, priest, lord and «devaka» – heavenly, in Russian, and especially in North Russian dialects, are used at the everyday level to this day (deva, devka, deuka) in relation to exclusively girls and women, but not men. Thus, the term that later became the basis of many words associated with the concept of «divine» in Sanskrit:

Deva rarman – sacred rite, worship,

Deva kula – temple, home of the gods,

Deva gana – doubt of the gods,

Deva-ja – of divine origin,

Devatva – divinity,

Deva-Deva – God or King of the gods, etc,

in the Russian language retained its most ancient meaning, where the concept of the divine is assigned precisely to the feminine.

We can state that the cult of the Goddess-Mother-Owl, protector of Grain and giver of Life, mistress of Fire and Water, formed in deep (still Paleolithic) antiquity, could arise only where for many tens of millennia there were meadow cereal steppes consisting of sown forms – wild rye, wild barley, wild oats and wild wheat. And such steppes existed for such a long time only on the territory of Eastern Europe – the Russian Plain. In the subsequent Mesolithic era (the Middle Stone Age, in 10—8 thousand BC, led to the disappearance of cereal steppes and the widespread distribution of deciduous forests (the real steppes remained only in a narrow strip of the Black Sea region), people were forced to burn these forests in order to restore the fields of cereals that now needed to be sown.

So, apparently, slash-and-burn agriculture appeared.Matriarchal-hoe farming, as B. A. Rybakov noted, survives to the Eneolithic (5—3 thousand BC). He writes: «All four dimensions entered the worldview of farmers: the surface of the earth, the height of the world plowed up and down, lost in the blue firmament of the sky, and the continuous movement of this world in time.

And all this was expressed in the ornament. The ornament has become a public phenomenon that allows, like later letters, to tell about your attitude to the world and to unite people to perform certain actions. ” Appearing back in the Paleolithic of the Russian Plain (Kostenki, Mezinskaya site), the ornament developed here to that complex system, which was then carried to the territory of future India, Ancient Greece, Ertruria, etc. And it was in Russia that these ornamental complexes have survived to the present day in the most complete and complete form.

At the turn of 4—3 thousand BC the role of agriculture is weakening and the importance of animal husbandry is increasing. As the authors of «Eneolithic USSR» note: «It was the development of livestock breeding in its mobile forms (distant pasture, semi-nomadic, and further nomadic) that sharply limited or even excluded the possibility of simultaneous agricultural practice… mobile livestock breeding is very productive in the first periods of development, it provides a surplus product faster and easier than agriculture… Collectives of mobile livestock breeders grew rapidly. Their herds grew accordingly, which required a constant expansion of „production areas“ – pastures. This expansion proceeded much faster and on a large scale than among the farmers… The conditions of feather grass and wormwood steppes, passing in their extreme southern limits into the semi-desert, sharply limited the possibilities of agriculture. The forage base necessary for the development of cattle breeding was practically unlimited here… in different landscape zones, cattle breeding took different forms. In the forest-steppe settlements marked by a strong settled settlement and the presence of even limited agriculture, it was clearly of a local nature. The herd was dominated by large domestic animals and a pig, respectively. To the south, in the steppes, the most productive and adapted animal to the specifics of this zone was the sheep. Sheep breeding was the decisive economic factor in the development of steppe areas».

This is where, in my opinion; one should look for the origins of the legend about the farmer Cain and Abel – «the shepherd of the sheep.» Speaking about the weakening of the role of agriculture and the significant strengthening of cattle breeding at the turn of the 4th-3rd millennia BC, when the «agricultural Eneolithic period with its equality of the» Golden Age «ended, B. A. Rybakov emphasized that «the struggle for these herds, their alienation and uneven distribution, the ability to move together with property in carts (carts (rattle cars)) over considerable distances under the protection of mounted warriors, the development of exchange -all this radically changed the established agricultural order, introduced into it is social inequality, and the military principle, and the relationship of domination and subordination within each tribe. The agricultural Eneolithic with its equality of the «Golden Age» did not leave us any traces of forced burials …The culture of battle axes, the culture of mobile and warlike horse shepherds gave birth to a new social phenomenon that consolidated the immeasurably increased power of tribal leaders and governors – the custom of violent ritual murder of the closest subordinates of the leader at his grave and a joint burial with him».

The millennial era of matriarchy has ended. The era of patriarchy has begun – the era of war and murder. The Ancient Mother Goddess ceded her place to God the Father.

But not everywhere and not always!

And where the ancient traditions of agriculture were born and preserved, the Mother Goddess remained not a Warrior-Virgin, but Mother Earth, Great Foremother, Owl – Mother-in-law.

The riddle of Vologda patterns

«Listen, yes people are kind,

Will I tell you yes to the old man»

(from a folk song)

The famous translator of the hymns of the Rig Veda, the oldest part of the Veda (rig – spoken, Veda – knowledge), into Russian T. Ya. Elizarenkova writes: These advantages are determined as a greater degree of correspondence between Vedic and Russian due to the better preservation of archaisms in it than in the Slavic languages, and the greater proximity of the Russian (Slavic) mythological and poetic tradition to the Indo-Iranian one.»

One of the largest modern American linguists P. Friedrich believes that the Proto-Slavic language preserved its Indo-European system of tree names better than all other Indo-European languages, from which he concludes that the ancestors of the Slavs in the common Slavic period lived in such a natural-climatic zone that corresponds to the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, and «after the Slavic period, the speakers of various Slavic dialects to a significant extent continued to live in a similar area.»

It must be said that the outstanding linguist of the first third of the twentieth century A. Meye was convinced that the Old Slavic language is one of the most ancient in the common Indo-European family and continues «without any interruption the development of the common Indo-European language: it is impossible to notice in it those sudden changes that give such a characteristic appearance of the languages Greek, Italian (especially Latin), Celtic, Germanic.

The Slavic language is an Indo-European language, generally retaining the archaic type.»

The Soviet linguist B. V. Gornung believed that the ancestors of the Aryans (Indo-Iranians) at the end of the 3rd millennium BC settled in northeastern Europe and were located somewhere near the Middle Volga, and another prominent Soviet linguist V. I. Abaev writes: «Through a number of centuries the Aryans carried the memory of their ancestral home and its great river Volga.» Back in the 1920s, Academician A. I. Sobolevsky said that in the vast expanses of European Russia, right up to the northern regions, names dominate, which are based on some kind of ancient European language. He wrote in his work «Names of rivers and lakes of the Russian North» (1927): «The starting point of my work is the assumption that two groups of names (rivers and lakes) are related to each other and belong to the same language of the Indo-European family.»

And there is nothing surprising in the fact that academician N. Ya. Marr believed that the ancient foundation of Slavism exists far in the north, «in those places that until recently were considered by no means Slavic and occupied by the Slavs already at the dawn of the so-called historical time.» Ancient ethnic groups of the East European North, preceding Slavization and Finnization, N. Ya. Marr sometimes called the «Northern Sarmatians» or, what is even more interesting, «the Russians».

In the second millennium BC Tribes of pastoralists and farmers, who call themselves «Aryans», which means «noble», come to Northwestern India from their Eastern European ancestral homeland. Some of the Aryans, and not a small one, left their ancestral home in search of a better life, but, as the indologist N. R. Guseva, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which the entire population of a significant part of Eastern Europe would have left it. Most likely, such a situation is simply impossible, because «no historical reasons have been identified that could cause their (the Aryans) obligatory withdrawal from their the ancestral homeland. «Probably, part of the Aryan tribes stayed at home, in the vastness of Eastern Europe, to become the ancestors of the future peoples of this land.

From this native land for them, the Aryan tribes left (for reasons unknown to us) thousands of years ago to find a new homeland in Iran (correctly – Aryana, the land of the Aryans) and India. They left and took with them their legends, fairy tales, myths, beliefs, rituals, their songs, dances, their ancient gods. On a new land for them, among other peoples, they sacredly kept the memory of their past, of their ancestral home. Preserved our and our memory! Low bow to you, distant brothers and sisters, for the fact that through the millennia you have carried our common shrine, our common past, our common memory! For keeping the golden keys from the bygone times, and today we are opening the treasury of the past of our people with them. Do we need it?

This question was answered back in 1911 by the outstanding researcher of the Russian North A. Zhuravsky: «In the» childhood «of humanity – the basis for the knowledge and direction of the future paths of mankind. In the epochs of» childhood of Russia "– the paths to the knowledge of Russia, to the control knowledge of those historical phenomena of our time, which seem to us fatally complex and not subordinate to the ruling will of the people. But whose roots are simple and elementary, like the initial cell of a complex organism.» The embryos of social «evils» are in the personal of each and every one. And we are obliged to take full advantage of the experience of the hoary past, and the closer we get to the embryos of this past, the more consciously, faithfully and confidently we will go «forward» … It is the history of the «childhood of mankind», it is ethnography that will help us to learn the logical laws of natural progress and consciously, and not blindly, go «forward» ourselves and move «forward» your people, for ethnography and history are the paths to the knowledge of that «past», without which it is impossible to apply the knowledge of the present to the knowledge of the future.

«Humanity» consists of «nations» and, first of all, it is logically necessary that the nation is a definite mutual whole, so that it appears to us not in the third person of the plural – «they» – but in the first – «we». Russia, on the other hand, less than any other nation, can know itself without the help of knowing the roots of its past; and without knowing oneself, it is impossible to cognize others and take into account one’s position among others, just as without correcting oneself, it is impossible to correct others… The embryos of many beliefs and ideals perished – let us look for their imprints on objects until they perished for centuries. This is by no means «interesting» or «curious», but also vitally important, necessary.»

No, we do not have a thousand-year history, as it is customary now to write and speak, but many thousand years. One thousand years can be said only in relation to the adoption of Christianity. Indeed, until this year, our ancestors did not live in caves and did not dress in skins.

Not all of a sudden, the word Gardarika («Country of Cities») as the name of Rus came into use in the European world. These cities were on our lands, and they were not born in one day, but took shape and developed over the course of many centuries.

Prince Oleg Novgorods, seizing power in Kiev in 885 and uniting Russia around this center, went to war against Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, and brought this empire to its knees. And at the beginning of the 10th century, Prince Igor, the son of Rurik, sent 500 ships to the Khazars, who were trying to suppress Russia, with 100 people on board. And they fought to the south of the Caspian Sea. This Russia was feared by other peoples, they reckoned with it, they paid tribute to it. Such strength and unity took shape long before Christianity, and, therefore, our history is incalculably ancient.

In the cities of Rus flocked goods produced by villagers – the townspeople needed not only food and building materials, but also things produced by artisans – fabrics, clay and metal products. The cities themselves became centers the production of many goods and especially luxury items for the growing stratum of the nobility. Judging by the data obtained during numerous excavations, and carefully processed by archaeologists, the Slavs since ancient times have been engaged in exchange trade with other countries, and this required an increase in the qualifications of people employed in any industry. The settlements, the embryos of the ancient Slavs’ cities were also known in the eastern countries: the fact that the Arabs and Persians had known them for a long time is mentioned in the works of Abu Reikhan Biruni (10th century) and Ibn Fadlan (9—10th century). The latter describes the arrival of Rus merchants to Itil (the Volga) and speaks of their ships, weapons, jewelry chains made of precious metals, pearl and beaded necklaces, as well as large wooden houses, which they immediately build on the shore upon arrival and live in 10 – 20 of them with wives and slaves; he also writes that the Russians knew money and at that time they were already selling, and not only changing their goods; he describes both their idols and the rite of burning the dead, in which the wife is killed (or she kills herself) and burned along with the body of her husband (note here that a similar rite is described in ancient Indian literature, which lived in India until the 19th-20th centuries); it is said that «Russian kings usually keep 400 brave warriors (squad) with them in their castle or town… These 400 are sitting below on a large Royal sofa, decorated with precious stones …, he (the King or Prince) has a governor, who leads the army…»

All these data are presented by N. M. Karamzin in the book «History of the Russian State», v.1. So what is the beginning of statehood, and indeed our history can be dated to just one millennium? There were cities, there was class stratification, there were historical traditions, and all this took shape from ancient times.

So, in these cities of the Russians with large wooden houses, we repeat, artistic crafts developed, dating back to time immemorial. Gradually, over the centuries, technology has changed, improving, but the themes of images, drawings and signs applied to handicrafts were protected by tradition. They were not changed, because they all carried a semantic load, had a certain meaning, often magical, incantatory, and were a reflection of the concepts of life and death, the acquisition of offspring, the preservation of property, the reproduction of livestock, the ripening of the crop. It was scary to change them, since magic played a leading role in the beliefs of the pagans, and these drawings and these signs had to be sacredly protected, as evidenced by at least the simple fact that they have survived in folk art to this day. The plot language, the language of symbols, in this art aroused heightened interest, but the main attention in the works of scientists is paid to identifying and explaining images of a female and male deity, found even in late Russian embroidery – this is a clear relic of paganism. It is interesting that such a female deity (and perhaps this is a praying woman) is almost exactly repeated in Russian embroideries and on Indian fabrics and ritual objects, which is not a simple coincidence (N. R. Guseva. Deep roots. Sat «Roads millennium» M. 1991). Since ancient times, in Russian and other Slavic embroideries, there are many geometric motifs, which, along with other themes, also lead us into deep antiquity, which means that some lines of history can be traced along them.

Russian folk embroidery has been attracting the attention of researchers for over a century.

At the end of the last century, a number of brilliant collections of this type of folk art were formed, and the first attempts were made to read complex «plot» compositions, especially characteristic of the folk traditions of the Russian North.

There have appeared many interesting works devoted to the analysis of the plot-symbolic language, the peculiarities of technology and religious differences in Russian folk embroidery.

However, most of these works focus on anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images, archaic three-part compositions that include, as already mentioned, a stylized and transformed image of a man – a female (more often) or male (less often) pre-Christian deity. Geometric motifs of North Russian embroidery stand somewhat apart, usually accompanying the main detailed plot compositions, although very often in the design of towels, belts, hemlines, sleeves and shoulder shirts, it is geometric motifs that are the main and only ones, which are extremely important for researchers. By the way, the analysis of the patterns of local traditional laces also deserves a lot of attention from this point of view. About archaic geometry in Russian ornamental art and the need for its careful study Academician B. A. Rybakov and in his works of the 60s – 70s, and in his profound work on the paganism of the ancient Slavs, published in 1981, the idea of the invariable depths of popular memory, which preserves in itself and carries through the centuries in the images of embroidery, carving for wood, toys, etc. the most ancient ideological schemes, rooted in unknown millennia.

In this regard, the collections of the museums of the Russian North are very valuable, i.e. those places where one can say the eternal remoteness from state centers, as well as a relatively peaceful existence (the Vologda region, for example, in its northeastern part, practically did not know wars), an abundance of forests and the protection of many settlements by swamps and impassable roads – all this contributed to the preservation for an immeasurable a number of 40 centuries of the most ancient forms of life and economy, respect for the faith of fathers and grandfathers, and, as a direct consequence of this, the preservation of ancient symbols encoded in embroidery ornaments, in patterns of fabrics and lace.

Of particular interest are embroideries that «survived» to the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries, which originated from the northeastern regions of the Vologda and neighboring areas of the Archangelsk region. Many scientists wrote that these were the lands of the Finno-Ugric tribes, but the place names indicate something completely different – the overwhelming majority of toponyms here are Slavic, and many of them are very archaic. So, in the Tarnogsky district of the Vologda region, out of 137 settlements, both large and small, only six have pronounced Finno-Ugric names. It is in these areas that the traditions of ornamental patterns of ancient origin, as we will trace below, are best preserved. The ornamental compositions, which will be discussed and which were reproduced in Vologda embroidery until the 30s, adorned only sacred things. B. A. Rybakov speaks very accurately about this process: «the deposition of very early layers of human religious thinking in embroidery… is explained by the ritual nature of those objects that were covered with an embroidered pattern… Such are the wedding kokoshniks of brides, shirts, capes for a wedding carriage and A special ritual object, long ago isolated from its household counterpart, was a towel with rich and intricate embroidery corner, on the towel the „pious“ put icons.» (Paganism of the ancient Slavs. M. 1981) It is these sacred ornaments that are presented in the local history museum of Vologda, and they will in the future be the main comparative material in our attempt to identify ornamental parallels between the most ancient patterns of North Russian embroidery and ornaments created by those peoples who lived later in different historical epochs in the vast territories of the Eurasian steppes and forest-steppe and spoke Indo-European languages, including those that belong to the Indo-speaking and Iranian-speaking branches of the Proto-Indo-Iranian language (or a certain number of dialects of the tribes, which entered the science under the general name of the Aryans).

So, among the peoples of Eurasia, one of the most ancient motifs of geometric-type ornaments was a rhombus or rhombic meander (the meander was explained by many as a conditional image of the top of a wave wrapped in right angles). The meander is found even on things dating back to the Paleolithic, for example, and various bone products found at the Mezina site in the Chernihiv region. Paleontologist V. Bibikova in 1965 suggested that the meander spiral, broken meander stripes and rhombic meanders on objects from the Mezin site arose as a repetition of the natural pattern of mammoth tusks (article «On the origin of the Mezin paleolithic ornament», Soviet Archeology, No. 1, 1965). From this, she concluded that such an ornament for the people of that era was a kind of symbol of the mammoth, the main object of hunting. It could have a magical incantatory meaning, aimed at the success of the hunt, and at the same time reflect the idea of people about wealth.

The meander pattern in its various combinations and modifications continues to exist for many millennia, spreading more and more widely among neighboring Indo-European peoples and diverging beyond their territories during the movement of the Aryans to the southeast.

We meet it as a symbol of good luck and a kind of amulet against misfortune on cult objects and ceramics (that is, in storage facilities of food and drink that are very important for people’s lives) and in later cultures.

It should be noted that already on the bone products of the aforementioned Merzin site, one can trace how the outlines of a swastika, another ornament characteristic of all Indo-Europeans, grow from a strip of a double meander depicted moving from right to left. This element is depicted in its basic form – in the form of a chair with ends bent at a right angle, and being complicated by new elements in the form of additional branches.

The swastika has taken one of the leading places in the ornament. This word is Sanskrit and in other languages it has no other meanings. It consists of two parts: «su» – good, happy and «asti» – is (third person singular from the verb «to be»); according to the rules of grammar, «y» before the vowel «a» is replaced by «b» and the result is «swasti», to which the suffix «k» and the ending «a» are added: swastika. This sign means «bestowing all good things, bringing happiness.»

If you place a dot in its four «sections», it will be a symbol of a sown field and at the same time a plea for a good harvest. By the way, if you put two swastikas one on top of the other with the top rotated by 45 degrees, you get the ancient Slavic sun sign «Kolovrat», that is. a rotating wheel (circle) with eight spokes with clockwise curved ends. The sign of the swastika, since ancient times, the ancestors of the Slavs and Aryans began to designate light, the sun as a source of life and prosperity. This sign can be traced from Archangelsk to the lands of India, where it is seen everywhere – it is used to decorate temples, houses, clothes and, of course, many items related to the wedding.

Until now, people are outraged by the ugly use of the swastika by the German fascists, who at all costs tried to liken themselves to the Aryans («Aryans»), attributing to these ancient tribes of pastoralists, and then pastoralists-farmers, the features of some devilish conquerors. At the same time, speculation on a relatively small number of similar words in German and Sanskrit looks bad – there are many more such words in Slavic languages. All the ancestors of the Indo-European peoples developed in the deepest antiquity in the process of historical contacts a certain volume of similar vocabulary, but the ancestors of the Germans and other European peoples belonged to the western group of Indo-Europeans, while the ancestors of the Slavs and Aryans belonged to the eastern, much more mutually close. The so-called Aryan swastika can still be seen in the handicraft works of the Slavs. Especially the northern ones: many works of folk art are decorated with it, including patterned knitted mittens (readers can see this in the magazine «Slovo», No. 10, 1992).

There are other elements of patterns that can be traced consistently in time from the north of our country to the Black Sea, and then further along the routes of the Aryans migrating to new lands. And the fact that they have been carefully preserved in folk art suggests that great importance was attached to them in the worldview of people, especially among the ancestors of the Aryans and Slavs.

A peculiar transformation of the meander motif appears to be characteristic of Tripillya ceramics – a figurative ornament consisting of so-called «jibs».

In general, it is possible to determine the circle of ornamental main motifs with which, focusing on Tripoli, as a certain set of them, we will compare the materials of subsequent cultures. This is a meander and its varieties, meandrous spiral, intricate cross, swastika, «jibs».

In search of analogies closest in time, we naturally turn to the ceramic complexes of those cultures that existed at different time intervals on the territory of Eastern Europe and the Urals with the Ural lands. The traditions of ceramics ornamentation, which include an amazing variety of meander and swastika motifs, are found among the closest neighbors of the «Srubniks» – the population of the Andronovo culture, created by Indo-Iranians and genetically related to the Srubnaya. Synchronous in time, these two cultures existed for a long period in very vast territories of the steppe and forest-steppe zones of our country. We have every reason to talk about the spread among the Slavs, or, more precisely, the Eastern Slavs, of the ornamental schemes described here. As in all Andronovo ornament, in North Russian folk embroidery and abusive weaving, the composition is divided into three horizontal zones, with the upper and lower ones often duplicating one another, and the middle one bears the most important patterns from their point of view in terms of significance. We do not know what the forms of ornaments on things made by people in the era of the most ancient Indo-Iranian (pan-Aryan) unity would have been, but we believe that the described elements of the ornamental patterns were hardly born overnight in the minds of the same Andronovites, but are rooted in genetically related them the culture of their common ancestors.

The aforementioned middle band of the horizontal composition can bear on itself the most diverse of the indicated ornament elements, consistent in time for different cultures, which are absolutely identical to the North Russian, Trypillian and much more Eastern and South-Eastern cultures. Special interesting is the legitimacy of such analogies, traced in the archaeological East Slavic materials. For example, a buckle in the form of intricately cut crosses, found in Novgorod in the 60s, dated to the middle of the 13th century, found a repetition of its pattern in embroidery recently made on a towel by a Vologda peasant woman.

The find of a slate spindle published by G. Polyakova in a Slavic settlement near Ryazan, which dates from the 11th-13th centuries, is interesting in that a drawing in the form of a six-pointed Orthodox cross surrounded by meander spirals and swastika motifs is scratched on the spindle. Similar examples could be continued. It remains for us to state the following: similar ornaments can arise out of mutual connection among different peoples, but it is difficult to believe that peoples separated by thousands of kilometers distances and millennia, unless these peoples are ethnogenetically related, can appear so completely independently of each other complex ornamental compositions repeating even in the smallest detail? And even performing the same functions: amulets and signs of belonging to a family or clan.

It is impossible to deny the inevitability of the emergence of ethnogenetic ties between the ancient ancestors of the Indo-Iranian tribes and the Indo-Iranian and Iranian-speaking branches that separated from their community, and, accordingly, those ethnic groups that formed in close proximity with them over the course of millennia, up to the addition of extensive and close in culture Srubnaya and Andronov communities.

When they were added, the process of their partial disintegration had to take place, expressed in the resettlement of individual tribes or even their groups as to the west, and to the east. The departure of the Aryans, for example, ended, as recognized by science, by the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. Territorially close to them for such a long time, the ancestors of the Slavs partially moved – to the west, forming groups known as the Western Slavs, and the main massif, called the Eastern Slavs, settled on the lands of Eastern Europe.

Moving to the east and south, the Aryan tribes carried away with them traditional forms of culture – the established skills of production, types of ornaments (and the understanding of the symbolism reflected in them), customs and beliefs. On their way to India and Iran, the Aryans entered into contacts with the peoples of the countries through which they passed, settling there, for different periods of time and partially mixing with this population. Therefore, here we are interested in those motifs of patterns close to the Old Slavic ones, which are revealed among the peoples living, for example, in the Caucasus or in Central Asia (although it should be remembered that beyond the Urals and to Afghanistan part lands was included in the area of the Andronov culture earlier).

Unfortunately, scientists began to trace in their works only in the last 25—30 years racial, linguistic, and cultural and other Arya-Slavic parallels, and research significantly expands the boundaries of our knowledge about our own past. Here we refrain from far-reaching conclusions and only note in conclusion that the framework of this analysis is limited by the boundaries of the steppe and forest-steppe zones of our country. Undoubtedly, the involvement of Indian to Iranian materials would significantly expand this framework.

We are deeply convinced that one should not so stubbornly hush up the hypothesis of the Indian historian B. Tilak about the likelihood of the most ancient unification of the ancestors of the Aryans (even in that distant era of their common Indo-Iranian lingualism, recognized as the original form of existence of their community) into tribal and tribal unions precisely in polar regions. Not only the possibility, but the full probability of this fact, has he convincingly proved by the many descriptions of the Arctic nature preserved in the monuments of ancient Indian literature. The most ancient ancestors of the Slavs, judging by the many rapprochements of various sides of the origins of their culture with the ancient Aryan, and then with the culture of the peoples of the Eurasian steppes, carriers of Indo-European languages (like, for example, the Andronovites, who once separated from the Indo-Iranian community), apparently, were so close to the Aryans, which passed on to their descendants and many common elements of the language and common motives of ornaments. Both language and ornaments were means of mutual communication and evidence of genetic proximity, and possibly also signs of membership, entry of the same clans, into the same tribes.

Golden thread

The symbolism of the underwear shirt in the Russian folk tradition is deep and interesting.

In everyday life, the shirt was the main form of clothing; both men’s and women’s shirts were sewn from linen, decorating them with woven ornaments and embroidery. Old Russian rubs were of a straight cut, tunic-like in shape and cut from a canvas bent in half. Sleeves were made narrow and long; in women’s shirts they were gathered in folds at the wrist and fastened with bracelets (handles). During ritual dances, in ritual actions, the sleeves were unraveled and served as an instrument of witchcraft. This, by the way, is the story of the Russian folk tale about the Frog Princess. The description of a foreigner (late 17th century) says: «They wear shirts woven with gold on all sides, their sleeves, folded into folds with amazing art, often exceed 8 or 10 cubits, sleeves, continuing with interlocking folds to the end of the arm, are decorated exquisite and expensive wrists.» Shirts decorated with embroidery and weaving are also mentioned in «The Lay of Igor’s Campaign» – a remarkable monument of medieval Russian culture. In her tears, Yaroslavna would like to fly like a cuckoo on the Danube, moisten the «be bryan sleeve» (that is, decorated with a typesetting ornament) in the Kajala River and wipe the bloody wounds of her husband, Prince Igor, with it. The magical power, concentrated in the sleeves of a shirt, in scarlet ornaments, should heal, heal wounds, fill the body with strength, bring health and good luck.

A long-sleeved shirt is depicted on silver ritual bracelets with nielloed patterns, intended for dancing on mermaids, found in different parts of Russia (Kiev, Staraya Ryazan, Tver).

Relating to the 12—13 centuries, these bracelets depict those ritual acts about which the church said: «Sin is dancing in mermaids», «this is the essence of evil and bad deeds – dancing, gusli… playing unlikable mermaid»,» the dancing god is the lover of the devil… the bride of sotonin. «B. A. Rybakov notes that:" in the temple, and not for a simple everyday dress, but for the celebration of another, but, obviously, secret participation in great-grandfather’s rituals.»

The ritual significance of the ornamented long sleeves is emphasized on the bracelet from Old Ryazan by the fact that the woman depicted here, while drinking a ritual cup at a pagan Rusal festival, takes it through the long sleeve deflated, while the man holds the cup with an open palm. Until the end of the 19th century in the Vologda, Arkhangelsk, Olonets and Moscow provinces, the tradition of using long-sleeved shirts with sleeves up to two meters with slots-«windows» for hands as festive and wedding clothes was preserved. Returning again to the fairy tale about the Frog Princess, it is worth remembering that it is at the real wedding of her and Ivan Tsarevich, where the Frog Princess first appears before her husband and his relatives in her real appearance as Vasilisa the Beautiful, that she performs a ritual witchcraft dance. After a wave of the loose right sleeve, a lake appears, after swing of the left – bird’s swans. Thus, the heroine of the fairy tale performs the act of creating the world. She, like the woman on the bracelet of the 12th-12th centuries, dances the dance of water and life. And this is quite natural, since since Vedic times a wedding has been perceived as a cosmic action – the union of the sun and the month. Interestingly, in the Vedic wedding ceremony, the groom, bringing the bride’s undershirt, said: «Live long, wear clothes, be the protector of the human tribe from the curse.

Live a hundred years, full of strength, dress for wealth and children, blessed with the life invested in these clothes». Such a text is logical, because, as noted earlier, the ornament of the fabric was perceived in this tradition as a sacred speech, a song of praise, as a way to comprehend the universal law. NR Guseva notes that in «Atharvaveda» there is an appeal to the gods «with a request to dress the donor in a kind of symbolic garment in which the gods dress each other and which bestows longevity, power, wealth and prosperity.» The fact that this is a shirt is evidenced by the lines of the Rig Veda that say «about beautiful, well-made outfits», as well as about a woman ripping a seam, about a wedding shirt and a wedding dress. NR Guseva believes that «the mentions of a seam and a shirt are, of course, especially valuable here,» because, unlike the substratum population of Hindustan – the Dravids, who wore unstitched clothes, the Aryans wore sewn clothes. She also emphasizes that: «In the Rig Veda there is also such a name for clothes as» atka "-" shirt», formed from the verbal root» at "-«to constantly move, stretch, walk.» From the same root comes the word «atasi» – «flax» and «atasa» – «linen clothes». This is a valuable indication that the Aryans knew flax. This is also indicated by the injunction of the Laws of Manu, which commands the chaste disciples of brahmanas to wear clothes made of linen, hemp and sheep’s wool. The profession of a tailor is also mentioned here, which speaks of the existence of tailored clothes. «Based on the published Rig Vedas, we can assume that it was in the ornament that the shirt could» bestow longevity, power, wealth and prosperity.»

The fact that in Ancient India there was ornamentation of fabrics is evidenced by the presence of masters in embroidery, printed fabric, patterned weaving and appliqué work in ancient lists of the middle and end of the 1st millennium BC («Arthashastra»). And also the fact that Indian embroidery using the chikan technique, where many different stitches are used: double-sided darning, flat and convex satin stitch, stalked and overcast seams, made on white fabric with white threads, is absolutely identical to the North Russian embroidery «chased», so characteristic of the Olonets province.

«In northern India, chikan embroidery covers men’s white shirts of local cut – long without a collar, with a straight fastener, with long straight sleeves and with pockets sewn into the side seams. Chikan embroidery is used to decorate women’s pajamas and shirts, as well as tablecloths, napkins, pillowcases, sheets, thin window curtains, corners of handkerchiefs, etc.», writes N. R. Guseva.

In the Russian North, embroidery was used to decorate the valances of wedding sheets, the ends of towels, so-called. «groom’s fees», etc. The technique of flat surface from Gujarat is surprisingly similar to the North Russian flat surface, widespread in the Olonets province. These examples can be continued for a long time, since there is a huge number of compositional schemes of embroidered and woven ornament, absolutely identical in India and in the Russian North: these are goddesses with their hands raised up, these are all kinds of ducks and peaves, and sung by the Rig Veda:

«With a single two

on poultry horses

two wanderers

travel together»

these are constantly repeating compositions of four swastikas, which correspond to the concept of «asceticism of five fires», that is, the standing of the priest between four bonfires in the form of swastikas under the rays of the sun (the fifth fire).

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