Slavic symbols

Many differents symbols in all times in Pagan Times was very used!

One of most important was the Solar Symbol for the God of Sun: Dadzbog, with so many symbols like SWASTIKA (who it’s not nazi symbols but used in all Europe since beginning of history and it is strongly emphasized that this symbol is for Religion!)

SWASTIKA or SUNWHEEL was and is again so important in Slavic Faith but in all Pagan Religion in Europe and exist since 10 000 years! In Slavic countries first Swastika found is more of 6000 years old!!! it means good favor of gods, the quest for success, victory in battle, good yields. Like some pagan celebrations that will last until today, despite Christianity, Pagan symbols are still used in many countries.

In Russia two symbols was so important for Sun (the HORSE, was a sacred animals and the ROOSTER too). These 2 symbols from the Scythian art, which shows again a close link between them and Slavs! The symbol of the Rooster is fundamental and it will last longer than others. They are found in Embroidery and lace of Russia and the Balkans.

RECE BOGA is a proto Slavic symbol of the Slavic Faith (the Hands of God), it’s 4 hands (with 3, 5 or 6 fingers) stylised in a cross and often represented with 4 Solar symbols (Swastika) between the hands… The 4 Hands represent the 4 directions of a suprem God but no gods are represented with 4 hands … so maybe it can only be a sacred symbol Slave with a wrong name …. Great symbol used in all Slavic Territory!

The world for Slavic believers was represented like a TREE or like 3 LEVELS with in the top Gods, in the center, Humans people and the last level for the world of Dead. 3 words to explain the differents levels are Praw, Yaw and Naw.

Perun was the God of Warriors and lightning and in the last years of Paganism the most important God! three symbols are identified for him and they protect people against ligthning and bad things in life. One of these is the AXE TALISMAN who represent the weapon of Perun.(like the Hammer of Thor)

SWARZYCA it’s a great Slavic Pagan Symbol or maybe Proto Slavic! like Hand of God it’s a pure Slavic Symbol. The carved Swarzyca appear in a wall stone of a collegiate church at Kruszwica in Poland and it certainly a part from an ancient Slavic Temple in Poland destroyed.

It’s not really a symbol but I need to show MASKS of an important celebration as DZIADY. these MASKS are used during the Ritual when Spirits of the underworld come back on Earth. It’s the good day for them to visit us and their Families but at the place of celebration, humans can’t look them except Slavic “Priests” with these Masks to look like spirits too. It’s a really important thing!

TRISKEL means many things so it’s why it’s an important Symbol like the others (Past, Present, Future), (Standbuy, Sleep, Dream), (Childhood, Adulthood, Old Age), (Sky, Air, Land) it’s also the symbol for communication with the divine 3 levels.

Many more Symbols are used in Slavic Countries for differents Gods or other but here are the most important and today in the come back of our Faith we need to wear them with Honor like our Ancestors!!!

Wieslaw

Bogowie-Slowian

Wallachian paganism in XII century

In 1173, the medieval Navarrese adventurer Benjamin of Tudela, in his long travel from Spain to Holy Land, pass through Italy and Greece.

Valhalla (Myths of the Norsemen by H. A. Guerber)

A Valkyrie, drinking horn in hands, awaits at the gates of Valhalla on the Tjängvide image stone from Gotland, housed at the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden.

This palace, called Valhalla (the hall of the chosen slain), had five hundred and forty doors, wide enough to allow the passage of eight hundred warriors abreast, and above the principal gate were a boar’s head and an eagle whose piercing glance penetrated to the far corners of the world.

The walls of this marvellous building were fashioned of glittering spears, so highly polished that they illuminated the hall. The roof was of golden shields, and the benches were decorated with fine armour, the god’s gifts to his guests. Here long tables afforde ample accomodation for the Einheriar, warriors fallen in battle. who were specially favoured by Odin.

“Easily to be know is,
By those who to Odin come,
The mansion by its aspect.
Its roof with spears is laid,
Its hall with shields is decked,
With corselets are its benches strewed.”

The ancient Northern nations, who deemed warfare the most honourable of occupatons, and considered courage the greatest virtue, worshipped Odin principally as god of battle and victory.

They believed that whenever a fight was impending he sent out his special attendants, the shield-, battle-, or wish-maidens, called Valkyrs (choosers of the slain), who selected from the dead warriors one-half of their number, whom they bore on their fleet steeds over the quivering rainbow bridge, Bifröst, into Valhalla.

Welcomed by Odin’s sons, Hermod and Bragi, the heroes were conducted to the foot of Odin’s throne, where they received the praise due to their valour.

When some special favourite of the god was thus brought into Asgard, Valfather (father of the slain), as Odin was called when he presided over the warriors, would sometimes rise from his throen and in person bid him welcome at the great entrance gate.

Myths of the Norsemen by H. A. Guerber

Invention of Runes (Myths of the Norsemen by H. A. Guerber)

An inscription using both cipher runes, the Elder Futhark and the Younger Futhark, on the 9th century Rök Runestone in Sweden.

Besides being god of wisdom, Odin was god and inventor of runes, the earliest alphabet used by Northern nations, which characters, signifying mystery, were at first used for divination, although in later times they served for inscriptions and records.

Just as wisdom could only be obtained at the cost of sacrifice, Odin himself relates that he hung nine days and nights from the sacred tree Yggdrasil, gazing down into the immeasurable depths of Nifl-heim, plunged in deep thought, and self-wounded with his spear, ere he won the knowledge he sought.

“I know that I hung

On a wind-rocked tree

Nine whole nights,

With a spear wounded,

And to Odin offered

Myself to myself;

On that tree

Of which no one knows

From what root it springs.”

Odin’s Rune-Song (Thorpe’s translation)

When he had fully mastered this knowledge, Odin cut magic runes upon his spear Gungnir, upon the teeth of his horse Sleipnir, upon the claws of the bear, and upon countless other animate and inanimate things. And because he had thus hung over the abyss for such a long space of time, he was ever after considered the patron divinity of all who were condemned to be hanged or who perished by the noose.

After obtaining the gift of wisdom and runes, which gave him power over all things, Odin also coveted the gift of eloquence and poetry, which he acquired in a manner which we shall relate in a subsequent chapter.

Myths of the Norsemen by H. A. Guerber

Frigg (Myths of the Norsemen by H. A. Guerber)

"Frigga Spinning the Clouds" by J. C. Dollman.

The Queen of the Gods

Frigga, or Frigg, daughter of Fiorgyn and sister of Jörd, according to some mythologists, is considered by others as a daughter of Jörd and Odin, whom she eventually married. This wedding caused such general rejoicing in Asgard, where the goddess was greatly beloved, that ever after it was customary to celebrate its anniversary with feast and song, and the goddess being declared patroness of marriage, her health was always proposed with that of Odin and Thor at wedding feasts.

Frigga was goddess of the atmosphere, or rather of the clouds, and as such was represented as wearing either snow-white or dark garments, according to her somewhat variable moods. She was queen of the gods, and she alone had the privilege of sitting on the throne Hlidskialf, beside her august husband. From thence she too could look over all the world and see what was happening, and, according to the belief of our ancestors, she possessed the knowledge of the future, which, however, no one could ever prevail upon her to reveal, thus proving that Northern women could keep a secret inviolate.

“Of me the gods are sprung;

And all that is to come I know, but lock

In my own breast, and have to none reveal’d.”

Balder Dead (Matthew Arnold)

She was generally represented as a tall, beautiful, and stately woman, crowned with heron plumes, the symbol of silence or forgetfulness, and clothed in pure white robes, secured at the waist by a golden girdle, from which hung a bunch of keys, the distinctive sign of the Northern housewife, whose special patroness she was said to be. Although she often appeared beside her husband, Frigga preferred to remain in her own palace, called Fensalir, the hall of mists or of the sea, where she diligently plied her wheel or distaff, spinning golden thread or weaving long webs of bright-coloured clouds.

In order to perform this work she made use of a marvellous jewelled spinning wheel or distaff, which at night shone brightly in the sky as a constellation, known in the North as Frigga’s Spinning Wheel, while the inhabitants of the South called the same stars Orion’s Girdle.

To her hall Fensalir the gracious goddess invited husbands and wives who had led virtuous lives on earth, so that they might enjoy each other’s companionship even after death, and never be called upon to part again

“There in the glen, Fensalir stands, the house

Of Frea, honour’d mother of the gods,

And shows its lighted windows and the open doors.”

Balder Dead (Matthew Arnold)

Frigga was therefore considered the goddess of conjugal and motherly love, and was specially worshipped by married lovers and tender parents. This exalted office did not entirely absorb her thoughts however, for we are told that she was very fond of dress, and whenever she appeared before the assembled gods her attire was rich and becoming, and her jewels chosen with much taste

Myths of the Norsemen by H. A. Guerber

Odin (Myths of the Norsemen by H. A. Guerber)

A depiction of Odin entering Valhalla riding on Sleipnir from the Tjängvide image stone.

Odin, Wuotan, or Woden was the highest and holiest god of the Northern races. He was the all-pervading spirit of the universe, the personification of the air, the god of universal wisdom and victory, and the leader and protector of princes and heroes.

As the gods were supposed to be descended from him, he was surnamed Allfather, and as eldest and chief among them he occupied the highest seat in Asgard. Known by the name of Hlidskialf, this chair was not only an exalted throne, but also a mighty watch-tower, from whence he could overlook the whole world and see at a glance all that was happening among gods, giants, elves, dwarfs, and men.

“From the hall of heaven he rode away:

To Lidskialf, and sate upon his throne,
The mount, from whence his eye surveys the world.
And far from Heaven he turned his shining orbs
To look on Midgard, and the earth, and men.”

None but Odin and his wife and queen Frigga were privileged to use this seat, and when they occupied it they generally gazed towards the south and west, the goal of all the hopes and excursions of the Northern nations. Odin was generally represented as a tall, vigorous man, about fifty years of age, either with dark curling hair or with a long grey beard and bald head.

He was clad in a suit of grey, with a blue hood, and his muscular body was enveloped in a wide blue mantle flecked with grey–an emblem of the sky with its fleecy clouds. In his hand Odin generally caried the infallible spear Gungnir, which was so sacred that an oath sworn upon its point could never be broken, and on his finger or arm he wore the marvellous ring, Draupnir, the emblem of fruitfulness, precious beyond compare.

When seated upon his throen or amred for the fray, to mingle in which he would often descend to earth, Odin wore his eagle helmet; but when he wandered peacefully about the earth in human guise, to see what men were doing, he generally donned a borad-brimmed hat, drawn low over his forehead to conceal the fact that he possessed but one eye.

To ravens, Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory), perched upon his shoulders as he sat upon his throne, and these he sent out into the wide world every morning, anxiously watching for their return at nightfall, when they whispered into his ears news of all they had seen and heard. Thus he was kept well informed about everything that was happening on earth.

“Hugin and Munin
Fly each day
Over the spacious earth.
I fear for Hugin
That he come not back,
Yet more anxious am I for Munin.”

At his feet crouched two wolves or hunting hounds, Geri and Freki, animals which were therefore considered sacred to him, and of good omen if met by the way. Odin always fed these wolves with his own hands from meat set before him. He required no food at all for himself, and seldom tasted anything except the sacred mead.

“Geri and Freki
The war-wont sates,
The triumphant sire of hosts;
But on wine only
The famed in arms
Odin, ever lives.”

When seated in state upon his throne, Odin rested his feet upon a footstool of gold, the work of the gods, all of whose furniture and utensils were fashioned either of that precious metal or of silver.
Besides the magnificent hall Glads-heim, where stood the twelve seats occupied by the gods when they met in council, and Valaskialf, where his throne, Hlidskialf, was placed, Odin had a third palace in Asgard, situated in the midst of the marvellous grove Glasir, whose shimmering leaves were of red gold.

Myths of the Norsemen by H. A. Guerber

Shamanism (photos)

Yupik Shaman exorcising evil spirits from a sick boy, Nushagak, Alaska, 1890s

Yakut-Sakha costume

Yakut Shaman with a shamanic drum

Yakut Shaman (Siberia, Russia)

West siberians

West siberians

Urarina Shaman, 1988 Peru

Uralic languages. The language isolate Yukaghir is conjectred by some to be related to Uralic

Turkic language map

Tsimshian Shaman

Shaman's Shaker-Dundas

Shaman's Ceremonial Apron from Siberia

Shaman Khorolkan of the Kambaghir tribe of the Evenk, first quarter of the nineteenth century

Shaman holding a séance by fire. Settlement Kyzyl, region Tuva, Russia

Shaman from an equatorial Amazonian forest. June 2006

Sami Shaman with his drum

Papua New Guinean Shaman

Navajo Shaman Ceremony

Koryak group with a drum, 1915

Ket Shaman, 1914

Hopi Snake-Shaman

Haida Shamans

Haida Shamans

Female-Shaman Hupa

Eskimo branch of the Eskimo-Aleut language family

Evenki Shaman costume

Crow-Shamans (Two Spirits)

Crow-Shaman

An Altai Kizhi or Khakas shaman woman — it cannot be decided exactly from the image alone, which of the two is the exact origin of the shaman. Early 20th century

A Gitxsan (Tsimshian) soulcatcher amulet

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity (New York Times)

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age.

Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display for the first time in the United States. The show will run through April 25.

At its peak, around 4500 B.C., said David W. Anthony, the exhibition’s guest curator, “Old Europe was among the most sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world” and was developing “many of the political, technological and ideological signs of civilization.”

Dr. Anthony is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and author of “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.” Historians suggest that the arrival in southeastern Europe of people from the steppes may have contributed to the collapse of the Old Europe culture by 3500 B.C.

At the exhibition preview, Roger S. Bagnall, director of the institute, confessed that until now “a great many archaeologists had not heard of these Old Europe cultures.” Admiring the colorful ceramics, Dr. Bagnall, a specialist in Egyptian archaeology, remarked that at the time “Egyptians were certainly not making pottery like this.”

A show catalog, published by Princeton University Press, is the first compendium in English of research on Old Europe discoveries. The book, edited by Dr. Anthony, with Jennifer Y. Chi, the institute’s associate director for exhibitions, includes essays by experts from Britain, France, Germany, the United States and the countries where the culture existed.

Dr. Chi said the exhibition reflected the institute’s interest in studying the relationships of well-known cultures and the “underappreciated ones.”

Although excavations over the last century uncovered traces of ancient settlements and the goddess figurines, it was not until local archaeologists in 1972 discovered a large fifth-millennium B.C. cemetery at Varna, Bulgaria, that they began to suspect these were not poor people living in unstructured egalitarian societies. Even then, confined in cold war isolation behind the Iron Curtain, Bulgarians and Romanians were unable to spread their knowledge to the West.

The story now emerging is of pioneer farmers after about 6200 B.C. moving north into Old Europe from Greece and Macedonia, bringing wheat and barley seeds and domesticated cattle and sheep.

They established colonies along the Black Sea and in the river plains and hills, and these evolved into related but somewhat distinct cultures, archaeologists have learned. The settlements maintained close contact through networks of trade in copper and gold and also shared patterns of ceramics.

The Spondylus shell from the Aegean Sea was a special item of trade. Perhaps the shells, used in pendants and bracelets, were symbols of their Aegean ancestors. Other scholars view such long-distance acquisitions as being motivated in part by ideology in which goods are not commodities in the modern sense but rather “valuables,” symbols of status and recognition.

Noting the diffusion of these shells at this time, Michel Louis Seferiades, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, suspects “the objects were part of a halo of mysteries, an ensemble of beliefs and myths.”

In any event, Dr. Seferiades wrote in the exhibition catalog that the prevalence of the shells suggested the culture had links to “a network of access routes and a social framework of elaborate exchange systems — including bartering, gift exchange and reciprocity.”

Over a wide area of what is now Bulgaria and Romania, the people settled into villages of single- and multiroom houses crowded inside palisades. The houses, some with two stories, were framed in wood with clay-plaster walls and beaten-earth floors. For some reason, the people liked making fired clay models of multilevel dwellings, examples of which are exhibited.

A few towns of the Cucuteni people, a later and apparently robust culture in the north of Old Europe, grew to more than 800 acres, which archaeologists consider larger than any other known human settlements at the time. But excavations have yet to turn up definitive evidence of palaces, temples or large civic buildings. Archaeologists concluded that rituals of belief seemed to be practiced in the homes, where cultic artifacts have been found.

The household pottery decorated in diverse, complex styles suggested the practice of elaborate at-home dining rituals. Huge serving bowls on stands were typical of the culture’s “socializing of food presentation,” Dr. Chi said.

At first, the absence of elite architecture led scholars to assume that Old Europe had little or no hierarchical power structure. This was dispelled by the graves in the Varna cemetery. For two decades after 1972, archaeologists found 310 graves dated to about 4500 B.C. Dr. Anthony said this was “the best evidence for the existence of a clearly distinct upper social and political rank.”

Vladimir Slavchev, a curator at the Varna Regional Museum of History, said the “richness and variety of the Varna grave gifts was a surprise,” even to the Bulgarian archaeologist Ivan Ivanov, who directed the discoveries. “Varna is the oldest cemetery yet found where humans were buried with golden ornaments,” Dr. Slavchev said.

More than 3,000 pieces of gold were found in 62 of the graves, along with copper weapons and tools, and ornaments, necklaces and bracelets of the prized Aegean shells. “The concentration of imported prestige objects in a distinct minority of graves suggest that institutionalized higher ranks did exist,” exhibition curators noted in a text panel accompanying the Varna gold.

Yet it is puzzling that the elite seemed not to indulge in private lives of excess. “The people who donned gold costumes for public events while they were alive,” Dr. Anthony wrote, “went home to fairly ordinary houses.”

Copper, not gold, may have been the main source of Old Europe’s economic success, Dr. Anthony said. As copper smelting developed about 5400 B.C., the Old Europe cultures tapped abundant ores in Bulgaria and what is now Serbia and learned the high-heat technique of extracting pure metallic copper.

Smelted copper, cast as axes, hammered into knife blades and coiled in bracelets, became valuable exports. Old Europe copper pieces have been found in graves along the Volga River, 1,200 miles east of Bulgaria. Archaeologists have recovered more than five tons of pieces from Old Europe sites.

An entire gallery is devoted to the figurines, the more familiar and provocative of the culture’s treasures. They have been found in virtually every Old Europe culture and in several contexts: in graves, house shrines and other possibly “religious spaces.”

One of the best known is the fired clay figure of a seated man, his shoulders bent and hands to his face in apparent contemplation. Called the “Thinker,” the piece and a comparable female figurine were found in a cemetery of the Hamangia culture, in Romania. Were they thinking, or mourning?

Many of the figurines represent women in stylized abstraction, with truncated or elongated bodies and heaping breasts and expansive hips. The explicit sexuality of these figurines invites interpretations relating to earthly and human fertility.

An arresting set of 21 small female figurines, seated in a circle, was found at a pre-Cucuteni village site in northeastern Romania. “It is not difficult to imagine,” said Douglass W. Bailey of San Francisco State University, the Old Europe people “arranging sets of seated figurines into one or several groups of miniature activities, perhaps with the smaller figurines at the feet or even on the laps of the larger, seated ones.”

Others imagined the figurines as the “Council of Goddesses.” In her influential books three decades ago, Marija Gimbutas, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, offered these and other so-called Venus figurines as representatives of divinities in cults to a Mother Goddess that reigned in prehistoric Europe.

Although the late Dr. Gimbutas still has an ardent following, many scholars hew to more conservative, nondivine explanations. The power of the objects, Dr. Bailey said, was not in any specific reference to the divine, but in “a shared understanding of group identity.”

As Dr. Bailey wrote in the exhibition catalog, the figurines should perhaps be defined only in terms of their actual appearance: miniature, representational depictions of the human form. He thus “assumed (as is justified by our knowledge of human evolution) that the ability to make, use and understand symbolic objects such as figurines is an ability that is shared by all modern humans and thus is a capability that connects you, me, Neolithic men, women and children, and the Paleolithic painters in caves.”

Or else the “Thinker,” for instance, is the image of you, me, the archaeologists and historians confronted and perplexed by a “lost” culture in southeastern Europe that had quite a go with life back before a single word was written or a wheel turned.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01arch.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: November 30, 2009
The New York Times

The war chariot from Duplajaja

From http://www.serbianunity.net

From http://www.muzejvrsac.org.rs

Age: aprox. 1500 BC (Late Bronze)

Culture: Žuto Brdo – Gârla Mare

This beautiful piece, seem to be discovered into a tomb, together with another piece, which represent two miniaturistic carts (war chariots): one with two wheels and other with three.

In the center of the chariot with two wheels, it is a anthropomorphic male statue, with a bird-head. On this bird, up, it’s an incision which represent two symbol of swastika (in left is a right-facing swastika and in the right place is a left-facing swastika).

Between them are two spirals, and in the front of them, in opposite side, in vertical direction, are two little circles.

Another left-facing swastika it’s at the base of abdomen.

Some historians think that this piece represent Hyperborean Apollo, which it’s the eternal Sun. These presumptions start because of the old legend which tell us that Apollo travel to Hyperborea into a chariot pulled by swans (you can observe that at the war chariot with three wheels).

Serbian historian Trbuhovic think that this miniaturistic chariot it’s used for practicing at a uranian and solar ritual, or for invocation of rain, because the noisiness from the chariot it’s like the noise of thunder.

Other hypothesis inform us that this war-chariot it could represent a vehicle for transportation to the otherworld, from the Sky. As examples you can see the chariot of Thor, drawn by two goats “Toothgnasher” and “Toothgrinder” or the chariot of Perun, which become Saint Elias at Christians.

The faces of birds could represent the soul of the deceased.

By Kogaion

Slavic Pagan Museum in Russia

Location: Kemerovo (Russian: Ке́мерово); south-west of Siberia, Russia

Veles (Велес)

Sventevith, Svetovid, Suvid, Svantevit, Svantovit, Svantovít, Swantovít, Sventovit, Zvantevith, Świętowit, Światowid, Sutvid, Vid, Святовит

Svarog, Сварог, Swaróg, Schwayxtix

Rugiewit, Rugiwit, Ругевит, Руевит, Rugievit, Rinvitm, Rujevit, Рујевит, Руђевид

Rod, Род, Div, Diy, Рід

Perun, Перун, Perunas, Perún, Parom

Lada or Lado (Лада, Ладо, Ледо) with her daughter Lelia

Jarilo, Ярило, Јарило, Jaryło, Jura, Juraj, Đorđe, Jarovit, Yarilo, Iarilo, Gerovit

A pagan spirit

In the right place you can see a calendar