Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/453

Rh careful not to provoke a spirit. Still he cannot know everything; this is possible only for particular wizards of both sexes who have intercourse with the spirits of evil and whose help is sought in need and richly rewarded.

The world is the work of God, the creator of all good and useful beings and things, and of the devil who made the mountains, marshes, beasts of prey, poisonous plants, illnesses, etc. God breathed into man a good spirit, the devil an evil one. The Polesian is very much in the dark about the godhead itself: "God knows how many gods there are." The Christian saints are to him smaller, special gods; thus St Elias is god of thunder, George of cattle and game, Nicolas of fields, Cosmas and Damian of smiths. They stroll about in the world amusing themselves by playing all sorts of pranks on mankind. Noteworthy is the cult of fire, namely of the hearth-fire, which must never be allowed to go out and is transferred to any newly-occupied house. The White Russian heathenism (with a very thin varnish of Christianity) goes back to the earliest Slavs, and clear traces of it are still found among all the Slav peoples. It is identical with the Shamanism of the Altaians, with this difference — that what constituted the belief of large masses in Polesie was among the mounted nomads a Shaman mystery of which the mass of the people took no notice, observing only the hocus-pocus of the wizards. The attention of observers was mostly attracted by the fire-worship, and thus the Arabian geographer of the ninth century calls both the Slavs and the Altaian-Magyars fire-worshippers. According to Procopius the Slavs believed in one single chief god, denied Fate, and worshipped rivers, nymphs, and other. No traces of mythology have survived; the later-mentioned gods and their worship belong to the individual Slav peoples.

Many Slav peoples burned the bodies of the dead, others — among them the Polesians — buried them. But the burning of bodies must be attributed to the influence of foreign conquerors, namely the Germans. As a matter of fact the Norman Rōs likewise burned the bodies of the dead together with their self-destroyed widows (Ibn Faḍlān), and the widows of the Heruli also hanged themselves on their husbands' burial-mounds.

Polesie is still the most backward district of backward Russia. As a consequence and at the same time as a cause of the slender needs of the people we see no division of labour. The Slav had to make for himself his few utensils; and in these, judging by the buried remains which are very poor in metal articles, he displayed remarkable taste in form and ornament. He could only supply the external market with raw products — costly furs, wax, and honey — but it is not likely that he brought them to the market, for he himself was offered wholesale as a captured slave.

In our first volume it was shewn how the salt-desert zone of the