Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/67

 CHAPTER VI

MONG European peoples all actual traces of pagan worship vanished long ago, and it is found only in museums through archaeological search.

Indeed, would it be possible to imagine and to believe that some hundred miles distant from Berlin people are sacrificing holocausts to the god Thor, or that in France people offer nocturnal prayers to the souls of the brave fallen on the Marne or at Verdun?

Of course not! But if this applies to the whole of Europe, Russia forms an exception. That land of "impossible possibilities" even now conceals among the lower orders a living pagan worship which has outlasted ages, thriving peacefully side by side with the Orthodox Church and twentieth-century civilisation,

I do not speak at all of such tribes, included in the population of Russia, as the Finn or Mongolian Wolyaks, Chuvashes, Mordvins, or the Kalmuks and Ostyaks, who, under the influence of certain ethnographical and historical-cultural reasons, have remained in a state very much akin to prehistoric paganism. I am speaking of the Russian people who were long ago in possession of the "window upon