Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/171

 mind. Although Russian mythology could not, of course, reach systematic unity, it contained some germs of unification, around which the varieties of heathen experience were gathered; although the Russian Olympus, even after the attempt of Vladimir Svyatoslavovich to restore the heathen cult, cannot be arranged in a strict hierarchy, yet its chief deity, the angry and jealous Perun, appears as a "centre of crystallisation" for various conceptions concerning the creative powers and processes of nature, connected with thunder-storms and thunder-showers, and even embracing some elements of culture: thus vivifying fire could be obtained, according to tradition, from the oak-tree, which was sacred to Perun; oaths were tendered in his name, and so on.

This unifying tendency became much stronger in Christendom.

Christian monotheism, of course, could not at once abolish polytheistic superstitions, and even in our own times some Russian peasants (for instance, in the government of Pskof) mention Perun in their oaths; but the baptism of Vladimir Svyatoslavovich and his people revealed to them the idea of an Almighty Creator and a benevolent Providence, and thus introduced a somewhat transcendental but harmonious conception of the world, which can be traced, for instance, in the precepts of Vladimir Monomach and other literary works of that time.

This unification in a religious and Christian spirit was, however, transformed by degrees into a dogmatic