Page:Russian Wonder Tales.djvu/22

xiv there their myth-mass and setting up their hierarchy of Pagan gods. These gods, good and evil, were personifications of the forces of nature. The religion of which they were the foci was thus a nature-religion, and upon it was grafted a system of ancestor-worship not greatly different from other Oriental forms. And the race's conceptions of these gods and the material world, the soul, the birth and passing of human life, the individual's relations to the deities and his fellows, and the manifold observances in which beliefs and customs were enshrined, were embodied in a mass of myths, all more or less variations of the primal solar-myth with which all nations seem to have begun their cosmogonies.

The dawn of Christianity—late in Russia—marked the sunset of these ancient deities. The new Byzantine faith, in its irresistible progress, either crushed out wholly their memories or transferred their attributes to the keeping of Christian saints, leaving their myths to struggle for existence against an ever-increasing weight of foreign legend. And as the form of the old Pagan religion merged more and more into the new, these myths sank beneath the surface of the everyday life of the people, while the primitive mythology, with its symbolism, was forgotten.