Page:Russian Wonder Tales.djvu/23

Rh The demiurge became first the merely supernatural being, man's henchman or servitor, and the ethereal abode of the old gods merely a mysterious upper country beyond the visible sky, inhabited by magical creatures pictured in a group of tales which are the Slavonic equivalents of the "Jack and the Beanstalk" story. In the next step these supernatural beings descended to the plane of the pseudo-historic, and finally merged into the real, becoming the old-time champions of the new faith, as, for example, the companions of Vladimir, who introduced Christianity into Russia. Lastly, these faded into the purely imaginary. By this process the Slavonic god of the thunder (Perun) sank by gradual degrees to Christian Paladin, to the conventional "Tzarevich Ivan" of the skazki, and in the last step to the friendly beast—the glowing bird, the heroic horse, the aid-giving wolf and bear—whose constant reappearance give the tales such a surprising variety of incident. The deities of evil underwent a like process, becoming the Kastchey, the Baba-Yaga, and the many malevolent beings which the skazki hero overcomes.

In lapse of time, too, the form of the myth deteriorated as had the content. The tales lost their coherency, becoming separated into episodes which in turn disintegrated to collections of mere fragments. These became