#Slavic mysticism

[whitetrashwarriorprincess]

A Tatar shaman, Minusinsk, Siberia, c. 1910.

[aleksandra-czudzak]

[natalieina]

Summer Magic

Model - Daria Skupova.

Natalie Ina Photography.

July 2021.

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[catkindness]

разрыв-трава

[eroticlamb]

valeria lukyanova , shot in the valley of ghosts on demerdzhi mountain , crimea , ukraine ୨ৎ

[mortheim]

Saints aren't nice - Paraskeva Pyatnitsa

Nearly all cultures were affected by their religion. Often by just knowing the religion of the country, you can guess some things that are valued in this society. And it isn't different in Russia. Orthodox Christianity made suffering one of the cornerstones of my culture. I would say that enduring hardships could be a national sport...

Anyway, Orthodox Christianity is rich in a lot of weird saints. Most of them are mixed with old, pagan, beliefs. And today's "guest" isn't an exception. Paraskeva Pyatnitsa can be considered part of the Slavic folklore, combining elements of Christian sainthood with remnants of pagan beliefs. Revered among Orthodox Slavs, she is based on both Saints Paraskeva of Iconium and Paraskeva of Serbia. However, in folk traditions, her role goes beyond Christianity, reflecting aspects of the pagan goddess Mokosh, who was linked to women’s work, fertility, and protection of the household.

Paraskeva became the personification of Friday, a day considered sacred and often tied to prohibitions around spinning, washing, and other household tasks. Those who disrespected these rules were believed to face her wrath, with punishments including illness, blindness, and flaying.

Russians prayed to Paraskeva Pyatnitsa for protection from the death of livestock, especially cows. The saint was also considered a healer of human ailments, especially the devil‘s obsession, fever, toothache, headache, and other diseases. In honor of Saint Paraskeva, there were special prayers worn around the neck and considered to be a protection against various diseases. Flowers, herbs, and other attachments to the image of Paraskeva-Patnitsa were also considered to be one of the most effective medical remedies and therefore were preserved from year to year as an important healing aid. In case of any illness, peasants boiled them in water and used this decoction to drink for various diseases.

In addition to her religious significance, Paraskeva’s folk image is both protective and fearsome. While traditional icons depict her as an ascetic figure in a red cloak, folk stories paint a wilder picture - showing her as a tall woman with loose hair and large breasts, a blend of both nurturing and punishing forces. In some regions, rituals like vodit' (lead) Pyatnitsu involved leading a woman dressed as the saint around the village, seeking her blessing for the harvest or livestock.

This blending of Christian and pagan elements made Paraskeva an important figure in both religious and rural life. Her feast days, especially October 14 (October 27, New Style), were celebrated with church services and the observance of traditional bans on work, particularly among women. In some regions, Paraskeva was also connected to the "12 Fridays" legend, marking sacred Fridays throughout the year for fasting and reflection. Some authors consider the echo of the Slavic pre-Christian beliefs some authors consider ‘idol’ sculptural images of saints preserved in some places even in the XIX - early XX centuries. The most frequent was the sculpture of Paraskeva Pyatnitsa. In Russia, her wooden sculptures were widespread - ‘wooden painted statue of Friday, sometimes in the form of a woman in oriental garb, and sometimes in the form of a simple woman in a ponyova and lapti’. The statue of Paraskeva ‘was placed in churches in special boxes and people prayed before this idol’.

Ultimately, this is one of the saints who is more like a minor pagan deity - she will punish you if you don't follow her rules, but she also can protect you from illness.

[mecthology]

Skrzak: The Mysterious Spirit of Slavic Mythology.

Equipped with sharp fangs and claws, it uses its aerial abilities to relentlessly hunt its prey, often accompanied by an eerie screech and unsettling laughter that is said to drive listeners mad.

Legends surrounding the Skrzak present a dual nature: as both a fearsome predator and a helpful household spirit. In some tales, it serves as a guardian of the home, residing beneath the hearth and quietly tending to household chores, soothing children, and protecting the home from harm. However, this protection comes at a steep cost—upon the master's death, the Skrzak claims their soul.

Modern interpretations add even more intrigue, with some suggesting Skrzak are bred by wizards for secretive purposes, while others believe they serve as protective spirits. This blend of helpfulness and terror adds to the Skrzak's mystery, capturing the imagination of those who explore the depths of Slavic mythology. Whether as a fierce hunter or a domestic guardian, the Skrzak remains a symbol of the delicate balance between protection and danger in the unseen world.

Follow @mecthology for more creepy creatures and weird legends.

Source: godsandmonsters.info/skrzak/, oldworldgods.com/slavic/skrzak-mythology/

[mysticpolin]

A Romanian Folktale’s Reflection on Loneliness: The Enigma of Muma Pădurii (The Mother of the Forest)

In the silence of the forest, the soul speaks. What do you hear?

~ Having grown up in Romania, I was lucky enough to explore a land brimming with folklore and ancient tales. Today, I’m thrilled to embark on this journey with you, beginning with one of our most enigmatic mythological figures: Muma Pădurii, the Mother of the Forest.

Often compared to the infamous Baba Yaga, Muma Pădurii is a witch who resides in the dark, mysterious heart of the forest. Her fearsome appearance and the tales are enough to chill the bravest soul. But beyond her terrifying facade lies a story of profound loneliness and lost love.

Romania is a land of incredible creatures and legends—witches, vampires, spirits, and more. I’m excited to share these myths and mysteries with you, diving into the rich tapestry of our folklore and uncovering the hidden stories behind these ancient beings. ~

Muma Pădurii often appears as a weathered hag, but could her perceived ugliness be hiding a deeper, more poignant beauty? Loneliness has a way of casting shadows over us, bringing out sadness and anger. Her isolation in the forest serves as a metaphor for the solitude we all experience—a place where our true selves emerge from behind layers of pretense.

In Romanian folklore, Muma Pădurii is a witch-like creature who dwells in the heart of the dark forest. Her face is said to be like rotting meat, and her eyes are as cold as death itself. She embodies the ancient and malevolent forces of nature. Her cruel acts—luring lost travelers into traps and sometimes even stealing away children—reflect a deep-seated loneliness and despair.

Her malevolence isn’t just a tool for harm but a way to fill the emptiness of her own life. She uses her fearsome presence to guard her solitude, driven by a sorrowful longing for the companionship she once knew—or perhaps never had.

“In the forest’s silence, the soul’s voice is heard.”

Muma Pădurii’s terrifying appearance might hide a deeper truth. She can transform into a beautiful woman to lure travelers into the forest, where they become lost forever. Her true form reveals that beauty and wisdom can emerge from darkness and suffering. Her outward appearance reflects how sadness and loss have shaped her existence.

To encounter her is to reflect on our own experiences of solitude and challenge. Are we, too, shaped by our own struggles?

For years, Muma Pădurii has been seen as nothing more than a villain in Romanian fairy tales, a scary story for disobedient children. But there is more to her than mere cruelty and fear.

To me, she represents a deep sadness and loneliness. Having lived for so long, she may have forgotten what love is or never known it in the first place. Her heart might be hardened, unable to express or even remember love.

People say you can still hear her laughter in the dead of night, but I think it’s not a sound of joy. It’s a cry for help—a sorrowful echo of a longing for something she has lost.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

To explore more about Muma Pădurii (The Mother of the Forest), and uncover the true stories behind her legend, visit my blog for in-depth tales and fascinating details!

[pathwaycircles]

main page: @sacralimplication

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[drum-cu-naluci]

The mystic's song

[letsgethaunted]

Baba Yaga LGH Inktober day 3 by clumsywyvern

[saphaburnell]

Pre-Order Char & Ash

Pre-Order the paperback via my publisher to get a signed copy and art card!

The Mystic Realms keep a tenuous peace after centuries of war. Forged into the Realms’ only Judge, demi-god Caleb Mauthisen is both peace maker and executioner of the Mystic Truce. Warrior-priest of preventing collateral damage amongst the Humans’ neutral space of Midgard. When Caleb is called to the charred remains of a scorched Sacred Grove outside Dover, rumours reignite tensions as Ares warns of war’s whisper. High Queen Selyka is hiding something in the roots and petals of her Fae Courts, and it smells of rot and ash.

Someone is burning the Groves planted from the bodies of fallen soldiers, eliminating their chance to rise again as sentient plants: Fae. Blasphemy and act of war in a single matchstick. Is the only Fae-cursed Mystic War Veteran left next in the line of fire? Tuija Draganova, immortal outcast bogatyr fights off the curse consuming her, and stands by Caleb’s side. Lives intertwined by love and shared combat.

Caught between the Mystic Truce, Ares’ demands for answers and concern for his cursed lover’s safety, Caleb descends into a roiling adventure to find the perpetrators and staunch the flow before the Mystic Realms lose faith in him and in peace. Little does he know the perpetrator Stana stole something far more precious than belief in gods and heroes.

Char & Ash is an emotional and captivating mythpunk / godpunk supernatural fantasy and the first novel in the mythic Judge of Mystics Saga.

[spookyasmr]

💀 BABA YAGA'S CREEPY WITCH HUT AMBIENCE | Haunted Forest Sounds, Torch Fire Crackling | Spooky ASMR

🌒 Deep in the dark and haunted forest there is a mysterious chicken-legged hut and evil old witch Baba Yaga dwells in it. Baba Yaga is a famous character of Slavic folklore and mythology and is well-known for kidnapping and eating children. She can fly around in a mortar looking for her prey and spreads horror onto those unfortunate who might encounter her. She's not only all-powerful witch but also the mistress of the forest who can command animals and birds. People also used to believe that Baba Yaga's house stands on the border between our world and the Kingdom of Death with Baba Yaga being a guardian (or a priest) sending souls of the dead into the other world. You don't really remember how you ended up in the most creepy part of this enchanted and dense forest. It seems like some ancient magical force has drawn you here. Be very careful because Yaga is definitely on her guard tonight! 💀

[mortheim]

Poludnitsa - not only night is dangerous

While Slavic cultures became somewhat distinct, they have common roots and, because of this, similar mythological creatures. And today we will talk about one of these creatures - Poludnitsa (Spirit of Noon).

In Slavic folklore, both noon and midnight are mystical times when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead thins. This is when spirits from the Nav, the shadowy realm of dark deities, undead, and alternate laws, emerge. One such spirit is Poludnitsa, known for her dangerous presence in the fields at noon, potentially leading to heat stroke or worse for those who encounter her. Poludnitsa is the embodiment of midday heat, a spirit active during the hottest part of the day. Her name is derived from the word "polden'," meaning "midday". Encounters with her are dangerous, particularly for pregnant women and children, who might fall victim to her wrath or have their children swapped. In addition, it has long been noticed that people subjected to serious heat stroke often receive some unusual abilities, while becoming somewhat out of this world.

In folklore, Poludnitsa can appear as a young blonde woman or an ancient crone, though she is most often seen in her youthful form. She typically carries a scythe, a sickle, or in later myths, a red-hot frying pan, which either protects her from the sun or scorches the fields, depending on the tale.

Meeting Poludnitsa could mean facing riddles or a dance challenge. Solving her riddles or out-dancing her might earn a reward - if one survives. Her presence and influence vary across regions, with some believing she only threatens children, while others think she endangers those who rest at noon, luring them into a deep, near-unbreakable sleep. Some believe Poludnitsa was originally a fiery spirit meant to protect fields and farmers from evil. Over time, her image changed, possibly due to Christian influences, giving her a more sinister reputation. Researchers suggest that her negative portrayal emerged only in the last centuries, hinting at an older, more benevolent role. Modern interpretations see Poludnitsa as a field spirit, warning laborers against the dangers of midday heat while protecting the crops. Her true allegiance - whether to light or darkness - remains debated.

[centrally-unplanned]

Time for a pet peeve take response - let me capture our target below:

[Unpopular Fantasy Opinion Take:] The fantasy genre by-and-large took the wrong takeaway from Tolkien, and has been generally spiraling since as a result. They took his surface-level aesthetics and fantastical elements, and left his engagement with real, historical texts, his philology & his moral seriosity. In a different timeline, subsequent authors would have adopted Tolkien's erudite love of language and mythology and applied it to other cultures & mythologies - not just superficially, but by engaging with the great Chinese novels or the Shahnameh like he did with Beowulf. Even when you *do* see more recent novels "inspired by" other cultures, they are very blatantly just taking the (degraded distillate of the) Western, Tolkien-esque tradition and coating it in a thin veneer of Chinese or Mesoamerican lore.

This is not the first time I have seen this specific take, and it is part of a "fallen literature" genre that is always confusing supply & demand, with a hefty bout of selection bias for good measure.

To get the obvious out of the way, the "lessons" people took from Tolkien are entirely what audiences want to read, and were never going to be any other way. Most people don't wanna read hard, heavy books! Even if they want that sometimes, for every one Gravity's Rainbow they are gonna read a dozen Gone Girl's as a palette-cleansing snack, which means by-the-numbers the latter will dominate. Fantasy did not invent the genre of adventure stories and swashbuckling heroes and hot maidens to woo and mystical mumbo-jumbo; people stapling tried-and-true genre tropes onto elves and orcs once they took off was a given. The "shallow" part was the only part that could have changed; a world where the median fantasy novel is dealing with theological issues could never have been.

And to top this all off, no disrespect to Tolkien at all, but like...he isn't that deep? The "moral seriousness" of the Lord of the Rings is very simple - characters are often cartoonishly evil or blatantly good, the conflicts they face are often black and white, and in particular the moral dilemmas faced by characters boil down to tests of courage more than half the time. What Tolkien does have is his own unique interests? Like in Middle Earth the "act of creation", from art to life, is itself a moral undertaking with metaphysical implications. This is super cool - but it is also again very simple, it is barely even discussed in the novels and his ideas can be summarized in a paragraph. This is all good btw! The novels would not benefit from more complicated morality. But modern books are just as complex, and often more so.

Actually just a little aside here - a lot of people do this thing with Tolkien where they mention his letters and drafts like that is canonical story text? Yeah he wrote like an essay about the theological implications of the various orc origin stories, but he didn't publish that, it is nowhere in the Lord of the Rings and is barely in the Silmarillion. Other authors have notes like those; you just don't read them.

And the "other cultures" stuff is particularly egregious - I'm sorry, are we just not reading many modern stories? You think Spinning Silver isn't pulling great threads from Slavic folklore? You think the Chinese Gays in Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Untamed aren't dropping refs to Daoism and the four classics in between their will-they-won't-they necromancy shenanigans? In response this author would, of course, pivot from their bailey of "no one references other traditions" to the motte of "and if they do it is shallow" with no definition of what qualifies as such, nor again any admittance that audiences care way more about getting the gays than the deep cut cultural refs. The fact that the median person in the west prefers their Dungeons & Dragons campaigns in a default Tolkien-esque setting because the point is to have a comfortable backdrop for ease of play of a combat dice game will just not factor into their analysis.

The elephant in the room for all of this is that foundational texts differ, structurally, from modern texts, because they were made in different environments. The Lord of the Rings probably wouldn't sell well today! The prose is wooden, the characters are flat, it throws random lore it never explains at you, Tom Bombadil is just there as a walking momentum-destroying plot hole, etc. People read it because it was a first in a world that didn't have books committing to this level of world-building & detail in a fantasy environment. And as a new genre, things like his crazy level of language building are appealing, it's all so new and different, something cool to dig into.

But imagine picking up your 185th elves-and-orcs sword & sorcery book in 1998 and reading "ah yes Quenya is just one of two alphabets for the Elven tongue and it is inspired by Finnish-Germanic and I write entire poems in it even though I never finished a cohesive dictionary or grammar system but I do have 15 pages of pronunciation notes"?? You would throw at it at a fucking wall, absolutely insufferable. It was cool the first time, and that is why you learn Elvish, just like you learn Klingon. That was never gonna keep as a zeitgeist - instead just popping up here or there as this or that series takes off.

You have to accept that audiences are in the driver's seat on this one - they have infinite stories to choose from, they are absolutely not being dragged along by willful writers. Which means genres will evolve and change over time - and that is fine.

[whencyclopedia]

The Frog Princess

The Frog Princess is a Slavic folktale focusing on the importance of recognizing someone’s inner beauty, regardless of their outward appearance, as well as the possibility of redemption after failure. The tale has many variants and appears in Czech, Hungarian, Italian, and Russian folk works as well as many others.

In the most popular version of the tale, from Russia, a prince who has married a frog discovers she is a beautiful and magical maiden but betrays her trust, forcing her to leave him. He must then embark on a quest to prove himself and win her back. The frog princess in this version is known as the fairy Vasilissa the Wise, but the heroine is not the same character as Vasilissa the Beautiful from the folktale of the same name featuring the witch Baba Yaga.

The Russian version is well-known for the dramatic twist it puts on the character of Baba Yaga who is seen here as a helpful entity, rather than as an evil, child-devouring hag, whose mystical powers are symbolized by the number three as there are three baba yagas, each of whom progress the plot. The tale is representative of the animal bride and offended supernatural wife motif, which appears in several legends from different cultures. The Slavic tale has nothing to do with the modern-day novel The Frog Princess by E. D. Baker which formed the basis for the 2009 Disney animated film of the same name.

Origin & Motif

The form of the story derives from one of the most ancient, the animal tale, made famous through Aesop’s Fables but first appearing in Mesopotamia. An animal tale uses animals as characters either to explain something (e.g. how the dog got its tail) or to impress some moral on an audience (as in the well-known Aesop tale, The Fox and the Grapes). Scholars Maria Leach and Jerome Fried comment:

The line between the literary and folk fable is not easy to determine, since tales from collections like that attributed to Aesop have had wide popular circulation and have been taken from and gone back into oral traditions of large groups of people. However, the area of contact between the didactic, moralizing fable and folklore is slight, for the animal tale proper is meant essentially to entertain. The hearer is required to suspend belief and see the animal speaking, thinking, and acting like a human being. (61-62)

In the tale of The Fox and the Grapes, for example, the fox behaves like a petulant child when he cannot reach the overhanging grapes and finally walks away saying they were probably sour anyway (inspiring the phrase "sour grapes" referring to someone who rationalizes a failure to get what they want). For the tale to be effective, an audience must accept the world of the tale in which foxes can speak, reason, and rationalize. In this same way, The Frog Princess relies on the suspension of disbelief at a talking frog who is able to perform transformational magic.

The tale is similar in many ways to the better-known The Frog Prince (also known as The Frog King) in which the youngest of three princesses drops her gold ball into a well by accident and it is retrieved by a frog after she promises she will be his companion. Once the frog returns her ball to her, however, she breaks her word and runs away. The frog then follows to force her to keep her promise. The princess only accepts the frog once she finds out he is actually a handsome prince and, according to different versions, she is either rewarded for her kindness or punished for being shallow and selfish.

The Frog Princess also has the main character show kindness to the creature but later betray its trust and also uses the device of the youngest of three as this was a popular motif in folktales. The youngest son would usually receive no inheritance, and the youngest daughter was married last and so might have the poorest dowry. Folktales balanced this perceived injustice by frequently featuring the youngest of the family as the hero or heroine.

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