Folklore & Fairytales discussion

I follow a blog of someone who is of Ukranian descent, who observes the rituals of her homeland, so it was with interest I listened to The Silence of Trees , a book about a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother living in Chicago who observes the same rituals as my blogging friend, sharing and passing them on to her family, all the while hiding her personal history in the Ukraine during the Second World War.

I've not encountered many English language books on the folklore and mythology of the Ukraine, but The Silence of Trees provided some fascinating details.

I'm very interested in Slavic Paganism. Have you seen the paintings of an artist called Ravenari? She's on Deviantart. She practices a Russian Pagan path mixed with the presence of Australia where she lives. Mostly totem animal paintings.

I've read quite a lot about Ukrainian folklore and Slav mythology recently, while doing research for the book I just published.

In particular I was trying to build a coherent picture of "the Black God" Czernobog (of Disney's Fantasia fame). However I also found a lot of stuff that was very helpful for my book in the modern folklore of the Chernobyl area, post-disaster. Stories about the 'Black Bird of Chernobyl' and the 'Kaptar', which seem to be a regional variant on stories that are very common in ex-Soviet nuclear testing areas. The names change, but the basic concept stays the same. It has also been suggested that the 'Black Bird' is a descendent of an old Ukrainian story about a gigantic headless crow that supposedly slaughtered a cadre of troops during the Crimean war, which was very tantalising but which I failed to discover any more about.

All in all, it was fascinating stuff to research and I would gladly read more about it.

Czernobog sounded very interesting to me, so I looked up the Wikipedia article on him. For anyone who's interested, here are some other places he's popped up:

"In literature, he appears in American Gods by Neil Gaiman, as "Czernobog", and much later in the novel as "Bielebog" (it is implied that the two are different aspects of the same character, sharing the same existence, but represent symbolic seasons). In Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, Crnobog is a “devil,” described as a “horned god, who summoned darkness,” mentioned as a possible explanation for the appearance of the tiger in the village of Galina.[5] In the alternate history novel The Peshawar Lancers, the Russian Empire turns to Chernobog worship after a comet impact causes widespread famine and cannibalism. Chernobog is also the main antagonist in the Heirs of Alexandria series by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint, and Dave Freer, and appears (at least in name) in The Russian Trilogy by C. J. Cherryh, although spelled "Chernevog". A version of Chernobog is also used in Richard Kadrey's third novel in the Sandman Slim trilogy, although it is spelled as 'Chernovog.'" Unsurprisingly, there's also a black metal band from Slovenia named after him ("Črnobog").

I tried searching him on Google Books and got some good results. Gods, Goddesses, and Mythology

I even found him in a book of "magickal correspondences" as a means of "accessing the dark".

Wikipedia claims that "many modern mythographers assumed that, if the evil god was Chernobog, the Black God, then the good god should be Belobog or the White God. However, the name of Belobog is not mentioned by Helmold anywhere in his Chronica, nor is it ever mentioned in any of the historic sources that describe the gods of any Slavic tribe or nation," but I found Belobog mentioned in many volumes as a definite and separate god, including a Cambridge paper. I wonder.

Yes, there does seem to be some controversy around Chernobog / Bielobog and their place in the pantheon. Makes him handy for my purposes though, since I don't have too many established facts to worry about! :-)

The Dark God/Light God contrast conflict myth is endemic all over Europe, actually. I recommend the essay The Death of Llew, by Mike Nichols. It's in his book The Witches' Sabbats as well as on the internet in various places.