Chthonic Forces (from the Greek chthon: earth) are gods and energies connected, in one way or another, with the productive forces of the earth — with the world of the depths, of earthly rifts and thickets, a world uncontrolled by humans and unyielding in its intentions.
Various first settlers and bogatyrs (folk heroes) typically contend precisely with chthonic forces, and succeed to a certain extent precisely because they themselves carry the ideology of these forces.
Outside observers depict chthonic forces as various monsters with square body parts, as if made of glacial boulders, while the mobile limbs contain noticeable knots and thickenings that show the creature's enormous strength, applied to its organs from within.
"Ilya" Muromlenin: a Russian chthonic hero
"Under the guise of the bogatyr Ilya, the byliny decisively feature some pagan entity of far more ancient times. And this entity is chthonic..." Iggeld, "The Trickster"
Russians are not very attentive to their own epic tradition. I don't know why, but that's how it is. So I suspect the title of this article will surprise many people, and rather strongly. Because the main hero of the Russian epic is usually associated with just about anything — for some, with "Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality" and "holy simplicity," for others with phrases along the lines of "brawn doesn't need brains!" and "Ilyushenka, how kind you are when sober" — but never with notions like "chthonic" and so on. We have long been persuaded, and it seems we have been persuaded, that Russian epic poetry has no depths, no mysteries, no tragedy. "Byliny? Oh, those are for little children, and not very bright ones at that."
Strangely enough, the Latvian poet Rainis, in his play "Ilya Muromets," understood our hero far better than the authors of the countless homegrown works done "in the Palekh style," and the parodies and jokes that inevitably festered around them. So, you say, strength... Very well, let's take a closer look at that strength. Where does our hero get his strength from — remember?
There are actually two versions. According to one, he draws strength from well water offered to him by wandering pilgrims. Well water — that is, water from underground. The source of the great Russian bogatyr's strength lies beneath the earth. We will see plenty of further confirmation of this later on.
In the second version (which, incidentally, is considered the oldest) "Ilya" (bear with me — I will explain both the quotation marks and the unusual spelling of the nickname in due course) meets the giant Svyatogor, whom "the moist mother earth cannot bear," and becomes his sworn brother. The giant's father is an old man, or "dark" (i.e. blind — a sure sign of chthonic beings), or else has eyelashes grown down to the ground, which his servant "peasants" lift with pitchforks so that he can look at something. This last trait is also characteristic of chthonic beings such as Viy or Kasyan.
The old giant reaches out his hand to his sworn brother's son. Sensing that this handshake will be no light matter, the latter slips into the old man's grip... a piece of red-hot iron. "A simple soul," sure. "Ilya" is in fact cunning and distrustful, as we will see many examples of.
"Strong is your hand, little bogatyr" — the blind giant concludes benevolently. The sworn brothers then find a coffin with an inscription — "whoever it is fated for shall lie in it." "Ilya" tries the coffin on — it's too big for him, but it fits Svyatogor perfectly, after which "Ilya," at his sworn brother's request, covers it with the lid — but then cannot remove it again. After this, Svyatogor bequeaths his sword to "Ilya" and passes on his strength, sometimes in the form of a "spirit," sometimes in the form of... bloody foam, which the bogatyr partakes of like a communion. Such, then, is the source of strength of the main hero of the Russian byliny (who would later also become an "Orthodox saint") — blood flowing from the tomb of a chthonic monster-titan.
Later on, our hero practices further methods of renewing his strength: after the battle with Nightingale the Robber "He rode off... into the dark forests, Into the dark, dense forests, And beyond, into the boggy marshes, Ilya fell down into the moist earth, "In the moist earth I have lain for twenty years, Twenty years I have lain, and not looked out."
Renewing his strength did not always take that long. In the battle with the "braggart" Zhidovin (!), "Ilya," having been struck down by his opponent, presses himself against that same "moist earth," and "strength flows to him threefold from the earth," after which he wins. Time and again the hero draws strength from, or out of, the earth. Incidentally, in Greek epic this is how Antaeus — a chthonic giant — gets his strength. But if Antaeus is a chthonic monster, then what does that make Murovlenin, who draws his strength by exactly the same means?
Given all this, it is easy to understand why "Ilya" endures without difficulty being imprisoned by Prince Vladimir "in the deep cellars," a punishment for the havoc he wreaked in Kiev with an alternative feast for the destitute "goli," for shooting arrows at churches, and for threats against the prince himself. Naive Fair Sun thought he could drown a pike! Naturally, it did not work — emerging from the "cellar," the bogatyr behaves nothing like an exhausted prisoner: he "roars like a beast, whistles like the Nightingale" (another sign of a chthonic character) and single-handedly inflicts heavy losses on the horde advancing on Kiev. The impression is that underground, the bogatyr not only ate and drank what the soft-hearted princess brought him, but also drew on Chthonos — his native element!
In some versions, "Ilya's" imprisonment in the "cellar" is described in great detail. He is covered with "oaken ceilings," buried in "black earth," covered over with "ochre-yellow sands," and sealed in with "white stones." Black–Ochre(Red)–White. Need I explain? A sacred tricolor older than Atlantis, denoting, among other things (and in this case, evidently), the three worlds — the Lower, the Middle, and the Upper — the three layers of creation. Among the Slavs, the oak is the World Tree. The impression is that a terrified Vladimir Vseslavich is trying to wall himself off from the terrifying, essentially unkillable ("in battle no death is written for Ilya!") Chthonic Force running loose in his city — walling it off with the entire bulk of Creation, of the Three Worlds, casting it down beneath the roots of the Oak-Tree, into the Unmanifest, into Chaos.
However, this did "Ilya" no harm whatsoever, fortunately for the Rus of the byliny. Though it is possible things are even more interesting than that, and the entire plot of the bogatyr's "revolt" and "imprisonment" is a reflection of a warrior-chief initiation rite — it is precisely after this that he becomes the head and unquestioned authority of the bogatyr retinue. I develop this idea in detail in my books "The Age of the Russian Bogatyrs" and "Gods and Castes of Pagan Rus."
Well, in any case, this is precisely a chthonic initiation.
The very "peasant" origin of the main bogatyr most likely carries a mythological rather than a social meaning — "Ilya" himself is never seen "farming" anywhere, except for clearing "stumps and roots" and "boulders and stones" from his parents' field. Again, the point is his closeness to the Earth as an element, to Chthonos. As for his social origin, "Ilya's" son, and sometimes Ilya himself, is called a "prince's son" in some byliny, while in the eleventh-century High German poem "Gertnit," where the mighty "Ilya the Russian" appears as a positive hero, he is styled "king of wild Rus."
Beyond his particular closeness to chthonic elements, there are several other traits that link "Ilya" to the world of chthonic characters. These are his cunning and his tendency toward shapeshifting and disguise, and his hypersexuality — traits of the provocateur-trickster, a figure that is likewise chthonic.
Contrary to the widespread view of the main bylina bogatyr as an embodiment of straightforwardness and brute strength, "Ilya" is in fact, when it comes to cunning, a match for the one usually considered the chief trickster of the byliny — Alyosha Popovich (a character also quite interesting in his own right; suffice it to say for now that this bogatyr originally had nothing whatsoever to do with Christian clergy). At least twice he appears unrecognized, in disguise — in Tsargrad he approaches Idolishche (according to the original version of the plot, incidentally, Idolishche is a welcome guest in Tsargrad, and "Tsar Konstantin Bogolyubovich" incites him against Rus, which can hardly be called anything but deeply historical), and, at the start of the bylina about him and the "goli," he sometimes appears "incognito" in Vladimir's own halls. In the first case he presents himself as a "wandering kalika [pilgrim]," with whom he has traded clothes; in the second, he apparently takes no measures to disguise himself at all (and yet no one recognizes him), and compounds matters by calling himself now "Mikitushka Shaltalovich," now "Zaoleshanin."
He generally loves to hide behind false names. That is, bogatyrs in the byliny rarely introduce themselves to one another for no reason — except to a prince upon arrival, or when the victorious opponent literally holds a knife to the throat (a notion of the magical power of a name?). Yet no one gives a false name, let alone in such numbers, as "Ilya" does. To the inhabitants of a town he has saved from the "Tatars," he introduces himself now as "Zbut-Boris-Korolevich," now as "Yurish-Marish-Shishmaretin" (in this last nickname the root "Mar" sounds twice, and "shish" once — both characteristic of the names of chthonic beings, of "unclean spirits": mars, shishki, shishigi, shishimary).
Moreover, the very name by which most of our contemporaries know him is itself yet another nickname, a new disguise. Ilya (Ileika) Muromets was the name of a Cossack impostor of the Time of Troubles, an associate of the well-known Ivan Bolotnikov. He truly was an Ilya from a village near Murom, son of the peasant Ivan Timofeyevich Korovin... except that the byliny about the bogatyr "Ilya" are, to put it mildly, older — and in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century records he is called not Muromets at all, but Morovlin or Murovlenin. Mor, mur... a root tied to stone, to the north, to death... to Chthonos, in short.
Foreign legends about him survive, recorded as early as the thirteenth, even the eleventh, century. Perhaps those are right who see in "Ilya" a reflection of the Varangian, "Murman" prince Oleg the Prophet (Elg-Eleika-Ilya) — the prince who did not hesitate to approach his enemies disguised as a merchant, who struck fear into Tsargrad, and who suspiciously refused Tsargrad wine, suspecting poison. But it is just as possible that Oleg is merely one more namesake of our hero. For in another Western poem, the Thidreks saga, "Ilias of Rus," a warrior of "King Valdamar," fights against... the Huns and the Goths. It is curious that in the byliny our hero constantly travels "Latin roads," in which it is not hard to recognize the famous Roman roads... but here we could digress into the, in this case, minor question of the geographical and historical origins of the Russian byliny — I have already examined that in detail in a separate work on the byliny.
In disguise, as befits a trickster, he "tests" and provokes both Idolishche (with a lethal outcome for the latter) and Vladimir (here matters are limited to threats). In Kiev, displeased with Vladimir, he throws a genuine alternative to the princely feast, and starts shooting arrows at symbols of the ruling order — here the domes of the princely tower, there the cupolas of churches (this last motif appears to be a later addition, since the byliny as a whole predate the Christianization of Rus, but it is telling that later storytellers linked precisely this character to an assault on Christian shrines).
Oh, and by the way, someone tell the Gramscians that their idol reinvented the wheel, and the copyright belongs to the Russian bogatyr! Because the "feast of the goli" and the war on symbols look far too much like the actions of some "color revolution." :)
A few words on "Ilya's" hypersexuality. Here, too, this embodiment of Russian Chthonos leaves far behind Alyosha, notorious as a "chaser of women." The main hero of the byliny is also the main lover-hero of the Russian epic. He sleeps with Svyatogor's wife; in some versions, with the daughters of Nightingale the Robber; with the warrior-maiden polianitsa Zlatogorka (or Svyatogorka); with the "honest widow" in the land of Talia. Unlike Dobrynya or Alyosha, his personal relationships never take on any social coloring. "He wandered the world and got a girl with child."
Sometimes his lover — and the mother of the ill-fated Podsokolnichek — turns out to be the well-known bylina witch Marinka Kaidalovna. That is, in most cases his women are some kind of not-quite-human beings, again connected to chthonic elements. In one version, incidentally, he turns out to be the illegitimate father of none other than Dobrynya Nikitich. That is still relatively harmless — but when he meets a son or daughter out in the open field, it never ends well.
Usually events unfold as follows: having beaten his own offspring with difficulty, "Ilya" recognizes the child, tells them the truth of their relationship, and lets them go. However, both the son and the daughter then try to kill the bogatyr, and he deals with them with unprecedented cruelty — planting one foot on one of the victim's legs, grabbing the other with his hands, and tearing them in half. I have already written that in folklore this is how the offspring of a union between a human and a non-human being — a rusalka, a leshy, a "volokh," a troll — are typically dealt with... except that it is usually the non-human partner who metes out this punishment in this way. Once again, "Ilya" finds himself in the company of chthonic beings.
As for the method of dispatching an enemy that involves severing the head (which is then mounted on a spear, with plans to turn it into a drinking vessel), as well as hacking the body apart and scattering it across the field — while this goes back to pagan sacrifice, it is a standard motif in the byliny and is not exclusive to "Ilya."
One bylina does describe "Ilya's" wife, but she turns out, as one might easily guess, to be rather unconventional. Unlike the wives of other bogatyrs — even the former polianitsa Nastasya Mikulishna, Dobrynya's wife, who after the wedding turns into an obedient housewife ("wherever they lead us, that's where we go") — "Savishna," the wife of the chief bogatyr, does not lose her warrior qualities even in marriage, and while the bogatyr sleeps, she dons his armor, mounts his horse, and drives the enemy away from Kiev. Unfortunately, nothing more is said about her anywhere.
His death is told in different ways — but always with the same outcome. In the bylina of the Battle of the Kama, the bogatyrs, emboldened by their victory over yet another horde, challenge the heavenly host itself to battle (!!!). The heavens accept the challenge — but the bogatyrs prove powerless: every opponent cut in two rises from the ground as two living warriors.
Another account of the end of "Ilya's" road is more peaceful. Seeing at the crossroads the famous stone inscribed "go right, and you shall be rich; go left, and you shall be married; go straight, and you shall be slain," the bogatyr dutifully visits all three roads, and on returning to the crossroads each time does not forget to note on the stone that "Ilya Muromets rode this way, and was not slain (married, made rich)." Having scattered or slaughtered the robbers lying in wait on the straight road, having ridden "left," where a cunning maiden with a trap-bed over a cellar awaited him (this time the wary "Ilya" did not fall into the cellar himself but tipped the maiden into it, and, freeing her captives, executed the mistress of the treacherous bed), and having ridden right, where treasure awaited him — which, in some versions, he again uses to feed and water the "goli," and in others uses to build a church — he brings his adventures to a close.
And the outcome, as already noted, is the same in both cases. The bogatyr goes into a cave and turns to stone. The bearer of subterranean power ends his path underground. Chthonos returns to Chthonos.
The Christians posthumously turned the bogatyr into a monk of the "Kiev Pechersk Lavra," but folk tradition held that "Ilya" descended into the caves before Anthony of the Caves, founder of the first monastery on Russian soil. Incidentally, before the monastery the caves were known as the Varangian Caves. Ye. Anichkov believed there had been a sanctuary there... And most likely, we may conclude, it was chthonic gods that were venerated in that cave.
P.S. Afterward, this whole story had a very curious continuation. First, in the seventeenth century "Ilya" was proclaimed an Orthodox saint, and certain relics deep within the Lavra began to be venerated as his remains. Old Believers visiting the Lavra reportedly saw the "saint" bogatyr's hand lying over his vestments in the "ancient two-finger sign," while supporters of Nikon's reforms told of the hand, "to the shame of schismatic foolishness," folded in the three-finger sign — and afterward it was reported straightened out entirely.
In my book, I simply assumed fraud on the part of cunning Pechersk monks, who led pilgrims now to one mummy, now to another. But now, having gotten a better grasp of the trickster nature of Muravlenin, I find myself wondering — is it not he who is playing the joke? What is more, despite widely reported press stories about the relics being transferred to his "homeland" — Murom (to which, as we recall, "Ilya" never had anything to do) — the relics bearing the Russian bogatyr's name are still on display in the Lavra.
Perhaps the monks are running yet another racket.
Or perhaps... Oleg the Prophet, too, turned out after his death to have several graves — in Kiev, in Ladoga, and "beyond the sea." And in general — "Ilya" sleeps within each of us. To exactly the extent that Russian Chthonos exists within us.
Literature:
- Gavrilov D.A. (Iggeld). The Trickster: The Player in Eurasian Folklore. Moscow, Sotsialno-Politicheskaya Mysl, 2006.
- Prozorov L.R. The Age of the Russian Bogatyrs. Moscow, Yauza, EKSMO, 2006.
Interesting Facts
- In a number of traditions, the earth itself was conceived of as a chthonic being: vegetation as fur, peninsulas as legs, and so on.
- Chthonic beings are also linked to marriage symbolism. A hero's marriage to a chthonic goddess signified taking possession of the land (the country).