Светлана Жарникова
Ornamental complex of the Nort of Russia

Ornamental complex of the Nort of Russia

Vinogradova A. G. Dancing. Canvas. Oil.

Russia is a country of eternal change and is completely not conservative, and a country beyond conservative customs, where a historical time lives, and does not part with rituals and ideas. The Russians are not a young people, but the old ones - like the Chinese. They are very old, ancient, conservatively preserved all the oldest and do not refuse it. In their language, their superstition, their disposition, etc., one can study the most ancient times. Victor von Hyun. 1870.

Zharnikova Svetlana Vasilievna

Archaic motives of North Russian ornamentation

(To the question of possible Proto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian parallels).

Specialty 07.00.07-ethnographic

Abstract of dissertation for the degree of candidate of historical sciences.

Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Order of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Order of Friendship of Peoples Institute of Ethnography. N.N. Miklouho-Maclay. On the rights of the manuscript. Moscow. 1988.

1. General characteristics of the work

This work was carried out as part of research conducted at the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences and aimed at studying the ethnic history and ancient ties of the East Slavic and Indo-Iranian peoples (Aryans, or Aryans).

The relevance of the topic is due to: firstly, the ever-increasing versatile Soviet-Indian contacts and the desire of the peoples of the two countries to get to know each other better, to find the origins of traditional Russian-Indian friendship; secondly, it is due to the growth of ethnic identity that has been universally observed in recent decades and often takes on such ugly forms as nationalism and racism. In light of this, regional ethno-historical research is currently gaining special scientific acuity, as knowledge of ethnic history helps modern people to free themselves from the narrowness of the nationalist view of the world, to understand the role and significance of the contribution to the common treasury of human culture of all peoples, to realize that humanity is one.

On the pages of this work, for the first time in Russian science, the most ancient Proto-Slavic-Indo-European relations (and possibly an ethnogenetic relationship?). Received coverage from the standpoint of a comparative analysis of the most ancient, which survived until the turn of the XIX - XX centuries. Both Indo-Iranian and East Slavic peoples have geometric and plot ornamental patterns, the addition of which goes into the depths of the Eneolithic, Neolithic and even Paleolithic of Eastern Europe.

The author of this work considered it necessary to pay attention to the following aspects of the problem:

1. Historiographies of the issue of the ancestral home of Indo-Europeans, Indo-Iranians and Pre-Slavs and the modern conclusions of Indo-European studies on this range of issues.

2. The question of archaeological cultures of the Eneolithic era - bronze and early iron, identified with the Indo-Iranian and Pre-Slavic ethnic massifs, testifying to the oldest contacts of the Pre-Slavs and Indo-Iranians in the vast territories of Eastern Europe.

3. The question of the oldest population of the north of Eastern Europe during the

Paleolithic-Bronze Age, in the light of the latest data from archeology, anthropology and paleoclimatology.

4. An analysis of the archaic geometric ornamentation of textiles, preserved among East Slavic and Indo-Iranian peoples until the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, as an ethnic differentiator and a peculiar indicator of the movements of Aryan peoples in Eurasia over a long historical period.

5. The question of the possible common sources of some images of archaic mythologists, preserved in the Rigveda and Avesta, on the one hand, and in the North Russian ornamental tradition, on the other.

6. Analysis of archaic ornamentation in trihedral-notched wood carvings and possible semantics of motifs of this carving among Indo-Iranians and Pre-Slavs.

7. An analysis of the evidence of the Rigveda, Mahabharata and Avesta about the ancient northern ancestral home of the Indo-Iranians and modern data from archeology, anthropology, paleoclimatology, confirming the possibility of northern localization of the oldest territories of the formation of the Indo-Iranian ethnic group.

2. The content of the work and methodological base. Sources and historiography.

This work consists of an introduction, which reveals the relevance of the topic, historiographical essay, three chapters devoted to the analysis of the development of East European ornament over a huge time period from the Upper Paleolithic to the turn of the XIX - XX centuries and its role as an indicator of ethnomigration processes associated with the movements of the Indo-Iranian peoples, in the middle of II - beginning of I millennium BC and conclusions.

The historiographical essay analyzes various hypotheses related to the problems of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, Indo-Iranians and great Slavs. A huge role in solving these issues is played by the data of comparative Indo-European linguistics. So one of the earliest, formed back in the middle of the XIX century is the hypothesis of the Central Asian ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, which is currently abandoned by the vast majority of researchers. One of the largest Soviet linguists B. V. Gornung rejected not only the concept of the “Asian ancestral home” and the e-e, but also all versions of the “Central European and South Russian-Caspian ancestral home” (From the prehistory of the formation of the common Slavic linguistic unity. M. 1963. p.11-12). The prominent Bulgarian linguist V. Georgiev also believes that the ancestral home of I.-E it is necessary to search only in Europe, restricting their habitat to areas of Eastern and Central Europe (Studies in comparative historical linguistics. M. 1958). In 1984, the work of V. V. Ivanov and T. V. Gamkrelidze, “Indo-European language and Indo-Europeans” (Tbilisi, 1984), was published, where the authors put forward a new hypothesis and I.-E. Ancestral home in the territory of Asia Minor. However, most researchers see the ancestral home of I.E. peoples precisely in the territories of Eastern and

Southeast Europe.

Based on this, a conclusion is being made at the present time about the ancestral home of the Indo-Iranian peoples. One of the most widespread and most heavily argued is the point of view according to which the Indo-Iranians in the era preceding their advance to the territory of Iran, Central Asia, Afghanistan and North-West India, lived in the south of Eastern Europe (in the Northern Black Sea region). As for the most ancient period of formation of the Indo-Iranian ethnic massif, at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, an outstanding Indian researcher B. G. Tilak put forward a hypothesis according to which the most ancient territories of the formation of the Pra-Hindoirais were the circumpolar regions of Europe. He proved his hypothesis using the evidence of the oldest monuments of Indo-Iranian mythology - the Vedas, where knowledge of such arctic phenomena as a year divided into a light and a dark half, aurora borealis, a freezing sea, the Pole Star and the Big Dipper high overhead and much more is recorded... Due to the fact that modern paleoclimatological data indicate that in the period from the VI to the end of the II millennium BC the climate of the north of Eastern Europe was much warmer and milder, and where the tundra is currently located, mixed forests and pine forests grew, it can be assumed that B. G. Tilak's concept is quite viable, and that part of the population of the north of Eastern Europe could advance into South Russian steppes at the turn of the 5th - 4th millennium BC when these territories, due to increased moisture content, lost their former semi-desert character (Berg L. S. Klimat i zhizn. M. 1947). Probably, the emergence in the steppe zone of Eastern Europe at the turn of the 5th - 4th millennium BC is connected with this movement of a part of the population from the European north to the south. Yamnaya culture, which many researchers consider Indo-Iranian. E. E. Kuzmina believes that it was in the steppe and forest-steppe zone in the IV-III millennium BC, and possibly somewhat earlier, that the wild horse was domesticated (Kuzmina E. E. The spread of horse breeding and the cult of the horse among Iranian-speaking tribes Central Asia and other peoples of the Old World. Central Asia in antiquity and the Middle Ages. M. 1977). From here, as E.A. Grantovsky (Early history of the Iranian tribes of Western Asia. M. 1970) and I. N. Pogrebava (Iran and Transcaucasia in the early Iron Age. M. 1977), as well as a number of other researchers, began in the middle ... II millennium BC distribution on the territory of the Northern Caucasus, Transcaucasia and Iran, as well as in the steppe of Kazakhstan and Southern Siberia of the Aryan peoples, who advanced at the end of II - early. 1st millennium BC to the oases of Central Asia, Afghanistan and India. With the Indo-Iranian tribes of the 2nd millennium BC at present, many Soviet researchers (S. P. Tolstov, I. A. Itina, I. M. Dyakonov, V. G. Gafurov, N. D. Chlenova, E. E. Kuzmina, B. A. Litvinsky, Khю A. Zadneprovsky, E. A. Grantovsky, A. L. Mendelstam and others) connect the representatives of the Abashevskaya, Srubnaya and Andronovskaya ethnocultural communities genetically related to Yamnaya and widespread in the 2nd millennium BC in the vast territories of Eurasia from the Lower Danube in the west to the Minusinsk Basin in the east, and from the Pechora in the north to northern Afghanistan in the south. This huge area in its western part was in close proximity, and often simply overlapped on those territories that a number of Soviet researchers (S. S. Berezanskaya, V. A. Ilinskaya, A. I. Terenozhkin, O. N. Trubachev, B. V. Gornung and others) are associated with the ancestral home of the Slavs. In light of the question of a possible Proto-Slavic-Indo-Arab contact (kinship?), this circumstance plays an important role.

The problem of localizing the ancestral home of the Slavs is no less controversial than Indo-Iranian. B. V. Gornung considers it possible to connect, the primary the area of formation of the Proto-Slavs with the carriers of the Trypillian Eneolithic culture of its middle stage.

At present, Soviet teachings are more and more confidently localizing the ancestral home of the Proto-Slavs in the Dnieper region and the Carpathian region, and associating the Trzhynec-Komarov culture with them II millennium BC (S. S. Berezanskaya, B. A. Rybakov, V. Danilenko, O. N. Trubachev, I. K. Sveshnikov, T. K. Alekseeva, A. I. Terenozhkin, V. A. Ilyinskaya and others). Archaeological materials testify that the connections, recorded at the level of the Eneolithic Yamnaya and Trypillian cultures, continue in subsequent historical periods, and that the Tschinetsko-Komarovskaya, Abashevskaya and Srubnaya cultures to a certain extent have common origins. The relative stability of the population of the Dnieper region and the fact that its ethnogenetic roots go back to antiquity are evidenced by anthropological data, “allowing us to trace the history of the physical ancestors of the East Slavic peoples to the Bronze Age” (V. P. Alekseev. Paleoanthropology and history. VI. 1985. no. 1.p. 35), i.e. until the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. The stability of the Slavic population on the Proto-Slavic territory is also evidenced by the fact that, as B. A. Rybakov notes, the boundaries of the Proto-Slavic Trzynets culture of the 2nd millennium BC completely coincide with the area of the Slavic Przeworsk and Zarubinets cultures of the 3rd century BC - III century AD (Herodotova Scythia. M. 1979. p. 206). Since the territories of the formation of Indo-Iranian peoples are currently recognized by most researchers in Eastern Europe and there were no historical reasons that, as noted by N. R. Guseva about the territory under consideration” (Hinduism. M. 1977. p. 43), and became one of the components in the ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs, whose original ethnic area was in close proximity to the Indo-Iranian, one can conclude about the ancient contacts of the Pre-Slavs and Indo-Iranians. Many acts testify to these ancient contacts. These are data from anthropology, linguistics, onomastics, the proximity of sacred vocabulary, many mycological plots and images of folk art, common among the East Slavic and Indo-Iranian peoples.

One of the exceptionally valuable historical sources that make it possible to trace the significant antiquity of the Proto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian ties is folk ornamentation and, in particular, the deeply archaic geometric and plot ornament of North Russian embroidery, weaving, lace and woodcarving, since, according to S. V. Ivanov, “parts or groups of a disintegrated tribe often disperse and lose contact with each other, but the ornament, continuing to preserve ancient traditions, testifies to the ancient commonality of these groups” (Folk ornament as a historical source. SE. 1958. No. 2. p. 18).

The first chapter of this work is devoted to the analysis of the formation and development of the East European ornament over many millennia and the identification of both in the East Slavic, and in particular, the North Russian ornament, and in the ornaments of modern descendants of the ancient Indo-Iranian peoples, common origins, dating back to ancient times. But before turning directly to archaic Eastern European ornamentation, the author considers it necessary to dwell on an extremely important issue - modern scientific data on the time of human settlement in the north of Eastern Europe. O. N. Bader believed that due to the continentality of the climate in northeastern Europe there was no glacier, and already in the Mousterian epoch (about 100 to 40 thousand years ago) the settlement of Neanderthals covered vast areas in the north. Probably at this time, the first meeting of people with the Arctic Ocean in northeastern Europe took place (O. N. Bader. From the depths of the Paleolithic. VI. 1976. No. 2. p. 126-127), which is confirmed by the presence of the Krutaya site on Pechora The mountain, the lower layer of which is about 70 thousand years old. The presence of Paleolithic sites in the north of Eastern Europe is noted by V. S. Stokolos and K. S. Korolev in their work "The Archaeological Map of the Komi ASSR" (M. 1984). Moreover, such of them as the Byzovskaya site, located not far from the Krutaya Gora, in its inventory has much in common with layers of the same age with it (25 - 29 thousand years) of the Don site of Kostenki I, XII. During the Mesolithic period in northern Europe, the number of human sites increases, as evidenced by archaeological research by S. V. Oshibkina, V. S. Stokolos, G. M. Burov, V. I. Kanivets, and the influx of population comes from the southwestern regions of the Volga-Oka and Baltic-Dnieper (Stokolos V. S., Korolev K. S. 1984), and "traces of the resettlement of the Mesolithic population from the Ural regions have not been found" (Oshibkina S. V. Mesolithic Sukhona and Eastern Prionezhie. M. 1983. p. 284). The Neolithic period in these territories was also not a time of depopulation. So, only in the basins of Pechora, Vychegda, Mezen, about two dozen Neolithic sites were discovered on the shores of watershed lakes and in river valleys, and this despite the fact that the Russian North has been very little studied archaeologically (Stokolos B. C. 1984). G. M. Byrov notes the proximity of the Neolithic Kargopol pottery widespread in the north of Eastern Europe from the Middle Volga and Dnieper-Donetsk mid or late 5th - mid 4th millennia BC (Bypov G. M. Archaeological cultures of the north of the European part of the USSR. Ulyanovsk. 1974, p. 93). At the same time, the coincidence of the ornaments of Kargopol Neolithic ceramics with patterns on wooden items of the Mesolithic age (VII millennium BC) from the same northern territories was noted (Burov G. M. 1974. p. 93), which gives grounds to consider the Neolithic the population of the north of Eastern Europe is ethno-genetically close to the Mesolithic that preceded it - firstly,and secondly, it allows us to raise the question of whether the origins of the common material culture of Northwestern Ukraine, the Middle Volga region and the North of Eastern Europe, repeatedly noted by researchers of the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age of these regions, lie in the depths of the Paleolithic - Mesolithic. Probably, B.V. Gornung was right, who believed that the belief that the Indo-Europeans, whose composition must be sought in the depths of the Stone Age, in their movements in Europe met various numerous non-Indo-European substrates is not true and that: “such an overestimation the role of these substrates and the widespread search for them are not justified ", ie:" Indo-European tribes in their migrations of the second half of the 3rd - early 2nd millennium BC often... they walked the same way, following each other, so to speak "catching up with each other" (Gornung B.V. 1963, p. 41). We can assume, based on the data of archeology, anthropology and other related sciences, that the substrate population of the north of Eastern Europe before the beginning of the movement here in the first half of the 1st millennium AD of the Slavs was largely (if not the overwhelming majority) Indo-European, related to language and culture to those who went to these lands from the lands of Novgorod and lower Russia. The preservation of elements of folk culture in the Russian North at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, often more archaic not only than the ancient Greek ones but also recorded in the Vedas, can probably be explained by the fact that the population of these places was largely descendants of the ancient population that had formed here back in as a result of advances up to the Bronze Age, i.e. at a time when, possibly, many social structures, mythological schemes and those ornamental schemes that were common for the vast Slavic-Indo-Iranian region and survived in relict form until our days, were taking shape.

Many ornaments that are components of complex geometric compositions of North Russian branched weaving, embroidery and lace, on the one hand, and Central Asian, Iranian, North Indian ornamental complexes, on the other, have their origins in the ornamentation of such Upper Paleolithic cultures of Eastern Europe as Kostenkovskaya (rows of oblique crosses ) and Mezin (rhombo-meander pattern). These ornaments, which have no direct analogies in the Paleolithic art of Europe, served V. A. Gorodtsov in his proposed division of the European Upper Paleolithic cultures of the Madeleine time (20-25 thousand years BC) into three separate areas - Western European, Central European and Eastern European (by the nature of the monuments of art) - the basis for highlighting the last (Eastern European) region. Complex swastika-meander ornaments, which continue to exist on various products of the Neolithic and Eneolithic period in Eastern Europe, in particular on the monuments of the Tisza and Trypollian cultures, appear in other parts of the Old World only in the Bronze Age, being a kind of indicator of the ways of the Eastern European Indo-European population habitat. B. A. Rybakov, exploring the development paths of the ancient rhombo-meander ornament in the Neolithic, noted the stability of this complex and difficult pattern, its undoubted connection with the ritual sphere, calling it a connecting link between the Paleolithic, where it first appeared and modern ethnography, which gives an incalculable the number of examples of such a pattern in fabrics, drinking and weaving” (Paganism of the ancient Slavs. M. 1981. p. 158).

Rhombo-meander and swastika ornaments are constantly found on the cult vessels of Tripollya and the Proto-Slavic Zashchinets-Komarovskaya and Abashevskaya, logging and Andronovo cultures inheriting from it, which a number of researchers associate with Indo-Iranians. This ornamentation is especially diverse in the carpet decor of the Andronov cult ceramics, which, as a rule, are in burials, which gave grounds for a number of researchers (S. V. Kiselev, G. E. Zdanovich, M. D. Khlobystina) to believe that these ornaments were symbols of genus, and the study of the number and combinations of their constituent elements can play a role in understanding the structure of each community (Khlobystina M. Some features of the Andronovo culture of the Minusinsk steppes. SA. 1973. No. 4. c. 61). Probably, being a symbol of the tribal and ethnicity of a person, the Andronovo ornament performed on ritual dishes placed in burials, the functions of a talisman, supposed to protect the spirit of the deceased on the way to another world or ask the gods for mercy. Being a kind of ethnic indicator, the non-Andrian-Svaetic and "single-file" ornament decorating utensils, weapons, etc., spreads across the territory of Eurasia together with those Indo-Iranian tribes, bearers of these ornamental symbols, which were recorded in the second half of the 2nd - early 1st millennium BC in the North and Central Caucasus and in the Transcaucasia (Armelia, Azerbaijan). M. N. Pogrebova believes that the white-encrusted ceramics of Iran, which appeared in the Eastern Transcaucasia in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, surprisingly similar in ornament to the Andronovo one, testifies to the advancement of a new population into Iran from the Volga and Ciscaucasia. A similar picture is noted by researchers in Central Asia. The steppe bronze culture discovered in the southern Aral Sea region and in the Akcha-Darya delta of the Amu-Darya, named by S. P. Tolstov as Tazabatyab, has molded ware with a geometric ornament of the Andronovo type. M. A. Itina believes that not only archaeological material makes it possible to record the advancement of pastoralist tribes from the northwest, but anthropological data also record a wide advancement of people of the Andronovo type to the south (Steppe tribes of the Central Asian interfluve in the second half of the 2nd - early 1st millennium BC. SE. 1962, No. 3). V. I. Sarianidi draws the same conclusion about the advancement of north-western pastoral and agricultural tribes to the territory of Central Asia and further to Afghanistan and India, and among other archaeological sources confirming this conclusion; he considers the ornament to be a very important indicator.

The author of this work, referring to the North Russian textile ornament, notes that it is here that ancient compositions that are absolutely identical to the Andronov ones have been preserved, and their convergence is amazing, from which one can draw a conclusion about the genetic relationship of the Andronov pottery ornamentation of the 17th - 9th centuries BC and decor of North Russian textiles (up to the end of the XIX - beginning of the XX century). Raising the question of which ethnic groups were the bearers and keepers of this ornamental tradition for more than 3500 years, the author of this work rejects the assumption that such a bearer of the Andronov tradition could be the Finno-Ugric population of the north of Eastern Europe, who allegedly took this tradition in ancient times from their own Indo-Iranian neighbors and preserved it up to the middle of the 1st millennium AD, i.e. until the period when the presence of Slavic settlements is archaeologically recorded in these territories. The impossibility of such a solution to this issue is convinced by a number of facts. So, most researchers of Finno-Ugric ornamentation, and in particular of fraudulent weaving, postulate very late (mid-19th century) the appearance of such ornaments in the decor of these peoples, as a result of their contacts with the Russian population (Kosmenko A. P. 1977, 1984, Klimova G. M. 1984). In addition, in the light of modern data from archeology, paleoclimatology, linguistics, and anthropology, the conclusion that a significant one has entered the population of Novgorod, Vologda, Yaroslavl and Kostroma lands (the Finno-Ugric substrate seems extremely problematic, if not unlikely. But since the North Russian ornament retained a huge number of Andronovo archetypes, which are often not found in other East Slavic regions, it can be assumed with a significant degree of confidence that these ornamental complexes survived in the Russian North due to the fact that the population of these territories was mostly descendants of the ancient Indo-European (possibly proto-Aryan) population.

At the same time, in the East Slavic tradition, many elements of the ancient swastika-meander and "single-file" ornament can be traced continuously practically from the Proto-Slavic Trinecko-Komarovo culture (mid-2nd millennium BC) until the end of the 19th century, from which one can conclude that the bearers of the ancient ornamental tradition were also those groups of the East Slavic (Krivichi) population, whose settlements and burial grounds dating back to the IV-VI centuries AD, discovered in 1984-1987 by archaeologist A. N. Bashenkin (Archaeological discoveries in 1984. M. 1986. p. 4; Hills and long mounds in the east in the Novgorod land. Abstracts of the conference "History and archeology of the Novgorod lands", Novgorod. 1987. p. 12-14) in the west of the Vologda region.

Thus, we can conclude that it was on the territory of Eastern Europe among closely related tribes that the most ancient ornamental complexes were formed that remained sacred symbols of Indo-Iranian peoples, on the one hand, and did not lose their sacred functions of amulets and signs of kinship among the East Slavic peoples, up to until the beginning of the 20th century, on the other. A comprehensive consideration of the development of ornaments common to the East Slavic (North Russian) and Indo-Iranian traditions from ancient times to the present day testifies to the single, deeply archaic origins of this tradition, about the long process of development and transformation of ancient archetypes, on the joint development of more diverse, new ornamental patterns over the millennia, about the obvious genetic relationship of these peoples, since similar ornament, of course, can occur among different peoples, but it's hard to believe that the peoples not ethno-genetically related and separated by thousand kilometers distances and millennia, such complex ornamental compositions can appear completely independently of each other, repetitive even in the smallest detail, moreover, performing the same sacred functions of amulets and signs of kinship.

The second chapter of the dissertation is devoted to the analysis of archaic plot compositions in the North Russian textile decor, which also developed in ancient times. A number of zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, ornithomorphic and phytomorphic images, which are the components of these archaic compositions, are quite reliably deciphered on the basis of Eastern Slavic folklore to mythology preserved until the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries and on the basis of the hymns of the Rig Veda and Avesta, the poems of the Mahabharata, Beliefs of the inhabitants of mountainous Tajikistan and especially the Hindu Kush. And at the same time, some images of the Rig Veda, Avesta and Mahabharata can be deciphered with the help of Eastern European archaeological materials and archaic themes of embroidery, weaving and lace of the North Russian region.

Such is the circle of images associated with the image of a female character in North Russian embroidery, where the forthcoming (unlike the Western Asian circle of images) are not lions, bulls and goats, but moose - horses - geese - swans (or ducks).

Making the assumption that the assimilation of a horse to a bird - a duck, a goose or a swan, preserved in the Rig Veda, as well as the assimilation of a horse to a deer, can have its origins only in those territories where both deer and geese, ducks and swans had to play a huge role in the economic life of people, the author turns to the Neolithic petroglyphs of the White Sea and Onega Lake, where the leading characters are a man, a waterfowl (duck, goose, swan) and an elk. Since only in northern Europe geese, ducks and swans nested in huge numbers until the end of the 19th century, and it was here that these cautious birds, losing their plumage in the spring, became completely defenseless, they not only celebrated with their arrival and departure the arrival and departure of the warm season, but also gave people a large amount of meat food in the most difficult time of the year without food - in late winter - early spring. The sacralization of waterfowl, characteristic of the Proto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Scythian, Iranian, Indian and East Slavic (North Russian) traditions, probably has its origins in this ancient Neolithic northeastern European tradition. Judging by the archaeological materials of the Saka tombs of Pazyryk and the Katandkno burial mound, the origins of the contamination of the images of the horse and deer, so characteristic of the Indo-Iranian tradition and recorded in the hymn of the Rig Veda, are also associated with northern latitudes. This conclusion is made due to the fact that the images of the so-called. Horned horses in the Scythian and Saka traditions are in fact often, judging by the design of the muzzle and horns, images of elk. Referring to the idea of N. N. Marr that the first riding and draft animal was a deer, which was only much later replaced by a horse (Means of transportation, tools of self-defense and production in prehistory. L. 1926), we can conclude that this first riding of all representatives of the deer family, only an elk could be an animal in all respects. This conclusion is made in connection with the fact that, firstly, the general dimensions of all other representatives of the deer family do not give them the opportunity to be riding animals, and secondly, already on the Neolithic petroglyphs of the north of Eastern Europe there are images that can be interpreted as a moose team. In addition, modern researchers dealing with the problem of elk domestication state that in a harness and under the top, as well as in the process of domestication, an elk is preferable to a horse, because gets used to the team in 2 days and makes no attempts to hit or bite a person, and at the same time, not every horse can catch up with a running young elk. Only by the fact that the Elk preceded the Indo-Iranians as a riding animal, a horse, can one explain many of the old ways of describing the sacrificial horse in the Rig Veda, as a creature with a horned head and fallow deer hooves (RV, I, 163). In the North Russian tradition, the contamination of the images of the swan-goose and the elk-horse is constantly encountered, and these images, as in the Indo-Iranian mythological tradition, mark only the sphere of the sacred.

A similar situation is typical for the image of the mother goddess, the central character of the plot compositions of North Russian embroidery and weaving. The semantics of this image, its changes and transformations in the process of historical development are traced and disclosed by B. A. Rybakov (Paganism of the ancient Slavs. M. 1981). One of the most significant moments in the images of the East Slavic goddesses - Rozhanitsy (in their North Russian version) is that very often these images in embroidery acquire zoomorphic-phytomorphic features. So widespread is the image of Rozhanitsa, whose body is transformed into a tree, and in the decor of women's hats it is always a golden tree with golden birds - swans (ducklings) on the branches - hands. To decipher this image, the author again uses materials of Indo-Iranian mythology ("Rigveda" and "Avesta"), as well as the circle of beliefs of the inhabitants of the Hindu Kush, as it is believed, the descendants of one of the first waves of Indo-Europeans in this region (Lelekov L.A. On the symbolism of burial vestments. Scytho-Siberian world. Novosibirsk. 1987. p.23). In the hymns of the Rig Veda (V, 78), the world tree is compared with a woman giving birth or is replaced by a woman-goddess-mother, and in the pagan beliefs of the inhabitants of the Hindu Kush, the supreme female deity Dizani (Disney, Dzhestak) was considered both a huge golden tree and a female creature. Referring to the Scythian tradition, the author of this work notes that the images of the serpentine goddess, the foremother of the Scythians, associated with the "childlike symbolism", are also marked with plant motifs. Analyzing the gold embroidery of North Russian women's headdresses, the author comes to the conclusion that the figurative solution of these embroideries does not originate from the Scythian tradition, but is much more archaic and not close to the anthropomorphic appearance of the Scythian goddess - Api, but to the goddess Aditi of the Rig Veda and to kafir goddesses - patrons of childbirth and women in labor - Dazani and Nirmali, embodied in the image of a golden tree.

Analyzing the relics of the cult of the bull and cow (widespread among many Indo-European and non-Indo-European peoples) associated with the worship of the moon and waters in the Indo-Iranian mythopoetic tradition, the author finds them numerous analogies in the folklore and mythopoetic traditions of the Eastern Slavs, in particular, the North Great Russians.

In the hymns of the Rig Veda (V, 78), the world tree is compared with a woman giving birth or is replaced by a woman-goddess-mother, and in the pagan beliefs of the inhabitants of the Hindu Kush, the supreme female deity Dizani (Disney, Dzhestak) was considered both a huge golden tree and a female creature. Referring to the Scythian tradition, the author of this work notes that the images of the serpentine goddess, the foremother of the Scythians, associated with the "childlike symbolism", are also marked with plant motifs. Analyzing the gold embroidery of North Russian women's headdresses, the author comes to the conclusion that the figurative solution of these embroideries does not originate from the Scythian tradition, but is much more archaic and not close to the anthropomorphic appearance of the Scythian goddess - Api, but to the goddess Aditi of the Rig Veda and to kafir goddesses - patrons of childbirth and women in labor - Dazani and Nirmali, embodied in the image of a golden tree. From the fact that the supreme male and female deities of the Indo-Iranian pantheon are associated with cows and bulls, it is concluded that a similar situation was probably characteristic of the archaic East Slavic pantheon. This, according to the author, is evidenced by the constantly emphasized horniness in the images of the goddesses - Rozhanitsy and the fact that the traditional form of East Slavic women's headdresses to one degree or another imitates horniness. It can also be assumed that the bull-shaped male masks depicted on the North Russian old women warriors were the visible embodiment of the image of the supreme East Slavic god Rod, whose analogues are Zeus, Dionysus and, above all, the great Vedic god Rudra in a zoomorphic embodiment by bulls. In the mythology of Hinduism, the bull is also inseparable from the image of the god Shiva-Rudra. The author concludes that in the north of Russian folk embroidery, swearing weaving and lace, not only in geometric ornament, but also in plot compositions, there are many motives that are absolutely identical to those in the ancient Indo-Iranian tradition. It is using such a richest source as Russian and, in particular, North Russian folk art that many mysterious images of the hymns of the Rig Veda and Avesta can be explained. This phenomenon of absolute uniformity of the most ancient layers of mythopoetic perception of the world, which makes it possible to decipher the poetic images of Indo-Iranian mythology with the help of visible images of North Russian peasant art up to the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century. XX century, and vice versa, deciphering the images of peasant art, captured in North Russian embroidery, weaving and lace, with the help of the hymns of the Rig Veda and Avesta, mythological representations of mountain Tajiks and residents of the Hindu Kush, not explained by convergence alone, and even less explainable by unity economic and cultural type, can only be explained by the ancient ethnogenetic community of East Slavic in Indo-Iranian peoples.

The third chapter of this dissertation is devoted to the analysis of the archaic ornamentation of the trihedral-grooved carving, which has survived to this day among the Eastern Slavs and Indo-Iranian peoples.

The author pays the main attention to the decor of the North Russian spinning wheel, as a household item that carries a huge and versatile semantic load.

Based on the analysis of the trihedral-notched ornament of the North Russian spinning wheels, the following conclusions are drawn:

firstly, the spinning wheel was a sacred object in the East Slavic tradition, since derivative of the spinning wheel - the thread is sacred in almost all Indo-European peoples (thread of life, thread of fate, thread of thought, etc.) and this is especially clearly manifested in the hymns of the Rig Veda, which emphasizes the connection between spinning and weaving with the Creation of the Universe, the Earth and the act of conception human.

The phallic images present on the North Russian spinning wheels and carved or scratched inscriptions, which represent only one word denoting the male productive principle in the Russian profane vocabulary, indicate that the spinning wheel was probably a kind of symbol of the male principle participating in the process of spinning, similar to the act of creation life.

Second, the spinning wheel in the North Russian tradition, judging by the strictly fixed numerical ratios of the number of geometric elements (often a multiple of 7), was probably a kind of calendar, a symbol of an ordered, cyclical time.

Thirdly, the spinning wheel, closely associated with the symbolism of reproduction, fertility, should play a significant role in the worship of ancestors - the givers of fertility. In this capacity, she probably, for a long time, served as a grave monument. This is convinced by the fact that in Serbia back in the 18th century; Archbishop Pavel Nenadovich demanded that his flock put crosses on the graves instead of the spinning wheels “lifted up” according to the custom (Tolstoy N. I. About one Carpathian-South Slavic isopragma-linguistics. M. 1973). In addition, it seems that it is no coincidence that the Nuristan grave boards are completely identical in shape and decoration to the North Russian spinning wheels and seamstresses. And, finally, it is very significant that the carved trihedral-champled decor covering the entire surface of the stone gravestones of the Moscow Kremlin of the XIV-XV centuries is absolutely similar to the carved decor of the North Russian spinning wheels of the late XIX – early XX century.

Fourth, judging by the structure of the ornamental complexes of the North Russian spinning wheels, they were a kind of visible image of the Universe, the "tree of life" and embodied the idea of the first creation, or the first divine pair of the creators of the world. This finds a clear parallel in the hymns of the Rig Veda, which assert that the first creators of the world - Aditi (mother, father and son at the same time), bisexual Purusha and Rudra, consisting of two halves - male and female, are certainly associated with wood, wood, and the material of the Universe there were wood and yarn. (Mahabharata. Adiparva. M.-L. 1950. p. 53; Mahabharata, Issue V, Book I-II. Ashgabat. 1983-84; Guseva N. R. Hinduism: mythology and its roots. VI. 1973. No 3; Bongard-Levin G. M. Ancient Indian civilization. M. 1980. p. 42).

Fifthly, the author emphasizes that the traditions of trihedral-notched carving, preserved in the East Slavic area, and especially in the Russian North, up to the end of the XIX – early XX century, are just as typical for Ossetia, Armenia and Iran, as well as for the decoration of wooden products from Central Asia, especially Mountainous Tajikistan and, finally, for the Hindu Kush, Pakistan and North-West India. This fact seems to be very important due to the fact that the trihedral-notched ornamentation was, apparently, by no means a simple decor, dictated by the desire only to decorate a wooden product. The completely identical forms characteristic of the North Russian region, rich in forest, and of Central Asia (in particular the Pamirs), poor in construction wood, testify to the symbolic essence of the ornament. This is all the more obvious that in Central Asia (especially in Tajikistan) the wooden parts of the house (shutters, doors, gates, etc.) were necessarily ornamented with trihedral-notched carvings. Whereas in the rich forest of the Finno-Ugric area, such carving was completely absent (Sheleg V. A. North Russian woodcarving: areas and ethnographic traditions. Russian North. L. 1986. p. 55-60). Thus, the presence of the same attitude to the ornamentation of wood products and to the semantics of these ornaments also, in the author's opinion, testifies to the ancient community of peoples who preserve the traditions of trihedral-notched carving, and is not dictated by the presence of forests in their habitat.

In conclusion, the author, on the basis of the analysis of archaic geometric and plot ornamentation, which remained in the North Russian peasant environment until the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, as well as existed for a long historical period among those peoples of Eurasia, whose ethnogenesis is associated with the migrations of Indo-Iranian peoples of the Eneolithic era - Bronze and Early Iron, and on the basis of modern data of paleoanthropology, paleoclimatology, archeology and history, he considers it possible to draw the following conclusions:

Firstly, on the territory of Eastern Europe, in particular the Russian North, the ornamental tradition, the origins of which lead to the Upper Paleolithic Kostenko and Mezinian cultures, has developed continuously over the millennia, transforming and changing, but retaining in the East Slavic tradition the most ancient archetypes that have developed even more than 20 millennia ago.

Secondly, the data of archeology and anthropology indicate that these ancient ornamental complexes, formed in Eastern Europe, were brought to Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, to the agricultural oases of Central Asia, to the Transcaucasus, Iran, Afghanistan and Northwestern India from steppes and forest-dampness of Eastern Europe by those agricultural and cattle-breeding, Aryan tribes, which in the II millennium BC began to advance east and southeast from their ancient ancestral home.

Thirdly, preservation in East Slavic and Indo-Iranian mythological fund of a number of absolutely identical plots, rituals and representations, a significant similarity of sacred vocabulary indicate that the addition of these mythopoetic representations and ritual-ritual practice took place in ancient times among closely related tribes living for a long historical period in neighboring interspersed, territories.

Fourthly, many complex and laborious images of ancient Indo-Iranian mythology get the possibility of a certain decipherment when correlating them with the archaeological sites of Eastern Europe of the Paleolithic-Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, as well as comparing them with the subjects of Russian, and in particular, North Russian, folk art.

Fifth, in connection with the question of the location of the ancient ancestral home of the Indo-Iranian tribes, the author turns to the hypothesis of the outstanding Indian thinker and politician Bala Gangadhar Tilak about the northern ancestral home of the Aryans. Proceeding from the fact that the texts of the "Mahabharata" and "Avesta", evidence of Scythian and ancient Greek mythology (Bongard-Levin G. M., Grantovskay E. A. From Scythia to India. M. 1983, Kuklina I. V. Ethnogeography of Scythia according to antique sources. L. 1985) place the ancestral home of the Aryans in those latitudes where the day lasts six months and the night lasts six months, the North Star and the Big Dipper are constantly high overhead, to the north lies the freezing sea, over which the aurora shines, and the main geographical landmark of this ancestral home is the Sacred Mountains, stretching from west to east and dividing rivers into flowing into the North and South Seas, the author comes to the conclusion that the only possible identification of these sacred mountains with those latitudinal uplifts in the north of Eastern Europe, which include the Subpolar Urals, Timan Ridge and Northern Uvaly. This conclusion is made on the basis of the fact that it is here that the main watershed of the rivers of the basin of the Caspian and White seas is located, and also due to the fact that it is at these latitudes that all those natural phenomena are observed on which attention is focused in the above-listed ancient sources. As one of the visual proofs, a map of Ptolemy (Rom. 1490) is given where in the north (according to the Ptolemy's grid at a latitude of 63-64 °, that is, at the latitude of the Northern Urals) mountains called Hyperborean and having a latitudinal orientation are placed. It is from these mountains, according to Ptolemy, that the Volga originates, called by the ancient Avestan name RHA, what can be considered true, so the ancients did not know the true source of the Volga, and such large tributaries as the Kama, Vyatka, Vetluga, Unzha, Kostroma and Sheksna really originate from the Northern Uvals. The author of this work notes that it is in the watershed and at present that very interesting from the point of view of the possibility of comparison are widespread their toponyms and hydronyms with Indo-Iranian vocabulary.

Sixth, modern anthropological data play a huge role in resolving the issue of the ancient population of the European north of our country, which indicates that a certain flattening of the face, characteristic of the ancient population of the north of Eastern Europe, noted on the skulls of the Oleneostrovsky Mesolithic burial ground and traditionally associated with the arrival of of this population because of the Urals "from the territories of the Finno-Ugric peoples, can be explained not by the Uralic origin, not by the mixing of Caucasians with Mongoloids, but by the mixing of northern Caucasians with southern ones (Gokhman I. I. Anthropological features of the ancient population of the north of the European part of the USSR and the way their education.Anthropology of the modern and ancient population of the European part of the USSR. L. 1986). This anthropological type was widespread in the Mesolithic of Eastern Europe and was identified in Ukraine, on the shores of the Sea of Azov, the Mesolithic of Yugoslavia, the Neolithic and Eneolithic of Czechoslovakia. In the Mesolithic period, traces of population migration from the Ural regions to the territory of the north of Eastern Europe "were not found" (Oshibkina S. V. Mesolithic Sukhona and Eastern Prionezhie. M. 1983. p. 284). But since during this period the racial trunks were already formed (Gokhman I. I. 1986), and the peoples of the Ural family developed that special, specifically "Yukaghir" Mongoloid, which A. G. Kozintsev considers to be inherent in one way or another to all peoples of this language family (Cranioscopy and racial classification. SE. 1987. p. 2), then the migration to the north of Eastern Europe of a significant amount of the Ural population in the subsequent Neolithic-Bronze Age seems unlikely. Such a resettlement of the carriers of "Yukaghir" Mongoloidism would have left a noticeable mark on the anthropology of the inhabitants of the Russian North. However, V. P. Alekseev considers the anthropological characteristics of the population of the Vologda, Kostroma, Yaroslavl and Tver provinces to be close to those found in the medieval population of Ukraine and, in particular, near the glades in the middle reaches of the Dnieper (Alekseev V. P. Anthropology of the European part of the USSR. M. 1981), and T. I. Alekseeva came to the conclusion that: “The glades are, apparently, the only group of Slavs in which the anthropological features of the Scythians of the forest belt is manifested” (Alekseeva T. I. Slavs and Germans in the light of anthropological data. VI. 1974. No. 3, p. 62).

Thus, the population of the Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Tver, Novgorod and Vologda provinces, having anthropological characteristics close to the early medieval Slavic tribe of Polyans, to a certain extent retained the "anthropological features of the Scythians of the forest belt." In the light of all of the above, the thesis of Slavic assimilation in the 1st millennium A.D. significant substratum Finno-Ugric population of the North of Eastern Europe seems unsubstantiated. Seventh, on the basis of modern data of anthropology, archeology, linguistics, as well as on the basis of materials from such a source that has preserved an exceptional archaism as Russian folk culture and, in particular, North Russian peasant art, we can conclude that, probably, the territories of the North East Europe was inhabited by Indo-European tribes in the deepest antiquity, since the lands east of Onega and White lakes were not subjected to the last (Valdai) glaciation, significant migrations of the population from beyond the Urals during the Paleolithic-Bronze period to these territories were not, and the most ancient human sites here belong to the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, and in recent years, a significant number of sites of the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age have been found.

The author considers it possible to assume that it was on the lands of the north of Eastern Europe that the initial period of the history of the Indo-Iranian (Aryan) peoples took place, and that their immediate neighbors were in the south, south-west and west - the Proto-Slavs and Prabalts, and in the north-east - the Proto-Finno-ugry.

This localization of the ancient ancestral home of the Aryans explains many of the riddles of the hymns of the Rig Veda and the Avesta; it also explains a lot of very ancient borrowings from Indo-Iranian languages into Finno-Ugric languages. Modern anthropologists do not reject the possibility of movement during the Upper Paleolithic-Mesolithic period from the north of Eastern Europe in the Urals and Trans-Urals of some groups, to which the modern population of these territories owes the lightening of pigmentation (Gokhman I. I. 1986. p. 220). This localization makes it possible to explain the numerous ancient convergences in sacred vocabulary, mythology and ritual among Indo-Iranian, East Slavic, Baltic and Finno-Ugric peoples. In the process of subsequent ethnic shifts, mutual influence and transformation of tribes and tribal associations, the Proto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian relations became even deeper and more versatile, which is clearly evidenced not only by archaeological materials, but also by the commonality of many cultural traditions that have developed over millennia and, of course , folk art, in visible images reflecting the long-term residence of Indo-Iranian and East Slavic peoples in close, and often common territories of Eastern Europe.

The main provisions of the dissertation are published in the following works:

1. Восточнославянское языческое верховное божество и следы его культа в орнаментике северорусских женских головных уборов. Тезисы

докл. на Всесоюзной сессии по итогам полевых этнографических

исследований 1980-1981 г.г., Нальчик, 1982.

2. О попытке интерпретации значения некоторых образов русской народной вышивки архаического типа. «Советская этнография», 1983, № 1.

3. О некоторых архаических мотивах вышивки сольвычегодских кокошников северодвинского типа. «Советская этнография», 1985, № 1.

4. Архаические мотивы северорусской народной вышивки и их параллели в древних орнаментах населения Евразийских степей, «Информационный бюллетень Международной Ассоциации по изучения культур Центральной Азии», М., 1986, № 6, 8 (in Russian and English).

5. Отражение языческих верований и культа в орнаментике северорусских женских головных уборов, «Научно-атеистические исследования в музеях, Л. 1986.

6. К вопросу о возможной локализации священных гор Меру и Хары индоиранской (арийской мифологии), «Информационный бюллетень Международной Ассоциации по изучения культур Центральной Азии», М.,1986, № 11(in Russian and English).

7. Фаллическая символика северорусской прялки как реликт протославянско-индоиранской близости, «Историческая динамика расовой и

этнической дифференциации населения Азии», М., 1987.

8. О возможных истоках образов птиц в русской народной обрядовой поэзии и прикладном искусстве, Тезисы докл. на Всесоюзной научно-практической конференции «Фольклор; проблемы сохранения, изучения, пропаганды», Москва, 1988.

USSR Academy of Sciences. Order of Friendship of Peoples Institute of Ethnography. N.N. Miklouho-Maclay. On the rights manuscripts.

East Slavic pagan supreme deity and traces of his cult in the ornamentation of North Russian women's headdresses

The question of the existence of a cult of a single supreme pagan deity among the Eastern Slavs is still considered open.

1. The statement made in 1872 by K. N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin about the identity of the pagan Slavic Family and the biblical creator remained outside the field of view of science for a long time. N. M. Galkovsky in 1916 called Rod "the most mysterious and least studied of all Slavic deities." This circumstance changed with the publication of B. A. Rybakov’s fundamental research “Paganism of the Ancient Slavs”, where much attention is paid to the cult of the Family and Rozhanitsy. Based on literary sources, extensive archaeological and ethnographic material, B. A. Rybakov concludes that K. N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin’s statement is correct. In the named monograph by B. A. Rybakov, one of the most important arguments proving the presence among the Slavs of the cult of Rozhanitsa, the companions of the Family, are images of folk, in particular, North Russian embroidery.

2. Materials from the funds of the Vologda Regional Museum are of particular interest in this regard. Even in the last century, images of anthropophoric creatures in the pose of women in childbirth were embroidered on the head warriors of young women in the Solvychegodsky and Tarnogsky districts of the Vologda province. But among the headdresses of the same region (Solvychegodsk district) there are a number of old women's warriors, on the heads of which there are stylized images of bull's muzzles set with silver threads. It seems that we have reason to associate these images with the cult of the supreme pagan deity of the Slavs, possibly Rod.

3. The following data lead to this conclusion: the list of analogues of the Genus in mythological systems given in the monograph by B. A. Rybakov is distinguished by a common feature: they are all masters of the waters, connected in one way or another with the Moon, and their zoomorphic embodiment is a bull. And since the areas of these counties are Slavic (the Finno-Ugric substrate is practically not found), it is possible that the images of bull heads on old women's warriors are associated with such a supreme pagan deity, who controls fertility, life and death of people.

All-Union session on the results of field ethnographic research in 1980-1981, dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the formation of the USSR. Abstracts of reports.

Nalchik. 1982

(Fig. S. V. Zharnikova).

Embroidery of the head of the Solvychegodsk old woman's festive warrior. Silver and gold embroidery. 19th century.

A) - gold embroidery is highlighted in tone.

B) - silver embroidery is highlighted in tone.

(Fig. S. V. Zharnikova).

Embroidery of the head of the Solvychegodsky (Cherevkovsky) old woman's festive warrior. Silver and gold embroidery. 19th century.

A) - gold embroidery is highlighted in tone.

B) - silver embroidery is highlighted in tone.

(Fig. S. V. Zharnikova).

Embroidery of the head of the Solvychegodsk old woman's festive warrior. Silver and gold embroidery. 19th century.

A) - gold embroidery is highlighted in tone.

B) - silver embroidery is highlighted in tone.

Ornamental embroideries of old women's "blotches" of the early 19th century.

Kokoshnik warrior. South Karelia. Gold on velvet. 19th century.

Kokoshnik Solvychegodsky Severodvinsk type. Gold and silver. 19th century

Borushka tarnogskaya. gold and silver embroidery. 19th century.

Solvychegodsky type. VOCM 3439/6

Tarnogsky district. VOCM 20890

Old warrior. Festive. Solvychegodsky type. VOCM 3439/150

Solvychegodsky type. VOCM 3439/92

VOCM 3439/144

VOCM 3439/111 Old lady's hat (slap). Festive. Cherevkovo. until 1917

Solvychegodsky type. VOCM 3439/93

Tarnogsky district VOCM NV 7991

Borushka. Tarnoga. VOCM 18660

VOCM NV 273

Old lady's hat. Festive. Solvychegodsky type. VOCM 3439/97

Old lady's hat. Festive. Solvychegodsky type.VOCM 3439/91

VOCM 3439/20

Solvychegodsky type. VOCM 3439/23

VOCM 3439/8

Lady's hat. from. Cherevkovo before 1917. VOCM 3439/94

Old lady's hat. Festive. Solvychegodsky type. VOCM 3439/150

Solvychegodsky kokoshnik. VOCM 3439/14

Solvychegodsky kokoshnik. VOCM 3439/18

Solvychegodsky kokoshnik. VOCM 3439/17

Borushka. Tarnoga. VOCM 20927

Lady's hat. Gryazovets county. Golden sewing. VOCM 3439/120

Solvychegodsky type. Cherevko. VOCM 3439/22

VOCM 3439/16

Solvychegodsky type. VOCM 3439/3

Tarnogsky district. Sbornik.VOCM 13746/1

Tarnogsky district. Sbornik. VOCM 4173/4

Tarnogsky district. Sbornik. NV 7991

Solvychegodsky type. VOCM 3439/9

VOCM 3439/25

Lady's hat. Severodvinsky. 19th century VOCM 3439/16. Photo by V. Tarasovsky 1988

Borushka tarnogskaya 19th century 20927. Photo by V. Tarasovsky 1988

Lady's hat. Severodvinsky. 19th century VOCM 3439/25. Photo by V. Tarasovsky 1988

VOCM 18660. Photo by V. Tarasovsky 1988

NV (scientific auxiliary fund) 7991. Photo by V. Tarasovsky 1988

VOCM 3439/91. Photo by V. Tarasovsky 1988

VOCM 3439/111. Photo by V. Tarasovsky 1988

Lady's hat. Severodvinsky. 19th century VOCM 3439/22. Photo by V. Tarasovsky 1988

Olonets province

Ivan Argunov. Portrait of an unknown peasant woman. 1784

Mezen. 1900

Shabelsky collection 1900

Shabelsky collection 1900

Zharnikova Svetlana Vasilievna

Attempting the interpretation of value some images of Russian folk archaic embroidery

(According to the article of G. P. Durasov)

Russian folk embroidery of the archaic type was the object of research of many scientists. A very extensive bibliography of works devoted to this issue is a vivid confirmation of this. The works of A. A. Afanasyev, A. K. Ambroz, V. S. Voronov, V. A. Gorodtsov, L. A. Dintses, G. S. Maslova, B. A. Rybakov and many other researchers, the genesis of Russian folk embroidery patterns has been largely revealed ... But since in life in general and in science in particular, there is hardly a question that could be given an absolutely exhaustive answer, in this case, researchers are attracted by the tempting prospect of offering their own interpretation of the semantics of the most ancient compositions of Russian folk embroidery. One of such attempts is the article by G. P. Durasov, published in the journal "Soviet Ethnography". On the basis of extensive archaeological and ethnographic material, the author made an attempt to find out the reason for the appearance of the image of a two-headed eagle in Russian folk embroidery and to determine the meaning of this ornamental motif. According to G. P. Durasov, this is a symbol of heavenly fire.

G. P. Durasov notes that the pattern in question can most often be found in the embroidery of the North and North-West of Russia, where it was used to decorate clothes (shirt hem), hats and towels (ends). A two-headed bird with lowered or raised wings was included in a complex frieze composition, one of the components of which was quite often the figure of a woman with raised or lowered arms. In Russian folk art, in particular in folklore, the idea of fire was associated with a bird - a rooster, a falcon, an eagle, or rather; fire was often associated with the images of these birds. In addition, this ornamental motif (the image of a two-headed eagle) is most typical for the embroidery of the North and North-West of Russia, where the slash-and-slash (fire) farming system prevailed from time immemorial.

The above facts allow G. P. Durasov to draw the following conclusion: “It can be assumed that in this region there has long existed a direct connection between the wide existence of patterns with a two-headed bird (heavenly fire) and a female figure (mother earth) and the preservation of the old slash farming systems ".

It would seem that this point of view, supported by statistical data on the distribution of undercutting in Kargopol, Vytegorsk, Pudozh and Olonets districts, is quite convincing and reasoned. However, it seems that it is still not an increase in the harvest of barley by 9% and oats by 17% on the undercut, and also not that the rye in the fields gave "6.1 itself", but on the "fire ground" itself 6.5 ", was the main factor in the preservation of the image of a two-headed bird (like heavenly fire) and a female figure (like mother earth) in the embroidery ornaments of the North Russian region. There was undoubtedly a definite connection between the two-headed bird and the female figure, but it seems to us that it had a slightly different character.

One can agree with G. P. Durasov that "the embroidery process itself was functionally, obviously, close to agrarian ritual actions." But the question is whether the double-headed eagle in these embroideries really symbolizes the heavenly fire. For doubt, I think there are more than good reasons. The image of the two-headed eagle came into Russian peasant embroidery only in the 17th-18th centuries, and became especially widespread in the late 18th - early 19th centuries, which is convincingly confirmed by the materials cited in the article by A.K. Ambroz (this article is repeatedly referred to by G. P. Durasov).

G. S. Maslova in her fundamental monograph, speaking about the widespread prevalence in the peasant embroidery of various provinces of Russia, the motif of the two-headed eagle with raised wings, notes: Russian linen manufactories of the 18th century, similar to the Yaroslavl manufactory "and further:" The name of this pattern in Pomorie is interesting - the tavern eagle, which may indicate one of the ways of its penetration into the peasant environment; the image of the coat of arms on the "tsar" tavern in the 17th century was not uncommon. "

It seems that it is more correct to associate the appearance of images of a two-headed eagle in folk embroidery with the general bureaucratization of the state apparatus of Russia, which began in the late 17th - early 18th centuries. Indeed, it was during this period that the official symbol of the Russian state - the two-headed eagle - appears everywhere: on money, on papers for official petitions, on milestones, uniform buttons, in tsarist taverns and even on vodka shtoffs.

The motif of the double-headed eagle, quite decorative, somewhat fabulous and at the same time laconic was not alien in its structure to the folk ornament. And he organically blended into the ancient ornamental compositional schemes, occupying the very center of these compositions. Now, probably, the statement that the center of any ornamental scheme is semantically more important than its periphery has become a commonplace, but in our case I would like to emphasize this again.

In compositions with a double-headed eagle, the regal bird is indeed always in the center, but it entered this compositional scheme relatively recently, not earlier than the 17th century. On either side of this central figure there are almost always ornamental, stylized, symmetrical images of birds, horses, trees, women with raised or lowered arms (Fig. 1).

All of them are components of a very ancient compositional scheme, into which he organically blended without breaking it at the turn of the 17th-18th century’s two-headed eagle.

But if the entire system of images of the periphery of the ornament, a clear symmetry of the motifs facing the center has been preserved, then the conclusion suggests itself: before the appearance of the two-headed eagle, there was another image here, which carried the most important semantic load in the ornament and outwardly somewhat resembled a two-headed eagle (since he was so painlessly able to supplant this ancient image).

Figure: 1. a - the end of the towel. XIX century. Kologrivsky uyezd Kostroma province.

b - a fragment of a valance. XIX century. Kargopol uyezd, Olonets province.

c - a fragment of the front part of the hem of a women's shirt. XIX century.

d - valance fragment. XIX century. Olonets province.

So what is this image? To answer this question, let us turn, following G. P. Durasov, to the works of V. V. Stasov, V. A. Gorodtsov, A. K. Ambroz, A. A. Afanasyev, B. A. Rybakov, G. S. Maslova and other researchers who studied the symbolism of Russian folk embroidery of the archaic type. All of them, noting in the peasant embroidery of a comparatively late period (XVIII-XIX centuries) the presence of various images of a two-headed eagle, consider a composition with a central female figure with raised or lowered hands to be more ancient. As a rule, riders on horses, birds, human beings or stylized trees appear symmetrically to such a figure (Fig. 2).

Figure: 2. a - the end of the towel (fragment). XIX century. (Vologda Regional Museum of Local Lore, f. 12534/72);

b - end of a towel (fragment), XIX century. (Vologda Regional Museum of Local Lore, f. 12534/1);

c - the end of the towel. Yaroslavl province. GME;

d - embroidery fragment. XIX century. (Arkhangelsk folk embroidery. M., 1954);

e - a pattern on a woman's shirt. XIX century, village Bolshie Halui, Kargopol district of Olonets province.

The structure of compositions of this kind, as well as the set of its constituent elements, is stable and is preserved in the embroidery on the ends of towels, on the hem of women's shirts, in the ornament of sarafans and aprons of women in the North of Russia. In a transformed geometric form (the so-called rhombs with hooks or toads), we find images of the ancient goddess of life and fertility in the ornaments of the hem of women's haymaking shirts. And in this case, our materials, I think, once again confirm the correctness of the conclusions of A. K. Ambroz, who defined in one of his articles a rhombus with hooks as an ancient agricultural symbol of fertility.

One of the leading motifs on the hem of the hayfields was the rhombus with hooks. It is known that such shirts in the North and North-West of Russia were worn by women on the first day of haymaking - the day when the preparation of fodder for livestock began for the entire long cold winter, on which, in essence, the welfare of the peasant family depended in the coming year.

Ornamentation of shirts, which were, along with headdresses and belts, a sacred element of clothing, was "closely associated with the magic of fertility. It was believed that the richer the shirt is decorated, the higher the reproductive power of a woman dressed in it and her ability to increase the fertility of everything around. One can therefore assume that, decorating the hem of the shirt with images of a toad or a diamond with hooks, the woman hoped, touching the hem to the ground and grasses, to convey to them the power of fertility hidden in the coded embroidery ornaments.

This process was probably thought of as reversible, that is, the woman, in turn, through such ornaments, when they came into contact with the ground and herbs, acquired great reproductive power.

The conclusion about the sacred significance of ornaments of this type is also confirmed by the abundant material provided by embroidery on women's headdresses - kokoshniks (povoiniks, collections, etc.) of the North and North-West of Russia. If in the ornament of the hem of the shirts we see geometrically transformed forms, then in the patterns of women's headdresses we encounter an even more archaic system of images.

Strange zooanthropomorphic giving birth creatures literally filled the heads of warriors (Fig. 3, 4) 4. As a rule, they have raised or lowered animal legs, branches, snake-arms; their "legs" are widely spaced to the sides. Before us is an almost naturalistic depicted act of childbirth: between the "legs" of a mythical creature, embroidered on damask or velvet with gold or silver threads, as a rule, another similar creature of a smaller size is depicted, connected to the mother's womb by a thin strip - an umbilical cord.

Sometimes these Rozhanitsy have two or three pairs of hands instead of one, inside the body there is a rhombus, a cross, a swastika or a small man. Always turned to heaven, to the home of the gods or deified ancestors, images on the back of the head of women's hats, almost in unencrypted form, they asked for one thing - fertility. And they survived in the most remote, remote places of the North Russian region, where the way of life, customs and rituals of farmers and hunters changed extremely slowly from century to century.

Yes, indeed, it was there, as G. P. Durasov correctly noted, that the slash-and-slash farming system still existed, but not because it was more productive. Due to the remoteness of these places, there were still huge untouched forest tracts - the only condition necessary for such system agriculture.

In addition, many archaic features of the way of life have been preserved here. And it is not surprising that it is here that we meet the image of a two-headed eagle and a goddess (women with raised or lowered hands), and often the latter is placed inside a two-headed eagle, in the place where the coat of arms with the figure of St. George the Victorious was usually placed in the official composition, i.e. in the absolute semantic center of the ornamental composition.

Figure: 3. a, b - gold embroidery on the quarters of the Tarnog warriors.

Vologda province. XIX century. (Vologda Regional Museum of Local Lore, inv. No. 18660 and 20927).

Figure: 4. a, b - gold embroidery on the quarters of the Tarnog warriors. Vologda province. XIX century. (Vologda Regional Museum of Local Lore, inv. No. 27078/5).

This circumstance in itself suggests that this particular female image, hidden a peasant embroiderer inside the official state symbol of tsarist Russia, was given exceptional importance.

So, a two-headed eagle and a woman inside, above or near him. Here we again return to the question we posed earlier: whose place did the eagle take in this composition, whom did it replace, if the earliest, quite readable images of it we meet in embroidery only from the 17th - early 18th centuries, and the whole compositional scheme is ancient, stable and almost unchanged?

Who was portrayed from ancient times in the place that the two-headed eagle occupied? And here we again remember the ancient images of the goddess in labor. Is it not she, giving life to all life on earth, preserved by the memory of many generations, revered and immortalized in embroidery on the hem of shirts, the ends of towels and on the heads of kokoshniks of North Russian women, was until the 17th - early 18th centuries in the center of the compositions we are considering?

This assumption is fairly easy to verify by superimposing one compositional scheme on top of another. And what? The outlines of the figure of the goddess fit surprisingly well into the image of a two-headed eagle, which in the composition, the distribution of masses both vertically and horizontally, is built on the same principle as the ancient image of the goddess in labor. This can be clearly seen in the attached samples of embroidery on the heads of the Tarnogsky warriors (Fig. 3, 4).

The replacement of one composition with another, later one can be illustrated even more clearly by the example of changes in the ornamentation of the finials of the Yaroslavl teremkovs spinning wheels (Fig. 5).

Figure: 5. a, b, c - tops of the Yaroslavl teremkovs spinning wheels. XIX century. Gryazovets district of the Vologda province. (Vologda Regional Museum of Local Lore, No. 24468, 15005, 24463).

If type a presents the most detailed ancient scheme, where the merged images of horses, birds, dog-headed creatures and snakes seem to form the figure of an ancient pagan goddess, then in the top of type b the composition is drier, more schematically, the heads of the snakes rise up, the trefoil that crowned the previous top, approaches the crown in outline; finally, type c shows us the replacement of the ancient pagan serpentine complex with the image of a two-headed royal eagle, crowned with a crown.

The new form - the two-headed eagle - freely and easily layered on the old (archaic), the meaning of which as a wish, a reliable amulet has not yet been lost, the meaning of the ancient composition in all its details began to be forgotten. Probably, the image of the ancient goddess of life - Rozhanitsa to the farmer of the 10th - 15th centuries spoke much more than his distant descendants in the XVII-XIX centuries.

However, the significance of this deity, apparently, was still quite great at a later time, since not everywhere and not always it is completely removed from the composition. Very often we meet, as G. P. Durasov absolutely rightly noted a two-headed eagle and a woman inside him or above his head. And in places remote from the noisy roads of the Vologda and Arkhangelsk regions, we can still find towels, shirts and hats in the chests of old women, where the ancient pagan goddess of life, Rozhanitsa, is depicted in all its glory, performing the great act of creating everything on earth.

Photo by V. Tarasovsky 1988

19 век Solvychegodsky district of the Vologda province. 19th century

Solvychegodsky district of the Vologda province. 19th century

Towel. Velsky district of the Vologda province

Zharnikova Svetlana Vasilievna

Reflection of pagan beliefs and cult in the ornamentation of North Russian women's headdresses

(Based on the material from the fund of the Vologda Regional Museum of Local Lore)

The special significance of the female headdress in the Russian folk tradition has been noted more than once, it is enough to recall the well-known works of N.I. Gagen-Thorn¹, G. S. Maslova², articles by L. N. Molotova ³ and other researchers. The specific connection between the female headdress and the symbolism of fertility was noted in the book by D. M. Balashov, Yu. I. Marchenko, and N. I. Kalmykova, Russian Wedding, published in 1985, a study devoted to various variants of the Russian wedding that existed before recently in the Tarnogsky district of the Vologda region. The authors write: “A very ancient custom with elements of magic was told to us in Ilez and repeated in the Lower Spas (that is, it can be assumed that the custom was once known throughout Kokshenga). Before a matchmaker or matchmakers left home for the success of the businessю They were whipped or pelted with women's headdresses"⁴. It is well known that the moment of the wedding, associated with the covering by a young female warrior-kokoshnik, is practically the end of the wedding ceremony, that the mere hairiness of a woman in public was considered a sin and shame, etc.

Such an important element of clothing was adorned with great care in the Russian North. Of course, we are talking about festive, ceremonial headdresses, distinguished by the richness of decor and often enormous cost, which stimulated their careful storage and transmission from generation to generation (naturally, not every peasant woman could afford the luxury of having a warrior, the cost of which was equal to the cost of two milk cows or horse)⁵. The motives, basic compositional schemes, the world of images of embroidery of these headdresses are far from the ideas of orthodox Orthodoxy.

Here we will talk about the cult of the ancient East Slavic pagan deities, Rod and Rozhanitsy, which until recently remained in our science to a large extent a dark spot. The question of whether the Eastern Slavs had a developed cult of the supreme god Rod and Rozhanitsy in antiquity was raised by B. A. Rybakov in his fundamental monograph "Paganism of the Ancient Slavs", published in 1981⁶. B. A. Rybakov convincingly proves that the Eastern Slavs, long before the introduction of Christianity, had a rather complex and syncretic cult of the supreme female deities - Rozhanitsy and the supreme god of the Family (the god of rains, thunderstorms, moisture in general, fertility and consanguinity), essentially similar in functions Christian creator god Sabaoth. He isolated from the numerous, often very complex ornamental motifs of Russian folk embroidery, those compositions in which one can assume the presence of images of two Rozhanitsa goddesses, although in stylized, often extremely geometrized schemes, these figures are read with great difficulty. Materials of the North Russian gold embroidery and, in particular, the embroidery of hats, where these images are more specific, I think, allow us to join the point of view of B. A. Rybakov⁷ and assume that the cult of Rozhanits really existed and remained for a long time in the north of Russia, not eradicated and not destroyed by Christianity, as is convincingly evidenced by the ornamentation of such a sacred element of clothing as a female headdress.

Let's start with the fact that on the heads, that is, on the upper, occipital parts of the Severodvinsk and Tarnogsky warriors, made of damask and velvet, as a rule, cherry, crimson or scarlet, are depicted embroidered with gold or silver threads on the "map" (cardboard templates) strange zooanthropomorphic creatures. As a rule, each of them is presented in a characteristic spread frog pose, typical for a woman giving birth. Under the main, central figure, on whose hands birds or snakes are sitting, the second image is placed. In Tarnog Borushki it is placed between the widely spaced legs of the first creature, as a rule, horned, the second, almost completely identical to the first horned creature, also in a characteristic spread-out pose. The central figure is connected to a second, smaller, thin strip - the "umbilical cord" (ill. 1).

Fig. 1. Borushka tarnogskaya. 19th century. VOKM 20927. Photo by V. Tarosovsky.

In Severodvinsk, specifically Cherevkovsky povoiniks, the central figure is connected by a strip, which also descends between widely spaced legs, with a triangle or three-stage pyramid. But the triangle and the step pyramid in many ancient agricultural cultures since the Eneolithic times were a sign of the female productive principle, a symbol of birth and reproduction8. So, E. V. Antonova, speaking about the origin and semantic load of signs on the statuettes of the Anau culture and comparing them, in particular, with signs on the Trypillian clay plastic, concludes that the triangle and the stepped pyramid throughout the early agricultural Eurasian Oykumen meant a woman, birth, growth⁹. A. P. Pogozheva comes to the same conclusion¹⁰.

Fig. 2. Severodvinsky Povinik. XIX century. Vologodskaya Oblast. Museum of local lore. Inv. No. 3439/16. Photo by V. Tarasovsky.

Since (which is especially emphasized by B. A. Rybakov in "The Paganism of the Ancient Slavs") folk symbolic and ornamental memory is distinguished by amazing conservatism and the ability to preserve motives created in antiquity for thousands of years, we can assume, following the named researchers, that the stepped pyramid and triangle Cherevkov warriors are the same thing with the second component of the compositions of Tarnog Borushki, a zooanthropomorphic creature in the pose of Rozhanitsa.

The specificity of the pose, as well as the fact that the upper and lower figures are connected by a thin strip, very similar to the umbilical cord, give us, I think, grounds for assuming that we have before us images of two Rozhanitsa goddesses, and in this compositional scheme the following

a component is the woman herself, who wears this warrior: she must continue further an infinite chain of births and, by all the logic of this incantatory ornament, must repeat the act of birth, reproduction.

It must be said that such images, made of pearls, beads, cut mother-of-pearl or bugles, are also characteristic of Kargopol kokoshniks, where a stylized figure, somewhat exaggerated in its sprawl, with raised arms and legs wide apart is almost always placed above the forehead.

It is interesting that women wore hats with such ornaments only during the reproductive period of their lives, often even only in the first years of family life, before the birth of a child ¹¹, and then changed to less decorated ones; getting old, they switched to other, old women warriors.

The strength of the tradition was so great that, having almost lost the ancient idea of the meaning of these images, which they called "toads" or "rokastitsy", embroiderers nevertheless, even in seemingly completely baroque compositions, so far from pagan symbolic, still retained the ancient scheme: while changing, transforming, it retains the most important thing, the basis of compositional construction - the spread-out central figure. One of the characteristic details in the images of Rozhanits on the North Russian warriors was the horns that adorned the heads of these zooanthropomorphic creatures.

It seems that this is also not an accidental detail ¹². The fact is that researchers have long noted that a number of Russian hats the moat has horns; these are Ryazan, Tula, Kaluga, Tambov, Kursk kichki, magpies and kokoshniks, this series also includes the famous Voronezh ships and one-horned Kargopol kokoshniks. They all bring the same element to the look of the woman wearing them - a woman likened to a cow or a goat, creatures considered from antiquity to be associated with the symbolism of fertility.

Fig. 3. Severodvinsky Povinik. XIX century. Vologodskaya Oblast. Museum of local lore.Inv. No. 3439/22. Photo by V. Tarasovsky.

Probably, the horniness of the Rozhanits embroidered on the headdresses, on the one hand, emphasizes their connection with the sphere of the sacred, and on the other hand, unites the goddess with her possible archaic prototype - the cow. B. A. Rybakov, speaking about the closeness of two Rozhanitsa, mother and daughter, to the ancient Greek Leto - Latona and Artemis, - emphasizes the connection of these Greek goddesses with the cults of fertility. But almost all the most ancient goddesses of the fruiting forces of nature in Eurasia and North America are in one way or another associated with the cow. Whether it is Isis or Ishtar crowned with cow horns, hair-eyed Hera or Io, turned into a cow, Europe, originally embodied in the guise of a cow, etc., we repeat, all of them in a zoomorphic version are associated with the cult of the same animal. It is interesting that one of the supposed analogs of the Old Russian Rozhanitsa - the goddess Artemis in the guise of Selena - was also depicted as horned, like Ilithia, helping women in labor, and in its Asia Minor version, it appeared to be many-breasted, with a whole host of cows on her body. All of these goddesses listed above have one more thing in common - they are somehow connected with the most ancient lunar cults, since the moon was the giver of fertility in the form of rain, dew and moisture in general in many ancient cultures.¹³ But the moon in the same cultures was usually associated with a cow or a bull¹⁴, since the moon, water, cow and bull have long been closely interconnected and interchangeable in various mythological systems. In addition, the marriage partners of many fertility goddesses also appear, as a rule, in a zoomorphic form, in the guise of the same animal - a bull.

Fig. 4. The Severodvinsk type povoynik. XIX century. Vologodskaya Oblast. Museum of local lore. Inv. No. 3439/25. Photo by V. Tarasovsky.

So, in the numerous headdresses that existed in the vast territory of Russia, the woman, who was a kind of earthly hypostasis of the goddess-woman in labor, was likened to a horned creature - a cow. Emphasizing the signs that associate a woman with a cow, and at the same time, the constant horniness of the Rozhanits depicted on the warriors suggests that since the women, and ultimately the goddess-Rozhanitsa, are horned, it is possible that god should have been depicted as horned Genus.

This assumption is supported by the conclusions of B. A. Rybakov about the genetic relationship of Rod and Baal, Rod and Gad, Rod and Apollo. Zeus, Jupiter, Dionysus and, finally, the Christian hosts, whose antagonist was the god Rod in church teachings against paganism¹⁵. However, both Baal and Gad (gods of fertility, water, and birth) had one zoomorphic incarnation - a bull ¹⁶. Apollo, as Pausanias wrote, loved bulls most of all¹⁷. Zeus of Crete was personified in the form of a bull. In the form of a bull or goat, the god of fertility and the elemental forces of nature, Dionysus, were embodied. And, finally, the prototype of Sabaoth - the ancient lord of the gods Ilu - was also depicted in the guise of a bull¹⁸.

In this series of analogues of the Sort, one of the most important, if not the most important, I think, can be called the most ancient Vedic (Aryan) god Rudra, about whom the famous Soviet Indologist N. R. Guseva writes: “In the Vedic pantheon, the god Rudra also played an essential role, which appears in the Vedas under many names and is the bearer of a number of functions. He is described as a benevolent creator of all living things, the son of the dawn and at the same time as an angry deity of storms. <...> Being a Vedic, that is, an Aryan deity, Rudra probably became an object of cult worship of the Aryans not in India itself, but was known even in the pre-Indian period of their history. Let's turn to some comparisons. The ancient Russian pagans had a god Rod - a formidable and capricious ruler of the sky, “who owned clouds, rain and lightning, from whom

all life on earth depended. " The meaning of the name "Rudra" repeats these definitions: formidable, mighty, god of thunder, benevolent. The name of the Slavic Family is also explained as red, shining, sparkling. There are Slavic words “ore” in the meaning of “blood”, and “ore”, “red” (“red color”). In Sanskrit there is also an ancient root “rudh” (“to be red”), from which “rudhira” is formed ("Red", "bloody", "blood")¹⁹. The connection of the name of the East Slavic god Rod with the words "ore" (blood), "ore", "red", "rodry" (red) is also noted by B. A. Rybakov ²⁰. But Rudra in zoomorphic incarnation is a bull, like a mighty bull he is sung in the hymns of the Rig Veda.

It must be said that one of the oldest traditions recorded in art forms, combining the cult of a female giving birth deity and the cult of the bull, symbolizing the masculine principle, takes us back to the 7th millennium BC, into the Anatolian proto-urban culture of Chatal-Huyuk. “The bull is one of the two main characters in the mythology of the inhabitants of Chatal Huyuk, at least that part of it that found expression in pictorial forms. The second (and perhaps the first) character was "Goddess" - the mother of animals (bulls and, apparently, rams) and people, portrayed as giving birth to them. <...> In some cases, two "goddesses" were depicted, one of whom was younger than the other (italics mine. - S. Zh.)… The image of a younger deity is associated with the idea of the renewal of the life of nature "- writes E. V. Antonova about the images in the temples of Chatal-Huyuk ²¹. But we encounter a similar situation in the Trypollian culture, where the same scheme is repeated: a female deity is depicted, often in the pose of a woman in labor; the masculine principle is embodied in the image of a bull, bull heads or horns²²