Bies

In the summer of 1824 a wind came down on the woods behind Bełżyce and took a large part of them apart. It pulled a grown pear tree up by the roots and set it down several hundred metres away in open field. Nobody would put an axe to it. The farmer whose land it landed on worked a wide loop around it season after season, and the story went round the district that something had settled in the broken wood and meant to stay. By 1824 the villagers called that something the devil. A few centuries earlier they would have reached for an older word.

That word is bies, and it is one of the oldest pieces of religious vocabulary the Slavs have. It goes back to Proto-Slavic, and behind that to a Balto-Slavic form meaning something close to “the one who frightens you,” built on a root that meant simply to be afraid. Its nearest surviving relative outside Slavic is the Lithuanian baisus, terrible. Aleksander Gieysztor made the same connection from the Slavic side, tying the name to a Lithuanian word for fear; Kazimierz Moszyński preferred a root meaning light, and almost nobody has followed him there. The mainstream reading has the better claim, and it tells you what kind of name this is. A bies is not a portrait. It is a reaction, the prickle at the back of the neck given a noun.

What the Polish record does say is where it lived and what it wanted. Leonard Pełka, whose survey of Polish folk demonology remains the standard one, describes the bies as a harmful and spiteful forest spirit, unfriendly to people, a personification of badly defined evil in nature. It kept to woods, to bogs, and to the deep parts of water. It guarded treasure hidden in the earth, which is a job that gets a spirit blamed for a great deal of unexplained poverty. And it could go into a person and work them from the inside, which is where Polish gets zbiesić się, to go out of your mind, and zbiesiony, the word for someone no longer running themselves.

That last one is the part that left a mark on ordinary life. A man in a crowded room starts speaking in a register the room does not recognise, and the people nearest to him take hold of his arms before they have decided why. Somebody sends for the priest. Afterwards there is the smell of tallow and too many bodies in a small space, and the neighbours agree quietly that something got into him, and that it is probably still out there.

Nobody ever drew it. Not in any early source, at any rate. The iconography that eventually attached itself to the word was borrowed wholesale from the Christian devil once the two had been pushed together: the small black men with little horns on their heads and hooves under them, the helpful farm imp passed hand to hand at a deathbed. Whirlwinds got a face out of the same borrowing. In the Lublin country a spinning wind was the devil dancing, and people said it was a wedding, the devil’s wedding, and that you did not walk into one because it could lift you and throw you down. Sometimes the wind was seen to take a shape, a black man, or more often a well dressed man in a hat, which is a strange and very specific detail for a countryside that had no reason to be impressed by hats.

The bigger thing that happened to the bies happened in writing. When the gospels were put into Old Church Slavonic in the ninth and tenth centuries, the translators needed a Slavic word for the Greek daimonion, and бѣсъ was what they took. The choice stuck across the whole Slavic world, and it did more work than translation. In Christian Slavonic usage бѣсъ also meant a pagan god. The old powers were not argued with; they were renamed, filed under a term that already carried dread, and left there. Every later chronicler describing sacrifices to Perun or Veles had the vocabulary sitting ready.

Polish came at the word sideways. Wiesław Boryś traces the Polish bies not to a direct native inheritance but to a borrowing from East Slavic, from the Old Ruthenian бѣсъ. The form Polish should have produced on its own is bias, and that form survives in exactly one place, the village name Biasowice. Poland borrowed its own devil back from the neighbours and kept the native word only as an address.

Further south the demon dropped the demon part. In Croatian, Serbian and Slovene, bijes and bes now simply mean rage or fury. Czech běs carries frenzy. The being lost its body somewhere along the road and kept its temper, which is a fair summary of what a fear-word does when the fear moves on to other things. What it could do, at its height, was narrow and effective: madness, possession, ruined weather, wrecked grain, the pull that takes a traveller off the path in bad country, and a hand on whatever was buried and unfound.

What it could not do was the interesting part. Franciszek Kotula, working the folklore of the Rzeszów foothills, noticed that the bies and the imported Satan never fully collapsed into one another in practice, because they were understood to be after different things. The bies went for the body. The devil went for the soul. Against the older one the countryside kept older answers, and they were physical too. If a whirl came across a field and started throwing the sheaves about, you threw something sharp into it, a knife for preference. Afterwards, they said, you would find blood on the blade.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a bies in Slavic mythology?

A bies is a malicious spirit of wild country in pre-Christian Slavic belief, hostile to people and associated with forests, bogs and deep water. Polish folk tradition treats it as the older, native forerunner of the devil. It was believed to enter people and control their actions, and to guard treasure buried in the ground.

What does the word bies actually mean?

It descends from Proto-Slavic *běsъ, from a Balto-Slavic word meaning roughly “the one who frightens,” built on a root meaning to fear. The Lithuanian baisus, terrible, comes from the same source. The name describes the effect the spirit had on people rather than any appearance.

What is the difference between a bies and the devil?

Christian writers merged the two, but Polish folk belief kept them apart on one point: the bies harmed the body while Satan went after the soul. The folklorist Franciszek Kotula recorded that distinction still holding in the Rzeszów region in the twentieth century. In practice the bies caused madness, sickness, storms and ruined crops rather than damnation.

Why does bes mean “rage” in some Slavic languages?

In Croatian, Serbian and Slovene the descendants of the same word, bijes and bes, now mean rage or fury, and Czech běs means frenzy. The term began as a name for a fear-causing spirit and drifted toward naming the emotion instead. Polish kept both senses, using bies for the demon and zbiesić się for going out of one’s mind.

Was bies used for the old Slavic gods?

Yes. When the gospels were translated into Old Church Slavonic, бѣсъ was chosen to render the Greek daimonion, and in Christian Slavonic writing the word also carried the sense of “pagan god.” That gave chroniclers a ready term for the deities their ancestors had sacrificed to.

Related Entries

Likho, Leshy, Bagiennik, Topielec, Strzyga, Kikimora, Domovoi, Vodyanoy, Rusalka, Baba Yaga, Perun, Veles, Satan, Demons