Chernobog

Also Known As: also Czernobog, Crnobog, Tchernobog and Chernabog; written Zcerneboch in the one medieval source; Slavic for “black god”
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Slavic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the bad god of the Slavs of the Elbe, held responsible for every stroke of ill fortune.
Role in Mythos: He is known from a single sentence in a twelfth-century German chronicle, as the dark half of a pair of gods named over a shared drinking bowl.
Relation to Humans: The people who named him did not pray to him for favours so much as speak over the bowl in his name, in words the chronicler heard as curses. Whether he was a god they worshipped, a devil the missionaries taught them, or simply their phrase for bad luck is still argued over.

The bowl goes round the table from hand to hand. It is a feast day somewhere near the Baltic coast in the 1160s, among the Slavic peoples who live between the Elbe and the Oder, and the hall smells of smoke, roast meat and spilled beer. Each man takes the bowl in turn and says something over it before he drinks. A German priest is in the room, or is told about it afterwards. He does not like what he hears.

His name is Helmold. He was a parish priest at Bosau, in what is now northern Germany, and he wrote a history of the conversion of his Slavic neighbours known as the Chronicle of the Slavs. He finished the first part around 1168, the year the Danes burned the great temple at Arkona and the old religion of the region lost its last stronghold. In one short passage he describes the custom of the bowl. The words spoken over it, he says, were not blessings. They were curses, said in the names of two gods, a good one and a bad one. The Slavs held that all good fortune came from the first and all bad fortune from the second. In their own tongue they called the bad one the Devil, or Zcerneboch, which means the black god.

That is all. It is the whole of the medieval record. Chernobog has no parents in it, no wife, no temple, no priest, no feast day and no story. Helmold does not even give the good god a name. One sentence written by a foreign churchman, in Latin, about a religion he wanted gone, is all there is to work from.

Everything else arrived later. In 1538 the Pomeranian chronicler Thomas Kantzow wrote of two gods, a white one he called Bialbug and a black one he called Zernebug, and added that the black god was bought off with human blood. In 1550 the geographer Sebastian Munster repeated the pair for the island of Rugen and compared the belief to the old heresy of the Manichaeans, who saw the world as a war between light and dark. By then the pagan Slavs of the coast had been Christian for close to four hundred years, and neither man could have met one. The white god in particular looks like a deduction: if there was a black god, the reasoning went, there must have been a white one to match. Two hills in Lusatia now carry the names Czorneboh and Bieleboh, and they are sometimes shown to visitors as ancient holy places. The names were given in modern times, after the gods had become fashionable.

So was there ever a Chernobog at all? The argument has run for well over a century and it has not closed. One side takes Helmold at his word. The name is good Slavic, it is built the way Slavic names are built, and a people who divided fortune into light and dark could easily have given each half a divine owner. Aleksander Gieysztor read the passage this way, and so did the Russian scholars Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov, for whom Chernobog was a real bringer of misfortune.

The other side thinks Helmold misheard, or heard correctly and misunderstood. Aleksander Bruckner argued that the black god was the Christian Devil, already taught to the Slavs by generations of missionaries and given a local nickname. Helmold’s own wording helps that case: they call him the Devil, or the black god. The first name is a loan from the Church. Stanislaw Urbanczyk suggested that Helmold had run together several things, a belief in harmful spirits, a belief in personal fate, and the devil of the sermons, and made one god out of them.

The most recent line of thought is the plainest. Across the Slavic languages, black and white are ordinary words for bad and good luck. Polish speaks of a black lot, Serbian of black fortune. In some Serbian and Bulgarian dialects a white god means a stroke of luck, and in Silesian and Slovincian speech a black god is a word for the devil or an evil spirit. Michal Luczynski, writing in 2020, concluded that the men at the feast were naming good fate and bad fate, in the way a person might drink to luck and spit at misfortune, and that an outsider turned the turn of phrase into a pair of gods. Nobody can prove it either way.

What can be said of his powers comes from that one sentence too. He sends bad fortune, all of it: the failed harvest, the lost ship, the sick child. He is not shown doing anything else. He fights nobody, steals nothing, and rules no underworld. His limits are as large as the gaps in the record. He has a counterpart who hands out every good thing, and the two are named together, in one breath, over one bowl. He has no cult that anyone recorded. He left no carved image. And within a few years of Helmold writing his name down, the people who spoke it had been baptised.

His second life has been far busier than his first. Walter Scott borrowed the name for Ivanhoe in 1820 and gave a god called Zernebock to the Saxons, who never had him. Modest Mussorgsky put Chernobog at the centre of a witches’ sabbath in the music that became Night on Bald Mountain. In 1940 Walt Disney’s Fantasia set that music to pictures, and a black, bat-winged giant unfolded from the peak of a mountain and raised the dead from a sleeping village until church bells drove him back into the rock. The studio spelled him Chernabog. In 2001 Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods made Czernobog an old immigrant in Chicago with a slaughterhouse hammer and a grudge.

None of those figures is in Helmold. The priest at Bosau saw no wings, no mountain and no hammer. He saw a bowl going round a table and heard a word he took for the name of a god.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Chernobog?

Chernobog is the “black god” of the Slavs who lived between the Elbe and Oder rivers. He is named in one sentence of the Chronicle of the Slavs, written by the German priest Helmold of Bosau around 1168. Helmold says the Slavs blamed all bad fortune on him.

Was Chernobog a real Slavic god?

It is disputed whether Chernobog was a real Slavic god. Some scholars, such as Aleksander Gieysztor, accept Helmold’s report of a god of misfortune. Others, such as Aleksander Bruckner, think he was the Christian Devil under a Slavic nickname, and Michal Luczynski argued in 2020 that “black god” was simply an expression for bad fate.

What is the source for Chernobog?

The only medieval source for Chernobog is Helmold’s Chronicle of the Slavs. It describes Slavs passing a bowl at feasts and speaking over it in the names of a good god and a bad god, the bad one called the Devil or Zcerneboch. Later writers such as Thomas Kantzow in 1538 and Sebastian Munster in 1550 added to the picture long after Slavic paganism had ended.

What does Chernobog look like?

No historical source describes what Chernobog looks like, and no idol or image of him is recorded. The famous winged black giant comes from Walt Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia, where he is called Chernabog. That design has no basis in the medieval record.

Is Chernobog the opposite of Belobog?

Chernobog is usually paired with Belobog, the “white god”, as his opposite. Helmold mentions a good god but never names him. The name of the white god first appears in sixteenth-century chronicles and may have been deduced from the black god’s name.