Dazhbog

The hill stood behind the prince’s palace yard, above the slope down to the Dnipro, and in the year 980 six carved figures were set up on it in the open weather. One of them was named in full. Perun had a head of silver and a moustache of gold, and the chronicler wrote both details down. Then he listed the others the way a man lists items he is in a hurry to finish counting: Khors, and Dazhbog, and Stribog, and Semargl, and Mokosh. Sacrifices were made to them and they were called gods. That is the whole entry. Everything anyone will ever know about Dazhbog’s cult in Kyiv fits into eleven words, and none of them describe him.

His name is the largest clue and it refuses to settle. The first half looks like an imperative, dazh, “give”, so that the whole thing reads as an order or a blessing: give, god. That reading has been standard since the early nineteenth century and it gives a deity of gifts, a deus dator, which suits a god of harvest and plenty rather well. It also produces the awkward form Dazhdbog with two d sounds, and that spelling barely appears in the manuscripts. The older alternative pulls the name somewhere colder and brighter. It derives dazh from a lost Slavic word dag, cognate with Gothic dags and German Tag, the word for day, from a root meaning to burn. On that reading Dazhbog is not the god who hands things out but the god of the burning daylight, and his name sits in the same ancient family as Dyaus, Zeus and Jupiter, all of them sky fathers whose names are the word for sky.

The one story attached to him arrives by a strange road. Under the year 1114 the Hypatian copy of the chronicle breaks off from reporting a rain of glass beads to retell a piece of ancient history. In Egypt there reigned Feosta, whom they called Svarog, and during his rule the smith’s tongs fell out of the sky and men forged weapons for the first time, having fought until then with clubs and stones. Svarog made the law that a man have one wife and a woman one husband, and that whoever broke it be thrown into a fiery furnace. After him reigned his son, whose name was the Sun, and they called him Dazhbog.

The Sun-king heard that a woman of good family was betraying her husband and went looking for her himself. He caught the pair together, cut down the man, and had the woman led through the Egyptian land in her shame. No furnace. After that, the text says, there was clean living throughout the country, and people began to praise him. It is the only scene in which Dazhbog does anything at all, and he spends it enforcing a marriage law in Egypt.

The reason for that is not mysterious. The passage is a Slavic translation of the sixth-century Byzantine chronicle of John Malalas, who had turned Hephaestus and Helios into Egyptian kings so they would fit inside a Christian world history. A South Slavic scribe, working in Bulgaria in the tenth century or thereabouts, translated the names as well as the words, and put Svarog where Hephaestus stood and Dazhbog where Helios stood. So the single narrative about Dazhbog is a Greek myth about Egypt, retold in Bulgarian. What makes it evidence anyway is the confidence of the substitution. The scribe expected his readers to know who Dazhbog was without explanation, and the Kyivan chronicler who copied the passage two centuries later did not think it needed one either.

Two hundred years after the idols came down, an anonymous poet writing the Tale of Igor’s Campaign reached for him twice, and both times only in the possessive. The life of Dazhbog’s grandson was perishing. Wrong rose up among the forces of Dazhbog’s grandson. Nobody has settled who the grandchildren are. The princes, probably, or the whole Rus people, and the argument has run for a century and a half without resolving. Either way he is being invoked as an ancestor, which is a role no other Slavic god holds in any surviving text.

That role is what makes the solar reading uncomfortable. The Kyivan pantheon has only six names in it, and putting two sun gods into six is a crowded arrangement. Khors has the better claim: his name comes from North Iranian, Sarmatian or Alanic, meaning sun-king, and the same Igor poem sends the werewolf prince Vseslav loping from Kyiv to Tmutorokan before cockcrow, crossing great Khors’s path in the dark. Dazhbog has no such passage. He is called the Sun exactly once, in a translation, in a slot where the Greek original had Helios and where the translator may simply have been matching the family tree rather than the job: the son of the fire god, as Helios was the son of Hephaestus. Strip that away and what is left is a god of light and giving who is somebody’s father, which is the oldest divine shape in the Indo-European record and the one the Baltic Dievas still occupies next door.

Serbia kept a darker version. Two legends written down in the 1860s give a figure called Dabog who ruled the earth while God ruled heaven, and who took so many souls that God had to father a son to defeat him and set them free. In the other, God cannot make the sky wide enough to cover the earth, so he sends a bee to eavesdrop on a council of demons where Dabog is explaining how the thing might be done. Dabog spots the bee and throws wind and rain at it, and the bee gets home anyway, and the world is corrected. In the folk accounts he is lame, silver-bearded, a shepherd of wolves, lord of the underworld and of the metals under it. The lameness is the smith’s affliction, which sits oddly and interestingly next to a father who was a blacksmith.

Away from the manuscripts the name survives mostly as a residue. Polish charters of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries name men called Dadibog and Daczbogius; a Dadzibog Maskiewicz studied at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in the seventeenth century; a document from Galicia in 1394 names Danilo Dazhbogovich Zaderevetskiy. In Ryazan speech, well into the nineteenth century, dazhba had worn down into a word meaning simply “indeed”. Some of the later evidence has to be handled at arm’s length. The Ukrainian songs in which Dazhbog meets a bridegroom at dawn, or sends the nightingale to open the doors of summer and shut the doors of winter, were recorded from 1924 onward and some only in the 1970s, late enough that the name may have travelled from books back into the singing. A boulder in the Minsk region of Belarus carries an old and genuine cult of offerings and rainmaking, but it was only called Dazhbog’s stone from the 1980s.

What became of him in the meantime is best seen in a Russian compilation of the 1560s, which lists the idols Vladimir smashed as Perun and Khars, and Toad, and Mokosh. Dazhbog’s name had been misread as two ordinary words, “and toad”, by a scribe who no longer knew there had been a god in it.

His powers, so far as the record allows any, are the powers of a giver: daylight, weather that lets grain ripen, wealth, and the descent that made a whole people his kin. His limits are more visible than his gifts. He has no myth of his own, no temple named for him, no image described anywhere, and by the tenth century the warrior god had taken the front of the hill, because princes with war bands prefer a thunderer to a grandfather. When Vladimir accepted baptism in 988 and ordered the idols cut down and burned, the chronicle follows Perun all the way to the water, twelve men beating him with sticks, the unbelievers weeping on the bank. Dazhbog goes into the fire off the page, unmentioned, and the chronicler never writes his name again.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dazhbog?

Dazhbog is a Slavic god listed in the Primary Chronicle among the six idols Prince Vladimir raised on a hill in Kyiv in 980. A later manuscript entry calls him the Sun and the son of the smith god Svarog, and the epic Tale of Igor’s Campaign refers to the Rus as the grandchildren of Dazhbog, making him an ancestral deity as well as a giver of good.

What does the name Dazhbog mean?

The name is usually translated as “giving god”, from an imperative meaning “give” plus the Slavic word bog, which meant both god and a portion of wealth. A competing and older explanation derives the first half from a lost word dag, meaning day or burning, which would place Dazhbog in the same Indo-European family as Dyaus, Zeus and Jupiter. The sources do not settle the question.

Was Dazhbog a sun god?

He is called the Sun in only one place, an eleventh or twelfth-century Slavic translation of the Byzantine chronicler John Malalas, where the translator substituted Slavic names for Greek ones and put Dazhbog where Helios had stood. Because the Kyivan pantheon already contained Khors, whose name is North Iranian for sun-king, a number of scholars read Dazhbog instead as a sky father and giver of plenty rather than as the sun itself.

Who is the Serbian Dabog?

Dabog is the South Slavic reflex of Dazhbog, known from two legends written down in Serbia in the 1860s. He rules the earth while God rules heaven, takes too many human souls until God’s son defeats him, and presides over a council of demons that a bee infiltrates on God’s behalf. Folk accounts make him lame and silver-bearded, a shepherd of wolves and a lord of the underworld and its metals.

What happened to Dazhbog after Kyiv was Christianised?

His idol was destroyed with the others in 988, and the chronicle never mentions him again after that year. His name survived in Polish and Ukrainian personal names into the seventeenth century and in a Novgorod proverb, but by the 1560s a Russian compiler transcribing the list of smashed idols no longer recognised it and wrote it down as two ordinary words meaning “and toad”.

Related Entries

Svarog, Perun, Simargl, Mokosh, Veles, Rod, Berehynia, Marzanna, Triglav, Sventovit, Vyrai, Dievas, Perkūnas, Helios, Surya