Khors

The hill stood outside the palace yard at Kyiv, on the high right bank above the Dnieper, and in 980 a young prince crowned it with six carved posts. The chronicler lingers over exactly one of them. Perun was cut from wood, his head plated in silver, his moustache gilded, and the monk writing four generations later could still see him. The rest arrive in one breath, a rush of names with the wood grain left off: Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, Mokosh. Khors stands second in that line. He stands second in almost every list Rus produced afterwards, second only to Perun in the sheer number of times a scribe wrote him down, and after two centuries of argument nobody can say what he was the god of.

It is not for want of trying. The guessing began with the name, because the name is nearly all there is. From the 1820s the favoured answer was Iranian: Persian *khurshid*, “shining sun”, or Ossetian *khur*, “sun”, carried north into the Dnieper country by traders, by Sarmatian neighbours, or by a garrison from Khwarazm said to have been quartered at Kyiv. It is a tidy solution and it has been repeated for two hundred years. Linguists have never liked it. Max Vasmer, compiling the standard etymological dictionary of Russian, could only concede that the derivation “is not free of phonetic difficulties”, which in his register is a demolition. The Iranian form begins *hva-*, which will not yield the short vowel in Khursu, and the Iranian *sh* should have come through Slavic as a *kh* or stayed a *sh*, not flattened into *s*. The history is worse than the phonetics. By the time Volodymyr raised his posts, Persia had been Muslim for three centuries, and *khurshid* there had long since stopped meaning a god and meant only the daylight in the sky. A borrowed word with the divinity worn off it does not usually arrive in a foreign country and take second place in the pantheon.

So other roots have been offered. Aleksander Brückner, working in 1918, went looking in Slavic itself and found a family of words for shrinkage: Polish phrases for a creature gone gaunt and pinched, Czech verbs for wasting away, a reconstructed Proto-Slavic adjective meaning skinny or stunted. Michał Łuczyński took up the same thread a century later and drew the obvious conclusion from it. A thing that wastes and comes back, month after month, is the moon. Wanda Budziszewska had already noted that Slavic dialects call the waning moon frail, worn, used up. Vladimir Toporov, meanwhile, could not shake the feeling that the ordinary Russian word *khoroshiy*, “good”, grew out of the god’s name rather than the other way around, and said so while admitting he had no idea which Iranian source the name itself came from. Everyone agrees the word is connected to something. Nobody agrees to what.

The one line in the whole corpus that puts Khors in motion is a single sentence in *The Tale of Igor’s Campaign*, and it is about somebody else. Vseslav of Polotsk judged men by day and sat cities out among princes, but at night he ran in the shape of a wolf. From Kyiv he ran, prowling, and reached Tmutorokan before the cocks crew, and the path of great Khors, as a wolf, prowling, he crossed. Read one way, that is a sun god: the prince outruns the daylight, cutting west to east across the road the sun takes, and beats it to the coast. Read another way it is a moon god, since the ride happens in darkness, since wolves belong to the moon, and since Slavic folk speech gives the moon the epithet great far more readily than it gives it to the sun. Old Norse poets called the sky the moon’s way. Neither reading can be pushed to a conclusion, and the sentence remains the most famous thing anybody knows about him.

The rest of his appearances are hostile. Preachers listing what the newly baptised were still doing at the back of the village put his name into their sermons beside Perun and Dyy and Troyan. In one apocryphal text Perun and Khors are described as old men. In another, a conversation staged between Basil, Gregory and John Chrysostom, a saint is asked what thunder is made from, and answers that there are two angels of thunder, “the Greek elder Perun, and Khors the Jew”. That line is a compound of Slavic memory, Christian angelology and Bogomil heresy folded together by a scribe with no interest in getting the old religion right, and it is one of the better-preserved statements we have about him. In the sixteenth century a German traveller named Johann David Wunderer reported seeing an idol of Khors near Pskov, standing on a serpent with a sword in one hand and a bolt of fire in the other. It would be a wonderful detail if his account did not also feature a god called Uslad, who never existed, and whose name is a garbling of the phrase “moustache of gold” out of the chronicle’s description of Perun. A stone statue was indeed dug up near Pskov in 1897, and it was indeed lost in the war, and it may be the one Wunderer saw. It says nothing about itself.

What can be said with confidence is political rather than devotional. The six gods on the hill were not one people’s pantheon but a coalition. Perun belonged to the prince and his war band; Mokosh was worshipped by Finnic tribes as well as Slavic ones; Khors and Simargl look like an offer made to the Poliane of the Kyiv region, who had Iranian ancestry somewhere behind them. Volodymyr was assembling a religion the way he had assembled a realm, by including whoever needed including. Eight years later he decided the whole arrangement had failed, sent Perun down the Dnieper tied to a horse’s tail with twelve men beating him, and put a church on the hill where the blood had soaked in.

Nobody knows what Khors did. His powers can only be reasoned backwards out of a road across the sky, a name that may mean radiance and may mean wasting, and a prince who outran him before dawn: a light that travels, that can be raced, that keeps to its path. His limits are the limits of the record. He has no birth, no parents, no consort, no story of his own, no festival that anyone thought worth writing down, and the four centuries between his idol going into the river and a foreign traveller inventing a sword for him are silent. He is the second most-mentioned god of a whole religion and he is a hole in it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Khors?

Khors is an East Slavic god named among the six idols Volodymyr the Great erected at Kyiv in 980, alongside Perun, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl and Mokosh. He is the second most frequently mentioned deity in the surviving records of Rus paganism, after Perun. Despite that, no myth about him survives, and his function is still disputed.

Was Khors a sun god or a moon god?

Both readings have serious support and neither has won. Scholars who accept an Iranian origin for his name, from words meaning “sun”, read him as solar, and point to the line in *The Tale of Igor’s Campaign* where Prince Vseslav crosses “the path of great Khors” while racing the dawn. Others note that Vseslav’s ride happens at night, that he travels as a wolf, and that Slavic folk speech applies the epithet “great” to the moon, and read Khors as lunar.

Are Khors and Dazhbog the same god?

Probably not, though the question is old and legitimate. In the Primary Chronicle’s list of Volodymyr’s idols, the conjunction “and” appears between every pair of names except between Khors and Dazhbog, which led Henryk Łowmiański and others to suspect that “Khors Dazhbog” was one compound name for one deity. Aleksander Brückner rejected the argument, and later analysis of Old East Slavic spelling has shown that scribes routinely dropped the conjunction in lists of names, which removes most of the force of the observation.

What does the name Khors mean?

Nobody has established it. The traditional derivation is from an Iranian word for the sun, such as Persian *khurshid*, but Max Vasmer and later linguists have shown that the sounds do not transfer correctly into Slavic and that the Persian word had lost its religious meaning long before 980. Aleksander Brückner and Michał Łuczyński instead derive it from a native Proto-Slavic adjective meaning “skinny” or “wasted”, which would suit a moon god passing through its phases.

Related Entries

Perun, Simargl, Mokosh, Svarog, Veles, Rod, Triglav, Marzanna, Rusalka, Leshy, Vyrai, Nav, Helios, Surya, Mithra