Veles

Somewhere on the lower Danube in 971, a Rus prince who had just lost a war put his seal to a treaty with Byzantium and called down a curse on himself in case he broke it. He swore first by Perun, whose business was lightning. Then he swore by Volos, the cattle god, and asked that if he lied, he and every man under him should turn yellow as gold and be cut down by their own weapons.

That oath is the firmest ground anyone has for the god the Slavs elsewhere called Veles. Two powers hold the agreement between them, one above and one below, and the one below is defined entirely by livestock: skotij bogŭ, the god of cattle, which in the tenth century was another way of saying the god of wealth. Cattle were the currency that walked. Whatever else Volos governed, he governed the part of a man’s life that could be counted in hooves.

The rest of the record is a scatter. Three treaties in the Primary Chronicle carry his name, though only the last of them is beyond real doubt as to authenticity. A sermon written against surviving paganism lists him next to Mokosh and Perun, but the crucial line survives in a single manuscript and looks copied in from the treaty text. And when Vladimir raised his idols on the hill above Kyiv, Perun with his silver head, then Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl and Mokosh, Volos was not among them. The god the state swore by did not get a place on the state’s hill.

He had an image somewhere lower down. A life of Vladimir says that when the prince turned Christian and had the idols hacked apart and burned, the figure of Volos, whom they called the cattle god, was thrown into the Pochaina at Kyiv: rope creaking, the cold suck of river clay, a crowd on the slope watching a god go into the water sideways. That detail runs in only one strand of the tradition and may be a later addition, or may come from a source since lost. Either way the placement says something. Down by the landing stages and the market rather than up on the ridge with the sky gods, near the water, at the bottom of the slope.

West of Kyiv his name outlived his cult by turning into an insult. Czech writers of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries used veles as a word for a devil and slotted it in beside čert and zmek: who was it, they ask, the devil or veles or some dragon, that stirred you up against me. A Czech translation of Sirach printed in 1561 has a man wishing his bad wife would become a wild goose and fly off to Veles across the sea and never come home. The Polish chronicler Stryjkowski, writing at the end of that same century, called him Vlos and made him a god of cattle and woodland, a Slavic Pan.

That comparison is the closest thing to a portrait anybody wrote down, and it arrives six hundred years after the treaties, from a man reaching for a classical shelf. Nobody described the idol before it went in the river. The shaggy, bearded, dripping Veles of modern illustration is built backwards out of etymology, since the root behind his name can be pulled toward wool, hair, meadow grass and wet. It is a reasonable guess wearing the clothes of a memory.

In Russian and Belarusian fields the last of the grain was not cut. Harvesters left a clump of ears standing at the edge of the stubble, bent them over and knotted them, and in places they called the knot Volos’s beard, sometimes setting a loaf of dark bread down among the stalks. Chaff sticking to wet forearms, the smell of cut straw going sour in the damp, the field emptied of everything but that one tied handful. The god of increase got the tail end of the crop, left where he lived, which was low.

He kept odd company besides cattle. The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, from the late twelfth century, twice addresses the old bard Boyan as Veles’s grandson, as though a singer’s craft ran in that particular family. The Pleiades carry his name across several Slavic languages, Volosyni among the Old Russians, Vlašići among the South Slavs. In the Balkans the name has soaked into the land itself: the town of Veles in North Macedonia, with a hill of St Elias the Thunderer standing over it, Velež above Mostar, Velestovo in Montenegro, Velíz in Bohemia.

Then there is the duel, which almost everyone has heard about and which the sources do not contain. In 1974 the philologists Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov assembled a Slavic cosmic combat out of Baltic and Belarusian folk material: Veles as a serpent climbing from the roots of the world tree with Perun’s stolen cattle, Perun smashing him back down with lightning, the loot falling as rain, the whole cycle resetting every year. It is a beautiful machine. It is also a reconstruction, and the part that turned Veles into the dragon has since been taken apart. Aleksander Gieysztor objected within eight years. Leo Klejn and Igor Diakonoff followed. Michal Téra put it flatly: there is not a single piece of evidence that Veles fought Perun, and nothing at all establishing a draconic or serpentine nature. A 2023 Czech monograph devoted to the god added the practical objection, that no one swears a state treaty jointly in the names of a chaos monster and the god sworn to destroy it. Toporov himself later shifted his own comparison away from the demon Vrtra and toward Varuna, the Vedic sovereign who binds men to their word and rules the waters. Roman Jakobson had set Veles beside Varuna decades before that, reading the tail of the name as an inherited word for lord.

What he can do follows from all this. He holds one end of the oath and enforces it, but through sickness rather than the sword, since Perun kills you and Volos turns you yellow. He governs what lies past the palisade: pasture, wet ground, woodland, the herds, the bottom of the slope, and by extension the dead, imagined grazing somewhere below like cattle turned out on a meadow. Wealth and increase are his, and so is the sort of knowledge that comes up from the dark end of things, whatever it was that Boyan inherited.

His limits are the same shape seen from the other side. His authority stops at the fence, and inside the ploughed field and the household other powers hold sway. He was never given the hilltop. He also broke up easily under pressure: as a protector of herds he slid into St Blaise, whose name sounded near enough and whose flocks were the same flocks, so the first church raised at Yaroslavl on his old shrine went to Blaise; his generous side drifted to St Nicholas; his dark side went to the devil, the leshy and the vodyanoy. The forgeries have not helped either. The Book of Veles, wooden planks of supposedly ancient Slavic scripture said to have been found in 1919 and published out of San Francisco in the 1950s, is a twentieth-century fake written in impossible Slavic, and it has shaped what people believe about Veles far more thoroughly than the treaties ever managed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Veles in Slavic mythology?

Veles, also called Volos, is a Slavic god of cattle, wealth, sworn oaths and the world below. He is named in the tenth-century treaties between Rus and Byzantium recorded in the Primary Chronicle, where Rus envoys swear by him and by the thunder god Perun together. He is one of the very few Slavic gods whose name shows up across the East, West and South Slavic areas.

Did Veles fight Perun?

There is no evidence that he did. The famous cosmic duel, with Veles as a serpent stealing cattle and Perun striking him down with lightning, was reconstructed in 1974 by Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov out of Baltic and Belarusian folklore, and the serpent identification has since been rejected by later scholarship, including by Toporov himself. Veles and Perun are named side by side as joint guarantors of an oath, which is difficult to square with them being mortal enemies.

What was Veles the god of?

The sources call him skotij bogŭ, the cattle god, which in the tenth century meant the god of wealth as much as the god of livestock. Beyond that he is associated with oaths and their punishment, with the wet lower world, and with everything outside the fenced and ploughed human space. Punishment for breaking an oath sworn in his name was sickness, described as turning yellow.

What did Veles look like?

No early source describes him, and nobody wrote down what his idol looked like before it was thrown into the Pochaina at Kyiv. The only surviving description is a late-sixteenth-century Polish account by Stryjkowski that calls him a god of cattle and woods and likens him to Pan. The hairy, bearded, dripping figure familiar from modern art is worked backwards from the possible meanings of his name.

Is the Book of Veles a genuine ancient Slavic text?

No. The Book of Veles is a twentieth-century forgery, allegedly copied from wooden planks discovered in 1919 and published in a Russian émigré newspaper in San Francisco in the 1950s. Its language is not consistent with any real stage of Slavic, and specialists in Slavic linguistics and mythology reject it outright.

Related Entries

Perun, Mokosh, Svarog, Simargl, Rod, Triglav, Leshy, Vodyanoy, Zmey Gorynych, Marzanna, Perkūnas, Varuna, Indra, Hermes, Hades