Vasily Chervoni (above) was on a fishing trip near the village of Derazhnoye and suffered a direct lightning hit during a thunderstorm. He was taken to a hospital where he died shortly afterwards, the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on Monday, July 6, 2009.
The newspaper noted that the late politician was a close friend of Ukrainian President Yushchenko and had at one time occupied the governor’s post in Rovno Region. A former activist in the Soviet youth movement Comsomol, Chervoni started an independent political career in the early 1990s with radical Ukrainian nationalists. At some point, Chervoni joined the religious movement Runvera – a Ukrainian sect that seeks revival of obscure ancient cults, in particular, the worship of the sun god Dažbog.
In 1992, Chervoni was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. When he was retired from the governor’s post in 2006, all Orthodox churches in Rovno Region had a special prayer thanking the Lord for deliverance.
The Sun God: Dažbog
Dažbog (above) was one of the major gods of Slavic mythology, most likely a solar deity and possibly a cultural hero. He is one of several authentic Slavic gods, mentioned by a number of medieval manuscripts, and one of the few Slavic gods for which evidence of worship can be found in all Slavic nations.
While the meaning of Dažbog’s name is not completely clear (as is the case with most other Slavic gods), taking into account several different versions of the name, most scholars agree the root dažd- or daj- is derived from root of the verb dati "to give."
Thus, according to most scholars, Dažbog would be "giving god," "god-giver," "god-donor," deus dator. This is particularly interesting since the Proto-Slavic word for god, *bagu (> Common Slavic *bogъ), the suffix of Dažbog's name, is argued either to be of Iranian origin (being related to Indo-Iranian etymons such as Old Persian baga, Sanskrit bhaga), or being semantically influenced by Iranian source, both being ultimately derived from PIE root *bʰag-, whose reflexes in both Slavic and Indo-Iranian came to mean both "deity" and "wealth, share."
Translated literally, Dažbog would be "giver of fortune." This echoes the ancient Indo-European concept that the deity is, in essence, an entity which gives wealth and abundance, an indication, perhaps, that Dažbog is a relic from common Proto-Indo-European religion, or even that this was not a name for any particular Slavic god, but a general epithet of a deity.
The Slavic god Svarog had two sons: Svarožič, who represented fire on earth, and Dažbog, who represented fire in the sky and was associated with Sun. Svarog was believed to have forged the Sun and have given it to his son Dažbog to carry it across the sky.
Pagan Slavs left their footprints across the region in a significant number of toponyms whose names can be associated with them and by discoveries of multi-headed statues in various Slavic lands. For example, the four-headed god Svantevit had a white horse and is represented by obelisks such as these.
Keelian Connection
I'm reminded that during the mid-1960s, John A. Keel became literally obsessed with collecting Fortean news clippings of bizarre deaths of people, livestock, and other animals killed by lightning. He would send copies of such newspaper articles to me and others, and requested that his correspondents forward any such events mentioned in local papers. For a time, Keel privately published a newsletter, Anomaly News, in which he would fill the pages with little offset copied news items of all such lightning deaths he could discover.
It is intriguing that Keel would die in New York City on July 3rd and Chervoni's lightning event is listed as July 4th. Of course, with the different time zones, maybe, in some strange Fortean twist of fate, the lightning strike and Keel's death occurred more closely in time that we realize. John would have been happy with this bit of synchronicity.
No comments:
Post a Comment