A Huge Drag

Question: I’ve noticed that you have links to the stories that you use to make your justifications on the pantheon pages. Could you perhaps do so on the blog for the pantheons you have in PDF? Specifically the Bogovi, to which I can find no reference in which Veles isn’t described as a dragon/snake fighting Perun.

Actually, we provide the stories on gods' individual pages to give our players a chance to read a little bit about the gods they're considering playing Scions of without having to wander around lost in their local libraries or internet searches; it's nice to know what god-parents do in their myths and to read about their exploits prior to a game's campaign. But they do also sometimes serve the double purpose of illustrating the associated powers and abilities of the gods through their actions, which never hurts.

At the moment, while the Anunna are active in our games, the Bogovi, Apu and Elohim are not, so we've been bending the sweat of our brows to working on other projects instead (additionally, John doesn't want to muddy the waters too much for our players by introducing a bunch of pantheons that may not be open for play yet). Considering that you're definitely not the first person to ask about them recently, though, the idea's still on the table. (Look, John, all I'm saying is that the people clearly want it.)

I'm totally all about discussing Veles, though, in the meantime! The characterization of Veles as a dragon that battles Perun is the result of comparative mythological reconstructionism, which is a long, complex-looking phrase that basically means it's made up based on other nearby cultures' myths. The theory was popularized by a pair of linguist-folklorists named Ivanov and Toporov; their reasoning basically boils down as follows.

1) Perun is clearly the storm god.
2) In most nearby cultures' myths, the storm god battles a dragon. (Indra versus Vritra, Teshub versus Illuyanka, Thor versus Jormungandr, Zeus versus Typhon, and so on and so forth.)
3) Therefore, Perun must fight a dragon.
4) Fragmentary sources indicate that Perun and Veles have an antagonistic relationship.
5) Therefore, Veles must be a dragon.

There's more to it, mostly linguistic connections from folktales, but that's the gist of the idea. However, we really didn't like it very much at all and chose not to include it in our Scion treatment because its basis is so very sketchy. There's no epigraphical, artistic or story evidence anywhere of Veles as a dragon; the closest you can get are some images of snakes, but snakes are a classic underworld symbol in many cultures and may not indicate that Veles himself is one as much as they're just indicating the presence of death. Other scholars, equally (or, in my ever-humble opinion, more) as reputable as Ivanov and Toporov, have reconstructed very different tales for Veles, including the root of his quarrel with Perun being the fact that he is occasionally lovers with Perun's wife and kidnapped one of his sons to raise as his own, all of which is understandably irritating but again none of which involves any hint of dragonhood. In fact, many of the widely-accepted bits of lore about Veles - the fact that oaths were sworn on him as well as on Perun, for example, or his syncretization after Christianization with the benevolent and protective Saint Nicholas - don't really seem to match up to the theory at all.

And in case you've run across the also-popular idea of Perun as the eagle atop the Slavic world tree, opposed to Veles as the dragon at its roots, that's yet another separate layer of theory that didn't come from Ivanov and Toporov, and which we haven't been able to find any reliable sourcing for at all. I suspect it's someone making a connection based on the idea of the opposed eagle and dragon Nidhoggr in Norse mythology, but there's no reason to suppose that Slavic mythology is going to be the same without proof.

Veles and Perun definitely don't get along all the time, but it's our pretty firm opinion that there's no reason to assume that the underworld god is a dragon, nor to assume that he represents a cosmic evil kept at bay by Perun. There's no evidence of these things in what little we still have of Slavic mythology, and we're not about to go assuming that all cultures must have the same myths, even when they may have similar roots at one point or another; there are similar facets and tales across Indo-European mythology, certainly, but there are also a startling array of diversions.

Sources on Veles that aren't based on the Ivanov/Toporov theory can be hard to find, and most of them aren't available in English (why is it that English-speaking academia isn't interested in this subject? Come on, guys!). The best English source for non-dragonish Slavic lore is Hudec's Tales from Slavic Myth, which contains narrative stories of his connections to the underworld and fertility rites. (And if you're fluent in Croatian or have a really good translator, the works of Radoslav Katicic and Vitomir Belaj are very interesting indeed.)

It would be a pretty large undertaking to post up stories here for every god of every one of our custom pantheons, so forgive me for not doing so in this post. I hope we can get the Bogovi some web space of their own soon, but until then, we're always happy to share if you have specific questions or want to know about a specific deity, either here (preferably as single posts, the way we've recently discussed Stribog and Baal) or if you email us.