Remember Me

Question: The Bogovi pantheon tree in your site says Pereplut (Perpelut?) is the god of memories. All I found was the dude as the goddess of wine.

Poor Slavic mythology! Finding anything out about it is like trying to get through a carnival funhouse. There are so many conflicting sources, confused pieces of scholarship and downright up-front wrong modern ideas about it that getting anything you can solidly say is legitimate is a long and frustrating road. Believe you me, we went nuts trying to get solid soucing for Slavic mythology when we were working on the Bogovi; they have no written records from the time of their worship, there was heavy syncretization with Christianity once writing did come to the area, and modern Slavic neopaganism has, not to put too fine a point on it, made up a lot of shit.

But luckily for us, Pereplut actually wasn't one we were concerned about being too inaccurate (although we did not have a lot of information on him, which is why we're not considering him Legend 12). The portrayal of Pereplut as god of memory comes from Ivan Hudec's Tales from Slavic Myths, an unfortunately expensive and hard-to-get resource published in Slovakia by their former Minister of Culture. It relates that Pereplut is the god of memory, has a "loud and irrepressible laugh", and is the brother of Chernobog and Byelobog, whose antics he regards with some amusement. (Chernobog and Byelobog aren't up with the other sons of Svarozhich on the tree because of space constraints, but as a general rule, most Slavic gods that don't have other parentage mentioned somewhere were probably created by Svarozhich.)

I see a few internet sites out there that are talking about a Slavic goddess of drinking named Pereplut, but frankly I don't know of any sourcing for that (and none of them try to give any). Other possibilities I have seen about Pereplut - usually theoretical ones, but sometimes we have to take what we can get with Slavic myth! - include some scholars who theorize that he might be another form of Perun (because of the similar names) or the Simargl (because of his name sometimes appearing with hers), some who think he might have some agricultural connections based on the other gods he's invoked with but who have no actual proof of that, and one Bulgarian folk source that suggests he might have been a god of soil and the fertility of the earth. But these are largely conjecture, and whether or not any of them are appropriate is entirely up to a given game's preferences.

By the way, Charles Graves does relate a folk tradition of drinking from a horn during worship of Pereplut, which is probably where someone got the idea that he must be a god of wine. Considering that the Slavs didn't really do much wine, however (they were a mead people most of the time) and that drinking horns are featured in the worship of several of the other Bogovi, most notably Svantovit, I wouldn't jump to any crazy conclusions based only on that.

It's worth noting here that, when you're out there trying to figure out what the hell the ancient Slavs were doing, that they were spread out over a wide range in ancient Europe and were not always doing the same thing in all areas. Chors is a good example; in western Slavic lands (southern Germany, Slovakia, Croatia and so on), she was firmly viewed as the gentle and beautiful moon goddess, victim of Stribog's cruel mistreatment, but in eastern Slavic lands (especially Russia), she was much more strongly connected to the sun and the dawn, racing Slavic heroes in myths where they need to beat the morning to succeed. Slavic gods covered a lot of territory and, as Dvoeverie would suggest, often borrowed things from neighboring cultures and made them their own, so it's seldom that you have a god who isn't at least a little different from place to place. It's theoretically totally possible for a Bogovi god to be revered as the female patron of one idea in one part of the Slavic lands, and the male patron of a totally different idea in another, and nobody would get too bent out of shape about that.

Personally, we would not recommend going with the female-wine-fertility version of Pereplut, simply because we don't see any reputable sources to back it up and it's therefore probably part of the vast soup of messy modern pagan nonsense that surrounds the Bogovi on a daily basis. But then again, this is Scion, so you can always play with the possibilities when it comes to Fatebonds, Dvoeverie and the gods themselves trying out new things.