Status of the LGBT+ people in pre-Christian Slavic communities?
I’ve prepared this post because recently I answered an ask in Polish to a similar question ( @nickbreadart ) and later on got a request to translate the informations I’ve included there into English ( @vveze ), so we might hopefully create a brainstorm with other tumblr users. I’m a native Polish speaker, so there might be some terminology (or grammar) I might stumble over - please show me the correct direction in case there are better or more suitable English words I can use below.
What I must write first: this post will most likely not satisfy your curiosity. It is, sadly, impossible to answer the question with the current knowledge and historical sources that we are aware of, to put it simply into words. We all know very well that there are huge problems with reconstructing the old Slavic pantheon, rituals, lifestyle, worldview (and so on) altogether precisely due to the lack of original resources. There are no historical sources from the first perspective. The strict censorship and teachings of the church over the centuries erased most of the remaining informations, just like it happened with lots of other pre-Christian cultures (here, I’m thinking about our Baltic neighbours in particular).
What we deal with, is a reconstructivist modern Rodnovery based on basically only two branches of knownedge: 1) the old medieval resources written primarily by Christian missionaries or Muslim traders, 2) the continuous customs known from Slavic folkore where parts of the 'paganism’ prevailed over the centuries on the course of the syncretism. I’m not afraid to say that both those factors are biased to some extent in the context of our question, and there’s a lot of codes in them just waiting to be properly analyzed.
So, is there anything we might analyze here at all? Is the Rodnovery community open enough to at least discuss this topic?
To the point: there are some details regarding gender, sexuality or relationships that I think we might at least analyze and discuss. I won’t be able to provide you any definite answers (even though I’d love to). What I can do at the moment is to point out a few things that you might filter through comparative studies:
In many (if not all) Slavic countries that accepted Christianity, there was a custom of making vows called ‘bratotvorenie’ or 'pobratymienie’ (their name vary just a little between the various Slavic languages). To understand what they are, you should read about the Greek term for that custom: adelphopoiesis - the 'brother making’ ceremony. According to the informations I’ve found, they were popular up until around 14th century in some European Catholic countries, and prevailed as long as until 18th century among some Orthodox Christians. In the Polish sources I’ve managed to find online (example here in the tables of contents), the vows for ‘bratotvorenije’ appear indeed as late as in 18th-century Orthodox prayer books for example from the Chełmskie of Przemyskie regions. That topic is still highly controversial, as many theories interpret them as a 'homosexual marriage of men’ (be it platonic or not). Christian theologians naturally reject that idea. What makes me wonder: as far as I know those vows survived the longest among some Slavs and Greeks - please correct me if you have better resources. What we all know, Greeks were acepting homosexuality in their own pre-Christian faith. Then, what about the Slavs?
Lots of Slavic rituals seem to follow a pattern known from many other primeval cultures in which a person dresses up as an opposite gender in rituals meant to evoke fertility. In many articles and research papers I’ve stumbled across, these practices are called for example a ritual transvestitism. In the case of Poland, this is the most common during the season of the kolędowanie that spans roughly from Christmas up until the first days of spring (depending on a region). It is a still-practiced custom in many rural areas, and it shows clear remnants of old rites where the spring was evoked and the winter chased away. People dress up in various kinds of symbolic clothing. It includes for example men dressing up as babushkas or brides. I’ve been posting lots of various pictures showing that custom in different corners of Poland, and you can see the ‘cross-dressing’ costumes e.g. here, here or here. Keep in your mind that this is only a syncretized version of a much older ritual. Similarly to the case above, there was for example a spring ritual that was noted e.g. among the Belarusians in which a woman was dressed as the god Jarilo and rode on a horse to announce that the spring had come.
In many primeval cultures the divine powers had to be in balance within the stereotypically ‘male’ and ‘female’ gender aspects - some gods were even presented as hermaphrodites for ritual reasons. That was often coming with certain religious respect towards non-binary people. Among the Slavs, there are at least two things that come to my mind at the moment. 1) First one is the multifaced statue of the Zbruch Idol of the god Svetovid that has both ‘male’ and ‘female’ figures carved on its sides. Even though the statue itself might be much younger that it had been initially believed after its discovery, the case is still worth analyzing. Some modern Western Rodnovery communities partly follow that concept by creating a multifaced statue which sides represent different gods and goddesses. 2) Second one are cases of ritual effigies prepared for spring or summer rites among the East Slavs. The effigies were sometimes decorated with both the ‘penis’ and the ‘breasts’ made of fruits and vegetables. In the past I’ve seen many pictures of such effigies online but unfortunately can’t find any atm - the current Eastern Rodnovery communities seem to stick to an effigy with a ‘penis’ only.
There are some legends that might be worth analyzing. For example the popular Polish legend about the pagan Queen Wanda who didn’t want to get married. You might’ve heard about this legend before in its version popularized during the era of the Partitions of Poland: Wanda refuses to marry a German (Alamann) prince and performs a suicide by jumping from a cliff to a river. However, in the oldest-known version of that legend (coming from 12th-century chronicle of the prelate Wincenty Kadłubek) Wanda simply wins over the Alamann troops and lives happily until the old age, never marrying anyone. Other legend I know about comes from Czechia, originally from the 12th-century Chronicle of the Czechs by the priest Cosmas of Prague. It tells about three wise daughters of the ruler named Krok. One of them was Tetka who spread the pagan faith among the common people and who 'didn’t know a man’. The chronicle of Cosmas mentions also a tribe of women who he calls ‘Amazons’, living in a fortress Devin (named after a Czech word for a maiden) somewhere near Prague. I can also recall reading that some researchers located one of the ancient tribes of Amazons on the territory of modern Ukraine - I need to go back to that and find out more. Here I want to add that a concept of a woman living umarried or an Amazon was quite often an old Christian code for a lesbian person, what some of you also pointed out after reading my post in Polish. Note also that both Wanda and Tetka are presented as highly respected by the community.
The matters of tolerance? I can speak here only about the history of Poland which I’m the most familiar with. Historically speaking, there had never been any official Polish laws of persecution towards the LGBT people since the creation of the Polish state that came with its Christianization (I’m obviously excluding those laws that were imposed by foreigners during the periods of occupation like for example the Partitions or the World Wars). Speaking about the times that interest us the most, which is the furthest to the past we can get, the only historical cases - not many of them - documented during the times of the witch hunt were happening in certain Polish cities that were re-founded under the Magdeburg Rights (historically known also as the medieval German Law or Magdeburg Law) that included various punishments based on the medieval interpretation of Bible. Dr Piotr Oczko even states that 'Magdeburg Law was merciless to homosexual persons’. Thing is, the Magdeburg Law was implemented by some Polish cities during the centuries that followed Poland’s Christianization primarily in order to gain the trade rights with the Western European cities. Afterwards, the Magdeburg Law was rarely followed in the local private relations (with exceptions of some witch-hunt-era cases in cities that had a large foreign minority). Instead, the people continued to practice the old common law of Poland that had been based on older Slavic tribal traditions in many aspects and which apparently didn’t include any such laws of persecution to be carried on.
I’m really counting on fellow users from other Slavic countries to share similar cases that might be worth analyzing. Maybe more legends? More customs that might hide something undercover? Maybe some historically documented stories (as far back into the time as we could get)? Or maybe I forgot to include something else that is known from Poland? Please comment!
