The book is not just a book describing the adventures of a hero. It is a work that helps to understand the Slavic world and its worldview. He acquaints us with the deities of ancient peoples and tries to explain their place and role in the life of s...
In this deity youth, energy and vital forces are boiling. Depending on the region of the Slavic land he was named Jarowit, Jaryło, Jaryła or Jaruna. Like many Slavic gods he had a multitude of attributes and functions. The multitasking of deities in the early pantheons evolved. Beliefs in local social groups were formed for tens of thousands of years. We can see the fruit of cultural transformations from a distance in time by several centuries, when the systems were closed and time passed by. Conquests of neighboring lands were conducive to the spread of ethos of local deities. and the gods of the conquered countries often borrowed attributes and functions from the invaders. The resulting mixture changed further.
Jarowit was worshipped by a large part of the Slavic lands. It was popular in the east and south.
The sources lead to two words, which have been preserved only in proverbs and names to this day. The first one is the ravines from the Old Indo-European - yeh₁ro, which means spring, which in the Old Slavic became the second most important - the young. However, a greeting meant someone eminent or simply a magnate.
Testimonies of worship are known from ethnographers' notes describing eighteenth and nineteenth-century rituals from Belarus and Voronezh, located about two hundred kilometers from the eastern border of present-day Ukraine. The local bishop forbade a celebration in honor of the god Yaryla. The memory of the events remained in the form of chronicle notes. The memory of the old god survived in the heads of the inhabitants. Cultivated religious practices, certainly secretly, may still live in human memory passed on to future generations.
The attributes of the deity were a white horse and a golden shield of a warrior. It was often depicted on a horse with a white coat, but without shoes. In one hand he held a bundle of grain with ears, in the other hand he held a human head. From the descriptions of St. Otto of Bamberg, who undertook the Christianization of Pomerania and Prussia, we learn about another dominant. In the great temple in Volgoshchy there was a tribute to the golden shield dedicated to Jarowit. It was a taboo and nobody dared to touch it. The shield and the attentiveness with which it was dealt with proves that in Volgoshchy the worship of Jary Brody as a warrior and patron of the warriors was worshipped. He was a good patron, considering the great importance of the settlement and the effectiveness of the warfare of the local warriors.
Jarowit was a god reborn every year. At the beginning of spring he came with the first rains and fertilized the ground. The puppets that embodied the saint showed him with a tremendous birth. Fertility attributed to youth even dominated over the nature of the warrior. It happened that in the spring service the deity appeared in the form of a white steed, on which the virgin was planted. The animal was tied to a stilt stuck in the ground. The huge bar symbolized the Jarowit phallus. Jarowit's mission was short. At the beginning of summer he was leaving and people were arranging a funeral for him.
Certainly, many virgins wore talismans dedicated to the deity in the temple and prayed for love, passion and fulfillment. Undoubtedly, many married women did the same for God to send them conception.
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From the life of St. Otto from Bamberg one can learn that in Wallachia there was a temple in which there was a huge gold shield "belonging" to Jarowit. According to the story, one of the clerics who took refuge in the temple, after taking the shield, went out to the chasing pagans who took him for Jarowit himself and started to withdraw in panic. This shield had a special meaning, because it was taken out of the temple only during the war to bring victory, hence the war character of this deity. This is also confirmed by hagiographers, describing Jarowita as the god of war and Mars (the Roman war deity).
Since Jarowit was the god of war, where did his relationship with spring come from? One of the arguments is the aforementioned attribution of the common identity of Jarowit with Jar³a, who was the god of spring, who was worshipped during the war. Moreover, the term -jar means not only strength, but spring. A strong, young, vigorous god becomes a harbinger of spring rebirth, the return of the world to life, especially fertile time. Chronicle writer Ebon says that the feast in honor of Jarowit was celebrated in early spring. Jaryła is usually presented as a young man dressed in a white robe and carrying very characteristic and meaningful attributes - a wreath of herbs on his head, rye ears in his left hand and a human head in his right hand. The first two are quite obvious - they symbolize the rebirth of nature in spring, fertility, fertility of the earth. What about the human head? Probably it is about the death of the old god and his replacement by a new or his rebirth. This interpretation can also be confirmed by the connection between Jarila and the female deity of winter (she also symbolically dies in spring). The motif of the spring death of the god is also quite common, it can be found e.g. in the British Isles.
Jarowit/Jaryło, as a deity with war aspects combined with fertility forces, can be one of the identity, a god with many faces, whose first thunderbolt in the new year announced the beginning of spring, and the rain coming from him had fertilizing properties. During the Christianization of the Slavs, the domain of Jarowita was probably taken over by St. George. To sum up, let us use the rhyme sung during the ritual dedicated to Jarowit, i.e. planting a young, white dressed girl on a horse attached to a pole with clear phallic symbolism:
