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lamus-dworski · 6 years

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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!

#long post #slavs #slavic customs #slavic beliefs #slavic paganism #polish history #loose thoughts #read with open mind #lgbt

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cinneira-blog · 7 years

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I rate how languages sound.

Okay, so I was asked to do this rate X thing. I’m gonna rate how I personally perceive how different languages sound.

ACHTUNG! IT’S DAMN BIASED AND RUDE!

Languages that I’ve never heard are not mentioned. Standard varieties are implied unless stated otherwise.

IE.

Germanic.

English. Is everywhere, so whining won’t help much, I guess. Certain British accents are cool (e.g. RP and London). SAE is a potato. Scottish English sounds affected. Irish English I dunno, is it even English? Quantum computers might be able to decipher it.

Dutch. Throat disease.

Icelandic. Shit tier.

Faroese. 10/10, it has “ch” sounds, “ll” —> “tl” and other nerdgasm-inducing things.

Danish. Acquired taste.

Swedish. 9.5/10. Very cute.

Norwegian. 8/10, sounds manlier and a bit rougher than Swedish.

German. Sounds gay when spoken, decent when sung.

Celtic.

Welsh. Mongolian of Europe.

Irish. Russian backwards, seems to have been robbed of sibilants. Poor souls.

Breton. Sounds 100% like French, but actually is not. Weird.

Romance.

Spanish. LA is shit, EU is better, but not really. Although the variety where they pronounce “ll” as a “j”-sound is cool.

French. Throat disease.

Italian. Overrated, but still very cool. They speak too fast tho.

Catalan. Better than both Spanish and French.

Occitan. Second only to Italian.

Portuguese. BR is shit, EU is a bit better. Madredeus are 10/10.

Romanian. Blanda-upped something, 4/10, I guess. Hard to tell.

Slavic.

Russian. Very cool when sung. Spoken, it’s hard to tell since I’m a native, but let’s say shit. Girls nowadays sound too capricious and guys whiny and gay.

Ukrainian. Jokes aside, quite cute. 6.5/10.

Belarusian. Jokes aside… Wait, it’s not even cute.

Polish. Gone overboard with sibilants. Like, seriously. Also flat.

BCS. Tones, really? (Can’t remember if it was actual tones or pitch accent, doesn’t matter tho). Doesn’t suit a Slavic language at all, makes it a bit too sing-song-ish.

Bulgarian. Surprisingly decent, although would be better if they had more palatalised consonants (it would be Russian at that point tho).

Czech. Too soft, can’t compute.

Baltic.

Weird Slavic.

Hellenic.

Greek. Utter shit when spoken, a tongue of gods when sung. Seriously, what the heck? Go listen to Eleftheria Arvanitaki/Natassa Boufiliou or even Disney’s “Colors of the wind” in Greek first, and then to a random Greek League of Legends streamer.

Armenian.

Worse Greek with uvulars and a lot of affricates. When a Slavic speaker complains about unpronounceable consonant clusters, you know something’s gone very wrong.

Indo-Iranian.

A no for me. If you think that was too wide of a brush, wait until I get to American or Australian languages.

URALIC.

Hungarian. Cute, cute, cute. 9.6/10. My mother is fluent in it, and I still can’t forgive her for not teaching it to me when I was a larva.

Finnish. A cheap imitation of Quenya. I’m [not] sorry.

Erzya, Moksha, Komi, and other Uralic tongues of Russia. Sound like Hungarian (or Finnish) spoken with a thick Russian accent. Not fun.

SEMITIC.

Arabic. I’m not really versed in dialects of Arabic, so I can’t say which ones it were, the ones I heard. Most likely, Levantine or Egyptian. Sounds like choking. Worse when sung.

Hebrew. Better than Arabic when sung, indistinctly shitty when spoken.

Berber (Tamasheq). Pretty cool, go listen to Tinariwen.

DRAVIDIAN.

A no. Can’t stand retroflexes (yes, they regularly give me existential pain when I speak Russian or hear Swedish, I know, but still).

CAUCASIAN (NW, NE, S).

These are actual alien tongues. Almost everything about them save nominal morphology (even with that said, they are mostly ERG-ABS) is butt-clenchingly hard (I mean, the real, mean, savage kind of hard. All the usual language learner boogeymen like Chinese or Arabic are jokes compared to THIS. Almost perfect analysability, go figure). Alan Bomhard thinks NWC had intercourse with IE when IE was young. Supposedly, one of the reasons why IE is so troubled with irregularity.

Kabardian. Can vary between completely alien-sounding to absolutely, stunningly beautiful. Go lurk on youtube for some videos.

Chechen. Danish of Caucasus, but devoid of potatoes. Incredibly soft-sounding and melodic.

Georgian. Surprisingly, shitty-sounding.

TURKIC.

Turkish. Shit tier.

Uzbek. Even worse.

Kazakh. Very decent. I hear a Russian accent every time though.

MONGOLIC.

Khalkha Mongolian. Welsh of Asia.

Other Mongolian varieties. Sounds just as funny as Ukrainian to a Russian speaker. Jokes aside, far softer than Khalkha. Not like it’s a good thing tho.

TUNGUSIC.

Manchu. I don’t think it’s possible to find a recording of it spoken, but from what I’ve read about its phonology it seems VERY DAMN INTERESTING. Why would you die out tho.

SINO-TIBETAN.

Mandarin. Absolute shit tier.

Cantonese. Cantopop one love. (Hong Kong makes much better mainstream pop-music than both Japan and Korea). Even though supposedly all the lyrics are written in Standard Mandarin and then sung with Cantonese readings. Spoken, sounds a bit angry.

Tibetan. Weird, soft, palatal. The cadence is nothing like any variety of Sinitic. Old Tibetan must have been hilarious, just as Old Chinese (btw, google “fengshengbang Old Chinese reconstruction” or smth like that, you will be very amused).

KOREANIC.

Korean. Uhm. In K-pop sounds like shit regardless. Alternative stuff, though, is pretty cool. When spoken, makes think of relationships gone wrong, arguments in drama and stuff. 6/10. Nell’s lead singer is 11/10 tho.

JAPONIC.

Japanese. 9/10 when sung (they tend to fuck the prosody to accommodate for Western rhythms), 10/10 when spoken by females, 2/10 when spoken by males. The worst thing you can hear in your life is Japanese spoken with English accent. The second worst is Japanese spoken with Russian accent.

TAI-KADAI.

Shit.

AUSTRO-ASIATIC.

Shit.

AUSTRONESIAN.

Shit, with the exception of…

Tahitian and Maori. These are very well designed conlangs. I would like to shake hands with the creator, he seems to have great understanding of phonetic aesthetics. Easy to pronounce for a change.

AMERICAN LANGUAGES.

I mean, I’ve heard some recordings and stuff, but can’t remember the names of the languages. These are something I know very little about, maybe some day I’ll dig into that potpourri.

NIGER-CONGO

Too much prenasalisation from what I’ve heard. Like, really.

KHOISAN

Clicks lol. On a serious note, some of them are very cool, it’s just the clicks, they sound like impure audio or smth, I can’t help.

So, basically my top 5 would be (in alphabetic order):

Faroese

Greek

Hungarian

Japanese

Kabardian

Not even that much of IE-bias, wow. Next time I’m gonna do the same thing but with writing systems/alphabets/orthographies.

#memes

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