Occult Explorers 20: Slavic Magic

Hello beautiful people and welcome to the Occult Explorers. I'm your Hostess Snappy, and I'm joined by my co-host, Dion. How's it going, Dion?

Ah, glad to be here, right before the Fourth of July holiday. Right? Getting ready to blow up a bunch of stuff. They've already been up all night blowing up things. Fireworks. That's awful. Like, I live right on the border, like, so I live on the Saint Mary's River, okay? And I, so I can see the U.S. just from my house. And since Canada Day on the first, it's been non-stop fireworks every night. It's starting to get to me, and I still got at least one more day of this.

Oh, you're, you're freedom celebrations are about the same time, huh? Yeah, yeah. We, we celebrated on the first, and then you guys on the fourth. So usually one's about that time. Up revolutions, right? Except ours wasn't so much a revolution as it was some exchanging of documents and, uh, you know, we'll still keep you on our, on our, on our money. Queen. Yeah.

But this is going to be a fun episode. I'm excited for this one. We're going to be digging into some Slavic magic and Slavic paganism, you know? And this was inspired because of, you know, this ongoing Russian crazy situation that we've been seeing, right? So, as always, we want to give a little bit of a trigger warning for this one. We are going to be getting into some weirdness. So, with that being said, where do you want to take us, Dion?

Well, uh, it worked. Slavic, East, West, South, from Germany to, uh, cities, up to Alma, Siberia, down to Bulgaria, all over. I was like, oh, there's a little more to the Slavic, uh, history than I thought. And it's, let's say, it's not so much DNA as it could be. It's more of a language and a culture and a mythology that can unite people because at the farthest tips, there is some genetic differences as well as similarities. But it's, uh, you'll see this in different cultures around the world where it's, uh, the language that unites people, right? And, you know, the Slavic people are super interesting because they kind of come out of the Indo-Aryan tribes, you know? And then they kind of conquer most of the, of the, what they call the European plains, which make up Poland and a lot of Russia to this day. But there's also a lot, like you said, they go all the way up north to Finland and they connect with the Finnish people. We can trace this linguistically, you know, that word "Slavic" is actually a Slavic word, you know? So it gets really interesting. And then when you go into the South into the Balkans, there's another weird admixture where they're mixing with the Greeks and they're mixing with the, the Magyars, and you get a whole other thing going on. So the Slavs are so essential to this region of the world, and they get downplayed unfairly for a lot of reasons, politically. Um, and that's what I, what I figured out when I was looking this up, is that the thorn in the side is Soviet USSR, um, Hitler. A lot of this stuff taints Slavic history, right? And they're taking it back, though. They are taking it back. You could, there's another thing that's music. I listen to. There's movements. There's lots of stuff. That's why we thought it was time to do this because of the Russian-Ukraine thing. Because I'm for people, Ukraine have autonomy, but I also understand there's an older history there that, that Russia has an older history too. That's not Soviet. That's not about dictators and communism. That's about just ancient tribes, right?

You know, this area of the world is so interesting because, like, it is that combination of West meets East, the horse peoples meets the Europeans, you know? And you get this really interesting admixture going on. And like you said, what's really interesting about this region too, is that we've seen this extreme revival here, you know? Like in a lot of places in Europe, right? The Christianization process was extraordinarily thorough, you know? People's religions were wiped out, their cultures completely assimilated. Not so much so in the Slavic areas. When I was looking into this, the anthropologists were saying that there were pagan holdouts up to the 1800s, you know? It's, and then there's a lot of speculation about its surviving underground within familial traditions, even, you know? So, but I mean, openly practiced until the 1800s, nowhere else in Europe do we see this, you know?

I love it, love it. Uh, so let's hit our first. So, so, you know, if you see a lot of our videos, we target or what we're looking for is the ancient goddess. And we're, where do we find the ancient goddess and all these different cultures and religions and mythologies and mystery cults? Because that's what seems to unite us. Yeah. His universal mother figure, um, Mokosh. Mokosh. Makosha. Uh, and obviously, you know, I don't have to say anything. I can barely speak English. What is what I know. I looked it up. It said the moist mother. She's very moisty, right? The moist mother. She's the, uh, the patron of all women, the divine feminine, right? She has this idea of being this cosmic womb. And I also like to me, it connects to that Greek tradition because we always see a lot of these goddesses described with the water, with the moisture, like Aphrodite, right? And there's this thing about these nymphs of the water and how the moisture drives you down into the land. It's really interesting, you know?

So, oh yeah, and you know, another thing about her, she, serpents, right? Are attached to her. Um, you'll notice, you'll see in a lot of these episodes we do, there's a, there's a pole, a stake, a linga, uh, a maple sundial, a tree. And no matter how you, you call it a mast for a ship, you know, a crucifix, no matter what you call this stake, it's the tree that they worship, the primordial tree. And here in Slavic cultures, you would see the totem culture. You'll see this in Hawaii, Native America, all over the world. Is it, as the universal totem culture of not only worshiping the tree itself, but then carving the tree into gods or ancestors, yeah, for poles, into tripods, into altars. We see this all over. But it's really important that we emphasize this. Like, this is, I like to talk a lot about near universals, you know? We mentioned earlier, the mother goddess, this Venus figure, the snake mother who's associated with water. That's a near universal, meaning many of the global cultures have an analogous figure to this. Another, uh, universal that we're, that we're going to see, um, it's just in, in, in, like how these people are approaching the trees, you know? Trees are always seen almost as god-like figures, almost always associated with the feminine, and almost always worshiped. And oftentimes, you see them as a focus of sacrifice where the tree is cut down and the tr, like, it's really interesting is that when we read a lot of these myths about virgin sacrifice and sacrificing these, these women figures or these Addie type figures, sometimes it's not a person, sometimes it's a tree. But you got to understand, in the pagan conception, the tree is alive. The tree is our ancestor. So it is a human sacrifice, which is why they're using the same language, you know? It's so interesting. The sacred grove, right? Animated, come alive, 3D.

Let's hit the next picture, and that takes us right back to our first episode, The Sacred Grove. Oh, yeah. We can't escape. We can't escape the mother in the grove. It's where we were all born, you know? The Garden of Eden. Look at. We got. This is part of Slavic totem culture, but you see on the right, another thing that they find up and down these regions is mushroom stones. Wow. Stones tilted, stacked, and shaped to look like mushrooms. And we know a lot, and mushrooms are associated with Mokosh and a lot of the Slavic paganism throughout this whole area. This is the, we always talk about the Amanita, you know? Finally, this, we're here at the motherland, not just Siberia, but it's right here. This is the spot. This is where they, like, these mushrooms, you know, that they set up altars to these mushrooms, and they're carved into the poles and different things. Uh, you know, let's hit the next picture. And we know too, with these mushrooms, that they are, you know, in, in Siberia, they're taking them and they're ingesting them with their reindeer and with the shamans, and then you, you know, they're having their people ingest the urine. And we know that the Scythians are doing similar things with their horses, you know? So, what are the, did you see anything like that with the Slavs, Dion?

Well, that they're connected to the culture, of course. Now, um, the reason why biotransformation, animals and humans have a capacity to take, uh, plants and different substances and render them into a psychoactive or bioavailability, you know? So what will happen is the first person will take the, the mushroom, which is kind of toxic, and will urinate. Now, that urine will now have the, the alkaloid psychoactive element bioavailable. And in this case, it's *muscaria* which is for *Amanita muscaria*, which is prevalent in this region with a whole host of others that they're taking. They love mushrooms, right? It's not just because, here's why we know, when it's very moisty in the dirt, the fungus grows. Yeah. It deals. It deals with moistness and thunders, you know? And even when I came across one of the other thunder gods, because we talked about, yeah. And he's, he was the patron god of Kiev, Rus, you know? Because, because obviously Kiev was the capital of Russia for thousands of years. No problem. But the people there now are, what is, what's the word? Autonomous. Now, who gives a [ __ ]? Other autonomous. Now, there's millions of people. They speak a different language. Deal with it. But the history is special. That was a special part of Russia. Honor it. Honor. Can we honor both of those? How do we do that?

This is something that I always find really interesting when we're talking about tradition. Because, you know, I am not, like, on one hand, I, you know, I'm not, I consider myself a pagan, but I don't follow any tradition of any kind. I do worship traditional gods, but I worship them in the present, in my own way, in my own conception. And I do look to the past, but I seek to bring the past into the present. What I take from the past is those images, you know, that, that those divine myths, those those things that are greater that exist beyond. And I think, like, we can still do this, right? We can look to these paths and we can talk about them. The problem becomes when we, when we talk about, like, recreating them in exactly in the present, you know? Like, there's too much of this toxic nostalgia, you know? Where it's like, yeah, let's celebrate the past. Let's, let's celebrate our shared connections, but let's also be mindful of where we are, you know? And who we are today. We have to take this into the now, right? That's why I'm both pro-Palestinian and I'm pro-Jewish. Gotta have a homeland, and Palestinians gotta have a homeland. Everyone's gotta have a homeland. Ukrainians, Rus, everybody get a homeland, you know? That's what this is all about. The homeland of the Earth is it's special, right? That's what the mother country and the father country and where we come from is special. That's what this is all about. All these episodes exploring where we come from, yeah, exploring the goddess, right? And this is something I want to highlight. It's, we need to stop putting boundaries up between us. We all live on the same Earth. We all are connected to the same mother. We all share this planet together. Nothing that happens anywhere on this planet doesn't not affect the other parts of the planet, you know? We are all interconnected, and we all need to work together in this, you know? And understand this. It's like, you can have a connection to your local land, to your local traditions, to your local stuff, right? But you also have to be able to see that greater connection. We have to become this idea of the super organism, you know? Like, I really, absolutely love, uh, this author, Isaac Asimov. You know, we're going to get a little weird here, but Isaac Asimov wrote a book series called The Foundation. But the cool thing about Asimov is he was a classicist. He was deeply influenced by the Greeks, and he understood a lot was going on with Greeks. And his story about the Foundation was actually inspired by by the story of the Greeks in Athens, because the story goes, if you read the Hymn to the Mother of the Gods by Julian, is that the Athenians started to persecute the most vulnerable. They started to persecute the priestesses of the Goddess Cybele, those who were practicing the rites of the mother. And this Julian believes is what ended the Greek Empire. But the Athenians got a ruling from the Oracle of Delphi, who told them that if they built the museum, the temple to the Muses, and collected their shared history, that part of them would survive. That they would be able to transform and come out of this calamity, even though their empire wouldn't be the same, they wouldn't lose everything, they could be reborn and transformed. And what we see with Asimov is the same kind of story, right? In Foundation, it's all about creating a museum, collecting all of our shared ideas together in order to survive calamity. But where it gets even more wild with Asimov is if you go to the end of his series of Foundation, the final evolution of humanity is to become Galaxia, right? An organism that is made up of the entirety of the Galaxy. But humans are all part of this. We're all one single being, but also individuals and separate. And that, that's where I think we need to get to, you know? Like, brilliant stuff to me. And I see reflections of this in a lot of pagan thought, you know?

Um, well, you know, as you were saying that, and I was looking at the image on the screen, I thought of mycelium, right? We're mycelial. That's the problem. We need to get back to our mycelial structure, where we're interconnected and interdependent on each other, yeah, and thriving, you know? We're connected. Yeah. It's a connect. You know, and so, uh, we had to give a trigger warning. You did give the trigger warning about politics and drinking urines and psychedelics and ancient Christianity and all that. Because let's go to the next picture, right? Reindeer. Loving, loving, big part of the culture. When we are studying Slavic history, they figure in the mythos heavily. And the colors, you'll notice those red and white colors, which is those mushrooms we keep talking about, which is a big part of their, uh, colors of their accoutrements, red and white. We'll see this. And if that was in the Middle East, we would posit that that could be semen and blood, or kermes, or serum brew, or, um, different psychoactives. But in this case, it could be a fungus that's red and white, and the reindeer like to to eat those little fungus. This is the thing, right? They talk about the reindeer with the nose for it, the special nose, and they'll go out and they'll find these, these *Amanita muscaria*, the red and white mushrooms. Now, I know you're, do you got to get into the Santa stuff, Dion? I want you to tell it.

Well, you're not gonna get wild. I was gonna get into Santa later, but people look at the Santa mythos, and what do we see right here? I mean, that almost looks like Santa, but that's not. If you were to zoom out, that's not Santa. That's just some Slavic culture. That's the traditional outfits that they wear. And around December 21st, uh, 24th to the 26th, they are doing rituals. They have winter rituals with reindeer and with rebirth. In, um, it's so close. There's so much to unpack there. We might have to come back with a whole episode just on that, right? You know, the connection with St. Nick, Santa Claus. There's so much going on. And we know, like, the, the Christian celebration of Christmas is not just taking from one culture, it's taking from many. But I want people to fixate on these images, because it's clear that these images are being incorporated. The red and white suits, the, the magic reindeer with red noses. Why do they have red noses? Because they can smell out and ingest *Amanita muscaria* mushrooms. What happens when you take *Amanita*? They're always described as flying, as being able to astral project. Now, these are reindeer who are eating these mushrooms, and then they're depicted as what? Flying. And also, a lot of these cultures, especially the ones further north, they would be making a special type of like igloo where the only entrance is through the top, you know? And because that's also where your fire is. So this imagery of of people climbing into people's houses through the chimney in order to give them gifts, this is just a shaman who's being a real nice, kind guy who got really stoned on mushrooms and decided to go do some good for his local community.

Ah, and you know what? You know what the gift that they offer is? Urine, right? That's a custom inside in Siberian mythos. Is all, right? Here's how it works. It came in out of the cold. We've heard that Eskimos get naked and cuddle. Yeah, this is these are all just famous kids, you know? And so they get, they get naked and they get under the covers. So the head shaman who has ingested the mushroom, the first pass is toxic, but when he urinates, it's now bioavailable. And they, and they say that as you keep doing it, it becomes more, um, active, become stronger. Um, and you would offer that to somebody for a multiple, two to three of reasons. It's cold, it's a warm beverage, it gets you high, you're gonna trip out. They had sex with with my wife's hair. We hear that that's the Eskimo thing. Is you offer your wife? Um, this is a different type of culture where you live in the snow and and whatever heat you got, you're dependent on fire and heat. And they were tripping balls on the stuff, you know? This is, this is evident, definitely.

Let's hit the next pick, right? No, it's so wild with a lot of that imagery. So it wasn't just reindeer, horses, right? We talk about horses in a lot of the episodes where there's the horse's hoof, the air got threshing on top of the, uh, plaviceps. You can get like a LSA, St. Anthony's fire, and horses get ergotism. Was it the snake venom? Remember we were looking better processing the venom through again, using the horse to create a bioavailable drug through pro, through that digestion, through that processing. And one thing was that, yeah, they would slowly inoculate the horse with, um, snake venoms. 18 months later, take the blood from it and ingest that, building an immunity to the snake venom. Another one is here, you can see what he's doing. He's milking the mare, because mare's urine is estrogenic, which we've talked about, and is used Premarin across the world by millions of people on a daily basis. Oh, yeah. So the horse had multiple things, multiple processes, as well as being, um, their dependents to to, uh, to go to war. There are, you know, they were nomadic. Part of the Slavic thing is that they were, some of them were very nomadic. Mm-hmm. Move around and fight, you know? It's not no later that they settled down, yeah, right. These are ancient nomadic peoples, right? And like we said, the Slavs, they're, they're spanning across that that great European plain. They go all the way to Finland, and then all the way to Bulgaria, you know?

So let's hit the next picture. And I really want to illustrate that. And this is called Kumis, and this is a fermented, uh, horse milk, which is very popular among Slavic culture, Russia, and it gets you high. It's, it's a part of it is that the mare's milk, or the horse's milk is, uh, has a lot of sugars, so ferments easy, gets alcoholic easy. It's a fast turnaround time. And they would spice it. Not only can you ferment it with things in the ferment that to break down the psychoactive elements in your plant materials, you can also feed it to the horse, and the horse's digestive tract will break it down for you and put it into the milk, right? And these are called spiced or medicated milks, which the, the warriors, Slavic warriors are famous for this. It could be ephedra in there, you don't know. They could be taking this going into battle, right? And we do know that like the Scythians were notorious for using marijuana and cannabis, and we know that if you go to India, they're still drinking milks infused with cannabis called Bhang, you know? And we see similar practices throughout all these different horse cultures. So I would not be surprised. And then like you said, the ephedra, right? We know like the Slavic peoples are really connected to a lot of these Aryan peoples, right? Like they are this horse kind of culture. There is this direct connection. There's so much overlap with the Aryan or the the Iranian ideas, and the Iranians, they're doing ephedra-based milks, the the Haoma, right? Which later then becomes the, um, the Indian Soma. So, yeah, there's a wide tradition of this spanning across this area, along with Mandrake and Belladonna, the nightshades, opium poppies, you said cannabis, yeah, fermented honeys as well, because Trachon is right there in the Slavic region, at the bottom of the Black Sea, where they were getting that fermented Rhododendron honey, right? Like a lot of the, the access to a lot of lucid and psychoactive plants, you know?

100. So let's hit the next picture, because we're talking about the mushrooms. So here's some random white. And here's this old witch lady with the with the mushroom cap there. And she's famous. Oh, is this our Baba Yaga? Baba Yaga. You might have heard it in the John Wick movie. Even that's John Wick's nickname. Wow. I've never seen those movies, but yeah, yeah, that's what came up with doing a lot of research on Baba Yaga. I was like, oh, John Wick came up. You know? And Baba Yaga is a famous witch in Slavic culture that had mushroom potions. And and sometimes you might see her in a barrel with chicken legs, um, or with traditional witch stuff, like the, the flying ointments on a with the broom, yeah. You know? And so in the colors of red and white. And and Baba is, that means like grandmother, matriarch, you know? It's, it's the maternal. And so there's lots of folklore or Baba Yaga spanning Russia, you know, to the different Eastern Europe, different Slavic mythology. It's very famous, you know? There's, there's, you could type in that and watch hour-long videos just on Baba Yaga, right?

Well, it's because it becomes so popular within modern popular culture, you see her everywhere, you know? I wouldn't be surprised if she's a comic book character in the Marvel Universe and I'm just not aware, right? And here I want to illustrate is the connection to rocks, stones, and mushrooms, you know? That's, that's where a lot of the ancient connection comes with herbs as well, and poisoning, you know, a multitude of herbs. It wasn't just the mushrooms, and it was putting the mushrooms into fermented milks as part of the formula. So let's hit the next picture. Interesting, because we're talking about Babas. Here's Baba Vanga. Oh, Vanga. All right. So we're gonna get some prophecies. Some, because that's part of the, the Slavic stuff, you know? Modern times. Who shouldn't like the lady? Hyped her up. She's like a folk hero. She's a Bulgarian mystic. And it was maybe, uh, she was born in 1911. In around the age of 12, she was kidnapped by a tornado, blown up into the sky. And when she came down, our eyes were filled with sand, and she was blind. But after that, she, uh, had visions. So much so that she'd been studied by Soviet scientists, different scientists from around the world. Her visions are, some of them were about Russia. What did she see? Like, what did she, what did she foretell? People say that she talks about the World Trade Centers and nuclear bombs and gets into Russian stuff, you know? I'm not gonna go deep into it. I just want to illustrate some of these folk hero, um, Babas. Imagine mothers, matriarchal mothers, that are in Slavic history, that are part of folklore, and it's still going on, right? Still going on. Still going on. This is, this is, we went from Baba Yaga to Baba. Kind of wild that she got the ear of Putin, you know? Think about that.

Oh, yeah. Well, they tried to make it a folk thing. Oh, we'll check that out. So from there, because we're talking about these Russian prophecies, there's another one that they say came true. It's the Third Prophecy of Fatima. So Fatima is a village in Portugal, which in 1917, in October 13th, was the final vision. There was a series of visions, Marian apparitions. Lucia and her and her two cousins would get visited. And so much so the church would come out. And so the Pope canonized them years later. And, oh, wow. And and part of the last vision on October 13th, 1917, was about Russia and, uh, accepting Christ and Evangelical prophecies. And this is underground stuff in the in the churches. But some people know about it. So much so that they, and found something called the Blue Army, which is the Order of Fatima. And that's a Catholic organization, which is dedicated to the prophecies and Fatima, Saint Fatima, which is Marian, because we talked about Marian cults, which worshiped the Virgin Mary in this different Marian apparitions that have happened, you know, black stones and black Madonnas. And this interconnects with that and with Russia, because that was their last, that was the last vision that the Virgin Mary told Lucia was a Russia needs to get soft and get cool and get respectful with the planet, and we could all be cool.

That's so interesting. So what did the, like, the Orthodox Christians think of Fatima? Do you know that they, they, uh, with venerated or children's was saying, and so that it's, what's Lucia is her name? Fatima is the village in Portugal. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. And like I said, there's a whole Catholic order around it. And they believe that the prophecy came true with when the Pope went to, uh, was certain dealings with the Pope in, uh, Russia, because they have to do with the Orthodox Pope, that's Korea, which we'll talk about a little later, too. There's been several attempts over the years to try and end the, to, you know, to like rejoin the churches, you know? Yeah, that's part of the prophecy thing, you know? And even so much when this happened, millions of people came out. You can Google it, you can see the pictures. It was called The Miracle of the Sun, 1917, October 13th. And because the Virgin Mary told them what it was going to happen, and they published it in the local newspapers in Portugal. And so millions of people came out, a thousands of people on that day. And so what happened was the sun started, uh, dancing in the sky. And there's multiple, uh, accounts of that. If you look at the newspapers and all the different history about it, it's called The Miracle of the Sun. Mary told Lucia, like, hey, you got to tell Russia to chill out. And so that's why we're bringing this back to remind Putin, nobody forgot nothing. Chill out. Listen.

To the next picture. Interesting. Oh, there we go. So here's a cool city inside, uh, that's called Suzdal. Possad. Um, dedicated to Saint Sergius, as well as the oldest Orthodox, uh, city port in Russia. Saint Sergius, the patron saint of Russia. But I bring it up because of the toy making factory. Toy making. Oh, yeah. Ancient history of toy making. This reminds me, like, Willy Wonka movies they used to watch as a kid, and Pippi Longstocking, stuff like that. Oh, yeah. It says Old City Orthodox capital and toy making factories are there. And they should make these toys. One was called Matryoshka. Babushka's. Let's hit the next picture, because people might recognize these. The, the nesting dolls. Yeah. Hey, well, there's another prophecy with the nesting dolls as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Of course. These are all prophecies. Everything is pretty much about prophecy. My grandmother had like 10,000 of these things, and I never even thought twice about them. Oh, there's different ones. There's different, um, it was a surrogate had it for his kids, and they invented them. They're wooden toys, and they'll say they're invented 1800s. They go way back. This is some people will trace it back to Japan, they say, with the, what are they called? The dolls. But let's hit the next picture, because there's Babushkas, which are the mothers, because we talked about the Babas, you know? There's Baba Yaga, Baba Vanga, Babushka, the grandmothers, the wedding ones. They fit inside each other. And they have, let's say, the iconography has a story to tell if someone knew how to read it, who the characters are, because as they would take them out, you would notice, oh, kid had the Virgin Mother, the Jesus, and the John the Baptist, and then Hoover, who baptized. And so there's an interconnection. And the, the amount of dolls, how many dolls is there? Specific amounts of dolls, numbers. And the characters on the dolls as well. And then is there something in the, in the smallest dolls that a seed? It's called the seed doll. With the Babushka, the Baba being the biggest doll, the mother. But there is an occult reference to this stuff, if one just knows how to look. Oh, interesting. Oh, yeah. And there was a prophecy that came out about them, dates and times, um, like say, adding up certain Babushkas as months, and then other ones as days, and then the images on them telling a story. Cool. This is where we're going. Slavic. This is the [ __ ] objectives of old weird [ __ ] right? You know, I like these little dolls. Oh, no, they're awesome. You know, I just, you know, I never thought of them as anything other than dolls. It's all occulted stuff, right? You know? And even, even the temples, the way they were shaped, this architecture, and the word "Tsar" compared to "Kaiser," "Caesar." So the words, etymology, it's all interconnected. Just Slavic history and get the bad rap because of nationalism now, because of, uh, Soviet stuff, because Hitler, you know, they take things and twist it, you know? The Slavic peoples have gotten screwed. They're in the middle of the great plain, the most desirable places. They're surrounded by all these medium-sized empires that want them, right? It's like the entire Balkan region, right? This is where we even get that word "Balkanized," because like everywhere in Europe went in there and broke up all the countries, tried to divide them as among as many lines as possible so that they could just exploit them. And an entire area of Europe is is depressing, not not depressing culturally, but just depressing how the rest of Europe has treated them, you know, politically. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's true. That's so that's what we're trying to honor their culture and honor as a universal culture, as part of our universal brotherhood, you know? This is what we're all about. This is our culture. Everyone's culture. So let's go to the next picture. [Music]

So, yeah, they have this is part of, uh, they had a Pantheon of gods. And even at the Kievan Rus, that what was I think Vladimir, um, one of the princes had a Pantheon there in a temple. And they may change names if you're in Germany, or whether you're in Scythia, or Bulgaria, but it's the same, um, archetype gods. But the reason I want to show you, because there's also a tradition of the alabastron. Oh, um, we've talked about that in the past, medicating one of these things. You don't remember the alabastron is a medicated dildo that would be covered in, um, entheogenic oils and then inserted either into the vagina or the anus, because, you know, a lot of these medicines could not be taken other ways, you know? You couldn't ingest it. You know, they don't have needles to inject it, you know? So this is how you're getting it, yeah. Yeah. You know, imagine if you look into African culture, the African gods, Shango, Ogun, different ones. And you go to the Egypt, has a different ones. And you go to Hindu, and they got the different ones. Here, they got a whole bunch of little different ones. And each one is like a personality, archetype, or something in nature, anthropomorphic energy that we're ascribing to nature. But we notice there's only one female to the left, right? You know, they're like, you only get one female in the crew. That's what we were talking about earlier, of the female goddesses. There in the rest are male. But, but they had to have one female in the crew, obviously. Um, and so let's hit the next picture, because now we're talking about, uh, Raw, because he was, he's one of the guys there in the, in the picture. Um, and and that's the modern form of Slavic paganism is called Rodnoverie, based on Rod. Interesting. You know? And this is the Rod, Father, the All-Father. And behind him is the Three Fates, which is three women. It sounds like the Fates, doesn't it? Yeah. They consider him the All-Father. Some people, um, you would just put change his name if you went to a different culture, but this is the All-Father. This is the, the main dude. And so that's why they named the modern day religion after Rod. Cool. You know? And and you'll see when you look it up, he's, uh, the Slavic hero, you know? These stories. And there's also, they got a black and white god, they got a thunder god, Perun. Yeah, like those different alabastrons down there, the little statues, the little phalluses, you know? They're these different characters. Could ruin the thunder one. They had Rod was on there, the black, black one, the white one, which is like Yin and Yang combo, no? We see so many different guys. Like, I know, like Perun is really interesting because it's sort of analogous to the thunder god, right? To Thor. And when we look, you see this name all over all over Europe because there's Perun, then there's Perun-us in, um, and I think it's as you go further north and stuff. And then there's even like, I know some linguists have taken some of the epithets of Thor and have connected them to Perun as well. And there's even a connection there with the with the mushrooms, because oftentimes, right, you have a damp area that gets struck by lightning, what's gonna pop out of there? Mushrooms. And this was seen as the goddess uniting with the father god, you know, to produce their children. A lot of that speculation you get with Jesus Christ is a mushroom comes in because there are these earlier pagan traditions that do have this kind of symbolism, that are talking about that are encoding this kind of imagery. It's not just that imagery, but that imagery is clearly there.

Love it. Let's hit the next picture. So this is our Arkona Temple. Now we're jumping over to Germany, from the coast of Germany, like if you were to go up into the water and go up, it's not the Black Sea, but the Baltic. And on top would be Finnish, you know, like Denmark, Sweden, Norway. [Music] Which they have their myths are all interconnected. It's all very interconnected. So this city right here, Arkona, up until the 1200s, was a pagan stronghold and would not convert to Christianity. Wow. And it's on an island off the coast of Germany. Was an island where they had this pagan temple that different Slavic cultures and priests would come to make tribute there until one of the bishops were like, they saw it like, as like, you know, as an artist temple. They saw this is like, ah, this is the Slavic stronghold. And you said, up to the 1800s, they were holding out in different spots here. They were holding out demographically and geographically, physically, like doing the sacrifices, the rituals, the colors, while you had churches throughout Europe and bishops trying to go there to convert them at their pagan stronghold. Slavic pagan stronghold. I think I read about this. Didn't the Christians do a crusade and burn it all down? Wow. They tried. See, a lot of people don't know. The Crusades, a big part of the Crusades with the Teutonic Knights and all that kind of [ __ ]. Yeah. It was originally in Germany on the Rhine River. Um, we have Crusades though in Jerusalem, where they did kill a lot of Middle Eastern people. But, but they also did kill a lot of Europeans up and down the Germanic river system. Did not want to convert to this [ __ ]. They're like, they fought hard. They fought very hard. So they had to have Crusades just to convert them. It was like a literal war of the death. When we start to look into, like, a lot of the conversion stuff, because I know, like, when you go further north to Scandinavia, it's almost entirely non-violent, you know? It's almost, it's just a slow kind of conversion over centuries, as first the nobility, then everyone else. But in Germany, it's wildly different. Like, you remember we mentioned we have the Teutonic Knights, who actually took over this island of Arkona and they owned part, large parts of the Baltic Sea area until they got absorbed into Bohemia and then later became parts of Germany and other countries. But like, these Crusaders were going around and claiming fiefdoms for themselves in parts of Germany and parts of, you know, Scandinavia. It's kind of intense, yeah. And, and if you'd like to see, um, the remnant of that would be Polish culture. The Poles. See, people look at Poland now because of the war and stuff, they see it as a smaller, little country that was a thriving kingdom. They used to kick everyone's ass back in the day. The Poles were very, very tough people. Well, people forget that the Poles were also united with the Lithuanians, and at one point, they were one grand empire, like this, you know? And so the Poles are considered at the far end of the Slavs, right? You know? And, and a lot of this culture has just been disappeared, decimated through Soviet, through Hitler, through modern Christian culture. They all did a number on it. Because people are trying to bring it back, and there's even music groups, you know? I listen to, like, Sarmong Ensemble, Heilung. There's different groups that you could check out that do this, modern pagan, what do you call it? Neo-pagan music, rock and roll. Yeah. It's interesting because again, right? A lot of these people, they're not, we can't recreate the music directly, but they're trying to use instruments of that time, or they're taking ideas and myths, and they're incorporating into modern kind of sensibilities. I love it, you know? It's a real amazing way to revitalize, rather than it's not toxic, toxic nostalgia. You're revitalizing. You're bringing it into it, you know? And this is wild. We see a lot of this paganism in, like, I was reading before coming on here, that they're currently building a temple in Poland, like Catholic Poland. They're building a pagan temple. Okay? Like, that's wild. They have pagan temples in Russia, right? Orthodox. Crazy. Who knows how long they'll stay now? Going, but they do have some. Oh, yeah.

So let's hit the next picture. So now let's jump over to Scythia and let's talk about Amazons, which come up a lot. We talk about because people really don't, they think this is all just the Amazons, oh yeah, that's just some mythology [ __ ]. Nah, this is a real kick-ass women. Now, when it killed you, yeah, you know, riding up on a horse. That had the word "toxins" comes from the bow and arrow, from the arrow poisons that they had made with snakes and dead animals and different herbs. And they were, see, people don't know, in Slavic culture, men and women had sex at younger ages, and women were encouraged to learn battle. They did everything. They learned how to do it. Everything. It was equal. It was an equal thing. And then they would go into battle equally. And like a lot of modern anthropologists and archaeologists who are looking into these different horse cultures, especially the ancient horse cultures, what we're finding is a lot of matriarchal tribes, right? And this is a, like, this is a misconception that a lot of people have. It's, it's not a human universal for women to raise the children. It's just not. In many cultures, the men raise the children, and the men take on a more feminine role, or and then the women become the, uh, the warriors or the, the hunters, right? And this is what we see with many of these different groups. Now, the Amazons specifically are special because the Greeks kind of highlight them and talk about them a lot as being the most intense version of this, right? Being a strict matriarchy. And also where these women and these men are going at least by the Greek accounts, are transitioning. They're going through a physical biotransformation, you know, where they're ingesting these mare's milk for these women to become extraordinarily large, you know, and more masculine. And we know, like, we have archaeological evidence now where they've dug up these women. These women are buried with swords and fake beards, you know, and crowns, all like, all of the stuff you would associate with them with a masculine authority, but they're women. And we find far more women, even though you see the trappings of men, or what we would assume are the trappings of men. This is why it's so interesting. And then when we find the, you know, the biological male graves, these people are smaller, you know, and they're more feminine. And they've been doing the same kind of bio transformation. Hmm. Yeah. This is just, unfortunately, unfortunately, what archaeology and anthropology says, yeah, not what doctor history says, what the facts state, you know? And I know some of these women would cauterize one of their breasts, right? Yeah, yeah. This is, this is a different culture. And the steps up here with the with the cauterizing of the breast, I imagine that there's a ritual function there because we know women don't need to lop off their breasts to be good archers. Like, that's not necessary, right? They are doing this. Why are they doing it? It's like a symbol of strength and power, or something for sure. So you said symbol of strength and power. So let's hit the next picture.

All right. [Music] The spiral swastika. You know, the swastika has a very, uh, touchy subject too. Trigger warning. Trigger, trigger warning. Swastikas. We need to know fascist, Nazi [ __ ]. Swastika is the ancient Hopi, ancient symbol, with the Buddhists, ancient symbol, with Slavics, ancient symbol on the planet. We were talking about near human universals, right? Earlier. This is a symbol that we see the earliest hominids carving into things, you know? This is something that stays with us cross-culturally, especially within the Indo-Aryan peoples, you know? And I know, like, in the Indian tradition, the swastika, it has a dual meaning. It is, uh, once the symbol of the sun, okay? But it's also the symbol of time and the transformation of the seasons. It represents the four quadrants and that ever-spinning circle of Dharma, the Dharma wheel, right? It's all interconnected. And I imagine we see similar stuff here in the Slavic version. I know, like, on the fascist side, you see a lot of fascists even use this version now, which is sad. They call it. That's what I saw. Let's get these old Slavic swastikas, and then I saw modern movements, um, you know, taking this stuff, and it's like, and it's just what they do. It's what fascism does, you know? So that's why we've got to remind people that this stuff is not about that. This is universal symbols that deal with fertility, with the movements of the planets and the stars, the Earth. Um, keep going. It's a symbol of transformation, of change, of the seasons, of the sun, like that's natural, that's human, right? This has nothing to do with no race science or or hierarchies or oppression. Like, go, go get out of here with that crap. Yeah, yeah. Way into that [ __ ]. You know, that's all it is. Because, but we know it's [ __ ]. Mushrooms grow, and you should take one of those little caps, and maybe it'll open your mind. You might have some love for your brothers and sisters, you know? I always think about what Ammon says, every good fascist needs the mother. The mother will set him straight. Reconnect with the feminine. Getting a spanking. Your mama's got a spanky. So let's hit the next picture. [Music]

Speaking of the mother, now we're going to go to the mother. So in the Norse sagas, the word that we're going to talk about, yeah, um, we're going to talk about them in the weekend is really going to have the experts who will break it down, but

Um, this is the mother of the Nards. This is, uh, say Tanaya. Yes, how you pronounce that? Pronounce it for me. Yeah, you normally pronounce it like that. Just because I could. Um, she was a mother figure in the Slavic, uh, Pantheon. Okay, we're to the Nards, who are these different heroes and different mythologies that we'll, we'll talk about in different adventures they got into. The Nard sagas are their later texts, but they, they're a compilation of, of, of myths from around the Caucasus. So even though they're more modern, they are relating much older traditions, you know? And there's a lot of connection with the Scythians, you know? The Nard sagas are sort of our, our closest connection to them outside of what's written about by other cultures and the little bits of archaeological evidence we have.

Oh yeah, oh yeah. You know, let's hit, let's hit one more picture. You know, because it was hard to find, um, actual things doing with, I saw tonight. But this is a statue in Syria, Levantine, right there next to Israel. Um, because there was a Circassian tribe that was being genocided. It took refuge down there, they said in Syria, and set up a Circassian, um, stronghold, which was obviously persecuted by different, um, folks over the years, Muslims, what have you. But and they tried to go back to, uh, like a Slavic Russian area, but they had the tongue, Circassian, and they still, they made a big statue in the middle of their, their area for Satanaya, the fertility goddess. That's amazing. The mother, the red and white mother. That's so cool. And you know what? I honestly believe that there is a connection, which is what's so wild about Syria. Everyone should go out and read the Syrian Goddess by Lucan, which talks about, uh, Babylon and the cult of Cybele and this mother goddess figure that's coming out of Syria, right? It's kind of wild that these people took refuge in Syria of all places, you know, which is the home of the oldest traditions of the mother cult, you know, at least in that area of the world. And they have their statue there. Intel, um, love it. And they were doing the, the rituals.

And so now we're going to talk about, uh, we're gonna bring it home. Let's go to the next picture. We got one more picture. Let me wrap this up because we value your guys's time, you know? Throughout the different parts of the year, they have different festivals. Winter festivals, summer solstice festival. They have a summer solstice festival, the Kupala festival, and that's, I think, on June 24th. It's around the solstice. Um, and they start doing these rituals. And there's movies, you know, there's movies you can go to like down to your Blockbuster, if they still exist, and rent you on a VHS one of these, uh, movies. No, but for reals, they got, uh, they're like Russian pagan horror movies. And you'll see people wearing robes and they're going back to nature with the maypoles and stuff. And, you know, crazy stuff happens. And this is a source for many movies, but it's true. They have these festivals where they have orgies and fertility rights are encouraged in nature. And they pick herbs, get drunk, and jump over the fires. You might see different images of them jumping over the fire. That's part of the Kupala festival. Amazing. That's so cool.

Oh yeah. So, um, I wish I could. I think one of the movies is Midsommar. I love that movie. It's more about, it's kind of a fake culture based off this, uh, oh yeah, it's definitely the imagery is there. And there's some wild stuff. At one point, they do like Caesar in his writings, he talks about, and a lot of people think it's all [ __ ] but he talks about the blood eagle, which is something that, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And spread them like wings. Yeah, they're putting your back. And that happens in Midsommar. Bloody terrifying. Midsommar to me is probably the best movie ever to show you how fascist indoctrination works and how cult indoctrination works. Like it is terrifying, terrifying. Oh yeah. I don't even think I saw the whole thing. I just remember like going, oh, whoa. So, you know.

And I just, I just wanted to add one last thing. We did get a message that says that, um, the statue you showed is actually not of Satanaya. It was actually a, a statue of, like, two and to educated women. But still, we, we're talking about the Circassian people in Syria. No, check it out. No, I, I thought that too. Type in Satanaya on Wikipedia and you'll see multiple images of that statue at, where is it? Their job, Syria. Because I was at first, because I was confused about that, I wanted to make sure. And that's part of the thing is that she's a patron for women. That's so interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So type in Wikipedia, go on there and change that. All right. Yeah, yeah. Go edit Wikipedia, people. But yeah, that's so cool. And like, we want to also highlight with this is that this, what's so interesting to me about about what's happening in these Slavic countries and where these, where all the Slavic peoples are, is this revitalization. You know, their culture was never eradicated, and they are bringing it back into the public, into the mainstream, you know? And that's beautiful. I think as long as they don't get nationalistic and racist, you know? Awesome. Well, yeah, guys, like, subscribe, comments, um, correct us on the correct statues, um, jump over the fire, anything. Have fun. We're just explorers. We're here to learn too. And if you guys have things to share, educate us. We want to be educated. This is what we're all about, learning and in and figuring this stuff out. So like, Gadion said, like and subscribe. And on Saturday, we're going to be doing part two of our deep dive into Mormonism. And then on Sunday, we're gonna have the return of Witch's Symposium, and we're going to be talking about Slavic magic again, more in depth. But this time, Wretch is going to be with us, and he is an expert to a certain degree in the Norse sagas. And we'll have Almond with us, who, as we know, is an expert in all things Scythian. So that's going to be a huge blast. So thank you guys so much. Any last words, Dion? Love it. All right, everyone. Peace, love, hail Satan. We'll see you next time. Take care.