Ilya's Day

The God of Thunder Lives On

The ancient Slavs worshiped many gods, but perhaps the most revered was Perun, god of thunder and lightning. When Prince Vladimir came to power in Kiev in 980 he decided that all the gods worshiped by his subjects should “support” him. He erected statues of them outside his palace that overlooked the Dnieper. Among them was a wooden statue of the thundering Perun, with hair of silver and whiskers of gold.

Eight years later, Vladimir adopted Christianity. According to the Primary Chronicle, he immediately ordered that all these “idols” be cast into the Dnieper. Perun was, furthermore, to be thrashed, “not because [Vladimir] thought the wood could feel anything, but to desecrate the demon who had deceived men in this guise.”

But the people were in no hurry to forget this ancient god. For many years a phenomenon that scholars have labeled dvoyeveriye (dual faith) existed in Rus, whereby professed Christians continued to perform many pagan rites and worship pagan gods.

Nevertheless, Perun was gradually forgotten. Or was he?

For centuries, in villages all across Russia, July 20 (Old Style) and August 2 (New Style) was one of the most important religious holidays: Ilya’s Day, the feast day of St. Ilya (the Prophet Elijah). Rus held this stern and implacable Old Testament prophet in particular esteem.

Who was St. Ilya? What was the system of beliefs about him passed down from generation to generation of Russian villager? It turns out that God brought Ilya from earth to heaven while he was still alive and he now rode across the skies in a chariot of fire. This chariot generates a terrible rumble, which is why the skies are so full of thunder around Ilya’s Day in early August. Why is there no thunder in winter? Apparently this is because in winter Ilya rides around on a sled, which isn’t nearly as noisy.

Ilya is able to summon rain and thunder and generally has amazing powers. In some areas it is believed, for example, that God tied one of his arms behind his back, because if he was able to use both he would destroy the entire world. Ilya, it was also prophesied, would make an appearance on Earth just before the Apocalypse.

Such a fierce and terrifying saint was regarded with a mixture of fear and respect, just as thunderstorms, capable of producing lightning that can burn down an entire village, were feared and respected. Preparations for St. Ilya’s Day were taken seriously: baking for the feast day began as much as a week in advance. As the day approached, people stopped working completely to avoid angering the fearsome saint/god. Heaven forbid that some peasant should feel compelled to go out into the fields to urgently harvest a crop. His fellow villagers would intervene to stop such foolhardiness, unharnessing his horse and maybe even giving him a thrashing for putting the entire village at risk. The threat of lightning strikes was considered to be particularly great around St. Ilya’s Day.

The day itself started with a visit to church, but from there events took a decidedly un-Christian turn. Ilya, apparently, merits the sacrifice of an animal, and not just any animal, a bull. The peasants of one or sometimes multiple villages would then gather for a grand feast. After the bull had been consumed, the dancing began, often including khorovody, where people formed a ring of dancing and singing.

What was going on here? The animal sacrifice was, of course, a holdover from ancient ritual. Furthermore, all around the world pagan sacrifices of bulls were always associated with the god of thunder – with Zeus, who liked to take the form of a bull, with Jupiter, with Indra. The thunder-wielding Perun was also variously associated with the bull in Slavic mythology. Apparently, over the centuries the line between Perun and Ilya had blurred. The nineteenth-century Russian peasants sacrificing bulls to St. Ilya may never have heard of Perun, but they were performing essentially the same rite as their pagan forebears centuries earlier. And the khorovody that were part of the celebration were also not just a simple expression of gaiety. Even if some of this practice’s former significance was long forgotten, by joining hands and forming a circle, modern peasants were perpetuating an ancient, mystical form of worship.

Ilya was capable of sending bolts of lightning down on a village, or he could refrain from doing so; he could flood the fields with rain or wait until the harvest was gathered. Such power had to be revered and appeased. Furthermore, to some extent Ilya was responsible for determining when summer would end and fall would begin. “Ilya ends the summer,” they used to say in Rus. There was also a saying “Peter and Paul [whose feast day was July 12] dwindled the hour; Ilya the Prophet stole an hour away.”

The change from one season to another was important, since such transitions create little cracks in time into which evil spirits can slip. Why do all spirits appear at midnight? Because that was when one day ended and another began. Why do people tell fortunes and commune with their ancestors around the end of December and beginning of January? Because that time marks the end of one solar year and the beginning of another, creating an opening through which otherworldly forces can move. The end of summer and beginning of fall also produces the same sort of crack in time.

The beginning of August is usually hot and sultry; the nights are not very long, but they are dark, now that early summer’s midnight dusk has passed. The night before Ilya’s Day was always called sparrow’s or rowanberry’s night. Thunderstorms often rock the sky on the eve of Ilya’s Day, and flashes of light can be seen in the distance. It is a time when all sorts of evil forces were believed to emerge from hell – no wonder the thunder was so loud! Of course, these demons and spirits did not manage to cavort long on earth, since the saint cast flaming arrows down at them and, to avoid his wrath, they transformed themselves into dogs, cats, and other animals.

What a strange and menacing saint the people of Rus revered – and not only the people of Rus, but many nationalities across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Who was this saint really? Was he Elijah the Prophet or was he the ancient Perun, whom Vladimir thought could be gotten rid of by casting him in the river?

So it is that this holiday is cloaked in an aura of primeval ritual and beliefs that existed long before Vladimir appeared to Christianize the eastern Slavs. Distant antiquity is supposedly a thing of the past, but who knows? There are probably still people who believe that Ilya the Prophet rides across the sky in his flaming chariot.