Triglav's third head rules Nav, the underworld of the dead, completing his triple dominion over all cosmic realms as described by medieval chroniclers of the Szczecin temple.
Veles rules Nav, the Slavic underworld beneath the roots of the World Tree — lord of the dead and keeper of chthonic wealth, he gathers the departed souls and guards the herds of the otherworld in the watery darkness below.
Rod created Nav, the underworld realm of the dead, as part of his primordial separation of existence into three vertical domains from the cosmic egg.
⚠ Rod's role as creator of the three-world cosmology is based on scholarly reconstruction. Primary sources mention Rod in connection with fate and birth but do not explicitly describe him creating Nav as a distinct realm.
The World Tree in Slavic cosmology connects three realms: Nav (the underworld of the dead), Prav (the heavenly realm of the gods), and Yav (the middle world of the living).
⚠ The three-world division (Prav-Yav-Nav) connected by a World Tree is a scholarly reconstruction. While the World Tree motif and the concept of nav' (the dead) are attested separately, their organization into this specific cosmological structure draws heavily on comparative Indo-European models.
In the Three Kingdoms fairy tale, Ivan Tsarevich descends through an opening in the earth to Nav, the underworld, where he battles Zmey and rescues captive princesses from the copper, silver, and gold kingdoms.
⚠ The underground kingdoms in the Three Kingdoms fairy tale are not explicitly named Nav in Afanasyev's text. The identification follows the standard scholarly mapping of fairy-tale underworld journeys onto the Slavic three-world cosmology.
Jarilo dies at the end of summer and descends to Nav, the underworld, only to be reborn each spring in a cycle of seasonal death and resurrection.
Each year during Rusalka Week, the drowned maidens rise from Nav through river and lake to walk among the living — the boundary between the underworld and the mortal world thins, and the restless dead dance in fields and forests until driven back beneath the waters.
Svyatogor's stone coffin seals him in the underworld, marking his descent into Nav. His death represents the ancient age passing into the realm of the dead as the human era begins.
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