Veles- Slavic GodDeity"God of Cattle"

The Oath and the Idol

In 907, Prince Oleg signed a treaty with Constantinople. The Primary Chronicle records that Rus' warriors swore by Perun, while the common people and merchants swore by Volos. The two gods divided the world between them: the warriors took the sky god, the merchants took the god of cattle and wealth below.

When Vladimir erected his pantheon of idols on the hill above Kiev in 980, Volos was not among them. His idol stood in the Podol, the low-lying commercial district along the Dnieper. The god of the depths kept his proper position: below the hill, near the water, among the merchants.

The Storm Chase

Veles coils at the roots of the world tree. Perun sits at its crown. Between them runs the oldest story in Slavic religion.

Veles steals from Perun: his cattle, or the waters that make the rain fall. He flees through the world, hiding in trees, in houses, among people. Perun pursues him with thunderbolts, striking each hiding place until Veles is driven back into the primordial waters.

When lightning hit a tree, Slavic people knew Perun was attacking Veles concealed within it. When it struck water, the thunder god was driving his enemy beneath the surface. Those killed by lightning were collateral: Veles had hidden behind them. Every thunderstorm replayed the chase.

The rain that follows is the release of the stolen waters. Without Veles's thefts, no storms. Without storms, no rain. The earth would dry and die.

Veles's Grandson

The opening of the Tale of Igor's Campaign invokes Boyan, "the prophetic bard," who is called "Veles's grandson." His fingers move across the strings like wolves across the plain. The medieval poet names no other god in this way.

Veles rules Nav, the realm of the dead beneath the roots of the world tree. Souls cross a river to reach it. Nav is not a place of punishment but of rest and accumulated knowledge. The dead know what the living cannot. Boyan's gift of prophetic song comes from there: he draws from the depths of Nav to give voice to heroic memory.

Veles's Beard

In Russian and Belarusian peasant practice, reapers left the last sheaf of grain in the field "for Veles's beard." They twisted the final stalks together and bent them toward the earth, dedicating the harvest's end to the god below. Cattle were his animals. In the early Slavic world, the word for cattle (skot) came to mean wealth.

After Christianization, Saint Blaise (Vlasiy in Russian) inherited Veles's role as protector of livestock. The saint's name echoed the god's. His feast day, February 11, was marked by customs that bear no connection to the historical martyr: blessing cattle, communal dairy feasting. The practices were older than the church calendar.