Als der Herrgott, der Satan und Sankt Petrus mit der Schöpfung beschäftigt waren

Orosz, György (2009) Als der Herrgott, der Satan und Sankt Petrus mit der Schöpfung beschäftigt waren. Studia Slavica, 54 (2). pp. 383-405. ISSN 0039-3363

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Abstract

In this paper I focus on dualistic creation stories, but without an attempt at an all-European overview. The analysis is confined to Swedish, Hungarian and Russian cultures, and references are made to various genres of literary fiction, folk legends, religious folk epic songs and annals. In the background of these examples the religious ideology of medieval bogomilism can be traced. “The Legend of Småland”, a chapter in Selma Lagerlöf’s children’s novel “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils”, draws on a dualistic cosmogonic myth of apocryphal traditions. This myth represents a modified variant of an etiological, dualistic belief. Satan is replaced by Saint Peter, who is believed to have created the mountains, which are symbolic of chaos, in the plain called Småland. In contrast, the plain was created by God. In the mythological view of the world, the plain is symbolic of the world of order, i.e. cosmos. The motif of soil or sand brought up from the bottom of the sea as well as the cooperation of the Creator and his Demiurge in the creation myth may be part of the ancient heritage in Hungarian mythology, or the motifs of the dualistic creation myth may have been borrowed later in the new homeland from nearby or distant neighbours whose tradition had been deeply affected by bogomilism. In the Russian Primary Chronicle, at the year 1071, an apocryphal story can be read in which magicians (‘volchvy’) present their ideas concerning the creation of man in accordance with the dualistic concept of Bogomils. The human body was created by Satan, from a bunch of straw hurled down from Heaven by God, and it was God who placed the soul in the body. Certain textual variants of “The Book of the Depths” (‘Golubinaja kniga’), a Russian religious folk epic, describe the single combat between Truth (‘Pravda’) and Falsehood (‘Krivda’). This combat can be interpreted, although indirectly, as the Bogomil tenet of the fight between Logos (Jesus) and Satan.

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