Zharnikova S.V. Who are we in this old Europe?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

… in North Russian dialects, words often carry a more archaic meaning than the one that was preserved in a modified and polished form in the sacred language of the priests of Ancient India.

In North Russian, gayat is to clean, handle well, and in Sanskrit, gaya is a house, farm, family.

In Vologda dialects, a card is a pattern woven on a rug, and in Sanskrit, cards are spinning, cutting, separating. The word prastava, that is, a woven ornamental or embroidered strip that adorns the hem of shirts, the ends of towels and generally decorates clothes, in Sanskrit means - a song of praise: after all, in the hymns of the Rig Veda, sacred speech is constantly associated with an ornament of fabric, and the poetic creativity of sages is compared with weaving - "Hymn fabric", "hymn weaving" and so on.

Probably, it is in the North Russian dialects that one should look for an explanation of how the ritual drunken drink of catfish was prepared. In the texts of the Rig Veda, a certain "sacrificial straw" is constantly mentioned, which is necessary for the preparation of soma:

“With the bucket raised, spreading

Sacrificial straw when sacrificing during a beautiful rite, I turn (her so that she gives) more room to the gods. ..

or

“On the sacrificial straw of this man

Squeezed soma for the sacrifice of (this) day, A hymn is pronounced and (drunk) an intoxicating drink."

Catfish, as you know, were mixed with milk and honey.

But it was in the Vologda Oblast that a device made of straw folded in the form of a grate for filtering beer was used. Therefore, the mysterious drink of the gods was not an infusion of ephedra or fly agarics, not milk vodka, as a number of researchers suggest, but, apparently, beer, the secrets of the preparation of which are still kept secret in the remote corners of the Russian North. So, old-timers say that earlier beer (and now vodka) was boiled with milk and honey and received a hoppy drink with amazing properties.

But these amazing words can be heard not only in the villages of the Russian North. Here are two young and quite modern women in the courtyard of a Vologda house, and, probably, discussing the third, one of them says: “Divya has her to walk in a hole, a man earns that kind of money.” What is this strange word - divya? It turns out that it literally means the following - good, easy, amazing. There is also the word divye - a miracle, the net is amazing. And in Sanskrit? Quite right, divya means amazing, beautiful, wonderful, heavenly, magnificent.

Or one more city conversation: “Such puddles in the courtyard, the water pipe burst. So she kicked and broke her hand. Apparently, the loser in question fell into the water. Returning again to Sanskrit, we note that there is a kulya or kula - a stream, a river. But there are rivers with this name in the Russian North: Kula, Kuloi, Kulat, Kulom and so on. And besides them, there are also a lot of rivers, lakes and settlements, the names of which can be explained by referring to Sanskrit. The volume of the journal article does not allow us to present here the entire huge list, numbering thousands of titles, but here are some of them:

Stylized female Vologda embroidery of the 19th century (left).

Indian embroidery from the same time.

It is interesting that the names of many rivers - "sacred krinits", found in the ancient Indian epic "Mahabharata", are also in our Russian North. Let's list those that match literally: Alaka, Anga, Kaya, Kuizha, Kushevanda, Kailasa, Saraga.

But there are also the rivers Ganga, Gangreka, lakes Gango, Gangozero and many, many others.

Our contemporary, the outstanding Bulgarian linguist V. Georgiev noted the following very important circumstance: “Geographical names are the most important source for determining the ethnogenesis of a given area. In terms of sustainability, these names are not the same, the most stable are the names of rivers, especially the main ones. " But in order to preserve the names, it is necessary to preserve the continuity of the population passing on these names from generation to generation. Otherwise, new peoples come and call everything in their own way. So, in 1927 a team of geologists "discovered" the highest mountain of the Subpolar Urals. It was called by the local Komi population Narada-Iz, Iz - in Komi - a mountain, a rock, but what Narada means - no one could explain. And the geologists decided in honor of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution and, for clarity, to rename the mountain and call it Narodnaya. So it is now called in all gazetteers and on all maps. But the ancient Indian epic tells about the great sage and companion Narada, who lived in the North and transmitted the orders of the Gods to the people, and the requests of the people to the Gods.

The same idea was expressed back in the 1920s by the great Russian scientist Academician A. I. Sobolevsky in his article “Names of rivers and lakes in the Russian North”: “The starting point of my work is the assumption that two groups of names are related to each other and belong to the same language of the Indo-European family, which I for now, pending the search for a more suitable term, I call Scythian."

In the 60s of our century, the Swedish researcher G. Ehanson, analyzing the geographical names of the North of Europe (including the Russian North), came to the conclusion that they are based on some kind of Indo-Iranian language.

"So what's the matter and how did Sanskrit words and names get to the Russian North?" - you ask. The point is that they did not come from India to the Vologda, Arkhangelsk, Olonets, Novgorod, Kostroma, Tver and other Russian lands, but quite the opposite.

Note that the most recent event described in the epic "Mahabharata" is a grand battle between the peoples of the Pandavas and the Kauravas, which is believed to have occurred in 3102 BC. e. on Kurukshetra (Kursk field). It is from this event that traditional Indian chronology begins the countdown of the worst time cycle - Kaliyuga (or the time of the kingdom of the goddess of death Kali). But at the turn of the 3-4th millennium BC. e. There were no tribes who spoke Indo-European languages (and, of course, Sanskrit) on the Indian subcontinent yet, They came there much later. Then a natural question arises: where did they fight in 3102 BC? e., that is, five millennia ago?

At the beginning of our century, the outstanding Indian scientist Bal Gangadhar Tilak tried to answer this question by analyzing ancient texts in his book "The Arctic Homeland in the Vedas", which was published in 1903. In his opinion, the homeland of the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians (or, as they called themselves, the Aryans) was in the North of Europe, somewhere near the Arctic Circle. This is evidenced by the extant legends about the year, which is divided into a light and dark half, about the freezing Sea of Milk, above which the Northern Lights ("Blistavitsy") sparkle, about the constellations not only of the polar, but also of the polar latitudes circling on a long winter night around the Pole Star … Ancient texts talked about the spring melting of snow, about the never-setting summer sun, about mountains stretching from west to east and dividing rivers into flowing north (into the Sea of Milk) and flowing south (into the South Sea).

It was these mountains, declared by a number of scientists "mythical", that became a stumbling block for researchers who tried, following Tilak, to determine more specifically where the country described in the Vedas and "Mahabharata" was, as well as in the sacred book of the ancient Iranians "Avesta ". Unfortunately, Indologists rarely turn to Russian regional dialectological dictionaries, practically do not know Central Russian and even more so North Russian toponymy, do not analyze geographical maps and hardly look into the works of their colleagues from other fields of science: paleoclimatologists, paleobotanists, geomorphologists. Otherwise, they would have long ago drawn attention to the highlands, called Northern Uvals, which stretch from west to east, marked in light brown on the map of the European part of Russia. It is they who, connecting with the Timan Ridge, the Subpolar Urals in the east and the heights of Karelia in the west, create that arc of heights, which, as the ancient Aryans believed, divided their land into north and south. It was at these latitudes that Ptolemy (II century AD) placed Ripeyskne, the Hyperborean or Alaun mountains, analogous to the sacred mountains of Meru and Khara of Aryan antiquity. He wrote that “the Alaun Scythians live inside Sarmatia, they form a branch of the strong Sarmatians and are called Alaunians”. Here it makes sense to refer to the description of the landscapes of the Vologda province, made in 1890 by N. A. Ivanitsky: “The so-called Ural-Alaunskaya ridge stretches along the southern border of the province, capturing the Ustysolsky, Nikolsky, Totemsky, Vologda and Gryazovetsky districts. These are not mountains, but sloping hills or flat heights that serve as a watershed between the Dvina and Volga systems. " It must be assumed that the Vologda peasants, who called these hills (like their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers) the Alaun Mountains, for the most part, did not read Ptolemy and hardly suspected such an antiquity of this name. If researchers looking for the Aryan ancestral home and the sacred mountains of the Aryans turned to Ptolemy's "Geography", the works of North Russian local historians of the past and early centuries, or the works of modern geomorphologists, then many problems would have been removed long ago. So, one of the largest geomorphologists of our time, Yu. A. Meshcheryakov, called the Northern Uvaly "an anomaly of the Russian Plain" and emphasized that they are the main watershed of the basins of the northern and southern seas. Speaking about the fact that the higher uplands (Central Russian and Volga) give way to them the role of the main watershed boundary, he made the following conclusion: southern seas ". And exactly where the Northern Uvaly stretch from west to east, the names of rivers, lakes, villages and villages, explained only with the help of the sacred language of the Aryans - Sanskrit, have been preserved to the greatest extent to this day. It was here that the tradition of ancient geometric ornaments and subject compositions, the origins of which can be found in various archaeological cultures of Eurasia, persisted in the weaving and embroidery of Russian peasant women until the middle of the 20th century. And first of all, these are those ornaments, often very complex and difficult to implement, which were the hallmark of Aryan antiquity.

In the 2nd millennium BC. e. (and possibly a little earlier) came to northwestern India tribes of farmers and pastoralists, who call themselves "Aryans". But not all of them left. Some part, probably, still remained on the original territory.

In June 1993, we, a group of workers in science and culture of the Vologda region and our guests - a folklore group from India (West Bengal), sailed on a motor ship along the Sukhona River, from Vologda to Veliky Ustyug. The Indian team was led by two women with amazing names - Darwini (giver of light) and Vasanta (spring). The motor ship was slowly sailing along the beautiful northern river. We looked at flowering meadows, age-old pines, at village houses - two or three-storey mansions, at striped steep banks, at the quiet expanse of water, admired the captivating silence of the white northern nights. And together we were surprised how much we have in common. We, Russians, because our Indian guests can repeat after us the words of a popular pop song with practically no accent. They, Indians, are how familiar the names of rivers and villages sound. And then we looked at the ornaments together, made exactly in those places where our ship passed. It is difficult to describe the feeling that you experience when guests from a distant country, pointing to one or the other embroidery of the 19th - early 20th centuries of Vologda peasant women, vying with each other say: “This is in Orissa, and this is in Rajasthan, and it looks like what is happening in Bihar, and this is in Gujerat, and this is how we have it - in Bengal. It was joyful to feel the strong threads connecting us through the millennia with our distant common ancestors.

In 1914, Valery Bryusov wrote poems, which, apparently, will be confirmed by more than one scientific work.

There is no need for deceptive dreams

No need for beautiful utopias:

But Rock raises the question

Who are we in this old Europe?

Random guests? Horde, Coming from the Kama and the Ob, That always breathes with rage

Is everything ruining in senseless rage?

Or we are that great people

Whose name will not be forgotten

Whose speech still sings

Consonant with the chant of Sanskrit.

f. Science and Life, 1997, no. 5