One passage about Dazhbog comes from the
Hypatian Codex, a 15th-century compilation of several much older documents from the
Ipatiev Monastery in Russia. The complete passage, reconstructed from several manuscripts, translates as follows: [Then] began his reign Feosta (
Hephaestus), whom the
Egyptians called Svarog ... during his rule, from the heavens fell the smith's prongs and weapons were forged for the first time; before that, [all] fought with clubs and stones. Feosta also commanded the women that they should have only a single husband ... and that is why Egyptians called him Svarog ... After him ruled his son; his name was the Sun, and they called him Dazhbog ... Sun tsar, son of Svarog. That is Dazhbog. This is, in fact, a Slavic translation of an original Greek manuscript of Malalin from the 6th century. In the Greek text, the names of gods are
Hephaestus and
Helios. Apparently, the unknown
Rus translator tried to re-tell the entire story (set in Egypt) by replacing the names of classical deities with those that were better known to his readers. One can only hope that he indeed replaced the names of Greek gods with their fitting Slavic counterparts; however, at least one issue remains problematic: in all Slavic languages, the word for Sun,
Suntse, is of neutral or feminine gender, never masculine (however, there is an Old East Slavic epic character "Vladimir Beautiful Sun" or "Vladimir Bright Sun" (
ru) which has the same place as Arthur in English culture). Also, in
Baltic mythology, which is most akin to Slavic, Sun is a female deity,
Saule, while the Moon is a male one. The same pattern can be observed in the folklore of many Slavic nations, where the Sun is most often identified with mother or a bride, and Moon with father or husband, their children being the stars. Where exactly this leaves Dazhbog as a possible male solar deity of Slavic pantheon remains questionable. Furthermore, this passage has raised quite a few theories about family relations between Slavic gods. If we assume that indeed
Svarog was believed to be Dazhbog's father, the question arises of his relation with
Svarozhits, another deity who is mentioned as a god of fire and war in several other medieval documents describing the pagan beliefs of Slavs. Svarozhits is simply a diminutive of Svarog's name, i.e., "little Svarog", which implicates he was considered a child of Svarog.
Vyacheslav Ivanov and
Vladimir Toporov proposed a reconstruction of this mythical genealogy that Svarog, a deity of fire and forge similar to the Greek
Hephaestus, had two sons; Dazhbog, who represented the fire in the sky (i.e., the Sun), and Svarozhits, who symbolised the flame on earth, in the forge. Film director and controversial amateur mythologist
Franjo Ledić, on the other hand, assumed that Svarog and Dazhbog are the same god.
Relationship to Khors Many mythologists also believe Dazhbog to be identical with another East Slavic deity with possible solar attributes,
Khors.
Osip Maximovich Bodjanskij based this theory on the following passage from
Primary Chronicle: And Vladimir began his reign in Kiev alone and erected idols on the hill outside his palace with porch:
Perun of wood with a head of silver and moustache of gold and Khors Dazhbog and
Stribog and
Simargl and
Mokosh. The names Khors and Dazhbog are the only two not clearly separated by the word "and" in the text. It is possible this indicates a compound deity, Khors Dazhbog. On this basis, Toporov assumed that Khors could be an Iranian (possibly Sarmatian or Scythian) name for this god, and Dazhbog a Slavic one.
Boris Rybakov compared Khors and Dazhbog to
Helios and
Apollo, respectively, concluding that both of them were solar gods, but while Khors represented the Sun itself, Dazhbog, as
deus dator, rather symbolised the life-giving power of the Sun. That Khors was indeed a solar deity was deduced from the following passage in the ''Tale of Igor's Campaign'': Vseslav the prince judged men; as prince, he ruled towns; but at night he prowled in the guise of a wolf. From Kiev, prowling, he reached, before the cocks crew, Tmutorokan. The path of great Khors, as a wolf, prowling, he crossed. In other words, prince Vseslav reached
Tmutorokan before dawn, thus crossing the path of Khors, the Sun. In the mythical view of the world, the Sun has to pass through the underworld during the night to reach the eastern horizon by the dawn. This, and the fact that prince Vseslav is transformed into a wolf during the night, while "crossing the path of Khors", draws a parallel with the Serbian Dabog, who, as stated already, was believed to be a lame "wolf shepherd" who rules over the underworld. Of particular interest is the fact that Serbian folk accounts describe him as being lame; lameness was a standing attribute of Greek Hephaestus, whom, as we have seen, the Hypatian Codex compared with Slavic smith-god Svarog, father of Dazhbog. (In fact, most of Indo-European smith-gods were lame; the reason for this was most likely
arsenicosis, low levels of
arsenic poisoning, resulting in lameness and
skin cancers. Arsenic was added to
bronze to harden it, and most smiths of the
Bronze Age would have suffered from chronic workplace poisoning.) Serbian Dabog, being lord of the underworld, was also associated with precious metals, and sometimes was said to have a silver beard. Serbian scholar
Veselin Čajkanović concluded that the
chthonic character of Dabog in Serbian folklore fits very nicely with the solar Dazhbog mentioned in Old East Slavic sources, pointing out that in numerous mythologies, solar deities tend to have double aspects, one benevolent, associated with the Sun during the day, and the other malevolent, associated with night, when the Sun is trapped in the underworld. The fact that in the ''Tale of Igor's Campaign'', the Rus and their princes are being referred to as "Dazhbog's grandchildren", indicates that Dazhbog was considered as an ancestral deity, a common role of a culture hero archetype in mythologies. == In modern culture ==