Russia – Bone and Sickle

The Fates

By boneandsickle | July 9, 2025

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:48 — 57.0MB)

The Fates of Classical Antiquity not only survived in the form of related fairy-tale figures but also as the object of superstitions and rituals associated with newborns. In South Slavic and Balkan regions particularly, these customs represent a surprisingly long-lived and genuine case of pagan survival.

We begin our episode examining the fairy godmothers of “Sleeping Beauty” as embodiments of the Fates. Mrs. Karswell reads a few key passages from the definitive version of the story included in Charles Perrault’s 1697 collection, Histoires ou contes du temps passé (“stories of times gone by.”) We learn how the fairies fulfill the historical role of godparents at the newborn’s christening. We also note the peculiar emphasis on the quality of what’s set before the fairies at the christening banquet, observing how a failure there leads the wicked fairy to curse the Sleeping Beauty.

Czech illustration — 1874 illustration by František Doucha for a Czech edition of Sleeping Beauty

We then explore antecedents to Perrault’s tale, beginning with the 14th-century French chivalric romance, Perceforest. A peripheral story in this 8-volume work is that of Troylus and Zeelandine, in which the role of Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmothers are played by Greek and Roman deities, with Venus as supporter of Princess Zeelandine (and her suitor Troylus) and Themis cursing Zeelandine to sleep in a manner similar to Perrault’s princess. A failure to correctly lay out Themis’ required items at the christening banquet is again again responsible for the curse, though the awakening of Zeelandine by Troylus awakens is surprisingly different and a notorious example of medieval bawdiness.

Preceding Perceforest, there was the late 13th-century French historical romance Huon of Bordeaux, in which we hear of the newborn fairy king Oberon being both cursed and blessed by fairies attending his birth. From around the same time, French poet and composer Adam de la Halle’s Play of the Bower describes a banquet at which fairy guests pronounce a curses and blessings on those in attendance prompted again by their pleasure or displeasure at what’s set before them at a banquet. We also hear of the Danish King King Fridlevus (Fridlef II) bringing his newborn son to a temple of “three maidens” to ascertain the destiny pf the child in Gesta Danorum (“Deeds of the Danes”).written around 1200 by Saxo Grammaticus. And lest listeners think such appeals to the Fates were strictly a literary motif, we hear Burchard of Worms, in his early-11th-century Decretum, condemning the not uncommon among the Germans of his region of setting up offering tables for the Fates. By this point, the connection between how fairy godmother types are served at a banquet and offerings made to the Fates to ensure a cild’s fortune should be clear.

We then turn back to the Greek Fates, the Moirai (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) and the Roman Parcae (Nona, Decuma, and Morta). Particularly in the case of the Parcae, we hear examples of their connection to the newborn’s destiny in the celebration nine or ten days after the birth of the dies lustricus, during which offerings were made to the Fates.

The Three Fates by Bernardo Strozzi, late 17th c

We make a brief side-trip to discuss the Norns (Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld), the Germanic equivalent of the Fates. These are more distant cousins, not strongly associated with the newborn and his destiny, though we do hear a passage from the Poetic Edda, in which the Norns are present birth of the hero Helgi. We also hear a gruesome passage from the 13th-century Njáls Saga, in which the Valkyries weave out the fate of those who will die in the Battle of Clontarf.

The Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Fates, the Wyrds, are also discussed, and we hear how the witches in Macbeth partook in this identity as the “Weird Sisters,” an association Shakespeare inherited from his source material, the 1587 history of Great Britain, known as Holinshed’s Chronicles.

We then turn our attention the Fates in Slavic and Balkan lands — the Rozhanitsy in Russia and Ukraine, the Sudičky among West Slavs, the Orisnici in Bulgaria, and the Ursitoare in Romania. As these customs survived into more recent times, there is a vast body of folklore to describe — much of it revolving around the setting up of offering tables and the communication of newborn’s destiny through dreams sent to mothers and midwives and confirmed by marks (visible or invisible) left upon the infant during their nocturnal visits on the third night after birth.

We also enjoy a couple entertaining folktales about Romania’s Ursitoare collected in the early years of the 20th century by folklorist Tudor Pamfile.

While such customs have since died out in Greece, customs related to the Moirai preserved into the early 20th century, as we hear in passages of John Lawson’s Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals, written in 1900.

We end with a brief look at christening parties in modern Romania, at which costumed Ursitoare play an increasingly major role, this paired with an introduction to the popular song “Ursitoare, Ursitoare.”

Romanian Fates attend a christening party. Ursitoare show by FormatiiNunta

Subterranean Sages and Russian Mystics

By boneandsickle | August 7, 2024

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:59 — 74.4MB)

Agartha, Shambhala, and Hyperborea are all names for a a mythic spiritually and scientifically advanced kingdom, always in some hidden location, sometimes within the earth, a legend which became an obsession of early Soviet spies, a mad soldier of fortune, and a mystical Russian artist during the 1920s.

We begin with a clip from the 1939 German documentary, Secret Tibet, which records the activities of visiting Nazi researchers in that country. While we can’t establish to what extent the expedition focused on Third Reich mythology connecting their Nordic Aryan with South and East Asia cultures, we examine other efforts by the Reich’s department of Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage) to make such connections. Alongside this, we look at some 19th-century precedents associating an ancient, primal race with both the far north and Vedic culture of the subcontinent. We also examine the classical concept of Thule (a far-north Neverland) appropriated by the pre-Reich Thule Society.

We next look have a brief look at 1871 book by French writer Louis Jacolliot, The Son of God, which introduces the name “Agartha,” (and its many forms) to designate an underground city or land serving as a repository of ancient wisdom. Jacolliot places this land in the East and associates it with a sort of universalized Vedic culture.

It’s Alexandre Saint-Yves’ 1886 book The Mission of India in Europe, that really defines Agartha as its come to be understood, placing it underground, in the East, and probably within the Himalayas. His fascination with the topic probably was inspired by his Sanskrit tutor, a mysterious Afghan, who called himself Hardjji Scharipf, and claimed to be “of the Great Agartthian School.” Scharipf, however, had little to do with the specific content of Saint-Yves’s book, which in part reads like Hollow Earth fiction of our previous episode. Mrs. Karswell reads for us some fantastical passages from his text.

The majority of Saint-Yves’s work, however, is devoted to the ruling principle of this hidden kingdom, something he calls “Synarchy,” (from Greek words for “together” and “rule.” Fearing the West’s descent into anarchy (Synarchy’s opposite) and its inability to receive the “Synarchic radiations” of Agartha, he calls upon the East to unify with Europe and guide the world toward a Synarchic utopia (the titular “Mission of India to Europe”). Saint-Yves is particularly concerned with Britain and Russia’s competition for the lands of Central Asia, an area poised to become the hypothetical capital of a united East and West.

This brings us Russia or the competing Red and White armies of the Russian Civil war fighting in this region.The Polish writer, Ferdynand Ossendowski, who served with the White Guard in this setting documents these conflicts in his 1922 best-seller, Beasts, Men, and Gods. Ossendowski not only mentions encountering the local myth of Shambhala (Tibetan Buddhism’s equivalent of Agartha). but also relates tales of Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg, a German cavalry officer loosely allied with the Whites, but fighting not so much for the Tsars as for Mongolia’s Bogd Khan, third highest lama of Tibetan Buddhist, whom Ungern imagines rebuilding the empire of Genghis Khan. Ossendowski describes the Baron’s use of Tibetan legends, including that of the King of Shambhala, to promote this cause. He also describes some of the German’s more perversely brutal ways, which earned him the moniker, “the Bloody Baron” which we naturally share.

Baron Ungern von Sternberg, painting by Dimitri Shmarin.

Next we come to a figure who represents a sort of nexus of all we’ve discussed — a Russian occultist and mythographer, Aleksandr Barchenko. We hear a bit about his early life, involving extracurricular ESP experiments, lecturing sailors of the St. Petersburg fleet on Shambhala, and his meeting with the occult-minded chief of the Secret Police, Gleb Bokii, who is attracted by Barchenko’s talk of an ancient body of knowledge that might be mined for new techniques of psychic control, surveillance, or manipulation.

While Barchenko was denied funding he sought for an expedition to locate Shambhala, Bokii sent him to investigate a phenomenon with of possible supernatural import on the far northern Kola Peninsula. There he was study a collective outbreak among the Sámi people of a trance-like state peculiar to Artic regions, known locally as “menerik” and elsewhere as, “the Call of the as North Star.” We hear some details of this bizarre condition and of Barchenko’s alleged discovery of vestiges of ancient Hyperborean culture on the Peninsula. We also hear of his search among the people of the Altai Mountains for legends related to Shambhala.

The last Russian Shambhala-enthusiast discussed is Nicholas Roerich, an artist and writer best known for his paintings of glowing Himalayan landscapes and spiritually charged scenes from Asian and Russian mythology. Along with his wife, Helena, a psychic in communication with Theosophy’s “Hidden Masters,” Roerich hatched a scheme he promoted (unsuccessfully) to Soviet officials, a “Great Plan” for uniting East and West, in which the mythical King of Shambhala (or the Last Buddha, the Maitreya) were to play a key roles. We hear tales of Shambhala collected during Roerich’s travels through the Himalayas and of a physical token allegedly from that kingdom, the Chintamani stone. Details are provided of stone’s mysterious delivery to a Paris hotel where the couple was staying in 1923, its role in developing Roerich’s status among his following, and the not entirely convincing evidence presented in support of the tale.

We end with some audio from the Hollow Earth itself, from a Tibetan cave — so says the Russian YouTube account, along with a collage of sonic anomalies collected under the the title, “The Earth Groans,” and (strangest of all) sounds that seemed to issue from within a Chinese mountain in Guizhou Province in July of 2020.