Jarilo
Slavic · deity · mythic · Recorded classification
The weight on this record is medium and not high, and the reason is stated rather than hidden: there is no medieval text that tells this story. It is assembled in the twentieth century out of Croatian, Serbian and Russian spring songs by Katičić and Belaj, and what it reconstructs is a Common Slavic myth nobody wrote down. That is worth having in the registry — it is the single most developed reconstruction Slavic studies has produced — but it is worth having labelled. The registry's prior state was worse in both directions: it held Marzanna with no husband to murder, and it held the reconstructed abstractions Belobog and Chernobog with no label at all.
Domains
- vegetation and spring
- agrarian fertility
Relations
- consort of: MarzannaRecorded with a non-symmetric kind on purpose. The marriage is the centre of the reconstruction and it lasts one season; recording it as a standing spouse edge would state something the cycle contradicts every autumn.Reference treatment of the solstice marriage of Jarilo and Morana, whose union assures abundance and fertility. (secondary)
- killed by: MarzannaThe registry already held the killer. It did not hold the person killed, which is the whole reason her winter means anything.Reference treatment: Jarilo was unfaithful after the marriage, Morana killed him for it, and in doing so became the goddess of winter. (secondary)
- reconstructed son of: PerunThe kind says 'reconstructed' because that is the evidential status of it. No medieval source names Jarilo's father; the filiation is inferred from comparative folk-song material by twentieth-century scholars. It is not entered in parentIds, because parentIds is where this corpus records descent it is prepared to assert.Reference treatment of the Katičić and Belaj reconstruction, in which Jarilo is the son of the thunder god, stolen on the night of his birth and raised in the underworld. (secondary)
- reconstructed fosterling of: VelesSame status, same reason, and the same refusal to write it into parentIds.Reference treatment of the same reconstruction, in which the newborn is taken to the underworld and raised by the god who took him. (secondary)
Sources
- Jarilo is a Slavic vegetation and fertility god of the spring, reconstructed by Katičić and Belaj as a life-death-rebirth deity who marries Morana at midsummer, betrays her, and is killed by her at harvest, beginning the cycle of the seasons.: Reference treatments of Jarilo, of the Katičić and Belaj reconstruction, and of the Jarilo–Morana seasonal myth. (secondary)