The main Moscow Archive contains the relatively famous MS 902/2468. It is famous because it is about the only source that mentions Svarog as, possibly, an eastern Slav Deity. That mention is inside the glosses to the Chronicle of John Malalas which the codex contains (about the Slavs in Malalas’ Chronicle you can read here). The translation of that chronicle also contains a mention of Lithuanian Gods dated to about/circa 1261 (according to Obolinsky). This was observed by Prince Obolinsky, then published by Dobryanskiy (from another Malalas codex – from Vilnius), then by Wolter, by Dauksza, by Theobald von Rothkirch and then by Antoni Mierzynski in his 1892/1896 fundamental “Sources of Lithuanian Mythology” (in Polish) (Mythologiae Lituanicae Monumenta).
Several curious things are presented here:
- a rationalizing story explaining why cremation was the preferred funerary rite among the pagans, that is the “Soviic” nation, including the Lithuanians and other pagans of the time
- the name Eant(as), which could be connected with Antenor or the Antes/Antoi – along with a Hellene connection that brings back the memories of Herodotus’ Budini/Geloni stories
- the very name “Sovii” from which one may be able to derive the Sovianie or Suovianie, that is the Slavs
Here is what that text contains:
“Sovii was a man. Having caught a boar he took out of him nine spleens and gave to those he had begotten to eat. And when they had eaten this, he grew angry with them. He was eager to enter the underworld; he went through eight gates, the ninth he could not cross but he reached his goal with the help of his begotten, that is his son. And when his brothers spoke against him, he left them and went to look for the father and came to the underworld.”
“And having eaten supper with his father, he made a bed for the father and buried him in the ground. The next day when the father got up, the son asked him how comfortable had his rest been. And he, sighing ‘oh’, said ‘the worms and lizards gnawed at me.’ In the same manner, the next day, the son cooked supper for the father and put him in a wooden coffin instead. The next day, again, the son asked the father and this answered that bees and mosquitos kept biting him ‘oh, how difficult it was to rest.’ So also on the third day, having put together a great pyre, the son tossed the father onto the fire. The next day he asked him whether he had slept well and the father replied: ‘I slept like a baby in a cradle.'”
“Oh what a great and devilish delusion he brought to the Lithuanians and Yatvingians and Prusssians and Estonians and Livonians and to many other nations who call themselves the Sovici believing that Soviia was a guide for their souls to reach the underground. And he lived during the times of Abimelech and they till this day bury their dead bodies on funeral pyres much as Achilles and Eant(as) [Antenor?] and other such Hellenes.””
“And this error he established among them such that they bring offering to terrible Deities to Andaeva [Andajus] and Perkun, that is, to thunder (grom), and to Zvorun, that is the bitch, and to Teliavelis, the smith who forged the Sun which shines on the Earth and tossed the Sun into the heavens.”
“This unsightly delusion came to them from the Hellenes. And there are 3446 years from the time of Abimelech and the populous brood of the despicable Sovii to the year in which we began to write these here books.”
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