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There is no doubt that the Judeo-Christian creation myth, in its canonical and various apocryphal forms, provided rich material for speculative thinking and fantasy among the Slavic peoples when they began to convert to Christianity in the ninth century A.D. The Slavic folklore tradition is rich in oral narratives about the creation of the world and its inhabitants. Frequently referred to as 'cosmogonie legends', they can be called myths, applying William Bascom's definition of the myth as a prose narrative accepted as a true account of events that occurred in the remote past: "Myths account for the origin of the world, of mankind, of death, or for characteristics of birds, animals, geographical features, and the phenomena of nature" (1965,4). The following discussion concerns Slavic myths about the creation of the world, or those episodes of mythical narratives that explain how the earth came to be.
In the folklore of peoples who have converted to Christianity, the account of the creation in Genesis is often transformed and creatively reinterpreted. Many Slavic creation myths include elements that clearly deviate from standard Christian doctrine, and must derive from a different source, or antedate the Slavs' conversion to Christianity. They represent the creation of the world as a kind of cooperation or competition between God and the devil, and many East Slavic and some South Slavic myths include an episode of diving into a primeval ocean for earth to create the world. Because of the rivalry or opposition between God and the devil, scholars often describe these narratives as 'dualistic'. In addition to these prose myths, a narrative about the creation of the world is found in a few Christmas carols from Galicia (Western Ukraine). In these songs, the creation is most often the work of birds who dive into the sea.
Students and scholars of anthropology and folklore will recognize this myth, in which sand or soil is brought up from the bottom of a primeval ocean to create the earth, as the widespread Earth Diver myth (Mot. A 812)'. The Baltic, FinnoUgric, Slavic and other peoples of Eastern Europe represent the western edge of the geographic distribution of this myth: beyond Eastern Europe and Russia, it is found across Siberia, in South and Southeast Asia, and in...