Anthropogenic myths are a complex of myths of Slavic peoples about the origin, creation of man. The original pagan mythological narrative has not survived, and the established in folklore largely repeat the biblical myth of the creation of man. At the same time, reconstruction of Slavic mythology is possible.
Man from the earth In Southern Slavs, the folkloric view that the first people grew out of the earth like mushrooms has been preserved. The largest number of attestations, at least 13, come from northwestern Bulgaria, written down between 1988 and 1999, and one from Macedonia. An excerpt from an ethnographic record made in the village of Leskovets in 1989:
Adam and Eve once rose from mushrooms and created this world. From mushrooms, from the earth... They grew like mushrooms. And from these two mushrooms – one boy and one girl... And a nation began to grow... And from grandma Eve and grandpa Adam are these children. And the nation begins to grow: today, tomorrow and tomorrow – and grows... From mushrooms. That's what I heard, that from mushrooms, from the ground they germinated – a generation is formed forever.
Other excerpt:
... man was created from a mushroom. Two mushrooms grew. And one was a man and one was a woman, and then they created a generation. And they established a village between two mountains. The village was established and [...] world created. From generation to generation... They grew out of the ground, out of the bottom. Man – from mushroom. So our grandmother told us that man was created from mushrooms.
There are also variants that speak of the creation of giants, dwarves and humans. The first one comes from Bulgaria, and according to it, the first generation of humans were velikans (giants), who grew like mushrooms and became extinct; the second generation were pedyamazhe (dwarves), who had long beards and became extinct; then a third generation appeared, created by God, of medium height. A similar myth was attested to in Macedonia, where God ordered humans to appear, who grew out of the ground like mushrooms, and were velikans, but were exterminated by God. He then created dwarfs, span in height, beards in ell, but they also became extinct. Finally, he created modern humans, of average height. These accounts have been influenced by biblical anthropogony and contain additional elements to older messages.
A West Slavic account is the 1875 text Can God be Denied? by Jan Podlaha, a Czech writer and pastor from the village of Stálce near the town of Tábor, which was a polemic against the evolution proposed by Charles Darwin. Excerpt:
So where did man come from...? Did he grow out of the ground like a mushroom after a warm rain, or did he come out of the ground to the surface...? That couldn't have happened and certainly didn't happen, because even now people would have to grow out of the ground... Besides, if even the first humans could have grown, how could the forces of nature have known that man and woman would be needed for human reproduction, and that they would therefore throw man and woman out of the ground and give them the ability to reproduce? Even non-believers no longer believe that people will grow out of the ground.
Ethnographic sources from the 19th century make no mention of such accounts, so Podlaha did not rely on texts by ethnologists, but on colloquial knowledge, based on what was believed in the Czech province in the 19th century. According to Łuczyński, this is to be proved by the participle no longer, which suggests that the belief of growing out of the ground like a mushroom circulated among some of his parishioners until recently.
An East Slavic attestation of this myth can be found in an excerpt from the novel , by the 19th century Ukrainian writer . Excerpt:
– I'm the one, you say, who grew out of the ground like a mushroom, and you have a mother hmmm! – mother... And do the rest of the boys have a mother? – They have one too – replied the boy. [...] So he did, and believed that the pany grow out of the ground like mushrooms, but the people do not – they have some mother beforehand. And she takes them somewhere, so that the pany have someone to serve them.
Although this myth appears in literary fiction, it is of folk origin; Svydnytsky, in addition to being a writer, was also a folklorist and probably refers to an unknown folk tradition. According to Michał Łuczyński, the word pany here refers to Poles, and the text may be ridiculing, humorous or ironic, and depicts Poles as orphans, i.e., people without mothers, implying their inferior origin.
A possible Belarusian attestation is the legend of the origin of the Belarusians recorded in Latvia: "And the woods, and the grasses, and the animals, and the fish, and then there appeared also a man: did he come from somewhere, or did he grow up here".
According to Łuczyński, this anthropogenic myth is basic one and it existed in Proto-Slavs. The motif itself (A1234 in Motif-Index of Folk-Literature) widespread among various peoples of the world, and especially among Indo-Europeans, such as the Indo-Iranians, the Armenians, the Greeks (in Arcadia, Attica, ), the Pelasgians and the Germanic peoples. On the basis of other Indo-European attestations, Łuczyński concludes that the myth of mankind growing out of the earth is of Proto-Indo-European origin. Thus, he reconstructs the Proto-Indo-European semantics of "(first) man grows out of the earth," "people (are born) like plants (vegetables in the Greek tradition, rhubarb in the Persian tradition)". The Slavic variant would differ from other Indo-European traditions in that humans grew like mushrooms, not vegetables, indicating the forest environment in which the myth was transformed. He also reconstructs Slavic motifs as follows: humans rise from the earth → the first human couple → the first human couple lives in innocence → incest of brother and sister → offspring of the first parents, although not all of these motifs have been attested to in Slavic folklore.
The given names of the first people in Slavic mythology have not been preserved. For Proto-Indo-European mythology, the name *Ym̥Hós is reconstructed, which would give the Slavic male name Im, while the female partner would be called Ima ().
Man from the different parts of the world In the apocrypha The Story of God's Creation of Adam, the first man is described as having been created from eight parts of the world: flesh from earth, bones from stone, blood from sea, eyes from sun, thoughts from cloud, "light from light," breath from wind, heat from fire. The Dove Book tells a similar story: mind from Christ, thoughts from clouds, "world-people" from Adam, bones from stone, flesh from earth, blood from sea water. Such an apocryphal story is common among Russians and Bulgarians and has classical or Proto-Indo-European roots. According to the Proto-Indo-European myth, the world was created by the dismemberment of a divine anthropomorphic creature or bull.
Man from the sweat The earliest anthropogonic myth is contained in the record of the Primary Chronicle under the year 1071, where it is told by the rebellious volkhvs. The itself is dated to late 1073 – early 1074 or autumn of 1076. According to the Chronicle, the two volkhvs appeared at a time of bad harvests and famine, announcing to the people that they knew the causes of the disasters. After arriving at large settlements with administrative functions, pogosts, they performed special rituals. They claimed that the "best women" hide bread, honey, fish and furs. People would bring their sisters, wives and mothers to them, and the volkhvs would kill them by making an incision behind the shoulder and literally taking the desired supplies out of their bodies. So they gathered 300 people around them and headed down two rivers to Byelaazyorsk. In Byelaazyorsk there was a skirmish between the followers of the volkhvs and a detachment of Yan Vyshatich, a protégé of Prince Sviatoslav Yaroslavich, who was collecting tribute there. During the skirmish, a priest was killed in the detachment, and Yan Vyshatich ordered the capture of the volkhvs. Having captured the volkhvs, Yan tries to find out who they are and why they killed so many people. They replied that the result would be abundance, because those killed were hiding supplies, which the volkhvs wanted to demonstrate. Yan replies that this is a lie and that there is nothing in man but bones and veins, and that God created man from the earth. Volkhvs answer:
"We know how man was created". And he asked: "How?" The two of them said: "God was washing in a bathhouse, and he began to sweat, and he wiped himself with a cloth of herbs, and he threw it from heaven down to earth. And Satan began to argue with God about who would create man from it (the cloth). And the devil created man, but God put the soul in him. That is why, when a man dies, his body goes to earth and his soul to God". Yan said to them: "In truth you have been inveigled by a demon. Which god do you believe in?" They said: "In the Antichrist". And he asked them: "Where is he?" They answered: "He lives in the abyss". Yan said to them: "What god is that who lives in the abyss? That is a demon; God is in heaven seated on his throne, honoured by the angels, who are before Him in fear and are unable to gaze on Him [...]"
The chronicler's account goes directly back to the story of Yan Vyshatich. The rebellion is similar to the , described in the chronicle under the year 1024, when the volkhvs were confronted by "old " who "hold an abundance." Scholars suggest several possible sources for the depictions of the volkhvs: traditional paganism, Christian preaching transformed in the minds of the Rus' people, or the Bogomil heresy brought to Rus' from Bulgaria.