The Dagley Dagley Daily

By Janet Dagley Dagley
Covering the world from the waterfront in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

ISSN 1544-9114

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Two brothers, an alphabet, a mountain, a church, and a god (or two)

Still feel like celebrating even though the Fourth of July holiday is over? No problem. Today and tomorrow are holidays in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, so party on in good conscience. Today's honorees, Saints Cyril and Methodius, may not have been the partying kind, but they do have a connection to the ancient pagan god Radegast, credited by many legends with inventing the very concept of partying.

Cyril and Methodius, or Constantine and Michael as their parents called them, are almost always mentioned in the same breath. Numerous churches and schools and even an order of nuns are named after the two brothers; hardly anything is named after either alone. The notable exception is the Cyrillic alphabet, named after Cyril even though Methodius probably had more to do with its development, used in many Slavonic languages including Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Moldovan.

Born in the Greek town of Salonika (now known as Thessaloniki) in the early 9th Century, both were called to religious service, and both became missionaries. The two took an unorthodox approach to spreading the gospel: instead of barging into a place and demanding that the people there learn Latin so that they could learn the religion the missionaries were preaching, Cyril and Methodius decided to learn the local language first and then preach in that tongue. It was a revolutionary and controversial approach for which they were persistently criticized and punished by their employer, the Catholic Church. Their first successful campaign was in the southern Russian region of Khazaria, where the people spoke Khazar, so Cyril and Methodius learned the local lingo and then began translating the sacred texts of their faith into that language. Word of their success in communicating with and converting the Khazars eventually got back to Rome, where, coincidentally, the Holy Roman Empire had just received a request from its Moravian branch for someone who could and would teach and preach in the local vernacular: Slavonic. Cyril and Methodius got the assignment. (If they'd stayed in Khazaria, the Khazar language might not be dead today.) Slavonic, now known as "Old Church Slavonic", was right up their alley because a version of it was spoken by some in their native northern Greece. But there was one big problem: because use of the Slavonic language had been discouraged for centuries by whatever conquering empire happened to be in control at any given time, there was no written version. Cyril and Methodius took care of that problem by developing the Cyrillic alphabet, based mostly on the Greek alphabet, with some Hebrew and other characters thrown in to handle sounds the Greek letters couldn't easily address. Because of their efforts, the Slavonic language became the second-most-used liturgical language in the Catholic faith, and more significantly, because of their efforts, the Catholic faith spread across eastern Europe. Though Cyril died in 869 before the Church could punish him sufficiently for that accomplishment, Methodius lived for 16 more years and spent three of those years in prison for his work.

As is so often the case, the people of eastern Europe already had a religion before Cyril and Methodius arrived. They worshipped Radegast, god of the sun, harvest, fertility and hospitality. Radegast had a lot in common with the Greek god of pleasure, Dionysus, also known as Bacchus to the Romans, also known as the god of wine. Dionysus/Bacchus also was considered the god of beer by some, but true Slavs know that beer is too important to be lumped in with wine: it has its own deity, the pagan god Gambrinus.

The locals believed that Radegast lived in a Moravian mountain, Radhost, and every year they gathered there to celebrate the summer solstice. They still do to this day, though there is now a chapel of Sts. Cyril and Methodius atop Radhost mountain as well as a statue of Radegast. Long ago, Cyril and Methodius Day was celebrated in February, since Cyril died on Feb. 14. Later the religious authorities moved it to summer, closer to the traditional solstice celebration -- one of many ways the Catholic Church incorporated and assimilated pagan traditions as it grew.

Tomorrow: yet another holiday, this one also associated with the Catholic Church.

posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @11:15 AM

5.7.03