It all began with a golden egg nestled in the darkness. Inside the egg was Rod, the soon-to-be creator of the world. He grew lonely so he created himself a companion, Lada, the goddess of love. The eggshell cracked and out spilled love and light. The Slavic myth of creation is quite a paradoxical story, reminiscent of the Big Bang theory on the one hand, and on the other, qualifying Rod as the closest that ancient Slavic religion got to monotheism, since he embodies the single all-creator from whom everything else came into being.
Since before his arrival, everything was one, Rod separated the light from the dark, the truth from the lie, the good from the evil, and the heavens from the oceans placing the earth in-between. He created the world and the heavenly bodies from his own body: the sun is his face, the stars are his eyes, the night are his thoughts, the winds are his breath, the rain and snow are his tears, and the thunder is his voice. He created everything on earth and in the sky, and then he created other gods to keep order in his newly founded three kingdoms: the heaven, the earth, and the underworld. He also planted the seed of the World Tree, a giant oak whose roots spring from the underworld, the kingdom of the dead, whose trunk runs through the earth, the kingdom of the living, and whose crown holds and supports the skies and the heavenly kingdom.
After his creation, Rod, in quite a Nietzschean manner, removed himself, or rather, continued existing indirectly in all his creation, leaving the management of the worldly affairs to all the other gods that had sprung from him. Hence no records of Rod can be found in any of the official Slavic pantheons, since he didn’t manifest himself as any of the traditional gods, but rather existed obliquely as an inherent part of the world itself.
© 2019 Erna Grcic
Erna Grcic 