MythicPerun, Slavic sky-and-thunder god with a hammer or axe
UBAndite cavalry commanders crossing the Russian plains (~5000 BC)
Andite cavalry commanders crossing the Russian plains (~5000 BC) = Perun, Slavic sky-and-thunder god with a hammer or axe
The Connection
The UB states explicitly that the hard-riding Andite horsemen "moved westward across the Russian plains, absorbing the best of the blue man and exterminating the worst" between 6000 and 5000 BCE, and that Thor, "the victorious commander of the armies of the north," was "later revered as a god." Perun, the Slavic and Baltic sky-warrior who wields a hammer or thunder-axe from horseback, sits in the same Indo-European lineage. If Thor is a historical Andite commander remembered as a god, the structurally identical thunder-rider of the Slavs is a plausible cousin memory of the same migration stream.
UB Citation
UB 80:4.5, 80:5.4
Academic Source
Ivanov & Toporov, Issledovaniya v oblasti slavyanskikh drevnostey (1974); Gimbutas, The Balts (1963)
Historical Evidence(Moderate evidence)
Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov reconstructed the "Basic Slavic Myth" in which Perun, the sky-god, battles Veles from a chariot drawn through the heavens, a structural twin of the Vedic Indra and the Norse Thor. Marija Gimbutas documented the Baltic Perkลซnas, the Lithuanian cognate, as an Indo-European thunder-god arriving from the east. The Andite invasion corridor the UB identifies (Volga, Don, Russian plains) is the same corridor historical linguistics identifies for the spread of the Indo-European thunder-god myth.
Related Mappings
Nodite cultural memory preserved in the Russian and Turkestan reservoir
= Veles, Slavic god of cattle, wisdom, and the underworld
Universal pre-Christian cult of the Tree of Life (UB 85:2.4)
= Slavic "world tree" traditions; the sacred oak of Perun
Salem missionaries reaching "all Europe, even to the British Isles"
= Rod / Svarog, pre-Slavic creator high-god marginalized by later pantheon
Van, the loyal wise counselor remembered in craftsman-hero traditions
= Ilmarinen, the eternal smith of the Finnish Kalevala