108 CHAPTER 1
According to Herodotus, the most important oath of the Scythians was
in the royal Hestias, and a false oath could incur a disability on the Scythian
king.415 “The royal hearth is like a root that ties the people to their land [.. .]
the tree that grows from the deity is an old eastern symbol. We see it in the
scene of the investiture in the famous knotted carpet from the Pazyryk burials
(dated between the fifth and the third centuries BC and made by the Scythians
in Kazakhstan, the Altai region—Author’s note) [.. .] As can be seen, the god-
dess associated with the hearth and the tree as sources of life is the main deity
of Scythia. This is why a false oath in the goddess of the royal hearth according
to the Scythians could bring misfortunes to the tribe and harm the fertility of
their land. And these disasters are symbolically encoded as an illness of the
king [.. .] together with the belief that the usurpation of power, i.e. the vio-
lation of the lawful inheritance of the royal hearth, is the cause for diseases,
infertility and discord”.416 Assuming that the Scythian king belonged to the
caste of warriors by birth, and that the sacral power belonged to the priests,
then according to D. Raevskii, “only the acquisition of both functions could
give the king absolute power, and this power was achieved by means of a sacral
marriage with the fire goddess Tabiti”.417
The myth of Targitaus and the Serpent-Legged Goddess indicates that the
Scythian kings were the mediators between the world of the living and the
world of the dead. The descent of Heracles (Targitaus) into the Underworld
(the cave) is done first by his horses and is preceded by a dream that equals
“temporary death”. According to traditional beliefs, horses provide the connec-
tion between the three worlds. In the Nart epos, the hero Soslan heads to the
world of the dead on a horse.418 In Bulgarian folklore the horse also belongs
to the descending hero. According to one Christmas song from the Svishtov
region, Dobri-Dan “with his faithful horse muddies the white Danube—he is
going downwards (along the river or across the river, the water can be asso-
ciated with the chthonic incarnation of the Great Goddess—Author’s note),
to go around his yard, which turns out to be the palace of the ruler of the
415 Raevskii 1977, 87. See Herodotus. Histories 4.68, in Dimitrov 1990, 27–28.
416 Marazov 1976, 48.
417 Raevskii 1977, 104.
418 Raevskii 1985, 41–42. The “Nart epos” is a name given to a series of tales about the Narts,
the epic heroes of the Caucasus. The sagas were recorded during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Is it presumed that the epos initially belonged to the Ossetians (the
descendants of the Alans in the Caucasus), but it was also known among other Caucasian
peoples. See for instance Dumézil 1976 and 1965.