Jarilo

Jarilo's identification as a mischievous god may involve the ability of shapeshifting.

At the beginning of the next year, both she and Jarilo are born again, and the entire myth starts anew.

The asteroid is named after the Slavic god Jarilo.

Spring festivals of Jurjevo/Jarilo that survived in later folklore celebrated his return.

Katičić and Belaj also re-discovered one very interesting characteristic of Jarilo.

On the same night, the infant Jarilo is snatched and taken to the underworld, where Veles raises him as his own.

This rather gruesome death is in fact a ritual sacrifice, and Morana uses parts of Jarilo's body to build herself a new house.

Belaj identified this lost god as Jarilo, a major Slavic deity of vegetation, harvest and fertility.

Up until the 19th century in Russia, Belarus and Serbia, folk festivals called Jarilo were celebrated in late spring or early summer.

With the advent of spring, Jarilo returned from the otherworld, that is, from across the sea, into the living world, bringing spring and fertility to the land.

From comparison to Baltic mythology and from Slavic folklore accounts, one can deduce that Jarilo was associated with the Moon.

Each year, the god of fertility and vegetation, Jarilo, who also dwelt there during winter, would return from across the sea and bring spring into the world of the living.

The Slavs believed the underworld to be an ever-green world of eternal spring and wet, grassy plains, where Jarilo grew up guarding the cattle of his stepfather.

Svantevit has also been proclaimed as a late West Slavic alternation of Perun or Jarilo, or compared with Svarožič and deemed a solar deity.

Certain songs were sung which alluded to Juraj/Jarilo's return from a distant land across the sea, the return of spring into the world, blessings, fertility and abundance to come.

After the harvest, however, Jarilo is unfaitfhul to his wife, and she vengefully slays him (returns him into the underworld), renewing the enmity between Perun and Veles.

However, because of the importance of Jarilo to Slavic farmers and peasants as a deity of vegetation and harvest, Christianity never extinguished the worship of his cult.

At the time of the spring equinox, Jarilo returns across the sea from the world of the dead bringing with him fertility and spring from the evergreen underworld into the realm of the living.

Later he turned to a kind of minimalist repetitive aesthetic already notable in his Confessiones (1979) for double bass and twelve wind instruments, and Jarilo (1981) an extensive piece for piano and tape.

Something or someone was identified to be Jarilo or Juraj: A doll made of straw, a man or a child adorned with green branches, or a girl dressed like a man, riding on a horse.

However, since Jarilo's life was ultimately tied to the vegetative cycle of the cereals, after the harvest (which was ritually seen as a murder of crops), Jarilo also met his death.

Also, since Jarilo is the (step)son of Veles, and his wife the daughter of Perun, their marriage brings peace between two great gods; in other words, it ensures there will be no storms which could damage the harvest.

It is very likely that originally the two elements of the name referred to Jarilo - male Proto-Slavic deity of the sun, spring, and fertility, and slav meaning glory, i.e. "glory of the sun".

In the cities of Wolgast and Havelberg, the war god Gerovit was worshiped, a likely corruption of Jarovit, a Slavic deity possibly identical to Jarilo of the East Slavic folklore.

Even the Slavic name Yury, Jerzy, Juraj or Jura is not as much a translation of Greek Georgios as a continuation of Slavic Jare, Jarilo or Jarovit.