Assianism
Assianism, sometimes called Uatsdin is a polytheistic, ethnic and folk religion derived from the traditional narratives of the Ossetians, modern descendants of the Alans of the Scythian tribes, believed to be a continuation of the ancient Scythian religion. It started to be properly reorganized in a conscious way during the 1980s, as an ethnic religion among the Ossetians.
The religion has been incorporated by some organisations, chiefly in North Ossetia–Alania within Russia, but is also present in South Ossetia, and in Ukraine. The Nart sagas are central to the religion, and exponents of the movement have drawn theological exegeses from them.
Etymology and definition
The revival of Ossetian folk religion as an organised religious movement was initially accorded the formal name Ætsæg Din in the 1980s by a group of nationalist intellectuals who in the early 1990s constituted the sacerdotal Styr Nykhas. Ætsæg, meaning "truthful", is the name of the foundational kinship in the Nart sagas, while din corresponds to the Avestan daena, meaning divine "understanding" or "conscience", and today "religion". Fearing that the concept of Ætsæg Din carried implications of universal truth that might offend Christians and Muslims, the Ossetian linguist Tamerlan Kambolov coined the alternative term Uatsdin in 2010, which has become the most common name for the religion in Ossetian. Daurbek Makeyev, the most known exponent of the movement, has preferred to name it Æss Din, meaning the "religion of the Æss", "As" or "Os", an alternative ancient name of the Alans, preserved in the Russian and Georgian name "Ossetians", and root from which the ancient Greeks likely drew the term "Asia". Khetag Morgoyev, the leader of the religious organisation Ætsæg Din, also uses the simple name Iron Din while rejecting the name Uatsdin, in which, according to his opinion, he sees no sense. In his Russian-language writings Makeyev has used the Russian variation of Æss Din, Assianstvo, i.e. "Assianism".Ruslan Kurchiev, president of the Styr Nykhas in 2019, prefers to define Assianism as a "culture" rather than a "religion", claiming that what it champions are rituals and values which are encapsulated in the Ossetian tradition. Similarly, representatives of the Dzuary Lægtæ, the council of the priests of the Ossetian sanctuaries, define Assianism, by citing the folklorist and ethnographer Soslan Temirkhanov, as " a worldview that arouses that holy spark that raises a person, illuminates and warms his soul, makes him strive for good and light, gives him courage and strength to fearlessly fight evil and vice, inspires him to self-sacrifice for the good of others". According to them, this Ossetian worldview is "not some form of perception abstracted from material, productive activity, but on the contrary, it is interwoven and reflects all aspects of being, at the same time being the very basis of being, an ontological principle, which we can phenomenologically characterise as pantheism", a worldview characterised by "intertwining, interconnection, interdependence" which favours a natural "logical-conceptual type of thinking and discursive thinking". Khetag Morgoyev defines the religion in similar terms, while emphasising its similarity to other Indo-European traditions, and especially its "almost identicity" to Indo-Iranian traditions.
According to the scholar Richard Foltz, despite claims to antiquity, from a scholarly point of view the movement "can be comfortably analysed within the framework of new religious movements". The adherents of Assianism object to the use of the term "Paganism" to refer to their religion, such term having strong derogatory connotations in Ossetian language and being still used by Christians and Muslims to ridicule traditional Ossetian beliefs and practices.
History
From the ancient Scythians to the modern Ossetians
The Scythians were a large group of Iranian nomadic tribes who populated the Eurasian Steppe during the first millennium BCE, from Eastern Europe to western China. Their name "Scythians" comes from Greek, Σκύθοι Skuthoi, meaning the "archers", a skill for which they were known and feared. They left a rich cultural legacy, particularly in the form of gold jewellery, frequently found in the "kurgan" burials associated with them. They practised the ancient Iranian religion.A group of Scythian tribes, the Sarmatians, known as the Alans from the first century onwards, migrated into Europe. Allied with the Germanic Goths, the Alans penetrated west into France, Italy, Spain, and other territories under the Roman Empire. The Romans tried to manage the threat by hiring them as mercenaries in the cavalry, or, particularly in France, by buying them off as landed gentry. Many toponyms in France, such as Alainville, Alaincourt, Alençon, and others, testify that they were territorial possessions of Alan families. Alan equestrian culture formed the basis of Medieval chivalry, and in general Alan culture had a significant role—though rarely recognised—in the development of Western European culture.
While most of the Scythians assimilated into other ethnic groups by the Middle Ages, the Alans of the Caucasus maintained a distinct identity and continued to dominate the area, so that the Byzantine Empire recognised them as an independent allied kingdom. Through their relations with the Byzantines and missionaries from Georgia in the south, the Alan aristocracy adopted Eastern Orthodox Christianity during the tenth century. This, however, had little effect on the general Alan population, so that the thirteenth-century Flemish traveller William of Rubruck reported that "they knew nothing apart from the name of Christ". The Ossetians are the sole modern population culturally and linguistically descending from the Alans, and they have preserved beliefs and rituals likely dating back to Scythian religion, even through waves of partial syncretisation with Christianity.
After the conquests of the Mongol Empire in the Caucasus during the mid-thirteenth century, contacts between the Alans and Eastern Orthodox religious authorities ceased completely, and their superficial Christianisation was stopped. There is evidence that between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century, shrines which were apparently built in honour of Christian saints were converted to indigenous Pagan use. The Russian Empire's expansion in the Caucasus by the end of the eighteenth century brought with itself Russian Orthodox missionaries who sought to "re-Christianise" the Ossetians. Their efforts had had limited success by the time when they were completely obliterated by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which introduced the peoples of the Caucasus into the rapid processes of industrialisation, modernisation and urbanisation of the Soviet Union.
Between the traditional and the new religion
The Ossetian people are today split between two states: North Ossetia–Alania, a constituent federal republic within Russia, and the neighbouring only partially recognised state of South Ossetia. The incipient collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s triggered projects of identity-building among many of its constituent nations. In Ossetia, as in other nations, this involved the recovery of an "authentic national religion" harking back to pre-Christian times. Ossetian nationalism also played a role, powered by ethnic conflicts for lands and resources with neighbouring peoples in North Ossetia, and for independence in South Ossetia, a territory historically part of Georgia, whose status as an independent entity is a matter of international controversy.According to Victor Shnirelman, in the Ossetian case certain traditions had survived with unbroken continuity and were revived in rural areas. This contrasts, and interacts, with an urban and more intellectual movement which elaborated a systematic revived religion associated with ethnic nationalism and with the opposition to both Russian and Georgian Orthodox Christianity, perceived as foreign, and to Islam, professed by the neighbouring Turkic and Caucasian ethnic groups and by a small minority of Ossetians. According to the scholar Sergey Shtyrkov, intellectual projects for the elaboration of an "ethnic religion" for the Ossetians date back to the early twentieth century, and it was with the Soviet atheist anti-religious "furious fight against Ossetian Paganism" in the 1950s that the idea appealed once again to Ossetian intellectuals. According to him it was Soviet anti-religious activism that drove ancient local practices from the sphere of "ethnic tradition" into the sphere of "religion" in the minds of the Ossetian people.
The scholar Richard Foltz reconstructs the development of Ossetian religion through seven phases: 1. An original Scythian Paganism; 2. a first wave of Christianisation under Byzantine and Georgian influence from the tenth to the thirteenth century; 3. a "re-Paganization" during the fourteenth and fifteenth century following the Mongol invasions and the disruption of the contacts with the Byzantines; 4. a partial re-Christianisation during the sixteenth and seventeenth century conducted by Georgian missionaries; 5. a further re-Christianisation conducted by Russian missionaries beginning in the late eighteenth century; 6. enforced state atheism during the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1991; and 7. a resurgence of "traditional Ossetian religion" since the 1980s–1990s. According to Foltz, the narrative of the contemporary promoters of Scythian Neopaganism is that the religiosity of the Ossetians maintained a strong underlying continuity while absorbing and adapting superficial influences from Christianity, and to a lesser extent from Islam and neighbouring Caucasian traditions, superficial influences which may be easily stripped away to reveal its essential, distinct "Iranian character".
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ossetian politicians have been outspokenly supportive of Scythian Assianism. During the 1990s, after the clashes between Ossetians and Georgians in 1991–1992, a field beside a sacred grove 30 kilometres to the west of North Ossetia–Alania's capital Vladikavkaz, where the Ossetian hero Khetag was said to have taken refuge from his enemies, was dedicated by the government as a holy site. Since 1994, sacrifices are held at the site with the participation of government officials and community leaders, with activities supervised by the sacerdotal Great Council. The ceremony is dedicated to the most important deity, Uastyrdzhi, said to have saved Khetag from his pursuers. Government participation is also seen at the ceremonies organised at the Rekom Temple in Tsey, Alagirsky District, North Ossetia–Alania.