who, of course, played an important role in this society. Beer was prepared for them, and it was men who drank it. This is also evidenced by the North Russian tradition, which survived until the first third of the 20th century.
In the 80s and 90s of the 20th century, old people told folklorists that the general drunkenness, which today is attributed by some to the Russian people as their specific «genetic» quality, was completely absent in the North Russian villages back in the 30s of the 20th century.
On holidays (Shrovetide, in particular), men drank no more than 3 glasses (the size of a thimble) of vodka, but they were not limited in beer. However, this beer, prepared according to ancient technologies, has nothing to do with the so-called «beer» that our «breweries» produce today. As for the women and children, they never drank beer, let alone vodka. They drank pivtso, a weak, almost non-alcoholic beverage. As for men, consuming beer brewed according to tradition, they could hardly sleep. And they did not have free time for constant drinking in the ancient matriarchal society. The men built houses, prepared firewood for the winter, hunted and fished.
And they also did very important work – they mined salt, the deposits of which are quite widespread in the North of Eastern Europe.
Note that even today, paying tribute to the ancient tradition, we meet guests with bread and salt, where the loaf is a female symbol, and salt, apparently, is male.
Turning again to Sanskrit, we find in it such terms as:
Lavana – salted, salted, plus:
Lavana – salt (sea)
Lavanya – salinity, salt, beauty, beauty
Lavanata – salinity
Lavanita – salty
Lavana-Jala – containing salt water, sea
Lavanoda (Lavana-Uda) – sea (salt – water).
But there is also in Sanskrit:
Lavana – cutting, mowing
Lavaka – reaper
Lava – cutting, plucking (fruits, berries)
Lava – the harvest
Lava is the cut, shearing, piece, piece, drop and name of the son of Rama and Sita.
In the Vologda and Arkhangelsk dialects there is the word «lavina», which means «mowing, cutting». In the Kostroma and Nizhny Novgorod regions, the word «rama» is «border, border, and end of arable land near the forest.» And in the Cherepovets district of the Vologda region, «ramenye» is «meadow grasslands among the forest. As for the term «Sita», in Sanskrit it is a furrow, a wrinkle, a fold and the name of Rama’s wife, but also – white, light. In Russian, there is such a concept as sieve (white) flour and sieve (white) bread, as well as the name of the device for sifting flour – a sieve. Thus, already at the linguistic level, a complex of connections is being built, where «rama» (one of the names of a wooden harrow) and «furrow» in the field give an opportunity for subsequent harvest, as a result of which «flour» will appear, in combination with salt, giving birth to bread.
This complex of concepts will arise later, after millennia, when the harvesting of wild cereals will be replaced by slash-and-burn agriculture. At the early stage of proto-agriculture, we can assume the participation of men in some important harvest rites, possibly related to the salt they mine.
Here it makes sense to refer to another Sanskrit term Lu (Lunati, Lunite, Lulava / Lu, Ulava / Lu Luve, Lavitum, Luna), which means:
Cut, separate,
Divide, divide,
Tear off, tear off,
Harvest, harvest.
And now we recall the city of Lunit, whose patroness was the ancient Egyptian goddess of the first dynasties of the kings (beginning from the 3rd millennium BC) – Nate. Herodotus considered her an analogue of the ancient Greek Athena. And the fact that the Greeks called this city Latopolis Laton, that is, the city of the goddess Lato (Leto-Summer, Lada). And here we mention a term such as Lavitum, associated with Lavana – mowing, harvesting, harvesting and with Lavana – salted, salted, and salt.
Apparently, the place and time of birth of such images as Owl – Mother-in-law and Lilith were the same. It is possible that the appearance of fair-haired (red-haired) and light-eyed Levites, the descendants of Jacob’s third son from Leah, named Levi, is also associated with the same «space-time» characteristics. Note that it is the third son (Ivan Tsarevich, Ivan the Fool) in Russian folk fairy tales, which are distinguished by the deep archaism of their plots, who possesses certain sacred abilities. He marries the Frog Princess, takes out rejuvenating apples, receives the magic horse Sivka-Burka the Prophetic Kaurka, etc.
But, the same thing happens with the descendants of Levi – the Levites. They were excluded from the 12 tribes of Israel and the only ones from all were not endowed with land.
That is, in fact, they led the lives of the Brahmins, not possessing property and receiving tithes from the people for their existence. But they also performed priestly functions, being singers, musicians and guards in the portable temple of the Tabernacle. It remains for us to conclude that the Levites (Lavites) in the deepest matriarchal antiquity in the north of Eastern Europe took part in the holy ceremonies of harvesting with salt, music, singing and ritual libations with beer. This is also evidenced by such an ancient text as «Mundaka Upanishad», one of the most authoritative Upanishads of Atharva Veda, the second chapter of which says:
«Whose agnihotra is not accompanied by the sacrifices of the new moon, full moon, four months’ offering of the first and is performed without guests, Deprived of libation, offerings to the visvadevas are not performed properly, destroys his worlds, up to the seventh.
Black, terrible, fast as a thought, very red, the color of thick smoke, The sparkling one and the goddess in all forms are the seven tongues playing.
Whoever, while these shine, performs and makes offerings on time, That they are the rays of the sun, lead, where is the abode of the one lord of the gods».
Of course, the texts of the Atharva Veda, and even more so the Mundaka Upanishad, were canonized thousands of years after the end of the era of matriarchy. But, nevertheless, here are preserved relics of that distant time when not God the Father, but the Great Goddess Mother was incarnated in seven tongues of flame and not solar, but lunar cults played a leading role.
It is also significant that the terms of classical Sanskrit «deva» – heavenly, divine, god, priest, lord and «devaka» – heavenly, in Russian, and especially in North Russian dialects, are used at the everyday level to this day (deva, devka, deuka) in relation to exclusively girls and women, but not men. Thus, the term that later became the basis of many words associated with the concept of «divine» in Sanskrit:
Deva rarman – sacred rite, worship,
Deva kula – temple, home of the gods,
Deva gana – doubt of the gods,
Deva-ja – of divine origin,
Devatva – divinity,
Deva-Deva – God or King of the gods, etc,
in the Russian language retained its most ancient meaning, where the concept of the divine is assigned precisely to the feminine.
We can state that the cult of the Goddess-Mother-Owl, protector of Grain and giver of Life, mistress of Fire and Water, formed in deep (still Paleolithic) antiquity, could arise only where for many tens of millennia there were meadow cereal steppes consisting of sown forms – wild rye, wild barley, wild oats and wild wheat. And such steppes existed for such a long time only on the territory of Eastern Europe – the Russian Plain. In the subsequent Mesolithic era (the Middle Stone Age, in 10—8 thousand BC, led to the disappearance of cereal steppes and the widespread distribution of deciduous forests (the real steppes