Assianism
Assianism, sometimes called Uatsdin, draws its holy stories from the Nart sagas, the hero epics of the Ossetian people of the Caucasus. Practitioners trace their faith to the ancient Scythians, nomadic tribes who once ranged across the Eurasian Steppe. Yet the religion in its organised form only took shape in the 1980s, when Ossetian intellectuals began consciously reviving what they called an ethnic faith. Today its followers include soldiers, hunters, artists and government officials who gather at sacred sites for ceremonies tied to the Ossetian calendar. What ancient beliefs survived nearly a thousand years of contact with Christianity and decades of Soviet atheism? Who decided what to call this faith, and why do its own leaders disagree about that name? And what happens when a religion built on land, ancestry and light collides with the Russian Orthodox Church next door?
The formal name Ætsæg Din, meaning 'True Faith', was given to the revived Ossetian folk religion in the 1980s by a group of nationalist intellectuals. That same circle later formed the sacerdotal Styr Nykhas, or 'Great Council', in the early 1990s. Ætsæg, meaning 'truthful', is also the name of a foundational kinship in the Nart sagas. Din corresponds to the Avestan word daena, meaning divine 'understanding' or 'conscience', and today simply 'religion'.
In 2010, the Ossetian linguist Tamerlan Kambolov coined an alternative name, Uatsdin, worried that Ætsæg Din implied a claim to universal truth that might offend Christians and Muslims. Uatsdin has since become the most common name for the religion in the Ossetian language.
Daurbek Makeyev, described as the movement's most known exponent, rejects both terms. He prefers Æss Din, the 'religion of the Æss'. That name uses an alternative ancient term for the Alans, preserved in the Russian and Georgian word for Ossetians. It may even be the root the ancient Greeks drew on for the word Asia. In his Russian-language writings, Makeyev calls the faith Assianstvo, rendered in English as Assianism. Khetag Morgoyev, who leads the religious organisation Ætsæg Din, instead uses the plain label Iron Din, meaning 'Ossetian Faith'. He rejects Uatsdin outright, saying he sees no sense in it.
Ruslan Kurchiev, president of the Styr Nykhas in 2019, argues the label should not be 'religion' at all. He prefers to call Assianism a 'culture', built from rituals and values already encoded in Ossetian tradition. The Dzuary Lægtæ, the council of priests at Ossetian sanctuaries, cite the folklorist Soslan Temirkhanov's description of the faith. He calls it a worldview that 'arouses that holy spark that raises a person, illuminates and warms his soul'. They describe this worldview as a pantheism woven into 'all aspects of being'. Khetag Morgoyev echoes the point, stressing Assianism's closeness to other Indo-European traditions. He describes its resemblance to Indo-Iranian traditions as an 'almost identicity'.
The scholar Richard Foltz takes a more detached view. Despite its claims to antiquity, he writes, Assianism 'can be comfortably analysed within the framework of new religious movements'. Its adherents, meanwhile, reject one label outright. They object to being called Pagans, a term they say Christians and Muslims use to ridicule Ossetian belief. That objection points toward a history of contact, and conflict, stretching back over a thousand years.
The Scythians were Iranian-speaking nomadic tribes who ranged the Eurasian Steppe during the first millennium BCE, from Eastern Europe to western China. Their name comes from the Greek word Skuthoi, meaning 'archers', a skill for which they were known and feared. They left behind a rich legacy of gold jewellery, often recovered from the burial mounds called kurgans. They practised the ancient Iranian religion.
One group of Scythian tribes, the Sarmatians, became known as the Alans, meaning 'Aryans', from the first century onward. They migrated into Europe, allied with the Germanic Goths, and pushed as far as France, Italy and Spain under Roman rule. Rome managed the threat by hiring Alans as mercenary cavalry, or, especially in France, by buying them off as landed gentry. French place names such as Alainville, Alaincourt and Alençon still testify to Alan family holdings. Alan equestrian culture became a foundation of Medieval chivalry, giving it a role in Western European culture that is rarely recognised.
By the Middle Ages, most Scythian groups had assimilated into other peoples, but the Alans of the Caucasus held onto a distinct identity, one the Byzantine Empire recognised as an independent allied kingdom. Through contact with Byzantine and Georgian missionaries, the Alan aristocracy adopted Eastern Orthodox Christianity during the tenth century. It had little effect on ordinary Alans. The thirteenth-century Flemish traveller William of Rubruck reported that 'they knew nothing (of Christianity) apart from the name of Christ'. The Ossetians are the only modern people descended, culturally and linguistically, from the Alans. They have preserved beliefs and rituals that likely reach back to Scythian religion, surviving waves of partial blending with Christianity.
By the middle of the thirteenth century, the Mongol Empire's conquests in the Caucasus would sever the Alans' contact with Byzantine religious authority entirely.
Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, shrines that had apparently been built to honour Christian saints were converted back to indigenous Pagan use. By the end of the eighteenth century, the expanding Russian Empire brought Russian Orthodox missionaries seeking to 're-Christianise' the Ossetians. Their efforts met only limited success, and were wiped out entirely by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which pulled the peoples of the Caucasus into the Soviet Union's rapid industrialisation and modernisation.
The scholar Richard Foltz maps this back and forth across seven distinct phases. They run from an original Scythian Paganism through repeated waves of Christianisation and re-Paganisation, ending in enforced Soviet atheism from 1921-1991. His seventh phase is the recent resurgence of what he calls 'traditional Ossetian religion'. According to Foltz, today's promoters of Scythian Neopaganism argue that Ossetian religiosity kept an unbroken continuity underneath. They say it merely absorbed superficial outside influence, which can be stripped away to reveal what they call its essential 'Iranian character'.
Victor Shnirelman observes that in the Ossetian case, certain traditions survived with unbroken continuity in rural areas. This rural persistence contrasted, and interacted, with an urban intellectual movement. That movement built a systematic revived religion tied to ethnic nationalism, opposed to both Russian and Georgian Orthodox Christianity and to Islam. According to Sergey Shtyrkov, intellectual projects to build an 'ethnic religion' for the Ossetians date back to the early twentieth century. It was the Soviet Union's 'furious fight against Ossetian Paganism' in the 1950s, he argues, that made the idea appeal to Ossetian intellectuals again. In his view, Soviet anti-religious activism itself pushed old local practices out of the category of 'ethnic tradition'. It moved them instead into the category of 'religion', in the minds of the Ossetian people.
During the 1990s, following clashes between Ossetians and Georgians in 1991-1992, the Ossetian government dedicated a field as a holy site, 30 kilometres west of Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia-Alania's capital. It lies beside a sacred grove where the Ossetian hero Khetag was said to have taken refuge from his enemies. Since 1994, sacrifices have been held there with government officials and community leaders in attendance, supervised by the Styr Nykhas. The ceremony honours Uastyrdzhi, the deity said to have saved Khetag from his pursuers. Government participation also extends to ceremonies at the Rekom Temple in Tsey, Alagirsky District.
From the Nart sagas, exegetes like Daurbek Makeyev have drawn out what they present as the religion's formal theology, built around a single, singular idea of God.
The Dzuary Lægtæ and Khetag Morgoyev describe Assian theology as a pantheism and non-dualism. At its centre stands Xwytsau, the supreme God, creator of the universe and of all beings. Xwytsau is also said to be the universe itself, or 'the body of God'. That body spans both the immanent material world of the living and the transcendent spiritual world where the dead return. This God has 'no tangible, personal qualities, nor extension in space and time'. Xwytsau is described simply as pure light.
The transcendent, spiritual dimension of God is called the World of Light, or Rukhs Dun. The immanent, material dimension of life is called the Illusory World, or Mæng Dun. Believers address the supreme God through many epithets, including simply 'Great God', 'Creator of the Universe', and 'God of the Gods'. Assian theology holds that God exists within every creature and is 'the head of everything'. In humans, God manifests as reason, measure, and righteousness, a quality called bar.
The first of several divine triads unites Xwytsau, matter, and spirit. Xwytsau, called Heaven, is the ineffable, omnipresent source of all worlds and of the highest wisdom humans can reach, without image or form. Iuag is the substance and matter of everything, both the uncreated and the created worlds. Ud is the universal self, reached when an individual soul identifies with Mon, the universal mind-spirit, itself another manifestation of Xwytsau. Ultimately, Mon and Ud are described as the same thing.
On the plane of everyday experience, Mon unfolds into a second triad of Uas, Uastyrdzhi and the duagi. Uas, meaning 'Truth' or 'Good Word', is the order of God that produces well-being in the world. Uastyrdzhi is that order incarnated in humanity, the archetype of the perfected man and mediator of all the other deities. The duagi are forces that continuously shape the world according to that same order. The most important among them are the seven deities tied to the seven planets.
A third distinction separates three cosmological states of being. Zedy are tutelary, generative forces that accompany the birth and growth of beings, in keeping with the order of God. Uayugi are destructive forces that violate that order and pull away from the light; in people, they are said to cause passions, fear, pride and nervous illness. Dalimon names the lowest possible state of mind, one identified entirely with brute matter and chaos; its opposite, ualimon, comprises all the clear, celestial entities above.
Khetag Morgoyev folds these ideas into a single concept, barduag, which comprehends both the zhad, the deities as transcendent ideas, and the dzuar, their immanent extension in the world. The word dzuar names both a given deity and its shrine. The activity of the barduag is called minzhvar, roughly 'making connections' or 'arranging things in the right way'. Its clearest expression is the calendar itself, where the cycles of nature and of human economic life interlock. According to this framework, every kin, every village, every natural feature and every moment in time has its own zhad. That same order, expressed through cycles and named forces, is what determines which of the seven planetary deities a given day, or a given sacrifice, belongs to.
Like other ancient Iranian religions, the Scythian faith counted seven deities, the arvon daudzhita, as the most important among many. Traditional Ossetian texts record roughly ninety daudzhita in total. Uastyrdzhi ranks as chief among them, the only one able to reach the supreme Xwytsau directly, and all the others are said to be introduced through him. Because these deities are believed to either favour or punish people, worshippers offer them sacrifices of bulls, rams, and sometimes goats.
The historian Herodotus recorded the names of seven Scythian gods over two thousand years ago. Papaios, corresponding to Zeus, was the sky god. Tabiti, corresponding to Hestia, was the hearth goddess, known today as Safa and linked to the sacred chain above the household hearth. Api, corresponding to Gaia, was the earth goddess; Oitosyros, corresponding to Apollo, the sun god; and Argimpasa, corresponding to Aphrodite, the fertility goddess. Herodotus did not record Scythian names for the two remaining deities he equated with Herakles and Ares. He also mentioned an eighth god worshipped among the Royal Scythians, Thagimasidas, a water god equated with Poseidon.
In the conservative Digor dialect of Ossetian, Monday is still called Avdisar, or 'Head of the Seven'. The seven days of the ancient Ossetian week were named after the seven deities more broadly. According to Richard Foltz, the god Herodotus called 'Ares' was probably Mithra, worshipped through altars shaped as a sword planted in a pile of stones or brushwood, a cult that continued among the Alans as late as the first century CE. Foltz identifies this Mithra with the modern Uastyrdzhi.
Uastyrdzhi, whose name derives from Saint George, anchors the modern version of this sevenfold, eightfold structure as the god of contracts and war, identified with the Iranian Mithra. Uatsilla, from Saint Elijah, is the thunder god; Uatstutyr, from Saint Theodore, protects wolves; and Fælværa, possibly a conflation of Florus and Laurus, protects livestock. Kurdalægon, identified with the Iranian smith-god Kaveh, is the blacksmith god. Donbettyr is the water god, Mikaelgabyrta, a conflation of Michael and Gabriel, governs fertility and the underworld, and Æfsati presides over the hunt.
Assian ethics ties human nature to a single order, Uas or Ard, said to run through all being. Humankind, in this view, is a microcosm inside a larger whole. The deities shape the world according to this law, while demons disrupt it, becoming the cause of illness and death. A person who subdues selfish material motives becomes open to the Uas, gaining the strength to produce, in the tradition's words, 'good, truth and beauty'. One driven by egoistic ends instead becomes a source of evil, lies and ugliness. In Khetag Morgoyev's words, humankind holds the free will to choose between deities and demons, between good and evil. That choice, in the movement's teaching, is renewed with every sacrifice and every feast held in a deity's honour.
The Ossetian calendar sets aside sixty fixed celebrations across the year, some held inside the household and others at outdoor sacred sites. Household rites centre on the hearth chain, a symbol of the goddess Safa, which holds a cauldron above the fire, itself a holy element in Indo-Iranian religions. The most important of these sixty, the Week of Uastyrdzhi, begins on the last Tuesday of November. Holidays otherwise follow the days of the week, the phases of the moon and the solstices; the Ossetian New Year, for instance, falls on the second Thursday of January.
Three of these holidays form a linked set of solar festivals: the days of Uastyrdzhi, Uatstutyr and Uatsilla, tied to three phases of the sun through the year. Uastyrdzhi is the winter sun, dying and rising again; Uatstutyr the spring sun, growing stronger toward summer; and Uatsilla the summer sun at full strength, fading through autumn toward the next Uastyrdzhi.
A ritual feast, called fyng or kuvyn, is held in a particular deity's honour, led by a 'holy man', or dzuary læg. He offers a toast called kuyvd, a word that also means 'prayer', usually made with beer, though any strong liquor will do. Ceremonial cakes made from cheese, called ualibakh, are eaten alongside the meat of a sacrificed animal. Only herbivorous animals, bulls, rams, goats or lambs, are considered acceptable sacrifices, along with fish. Pigs and chickens, both omnivores, are avoided, just as Herodotus recorded among the ancient Scythians. A circular dance called simd sometimes accompanies the ceremony, with one version featuring a circle of dancers standing on the shoulders of another. The Nart sagas credit the hero Soslan with inventing the simd. A system of stick divination, also recorded by Herodotus among the Scythians, is still practised today.
The prayer's structure mirrors the order of creation itself, compared by the tradition to a mandala radiating outward from a single point. The ceremonial cake echoes this shape, its three circular layers and central hole representing the three levels of reality: sky, sun, and water or earth. The three-legged ceremonial table carries the same symbolism, its round top standing for the sun and for the infiniteness of God. Sacrificed meat is placed on the table marked with an equilateral cross, called dzuar, the same word used for a manifested deity. For a particular deity being honoured, a second, different cake is prepared: three triangular pies arranged into a nine-pointed star when viewed from above.
Communal ceremonies are usually held at natural shrines called kuvandon, or 'place of prayer', sometimes with a temple built in wood or stone. These sites appear in groves, forests, hills, fields and caves, wherever people sense what the tradition calls a 'strong energy field'. The journalist Alan Mamiev observed that Ossetians 'pray in nature' and that 'every family has its own shrine on their land'. The architect Slava Dzhanaïty later led the reconstruction of the Rekom Temple, after it burned down in an accidental fire in 1995. He said Ossetian shrines 'should not rise above nature or make it ugly'. They are built only of local natural materials, with architectural lines meant to mirror the surrounding land. Ruslan Kuchiev, president of the Styr Nykhas, put it more simply: 'You have to be part of nature, that's what our ancestors thought.' The Alagir region alone holds about three hundred such shrines.
The most important symbol in Assianism, according to the Dzuary Lægtæ, is the Uatsamongzh, a bowl or goblet named in the Nart epics and said to mean 'revelator of divinity'. It represents the inverted vault of the sky, said to fill worthy heroes with unearthly knowledge. The movement traces this image to the earliest Indo-Europeans, finding it echoed later in Celtic and Germanic legend. In medieval Western Europe, the same image resurfaced as the Holy Grail. A second major symbol, the horse, another ancient Indo-European image, appears in Ossetian funeral rites and as the steed of deities in many visions.
The Three Tears of God, first drawn by Slava Dzhanaïty, has become the faith's most visible emblem. It is described as 'seen everywhere throughout North and South Ossetia on t-shirts, car stickers, and advertisements'. Its three tear-shapes each hold an equilateral cross. Together, they stand for the faith's three most important shrines: the Rekom Temple, the Mykalygabyrtæ Temple, and the Tarandzhelos Temple. The Tarandzhelos Temple sits south of Mount Kazbek, across the border in Georgia.
In 2009, the Eurasianist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin convened a conference at Moscow State University's Center for Conservative Research on the role of Ossetians in Russian history. Daurbek Makeyev, head of the Atsætæ religious organisation, took part. Dugin praised the revival of Ossetian culture, saying it preserved a pristine Indo-European heritage. He argued that Scythian culture had shaped the development of Finno-Ugric, Turkic and Slavic peoples. European scholars, he said, had largely ignored this influence. Makeyev told the gathering that the Atsætæ organisation existed not only to foster Ossetian tradition, but to share it more widely. In his words, 'what was preserved in Ossetia is not merely Ossetian, but is a worldwide heritage'.
Makeyev has taken sharper aim at Christianity itself, criticising what he calls its alien and Jewish origins and the corruption of the Russian Orthodox Church. In a 2002 text, Makeyev wrote that a person who abandons 'his people's God' for 'the alien faith (ideology) from Moses' followers' invites disaster. Such a betrayal, he wrote, brings 'damnation... upon his whole people and all their lands and possessions'. In a 2007 text he went further, framing the betrayal of a people's god as 'the ultimate crime, a crime against the Nation'. Makeyev also frames Christianity as anti-environmentalist. In a 2019 speech, he said it 'separates God from his Creation', while Assianism takes 'a collective approach where everything is interconnected'. Even land outside a named shrine like Rekom, he argued, remains sacred.
The Dzuary Lægtæ go further still, calling Orthodox Christianity an 'alien religion' that historically 'sought to captivate and corrupt the souls of the conquered'. They argue it spread through Ossetia under the tsarist autocracy by coercion and police pressure, luring children and the poor with gifts. That process, they say, broke up families and ruined farms. They add that Islam spread among Ossetians partly as an alternative to forced Christianisation. The hostility runs both ways. The Russian Orthodox archbishop Leonid in Moscow tried to have Makeyev's books banned as 'extremist literature'. He drew on his own past as a general in the Federal Security Service to press the case. The Russian Orthodox Church has also repeatedly sought, without success, to have the Rekom Temple torn down and a church built in its place.
Scythian Assianism is present in both North Ossetia-Alania and South Ossetia, though more widespread in the former, with soldiers, hunters, sportsmen, intellectuals and artists especially well represented among believers. According to Richard Foltz, the movement's success has become 'unrivalled' among all Neopagan religious movements. It has also spread among Cossacks in Russia and Ukraine who claim a Scythian identity, some identifying within the wider Rodnovery, or Slavic Native Faith, movement. According to the 2012 Arena Atlas, a complement to Russia's 2010 census, 29.4% of North Ossetia's population were adherents of the Ossetian Pagan religion; the religion's own authorities claim a figure above 55% among ethnic Ossetians.
On the 18th of May 2014, 1,500 delegates gathered at the Forum of Ossetian Kins in Alania. They drafted amendments proposing to recognise the Ossetian worldview as the 'most important part' of Ossetian culture. The document also called the mountainous homeland a 'sacred center... of general Aryan significance', and proposed standardising Ossetian as a state language.
Common questions
What is Assianism?
Assianism, also called Uatsdin, is a polytheistic, ethnic and folk religion derived from the traditional narratives of the Ossetians of the Caucasus, believed to be a continuation of the ancient Scythian religion. The Nart sagas are central to it, and it is present chiefly in North Ossetia-Alania, but also in South Ossetia and Ukraine.
When did Assianism begin to be reorganized as a modern religion?
It began to be consciously reorganized as an ethnic religion during the 1980s, when nationalist intellectuals gave it the formal name Ætsæg Din. In 2010 the linguist Tamerlan Kambolov coined the alternative name Uatsdin, which is now the most common term for the faith in Ossetian.
Where is Assianism practiced today?
Assianism is practiced chiefly in North Ossetia-Alania within Russia, and is also present in South Ossetia and Ukraine. According to the 2012 Arena Atlas, 29.4% of North Ossetia's population were adherents of the Ossetian Pagan religion, while the religion's own authorities claim a figure above 55% among ethnic Ossetians.
Who is Uastyrdzhi in Assianism?
Uastyrdzhi is the chief deity among Assianism's lesser gods, said to be the only one able to reach the supreme God, Xwytsau, directly. His name derives from Saint George, and he is worshipped as the god of contracts and war, said to have saved the Ossetian hero Khetag from his pursuers.
Why do some Assian leaders reject the term paganism?
Adherents of Assianism object to the term Paganism because it carries strong derogatory connotations in the Ossetian language and has long been used by Christians and Muslims to ridicule traditional Ossetian beliefs and practices.
How are Assianism's rituals performed?
Assianism's rituals center on a feast called fyng or kuvyn, held in honour of a deity and led by a 'holy man', or dzuary læg, who offers a toast called kuyvd. The ceremony includes cheese cakes called ualibakh, sacrificed herbivorous animals such as bulls, rams, goats or lambs, and libations of beer or strong liquor.
All sources
4 references cited across the entry
- 1wacdin.comАссианство / Уацдин (Assianism / True Faith)
- 3Арена: Атлас религий и национальностейСреда (Sreda) — 2012