Chernobog – also spelled as Chernevog, Czernobog, Chornoboh, Crnobog, Tchernobog and Zcerneboch among many other variants – is a Slavic deity whose name means "black god", about whom much has been speculated but little is attested and known definitively. The only known historical sources for this god are a 12th-century Christianchronicle and the 13th-century Icelandic legend Knýtlinga saga, which describe him as a dark, accursed deity. In modern depictions, such as video games and film, Chernobog is generally portrayed as a demon or monster with a grotesque and/or frightening appearance, often linked to darkness and death. Although like most pagan faiths, the ancient Slavic religion was chiefly polytheistic with a wide pantheon of gods, Chernobog has been historically assumed to be the dualistic counterpart or contrasting aspect of the "good" deity, Belobog. This dualism is a common theme amongst Eurasian religions.
Folklore
The name of Chernobog, or more accurately the meaning of his name, is preserved in several curses in Slavic languages. A veneration of this deity perhaps survived in the folklore of several Slavic nations. In some South Slavic vernaculars, there exists the phrase do zla boga, used as an attribute to express something which is exceedingly negative.
An early appearance of Chernobog in popular culture is in the 1940 Disney filmFantasia as Chernabog, a great and powerful night demon who awakes and summons evil spirits; the scene occurs in the form of an animation accompanying Modest Mussorgsky's piece Night on Bald Mountain. Since the 1990s, Chernobog has been variously portrayed in a number of video games:
His Fantasia incarnation is referenced in the 1993 MS-DOS video game ', in which the Dark One, Avoozl, emerges from a mountain in a manner akin to Chernobog awakening during the Night on Bald Mountain sequence, and appears as a mountainous, bat-winged, demonic monster.
In multiple entries of the Shin Megami Tensei series of JRPGs, he is a summonable monster, appearing usually as a bald, purple humanoid cloaked in a red scarf and holding a large scythe.
In the 1997 first-person shooterBlood, Tchernobog is the primary antagonist, being depicted as a "bloodied, horned Dark God of monstrous appearance", who controls the cult known as "the Cabal".
He is one of the numerous playable deities in the popular MOBA game Smite and belongs tothe Hunter class.
In the Crusader Kings 2 expansion Monks and Mystics, Chernobog is a "satanic" god around whom the "Cold Bloods" sect revolves when a Slavic pagan ruler is played.
In "The Shrouded Isles" PC game, Chernobog is the god that the villagers worship and make sacrifices to.
The Fantasia incarnation appears as a boss in the Disney-inspired videogame Kingdom Hearts and in ', one of its sequels.
Literary appearances include the 2001 novel American Gods by Neil Gaiman, in which Czernobog is featured as a recurring character, Naomi Novik's 2018 fantasy novel, Spinning Silver, which is inspired by Eastern European mythology, and Charles Stross's Laundry Files. In S.M. Stirling's novel The Peshawar Lancers, set in an alternative 2025, Satan is worshipped in the Russian Empire as Chernobog, the "Black God", after a Russian patriarch believed God and Christ had abandoned the world to destruction by a comet fall in 1878. In this timeline, the Russians turned to human sacrifice and cannibalism as form of worship of Chernobog, and the main antagonist, Count Ignatieff, is both an Okhrana agent and a worshipper of the Black God. In television, he is played by Peter Stormare in the series American Gods. Chernobog appears in Marvel Comics's universe as the deity of darkness, chaos and night. He serves as a member of the Russian super-hero team Winter Guard.
