The Zbruch Idol

In 1848, the good people of the then-Polish village of  Liczkowce – now Lychkivtsi, Ukraine – were gazing sadly into their local river, nearly dried up because of a severe drought, when they saw that the muddy riverbed was staring back at them. 

They attached ropes to the thing that was staring at them and pulled out what is now called in English the Zbruch Idol, but sometimes in Polish the Światowid ze Zbrucza, the Zbruch Worldseer. It now resides at the archaeological museum in Krakow.

This four-sided pillar stands 8.8 feet (2.67 meters) in height and may once have been taller, since the bottom looks broken off. On each side there are three tiers; the lowest is 26 inches (67 centimeters), the middle tier is 16 inches (40 centimeters) and the top tier measures 66 inches (167 centimeters). 

The general idea is that this is a Slavic pagan idol carved in before 700 AD that was then discarded when the area was Christianized between 800 and 1000.

The idol ended up in the hands of a local landowner and antiquary called Count Mieczysław Potocki, who presented a paper about it to the Kraków Scientific Society in 1850. 

Potocki's theory, which is still one of the main theories about this object, is that it represents the Slavic god Svetovic  (Svantovic, Svetovit) who was the god of war but also of lots of other things and was often depicted with four faces. (As in this 18th-century illustration)

(The two things Svetovic was most commonly associated with were war and abundance, which makes you wonder about the ancient Slavs. Among the classical Greeks and Romans peace was the mother of abundance, as in this famous ancient statue. But maybe the ancient Slavs spoke, not of peace and plenty, but war and plenty.)

The other main theory about the idol is that it represents, not one god, but four. The best evidence for this view is that two of the personas depicted seem to be women. You might think that was a slam dunk case, but really Svetovic is such a protean figure, with so many guises, that appearing in drag would not be surprising. 

That's not a joke; the Irish Lug, one of the closest parallels, really does dress in women's clothes in some of the old stories, and changing sex is routine for Hindu deities. Deities also have a disconcerting habit of splitting: into three, into four, into male and female twins, the resulting beings having their own names and cults but remaining somehow connected. And that is a lesson against applying naive ideas about identity to ancient gods. Smart people then were as smart as smart people now, and some of them thought that imagining the gods as big people with distinct personalities was pretty silly. It is in the Hindu and Irish stories that you can most clearly see the "gods" as masks over a deeper and more profound reality, but I believe that idea was everywhere in the ancient world, so I wonder if the person responsible for this idol might have laughed at the question of whether it depicted one deity or four.