Relief with a male and a female water being and the origin of the rusalka

A curious carving of two aquatic creatures: one male, one female. One should be careful with the term "rusalka", since it is purely Slavic. For clarification one ought to read about life beneath the waters and the harem of the vodyanoy: here one thinks of Barbara Frischmuth's "Mystifications of Sophie Silber" and "The Ancient Triton".

In this case it is probably worth recalling the Nereids of antiquity, who are sometimes the wives of gods and of mortal heroes. Poseidon is the counterpart of the vodyanoy, while rusalkas were originally female only. The rusalka, for that matter, was at first not a water spirit at all but a deity of forest and field: see Lesya Ukrainka's "Mavka", and in Punkin she sits in the branches, after which she is often depicted wrongly, as in Pushkin, with a fish's tail.

The image of the female deity in the folklore of different peoples is varied and dynamic, and by no means confined to aquatic beings alone. Beside the female water deity on our bas-relief stands, of course, a male deity: a sea king or vodyanoy. Possibly this is an echo of the myth of Poseidon and his consort Amphitrite; the beard points to royalty.