History of the Ryakovich Family
The Ryakovich family can be traced back through various years of both Russian and Chinese history. At the point where my family tree is no longer Russian(as in going backwards from present to past), my ancestors married into several Chinese families during the great periods of unrest while the country now known as China was being solidified as one country(which was before that a bunch of seperate provinces and what not owned by various warlord types). One of the main aspects of that, that applies to your Q is that throughout that early period, my ancestors were married into families that were responsible for training soldiers for wars within China to strengthen the foundation of China being one country, as well as later on when Japan came into existence as its own country. The training taught to these armies through various forms of martial arts were designed for war, therefore modified from being designed to promote peace and one-on-one style fighting to being designed to kill mass numbers of people. Because of that goal, those that taught those arts used their beliefs in various demons, such as Tchort(the Russian Devil) as well as the Devils of other outside influences, etc. to put people in the right mindset and become instruments of destruction. However, my ancestors soon for various reasons left the training schools and ventured back to Russia, still maintaining their worship of Devils because of the years of prosperity given to them by the Dark Path.
It went on like this for years, building a STRONG devotion to witchcraft and the like in the family through tradition. However, without wars and things to fight, people soon began to question why the family maintained such a dark outlook and perspective. In effect, the Devils that had supposedly brought prosperity became obsolete. In the worship of Devils, the treatment of children is both somewhat horrific and extreme, and that's sort of a universal thing. One of the things many(not all, but many) devil-worshipping covens do traditionally is at some point they release the children from the coven to an extent, and let them sort of venture off and find their own path(of course up to that point they have been mentally trapped into believing that not only are they too outcast for the world to accept them, but their own coven is the only place of acceptance, a lesson which begins shortly after birth with an unholy baptism and later with a formal ceremony around age 2 to 4 or 5). These newer generations ventured out and found out about various other religions, one of them being Wicca and its counterparts.
Returning home, filled with questions about why the hell anyone would worship and serve such a twisted mentality and deity, soon after came a huge uproar, much fighting and bitter rivalry. The Devil-Worshipping older generations held out for years, then finally gave in, and were honorably exhiled and alienated from the family, allowed to return only if they shed their worship of the Dark One and embrace the "newer" ideas of Wicca and such, with it's focus on positive uses of magick and ideals. This lasted for some time, but not very long, as the town sarrounding the Estate of the family began bringing a Christian(Catholic) mentality into the mix which regarded any sort of "witchcraft" to be the work of the Devil, and regularly rebelling against the family, who were at the time the primary government and owners of the town and almost all of its land. Once again fighting became brutal, involving several hangings, murderous ambushes, etc. Through this period, the family resolved that religions and paths such as wicca were too idealistic, unrealistic, and more to the point suicidal(with regards to the "peace and love" ideals) for the family.
The worship of Devils once again reared it's head with the arrival of a distant relative at the time, Slovakia T., who was a witch from the mountains and practiced with a clan there of her own creation. However, Slovakia brought a slightly more "tolerant" form of Devil worship, which she derived from the Xtian bible and other bibles, seeing the so-called "Devil" more as a a deity who embodied all living things, and surfaced naturally to protect it's followers from becoming weak and frail in the world. Through this and other outside influences brought in by younger generations who studied abroad in Germany, England, Ireland, and other places, the family learned of a different kind of Satanism, one where the Devil was not a twisted, chaotic, psychopath, but the "savior", sent to save people from their worst enemy...themselves.
Down the line a few more years, we have the more recent generations who altered the family religion and styles of witchcraft in various ways as leadership of the family coven passed itself downward, and here we have me, today, being the youngest generation and bringing in western Satanism as developed by LaVey into things, due in part to my being born and raised as a 3rd generation Russian-American(my father was a young boy when his father immigrated), but also because I can't just follow tradition without adding something new to it.
Back to the Main Page