Płanetnik

What it is

The płanetnik sits in the demon lore of the Slavs as a creature of the air, described as demonic or partly so, whose whole business is the weather. It was held to steer the clouds, so a village could thank or blame it for what fell from the sky: rain, hail, a storm held back or let loose. Its company was said to be the souls of people who died without warning, and it could act as helper or menace depending on its mood. The same word served for living men and women credited with reading the sky or commanding it, so the name covered both a spirit and the human who dealt with one.

Where it comes from

The name traces to płaneta, an old Polish word for a cloud, above all one heavy with storm; chmurnik and obłocznik, its other titles, grow from cloud words as well. A second reading turns this upside down: płanetnik would then be a late coinage off Latin planeta, and the Slavic cloud-names the truly old terms, so even the word's age is argued over. Farther south the same work is done by beings the South Slavs call zduhaći, and there the płanetnik is reckoned one with the żmij, the likeness of their tasks making the two interchangeable.

How it is done

Old custom treated the storm-bringer as someone to be managed rather than only feared. Flour was the peace-offering: thrown into the wind or tipped onto a fire, it was thought to earn a płanetnik's goodwill. Men born with the weather gift worked another way. As a storm gathered they were carried up into the sky, now and then along a rainbow, to battle the dragons that storm and hail clouds were believed to hold. Others fought from the ground, walking into the fields and driving the weather off with spoken charms. Still others made a quieter craft of reading the sky.

Tools and materials

Flour is the odd, homely object at the centre of it, a gift for the wind or the flame. Rainbows appear as the road along which a chosen man rises to the clouds. Charms, words spoken with intent, are the weapon of those who meet a storm in the open field. The beings themselves were pictured two ways: tall, aged figures under broad hats, or small creatures of no great size, and the hat at least gives the figure a face.

What it is for

Ask what the płanetnik is for and the answer is weather first, safety second. In its kindly mood it was said to come down before a storm to give warning, and to keep drought off the land. In its cruel mood the same powers were turned around, and hail and storms were counted its doing. The human bearers of the name had a wider charge still: as local healers and, in one telling, as Slavic shamans, they stood against vampires and hostile spirits on their neighbours' behalf. Favour was the whole game, hence the flour.

Who does it

Two kinds of being carry the name. The first is made of the dead: souls of people who died abruptly, chiefly at the rope or in the water, were said to swell the ranks of the płanetniks, and those who died by their own hand were believed to come back into the world as zduhaczs, their bodies cursed to serve as a żmij until that appointed fate had run. The second is alive: certain men were held to have the gift of weather, others told fortunes in the sky for a living, and among the shepherds of Podhale and the Carpathians the healer on the road bore the title too.

Peoples and places

Belief in the creature belongs to the Slavic world at large, with the fullest set of names in Polish: płanetnik, chmurnik, obłocznik. The South Slavs kept the same figure under the name zduhać and folded it together with the żmij. The highland shepherds of Podhale and the Carpathians, working as healers, carried the name into everyday life. In Poland the being also had a literary afterlife among the Young Poland writers, which is where many readers meet it first.

What people believe

The picture of the world here is one where the sky is staffed. Dragons were thought to ride the storm and hail clouds, and the beings who fought them were souls on assignment, not gods. The suddenly dead did not rest; they took up weather work. For those dead by their own hand the story ran further: they were to come back out of the land of the dead, oppose the vampires once more, and wear a body bound into the shape of a żmij until that term expired. Living people with the gift could be pulled up into the same service.

When it is done

The creature keeps a weather calendar, not a feast one. Its hours are the ones the cloud decides: the chosen man is snatched upward just as the storm readies, the charmer walks out while there is still time to turn it, and flour goes to wind or fire when the sky looks wrong. Drought is the other summons, the moment to call on a friendly one instead.

Compare and confuse

Under other names the same worker reappears: zduhać among the South Slavs, where matching tasks decide identity and the żmij is folded in as well. In Polish, the cloud titles chmurnik and obłocznik name the very same being, and the word płanetnik also stretched to cover human weather-readers and storm-workers.

Today

The being's afterlife is on the page. Writers of the Young Poland movement in Polish letters took it up: Antoni Lange built a novel around płanetniks, Władysław Orkan wrote a book with them for a title, and Bolesław Leśmian set a tale called Strój inside his Łąka. In Adolf Dygasiński's Syn boginki the hero ends the story as a płanetnik himself.

Questions people ask about Płanetnik

Good reading and sources

• Płanetnik on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data