The Slavs

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A village stood in a clearing on the edge of the forest, its huts dug halfway into the ground against the winter, a few square miles of cleared field around it and the trees pressing back at the boundary. There was no city within reach, no king over the village beyond the elders of the kin, and no one in it who could write. Around the year 550 there were many such villages, scattered north of the lower Danube and back into the marshes and river valleys of the great plain. Within two hundred years the people who lived in them held the better part of a continent, from the Baltic shore to the Aegean, and from the Elbe to the upper Volga. They were the Slavs, and they remain the largest ethno-linguistic family of Europe.

What they believed in those first centuries is among the hardest things in the study of European religion to recover, and for a single reason. The Slavs wrote nothing of their gods until they were no longer pagan. Everything known of the old religion comes from elsewhere: from Greeks and Germans and Danes who came to fight them or convert them, from Christian chroniclers compiling lists of forbidden powers, and from the folklore of villages set down a thousand years too late. The religion is a reconstruction throughout, and the honest study of it begins by admitting how little is firm.

Genealogy: a people out of the sixth century

The Slavs enter the written record abruptly, in the sixth century, in the works of Eastern Roman authors describing the peoples pressing on the Danube frontier. Procopius of Caesarea, writing his history of the wars of Justinian around the middle of the century, described them under Greek forms of the name — Sklavenoi, Sklaboi, and the like — alongside a kindred group he called the Antes. His Latin contemporary Jordanes, in the Getica of 551, set down the same division: the Sclaveni, whom he placed from the region of the Danube northward to the Vistula and west toward the Dniester, and the Antes east of them, from the Dniester toward the Dnieper. Both authors traced the two groups from a broader, older people they named the Venedi or Venethi. This is the first clear naming of the Slavs in any source, and it is already the naming of an outsider.

The portrait Procopius gives is of a people without kings. They “are not governed by one man,” he wrote, “but from ancient times have lived in democracy,” deciding their affairs in common. They lived in scattered huts, moved their settlements often, and went into battle on foot and lightly armed. Archaeology fills in the rest of the picture. The earliest material cultures securely tied to the Slavs — the Prague-Korchak complex of the north and west, the Prague-Penkovka of the steppe edge — appear in the sixth and seventh centuries: small undefended villages, sunken-floored houses, simple handmade pottery, an economy of grain and cattle. There were at first no towns, no states, no monumental building, and no writing. The society was a village society, bound by kinship, spread thin across cleared land at the forest’s edge.

The expansion of the Slavs from the early medieval homeland into the Balkans, central Europe, the Baltic lands, and the East European river systems. Map by Davius, public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

From that base came one of the swiftest expansions of the early Middle Ages. From the 520s the Slavs raided across the Danube into the Roman Balkans; from the middle of the sixth century the raids became settlement. Over the seventh and eighth centuries Slavic-speaking peoples spread south into the Balkans as far as the Peloponnese, west to the Elbe and into the eastern Alps, north toward the Baltic coast, and east into the forest and river country of what would become Russia and Ukraine, up the Dnieper and toward the Volga. As they spread, the single people of the sixth century divided by distance into the three great branches that survive: the East Slavs of the Russian and Ukrainian rivers, the West Slavs of Poland and Bohemia and the lands between the Elbe and the Oder, and the South Slavs of the Balkans, cut off from the others by the Magyars and the Germans across the middle of the continent. By the ninth century the division was settled, and with it the linguistic map of half of Europe.

The teaching: a religion reconstructed from its enemies

Set against this success in the world stands the near-total silence of the Slavs about their gods. No Slavic scripture survives, no native myth, no hymn or prayer recorded by a pagan hand — because the pagan Slavs did not write. The religion has to be assembled from four kinds of evidence, none of them written from inside the faith, and the seams between them never fully close.

The oldest witness is Procopius again. In the same sixth-century history, turning aside from the wars to describe the Slavs’ customs, he set down the single most important sentence ever written about their religion by a contemporary. They hold, he wrote, that one god, “the maker of the lightning,” is alone lord of all things, and to him they sacrifice oxen and offer every kind of victim. They also reverence rivers and nymphs and other spirits, sacrifice to all of these as well, and read the future in the entrails of their offerings. Almost everything later reconstruction wants to find is latent in that report and confirmed by nothing else of its age: a high god of the storm who stands above the rest, a world thick with the spirits of water and place, sacrifice, and divination. Procopius gives the god no name. The identification of his lightning-maker with Perun, the named thunder-god of the later Rus, is an inference across four centuries of silence — reasonable, widely held, and unproven.

The second body of evidence comes from the West Slavs along the Baltic, and from the Germans and Danes who destroyed them. Here, uniquely, the Slavs built temples — wooden halls enclosing carved idols, served by priests and oracle-horses — and Latin chroniclers described them in detail before they were burned. Thietmar of Merseburg wrote in the early eleventh century of the sanctuary of the Redarii at Rethra; Helmold of Bosau, in the twelfth, of the cult of Svetovit among the Rani; the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus left the fullest account of all, of the four-headed idol of Svetovit in his temple at Arkona on the island of Rügen, with its great horn of mead and its sacred white horse, taken and burned when the Danes under King Valdemar I stormed the fortress in 1168. From the trading-town of Wolin and nearby Szczecin came the three-headed Triglav. These are precise, eyewitness reports — and they are the reports of men who had come to end what they described, and who saw idols where the Slavs saw gods.

The Zbruch idol, a four-faced stone pillar pulled from the river Zbruch in 1848, often read as a cosmic image in three tiers — the heavens, the human world, and the underworld below. Whose gods it carries is debated. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The third body of evidence belongs to the East Slavs and the conversion of the Rus. The Tale of Bygone Years, the chronicle compiled in Kiev in the early twelfth century and known as the Primary Chronicle, looks back on the pagan order it had helped to overthrow. It records that in the year 980 Prince Volodymyr set up on the hill above his hall a row of idols — Perun first, with Veles the cattle-god placed separately in the lower town, and beside Perun a cluster of figures the chronicle names: Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, and the one goddess Mokosh. It records, too, the oaths the Rus swore on Perun and on their weapons, and a passage borrowed from a Byzantine chronicle that names Svarog, glossed as a divine smith and the father of the sun. This is the nearest thing to a Slavic pantheon that any source provides — and it is a Christian list of the gods a Christian prince had thrown down, eight years before his baptism and a hundred and thirty years before the chronicle was written.

The fourth and largest body of evidence is folklore, recorded from the peasantry of the Slavic countryside chiefly in the nineteenth century — more than a thousand years after the conversion began. It is here that the lower ranks of the old religion survived most fully: the domovoi, the spirit of the house that lived behind the stove and had to be appeased; the rusalka and the vodyanoy, the spirits of the water who drew the unwary down; the leshy of the forest; and above all the round of the agricultural year, the rites of the solstices and the harvest, the bonfires and the drowned or burned effigies of the seasons. Behind much of it stands the figure scholars call Moist Mother Earth, Mat Syra Zemlya, sworn upon and confessed into. This is the richest material of all and the most treacherous, because over a thousand years pagan and Christian had so interpenetrated that no element can be assumed pure, and a custom recorded in 1890 cannot be read straight back to 890.

Out of these four broken sources the modern study of Slavic religion has built its reconstructions, and the most influential is also the most contested. In 1974 the Soviet scholars Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov proposed a single “basic myth” underlying the whole tradition: a conflict between Perun, the thunderer above, and Veles, a serpentine god of the underworld and of cattle below, in which the storm-god strikes down his adversary and releases the waters. The pattern is elegant, it has analogues across the Indo-European world, and it has shaped nearly every popular account since. It is also a reconstruction — assembled by comparison and inference, not read off any text, and challenged in its particulars by later scholars who doubt that Veles was ever Perun’s enemy. It belongs to the register of learned hypothesis, and the responsible reader holds it there.

The same caution governs the rest of the reconstructed system. The tidy oppositions beloved of popular writing — a black god against a white god, Chernobog against Belobog, a fixed hierarchy of deities common to all the Slavs — rest on thin and late attestation. Britannica’s survey of the religion notes that perhaps only Perun and Svarog can be supposed common to the Slavs as a whole; the rest are local, or doubtful, or known from a single hostile line. The Slavic pantheon as usually drawn is less a thing the Slavs possessed than a thing later ages assembled for them.

Reception: conversion, double faith, and the reinvented past

The Slavs were Christianized in waves across some five centuries, and the form the new faith took divided them as lastingly as language did. To the West Slavs it came in Latin, from the Frankish and German churches: Bohemia and Poland in the tenth century, the pagans along the Baltic only with the conquests and crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth. To the South and East Slavs it came chiefly from Byzantium, in Greek and then in their own tongue. The line ran roughly where the older line between Rome and Constantinople had run, and it set the West Slavs among the Catholic and Latin-writing nations, the East and most of the South among the Orthodox and the users of a different script.

That script was itself a gift of the mission. In 863 the Byzantine brothers Cyril and Methodius, sent from Constantinople to Great Moravia at the request of its prince, set about translating the scriptures and the liturgy into the Slavic speech, devising for it the alphabet now called Glagolitic. From their work, carried on by their disciples in Bulgaria, grew Old Church Slavonic, the first literary language of the Slavs, and the script that bears Cyril’s name — Cyrillic — which their followers shaped from Greek letters and which spread with Orthodoxy through Bulgaria and into the lands of the Rus. The conversion that ended the old gods thus also gave the Slavs their letters, and the first thing written in Slavic was the gospel of the faith that displaced them.

“The Baptism of the Kievans,” by Klavdiy Lebedev (late nineteenth century) — the people of Kiev brought to the Dnieper after Volodymyr’s conversion in 988. The toppled idols of the old gods went into the same river. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The old religion did not end where the chronicles say it did. In the villages the rites of the agricultural year went on under Christian names; the thunderer’s offices passed to the prophet Elijah, who rode the storm-clouds in his fiery chariot; the cattle-god’s to Saint Blaise; the house-spirits and water-spirits were never baptized at all. Medieval sermons rail for centuries against Christians who still pray to Perun and Mokosh and the rod, who still bring offerings to wells and groves. To this enduring coexistence the later Slavic tradition gave a name, dvoeverie, “double faith” — a single people keeping the church’s feasts and the old powers’ rites at once. The word and the long survival are real; the framing is itself contested, for some scholars argue that dvoeverie as a tidy system of two layered faiths is partly a construction of nineteenth-century and Soviet scholarship, projecting order onto what was only the ordinary untidiness of folk Christianity. What is not in doubt is that a great deal of the pagan world outlived its gods, low to the ground, under other names.

Then the Romantic age went looking for that buried past, and where it could not find enough it sometimes made more. The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Slavic antiquity, bound up with the national awakenings of peoples without states, produced serious scholarship and also a hunger for a grander pagan inheritance than the sources could supply — and into that hunger came forgery. The most notorious is the so-called Book of Veles, a text of wooden tablets claiming to preserve the lost scripture of the ancient Slavs, surfacing in the twentieth century and purporting to record centuries of pre-Christian history and belief. It is a fabrication. Linguists and historians are agreed that its language is a clumsy invention of the modern period and that it is worthless as a witness to the pagan past, however widely it still circulates. It is named here only to be set aside: it is not a source for anything but the modern longing that produced it.

That longing has its living religion. Since the late nineteenth century, and in organized form chiefly since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has grown across the Slavic countries a reconstructed native paganism, Rodnovery — “native faith” — which gathers the scattered evidence, the genuine and the forged together, into a practiced worship of Perun and Veles and the rest. It is a modern faith, built deliberately out of the very source-problem that defines the whole subject: a religion reassembled, in full knowledge that the original was never written down, from the notes of its enemies and the memory of its survivals. The Slavs of the sixth century left their descendants half a continent and almost no record of their gods. What was made of that silence, after, has been almost everything.

→ Related: Perun · Veles · Svarog · Mokosh · Dazhbog · Arkona · Peryn · Kiev Pantheon · Wolin · The Rus · The Balts · The Norse · The Vikings · Reincarnation · Soul · Christianity · Old Testament