Slavic Religion

Slavic peoples enter the written record in the sixth century, when Byzantine authors describe groups they called Sclaveni and Antes along the Danube. Over the following centuries Slavic speakers spread across a vast area, from the Baltic to the Balkans and from the Elbe to the Volga. Like the Germanic and Baltic peoples, they inherited a religion with Indo-European roots, and their thunder god Perun has close relatives in the Lithuanian Perkūnas and, more distantly, in the Norse Thor.

The Byzantine historian Procopius, writing in the sixth century, gives the earliest description. The Slavs, he says, believe that one god, the maker of lightning, is lord of all, and they sacrifice cattle and other animals to him; they also honour rivers, nymphs and other spirits. After that, there is a long silence. The Slavs had no writing until missionaries brought it with Christianity in the ninth century, and the old religion was recorded only by those who were replacing it.

The surviving evidence falls into two main groups. In the east, the Primary Chronicle of Kyiv, compiled by monks in the early twelfth century, tells of the gods of the Rus’ princes. In the west, German and Danish clerics describe the temples of the Slavs living along the southern Baltic coast, the last of whom remained pagan into the twelfth century. Between these two bodies of evidence lie centuries of change and many regions about which almost nothing is known.

The Primary Chronicle records that in 980 Vladimir, newly ruler of Kyiv, set up idols on a hill outside his palace: Perun, with a silver head and a golden moustache, Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl and Mokosh. It adds that people sacrificed to them. Some of these names are well attested elsewhere, while others, such as Khors and Simargl, may be of Iranian origin and remain obscure. Historians debate whether this pantheon reflected long-standing belief or was a new state cult that Vladimir assembled to unite his realm.

Perun was clearly the god of princes and warriors: in tenth-century treaties with Byzantium the Rus’ swore by him on their weapons. Volos or Veles, the “god of cattle”, appears in the same treaties as the guardian of oaths for others. In the twentieth century the linguists Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov reconstructed a myth in which the thunder god pursues a serpent-like adversary, often identified with Veles, across the world; the reconstruction is influential but partly hypothetical. Mokosh, the only goddess on Vladimir’s hill, was still feared and honoured by peasant women in later centuries, linked with spinning, water and the moist earth.

On the Baltic coast the gods looked different. German and Danish writers describe Svarozhich at Rethra, Triglav with three heads at Szczecin and, above all, Svantevit at Arkona on the island of Rügen, a four-headed statue taller than a man. Alongside these great gods, Slavic belief everywhere included spirits of the house, the forest, the field and the water, and a deep concern for the dead.

Much of this lower world of spirits is known only from folklore recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, long after conversion, so it must be used with care. Village belief spoke of the domovoi, a house spirit who lived behind the stove and had to be kept content, of the leshii, master of the forest, who could lead travellers astray, and of the rusalki, water spirits often thought to be the souls of girls who had died young. Families remembered their dead at set times of year with meals at the graves, customs that continued under Christianity as days of remembrance. Whether these beings go back to pre-Christian times in the form later recorded is debated, but the respect for ancestors and for the spirits of place appears in the earliest sources too.

Among the eastern Slavs worship seems to have taken place mostly in the open air: on hills, in groves and beside springs and rivers. At Peryn near Novgorod, where the Chronicle says Vladimir’s uncle Dobrynya set up an image of Perun, excavations in the 1950s uncovered a circular site with traces of fires that many archaeologists interpret as his sanctuary.

The Baltic Slavs built true temples served by powerful priests. Saxo Grammaticus, writing around 1200, describes the shrine of Svantevit at Arkona in detail: a wooden hall within a fortified headland, a huge four-headed image holding a horn, a sacred white horse and a yearly harvest festival at which the priest read the coming year’s fortunes from the wine left in the horn. Thietmar of Merseburg and Adam of Bremen describe Rethra as the religious centre of the Liutici confederation. These accounts come from Christian enemies, but they agree that temples here were also political centres, holding treasure and guiding war. The biographers of Bishop Otto of Bamberg, who led missions to Pomerania in the 1120s, describe temples at Szczecin decorated with carvings, a three-headed image of Triglav and a sacred black horse used for divination, much like the white horse of Arkona. Such parallels suggest shared customs among the Baltic Slavs, though the writers may also have borrowed from one another.

Sacrifice of animals is reported by many sources. Chroniclers also mention human sacrifice in a few cases, such as a Christian father and son said to have been killed in Kyiv in 983, but such reports were written by Christians and are hard to confirm.

Christianity came to the Slavs from two directions. In Central Europe, Moravia received Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius in the 860s, and Poland’s ruler Mieszko I was baptised in 966. In the east, Vladimir accepted baptism around 988 and married a Byzantine princess. The Chronicle says he had Perun’s idol tied to a horse’s tail, beaten and thrown into the Dnieper, while the people of Kyiv were baptised in the river. Conversion of the countryside took far longer.

The Baltic Slavs held out longest. After uprisings against German rule and the Wendish Crusade of 1147, King Valdemar I of Denmark and Bishop Absalon took Arkona in 1168 and had the image of Svantevit chopped up and burned. Within a few decades the last pagan temples between the Elbe and the Oder were gone.

Old beliefs lingered in folk custom. In Russian tradition the prophet Elijah, who rides a fiery chariot, inherited Perun’s thunder, and Saint Blaise (Vlas) became a protector of cattle like Volos. Russian scholars once called this mixture dvoeverie, “double faith”, though many historians now question the term. Festivals such as Kupala Night and the spring feast of Maslenitsa keep pre-Christian echoes. Since the late twentieth century the Rodnovery movement has sought to revive the worship of Slavic gods in several countries.