The Slavic Native Faith

In 988, Grand Prince Vladimir of Kyiv ordered the wooden idol of Perun — the thunder god, chief of the Slavic pantheon — dragged through the streets, beaten with rods, and thrown into the Dnieper. Twelve men with sticks struck the idol as it was hauled to the river. The people wept. The chronicle says Vladimir then commanded all of Kyiv to come to the river for baptism, and those who did not come would be "considered enemies of the prince." Christianity arrived in Rus' not as an invitation but as a decree.

A thousand years later, in clearings outside Moscow, in meadows outside Kraków, in parks in Kyiv and Belgrade and Prague, men and women gather around fires, pour mead on the earth, and call on Perun, Veles, Mokosh, Svarog — the gods whose idols were thrown in the rivers. They call themselves Rodnovery: the native believers. They are the largest and most complex of Europe's pagan revival movements, spread across a dozen Slavic nations, fragmented into hundreds of groups with no central authority, and shadowed by a nationalism question sharper than anything the Baltic or Celtic revivals face.

What follows is an honest profile. Rodnovery contains sincere reconstructionists, genuine mystics, village grandmothers who never stopped leaving offerings at springs, and also ethno-nationalists, antisemites, and people who confuse their ancestors' gods with racial purity. The tradition deserves better than either uncritical enthusiasm or blanket dismissal. It deserves the truth.

I. The Name

Rodnovery (Russian: Родноверие, Ukrainian: Рідновір'я, Polish: Rodzimowierstwo) means "native faith" — from the Slavic root rod- (kin, birth, origin) and vera (faith). The term claims the tradition not as an invention but as an inheritance: the faith you were born into, the faith of your people, the faith of the rod — the clan, the bloodline, the ancestral root.

The name is contested. Not all Slavic pagans use it. Some prefer Slavic Native Faith (Slavyanskoe Rodnoverie). Some call themselves Yazychniki (язычники, "pagans" — from yazyk, "tongue/nation," cognate with the Biblical "gentiles"). Some use national variants: Rodzimowiercy ("native believers") in Poland, Rídnovíry in Ukraine, Starověrci ("old believers") in Czech lands — though this risks confusion with the Russian Orthodox Old Believers. Serbian practitioners sometimes use Starovjerstvo or simply call their practice Slovenská vera — the Slavic faith.

The diversity of names reflects the diversity of the movement. There is no Slavic Vatican. There is no pope, no synod, no creed. What there is: dozens of independent organizations across a dozen countries, all claiming to revive the same ancestral tradition, all disagreeing about what that tradition actually was.

II. The Problem of Sources

Every pagan revival faces a source problem. The Baltic revivals have the dainos — hundreds of thousands of folk songs carrying theology in verse. The Norse revival has the Eddas, the sagas, Snorri Sturluson's systematic mythology. The Slavic revival has fragments.

The pre-Christian Slavs left no written religious texts. They had no Snorri, no Hesiod, no Rig Veda. What survives comes from outsiders looking in:

Procopius of Caesarea (sixth century) noted that the Slavs worshipped a single supreme god (likely a sky deity), rivers, nymphs, and "other spirits," and sacrificed to them. Thietmar of Merseburg (eleventh century) described the great temple at Riedegost among the Polabian Slavs — a wooden structure in a sacred grove, housing idols, with a horse used for divination. Helmold of Bosau (twelfth century) described the temple at Arkona on the island of Rügen, dedicated to Svantevit (Svetovid), a four-headed god whose idol held a drinking horn — when the horn was full after the harvest, the next year would be abundant.

The most important single source is the Primary Chronicle (Povest' vremennykh let), compiled in Kyiv in the early twelfth century, traditionally attributed to the monk Nestor. The Chronicle describes Prince Vladimir's pagan reform of 980 — his erection of a pantheon of six gods on a hill outside his palace:

Perun, made of wood with a head of silver and a mustache of gold; Khors; Dazhbog; Stribog; Simargl; and Mokosh.

This is the closest thing Slavic paganism has to a canon — a list of six divine names, recorded by a Christian monk writing two centuries after the conversion, who had every reason to misunderstand or misrepresent what the old religion actually was. Scholars have debated every name on the list. Some of the gods (Khors, Simargl) may not even be Slavic in origin — they may be Iranian borrowings from the Alans or Khazars.

Beyond the chronicles, the evidence comes from folklore — Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Serbian, Bulgarian folk customs that preserve pre-Christian elements; from archaeology — temple sites, idol finds, sacred groves; from comparative mythology — using the Baltic, Germanic, and Vedic parallels to reconstruct what the common Proto-Slavic religion might have looked like; and from linguistics — the divine names embedded in Slavic languages, place names, and personal names.

This thinness of sources is the defining challenge of Rodnovery. It is also its defining temptation. Where evidence is scarce, imagination rushes in. The gap between what is attested and what practitioners believe has been filled, at different times, with genuine scholarship, creative reconstruction, romantic nationalism, and outright fabrication.

III. The Gods

The reconstructed Slavic pantheon is smaller and less systematic than the Norse or Greek — more like a constellation of powerful figures glimpsed through the fog of centuries than a clear family tree on Olympus.

Perun (Перун) is the thunder god — the closest thing the Slavic world has to a chief deity in the attested sources. His name is cognate with Lithuanian Perkūnas, Vedic Parjanya, and the Proto-Indo-European **Perkʷunos. Vladimir placed him at the head of the Kyivan pantheon. The chronicle describes his idol: wooden body, silver head, golden mustache. His weapon is the axe or the thunderbolt. His tree is the oak. In the mythology reconstructed by scholars, Perun is locked in an eternal conflict with Veles — the storm god against the chthonic serpent, a pattern found across Indo-European traditions.

Veles (Велес) is the god of cattle, the underworld, magic, music, and oaths. His name appears in the Chronicle in a different context: treaties between Rus' and Byzantium invoke "Veles, the god of cattle" alongside Perun. The Perun–Veles opposition — sky versus earth, order versus chaos, the thunder-striker versus the serpent below — is the most widely accepted structural interpretation of Slavic mythology, developed by the Russian scholar Vladimir Toporov and the linguist Vyacheslav Ivanov in the 1970s. Whether this binary actually organized Slavic religious life or is a scholarly artifact imposed on fragmentary evidence remains debated.

Mokosh (Мокошь) is the only goddess named in Vladimir's pantheon — and thus the most prominent female deity in the attested sources. Her name may relate to mokry ("wet") or to spinning and weaving. In Russian folk practice, Mokosh survived as a domestic spirit associated with spinning — women were forbidden from spinning on Friday nights, which was Mokosh's time. After Christianization, her functions were largely absorbed by the cult of Paraskeva Pyatnitsa (St. Paraskeva of Friday) — a saint who does not exist in Byzantine tradition but appeared in Russian Orthodoxy suspiciously equipped with Mokosh's attributes.

Svarog (Сварог) appears in one passage of the Hypatian Chronicle as the divine smith who forged the first plowshare and established marriage — a civilizing deity. His son Dazhbog (Даждьбог, "giving god") is a solar deity. Stribog (Стрибог) is mentioned in the Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Lay of Igor's Campaign, twelfth century) as the grandfather of the winds. Khors (Хорс) is likely a solar deity of Iranian origin. Simargl (Симаргл) is almost certainly the Iranian Simurgh — a winged dog or griffin — borrowed into the Kyivan pantheon, perhaps through Khazar or Alan contact.

Beyond Vladimir's six, folk tradition preserves a host of lesser beings: domovoi (house spirits), leshii (forest spirits), vodyanoi (water spirits), rusalki (female water or forest spirits associated with the unquiet dead), baba yaga (the ambiguous crone of the forest). Whether these are degraded gods, nature spirits, or ancestors is a question that admits no single answer. They survived Christianization precisely because they were not gods — they were the neighbours, the local powers, the spirits of the threshold and the well. The Church could destroy the temples of Perun. It could not empty the forest of the leshii.

IV. The Baptism and What Survived

The Christianization of the Slavic world was not a single event. It was a cascade across five centuries and a dozen nations:

Bulgaria — 864, under Boris I. Moravia — from the 860s, through the mission of Cyril and Methodius. Bohemia — from the late ninth century. Poland — 966, under Mieszko I. Kyivan Rus' — 988, under Vladimir. The Polabian Slavs — the last holdout, with the temple of Svantevit at Arkona on the island of Rügen destroyed by the Danes in 1168. That date — 1168 — is as important to Rodnovery as 1387 is to Romuva. Arkona is the Slavic Thermopylae: the last stand of the last temple, remembered not as a military defeat but as a spiritual martyrdom.

The pattern was the same everywhere: the prince converts first, usually for political reasons (an alliance, a marriage, a throne), and then commands his people to follow. The idols are thrown in rivers, the sacred groves are felled, the temples are burned. Missionaries arrive. Churches rise on the sites of former shrines. The calendar is overlaid: Kupala Night (the summer solstice festival) becomes St. John's Day. Maslenitsa (the spring farewell to winter) becomes the week before Lent. Koliada (the winter solstice) becomes Christmas.

What survived was dvoevertie — "double faith." The term was coined by medieval churchmen frustrated that their converts were attending liturgy on Sunday and leaving offerings at sacred springs on Monday. The phenomenon was not hypocrisy — it was the natural response of people whose daily life was structured by relationships with local powers (house spirits, field spirits, forest spirits, ancestors) that Christianity did not replace but merely forbade. You could forbid the offering. You could not forbid the grandmother's knowledge that the domovoi lives behind the stove and must be fed.

Dvoevertie is the foundation on which Rodnovery builds its continuity claim. The folk customs are the evidence: the seasonal festivals with pre-Christian cores, the rituals around birth, marriage, and death that carry pre-Christian elements, the spirit ecology of the village — all of these, Rodnovery practitioners argue, are the living remnants of the old religion, never fully extinguished, merely covered by a Christian veneer.

The counter-argument is that a thousand years of Christianity is not a veneer. The folk customs have been reshaped by a millennium of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant influence. The domovoi in 1900 is not the same being as the domovoi in 900. The Kupala Night bonfire in the nineteenth century is not the same festival as the pre-Christian solstice. The continuity is real — but it is a continuity of forms, not necessarily of meaning. The fire burns. Whether it burns for Perun or for St. John is a question that honest people answer differently.

V. The Book of Veles

No discussion of Rodnovery can avoid the Book of Veles (Велесова книга, Vleskniga), and no discussion of it can avoid controversy.

The Book of Veles purports to be a pre-Christian Slavic scripture — the oldest Slavic religious text, written in a Proto-Slavic language on wooden boards (the doshchechki) by pagan priests in the ninth century. It tells the mythological and legendary history of the Slavic peoples from their origins through their migrations, wars, and religious life. If authentic, it would be the single most important document for Slavic paganism — the missing scripture, the Slavic Edda.

The story of its discovery is itself a narrative of loss. In 1919, during the Russian Civil War, a White Army officer named Fyodor Izenbek (Isenbeck) allegedly found a collection of wooden boards inscribed with an unknown script in a looted estate near Kharkiv. He carried them through emigration to Brussels. There, in the 1920s and 1930s, the emigrant writer Yuri Mirolyubov (Миролюбов) claimed to have transcribed the boards. The boards themselves disappeared — variously said to have been destroyed during the German occupation of Brussels, lost, or never to have existed at all.

What survives is Mirolyubov's transcription, first published in fragmentary form in the emigrant journal Zharkoe in San Francisco in the 1950s. The language is peculiar — not quite Old Church Slavonic, not quite any attested Slavic language, full of grammatical forms that no known Slavic language uses. The script is unlike any known early Slavic writing system.

The scholarly consensus is overwhelmingly against authenticity. Omeljan Pritsak (Harvard), Anatole Alexeev (Russia), Henrik Birnbaum (UCLA), and virtually every Slavic linguist who has examined the text have concluded that it is a modern fabrication — likely composed by Mirolyubov himself or his circle. The linguistic anomalies are not archaic but artificial: a pastiche of Slavic forms that resembles what a creative amateur might produce while trying to invent a "proto-Slavic" language. The content includes anachronisms and historical claims unsupported by any other source.

And yet the Book of Veles is treated as genuine scripture by a significant portion of the Rodnovery movement — particularly in Russia and Ukraine. For practitioners who accept it, the scholarly arguments are dismissed as the same establishment bias that denied the antiquity of pagan traditions for centuries. The emotional appeal is enormous: a people without a scripture suddenly has one. The gods speak in their own language. The ancestors left a testament.

The Book of Veles is instructive because it illustrates the tension at the heart of Rodnovery: the desire for a written revelation, a text that grounds the tradition in documentary authority the way the Eddas ground Norse paganism or the Vedas ground Hinduism. That the Slavs did not produce such a text — that their religion lived in practice, custom, song, and gesture rather than in scripture — is a historical fact that some practitioners find unbearable. The Book of Veles is a response to that unbearability. Whether it is a forgery or a revelation, it is a symptom of a real need.

VI. The Revival

Slavic neo-paganism did not begin in one place or with one founder. It emerged independently across the Slavic world in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — a parallel awakening with no central coordination.

In Russia, the roots lie in the late Soviet period, when the general breakdown of Marxist-Leninist ideology opened space for alternative worldviews. Two streams fed the Russian revival:

The romantic-nationalist stream found its voice in writers like Aleksei Dobrovolsky (1938–2013), who took the religious name Dobroslav. Dobrovolsky was a dissident who had been imprisoned for anti-Soviet activism in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s, he had moved from political dissent to racial mysticism, eventually advocating a synthesis of Slavic paganism, deep ecology, and explicit antisemitism. He called Christianity and Judaism "spiritual occupation" and preached a return to the Aryan gods. His commune in the Kirov region became a gathering point for the most radical wing of Russian Rodnovery. He died in 2013, but his ideological lineage continues.

The reconstructionist stream took organizational form in the Union of Slavic Native Belief Communities (Soyuz Slavyanskikh Obshchin Slavyanskoy Rodnoy Very, or SSO SRV), founded in 1997 by Vadim Kazakov. The SSO SRV is the largest and most institutionally developed Rodnovery organization in Russia. It maintains a network of local communities (obshchiny), conducts ceremonies at historical sites, publishes educational materials, and explicitly rejects ethnic supremacism — though its relationship with the broader landscape of Russian nationalism remains complex. Kazakov has publicly distanced the SSO SRV from Dobroslav's racial mysticism, but the boundary between ethnic religion and ethnic nationalism is not always easy to police.

In Ukraine, the revival took a distinctly national character. Lev Sylenko (1921–2008) founded RUNVira (Ridna Ukrains'ka Natsional'na Vira — "Native Ukrainian National Faith") in 1966, initially among the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada. Sylenko's system was syncretic and idiosyncratic — he proposed a monotheistic version of Ukrainian paganism centered on Dazhbog as the supreme deity, and wrote a lengthy scripture (Maha Vira, "The Great Faith") that owed as much to his personal philosophy as to historical Slavic religion. RUNVira had limited appeal in Ukraine itself but planted the seed.

The broader Ukrainian Rodnovery movement grew in the 1990s and 2000s, intertwined with Ukrainian national identity — the desire to distinguish Ukrainian culture from Russian culture, and to claim a pre-Christian heritage that was Ukrainian rather than "Kyivan Rus'" as filtered through Russian imperial historiography. The war that began in 2014 intensified this dynamic. Some Ukrainian Rodnovery practitioners serve in the military. Some have been killed. The tradition's entanglement with national self-defense is real and recent.

In Poland, the Rodzimowiercy (Native Believers) organized formally in the 1990s, though individual interest in Slavic paganism had been growing since the 1970s. The Rodzimy Kościół Polski (Native Polish Church, or RKP) was registered in 1995. The Polish movement tends to be more scholarly and less politically radical than the Russian, partly because Polish national identity is deeply intertwined with Catholicism — to be a Polish pagan is to be doubly marginal, and the people who choose it tend to be genuinely committed to the historical tradition rather than using paganism as a vehicle for political ideology.

In the Czech Republic, the movement is small but intellectually serious. In Serbia, groups like Staroslavci have attracted attention. In Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, smaller communities exist. The internet has connected these disparate movements since the 2000s, creating a pan-Slavic Rodnovery discourse that transcends national boundaries — though the national boundaries keep reasserting themselves, because Slavic paganism is by nature a tradition of specific peoples in specific places.

VII. The Practice

Rodnovery practice varies enormously across groups, but common elements recur.

The seasonal cycle is the foundation. Most groups observe eight festivals aligned with the solar year:

• Koliada (winter solstice) — caroling, fire-lighting, feasting, divination. The word koliada itself may derive from the Latin calendae or may be genuinely Slavic — the etymology is disputed.
• Maslenitsa (late winter/early spring) — the farewell to winter. Pancake feasting, effigy burning (the straw figure of Morena/Marzanna, the goddess of winter and death, is drowned or burned), games, revelry.
• Vernal equinox — sometimes associated with Yarilo (the spring/fertility god) or Lada (the goddess of spring and love).
• Kupala Night (summer solstice) — the most important and most public. Bonfires, jumping over flames, floating flower wreaths on rivers, bathing in rivers, gathering herbs. The Kupala celebrations are widespread even among non-pagan Slavs — like Rasos in Lithuania, the festival belongs to the culture more than to any single religion.
• Perunov Den (Perun's Day, around late July) — dedicated to the thunder god. Warriors' festival.
• Autumnal equinox — harvest thanksgiving.
• Dedy/Dziady (the Day of the Dead, late autumn) — honoring ancestors. Food and drink are placed at graves or at a table set for the dead. The Belarusian Dziady is the most elaborate surviving version of this practice.
• Veles' Day (varies) — dedicated to the god of the underworld and cattle.

Ceremony typically involves: kindling a sacred fire; invocations to the gods, ancestors, and nature spirits; offerings of food and drink (bread, grain, mead, milk) placed in the fire or poured on the earth; hymns, chants, or readings from reconstructed texts; and communal feasting. Ceremonies are usually conducted outdoors — in groves, beside rivers, at ancient sites where idols or temples once stood.

Idol-making is a distinctive Rodnovery practice. Many communities carve wooden idols (kumiry) of the gods — tall wooden posts with carved faces, erected in outdoor sanctuaries. The practice is directly attested in the medieval sources (the chronicles describe wooden idols in detail) and connects practitioners physically to the pre-Christian tradition. The idol is not merely decorative. It is treated as a vessel for the god's presence — offerings are made before it, prayers are directed to it.

Life-cycle rituals — naming ceremonies for children (sometimes called imeniny or imyanarechen'e), coming-of-age rites, weddings (svad'ba in the old style, with fire-jumping and the bride's farewell to her clan), and funeral rites (ideally cremation, though legal restrictions in most countries make this difficult) — are practiced by established communities, though the degree to which these are historically attested versus creatively reconstructed varies.

VIII. The Shadows

This section must be written plainly. Rodnovery has a problem with fascism, and any profile that does not say so plainly is not honest.

The problem is structural, not accidental. An ethnic-religious revival that defines itself by ancestry — rod, the clan, the bloodline — carries within its foundational concept the possibility of exclusion by blood. When the defining question is "whose faith is this?", and the answer is "ours — the people of this blood, this soil, this tongue" — the distance between ethnic identity and racial ideology is measured in degrees, not in kind.

Not all Rodnovery practitioners are nationalists. Not all nationalists within Rodnovery are fascists. Not all fascists within Rodnovery are violent. These distinctions matter. But the pattern is real and documented:

Dobroslav's lineage in Russia propagated an explicitly antisemitic, anti-Christian ideology that framed Slavic paganism as the spiritual arm of a racial war against "Judeo-Christian" civilization. This ideology has adherents in multiple Russian Rodnovery communities. The sociologist Kaarina Aitamurto, who conducted extensive fieldwork among Russian Rodnovery communities in the 2000s and 2010s, documented the spectrum from inclusive polytheism to racial mysticism and found that the boundaries were porous — practitioners who rejected Dobroslav's extremism still sometimes reproduced his framing of Christianity as a foreign imposition designed to weaken the Slavic race.

In Ukraine, the interweaving of paganism with nationalism has been complicated by the Russian invasion. Some Ukrainian Rodnovery practitioners and groups have been associated with far-right paramilitaries, including the Azov movement, which has used Slavic pagan and Norse pagan symbolism alongside explicitly neo-Nazi iconography. Other Ukrainian pagans reject this association entirely and practice a tradition rooted in village customs and folk ecology. The war has made it nearly impossible to separate the question of national survival from the question of national identity, and impossible to discuss either without acknowledging the far-right element.

In Russia, the historian Victor Shnirelman has documented the deep connections between Russian neo-paganism and Russian ultranationalism — including explicit ties to organizations that promote racial theories, antisemitic conspiracy thinking, and the ideology of "Aryan" racial superiority. His work (Russian Neo-Pagan Myths and Antisemitism, 2001; Hyperborea: A Myth of the Russian Right, 2009) shows that the entanglement of Slavic paganism with racial ideology is not a fringe phenomenon but a significant current within the movement.

In Poland, the Rodzimowiercy have generally maintained a clearer boundary — the RKP and the ZZR (Zrzeszenie Rodzimej Wiary, "Association of Native Faith") both publicly reject racism and fascism. But even in Poland, the broader landscape of Slavic paganism includes individuals and groups who use the tradition as a vehicle for nationalist ideology.

The honest assessment: Rodnovery is a large, diverse, decentralized movement. It contains people whose practice is grounded in genuine scholarship, ecological reverence, and ancestor-honoring. It also contains people whose practice is grounded in racial ideology wearing a pagan mask. The movement lacks the institutional authority to expel the latter, and the inclusive rhetoric of "native faith" — faith for "our people" — provides linguistic cover that both sincere practitioners and ideologues can shelter under. Mainstream Rodnovery organizations like the SSO SRV and the Polish RKP have tried to draw the line. Their success has been partial.

This shadow is not unique to Rodnovery. Norse Heathenry carries the same burden. Hindu nationalism weaponizes Vedic tradition. Buddhist nationalism fuels ethnic violence in Myanmar. Any tradition that roots itself in ethnic identity can be weaponized for ethnic supremacy. Rodnovery's problem is not that it is worse than other traditions — it is that the problem is present, documented, and unresolved, and that any profile that omits it is complicit in the omission.

IX. The Scholarly Landscape

Rodnovery has attracted significant scholarly attention, particularly from sociologists and historians of religion.

Kaarina Aitamurto (University of Helsinki) conducted the most extensive English-language fieldwork among Russian Rodnovery communities. Her Paganism, Traditionalism, Nationalism: Narratives of Russian Rodnoverie (2016) remains the standard academic treatment — balanced, detailed, and unafraid to examine the movement's darker dimensions alongside its genuine religious life.

Victor Shnirelman (Russian Academy of Sciences) has been the most relentless critic of the far-right dimension. His work traces the ideological genealogy of Russian neo-paganism from nineteenth-century Slavophilism through Soviet-era neo-nationalism to post-Soviet radical movements. His analysis is polemical but grounded in extensive documentation.

Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont) has written on Ukrainian pagan and nature-spiritual movements from the perspective of an engaged scholar of Ukrainian heritage, navigating the difficult terrain between diaspora identity politics and academic analysis.

Scott Simpson and Mariusz Filip have studied Polish Rodzimowierstwo, documenting a movement that tends toward scholarly rigor and ecological consciousness rather than political radicalism.

Dmitry Galtsin has examined the legal and social status of Rodnovery in Russia, where the Orthodox Church's privileged legal position creates a hostile environment for non-Christian religious minorities.

The comparative scholars Boris Rybakov (1908–2001) and Vladimir Toporov (1928–2005) deserve mention as ancestors of the movement, though neither was a practitioner. Rybakov's Paganism of the Ancient Slavs (1981) and Paganism of Ancient Rus' (1987) provided a scholarly framework for understanding Slavic pre-Christian religion — though his interpretations have been criticized as overly systematic and sometimes speculative. Toporov and Vyacheslav Ivanov's reconstruction of the Perun–Veles "Basic Myth" provided the structural backbone of Slavic mythological reconstruction and remains influential despite ongoing debate about its validity.

X. What Is Distinctive

Rodnovery is not simply "the Slavic version of" Asatru or Wicca or Romuva. Several features make it distinctive among European pagan revivals:

The source scarcity. No other major European pagan revival builds on such thin documentary evidence. The Norse have two Eddas, the sagas, and Snorri's systematic mythology. The Greeks have Homer, Hesiod, and centuries of literary and philosophical texts. The Balts have hundreds of thousands of folk songs. The Slavs have chronicle fragments, archaeological sites, and folklore. This scarcity forces Rodnovery into a more radical dependence on reconstruction, comparative mythology, and living folk custom — and makes it more vulnerable to fabrication and speculation.

The geographic scale. Rodnovery spans a dozen nations from Poland to Russia, from the Czech Republic to Serbia, from Ukraine to Bulgaria. The Slavic world is enormous, and the traditions within it are diverse. Russian village customs are not Polish village customs are not Serbian village customs. Rodnovery must navigate national rivalries, linguistic differences, and competing claims to the "authentic" Slavic tradition. The pan-Slavic ideal often collides with national particularism.

The political entanglement. More than any other European pagan revival, Rodnovery is entangled with contemporary politics — Russian nationalism, Ukrainian national resistance, Polish identity debates, Serbian cultural politics. The tradition cannot be understood apart from these contexts. Practitioners know this. Scholars know this. The question is not whether the political dimension exists but whether it can be separated from the religious one, and the answer — so far — is: sometimes, partially, with effort.

The spirit ecology. What survived Christianization most robustly in the Slavic world was not the high mythology of Perun and Veles but the low mythology of the domovoi, the leshii, the vodyanoi, the rusalki — the spirits of the house, the forest, the water, the threshold. Rodnovery's most authentic claim to continuity lies not in the reconstructed temples and carved idols (sincere as these are) but in the grandmother who still leaves bread for the domovoi, the village that still drowns the effigy of Marzanna at the end of winter, the family that still sets a place for the dead at the autumn table. The living tradition is domestic, local, intimate — exactly the layer that survived because it was too small and too personal for the Church or the state to destroy.

XI. The Practice Today

How many Rodnoversy are there? No one knows with precision.

In Russia, estimates range from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand sympathizers, depending on how the term is defined. The 2012 Sreda survey found approximately 1.5% of Russians identifying as "pagan" or "traditional believer" — a number that, applied to Russia's population, would mean over two million people. Most scholars consider this an overestimate of organized Rodnovery and an underestimate of diffuse folk-pagan practice.

In Poland, the Rodzimowiercy number in the thousands — a small but committed community with a disproportionate scholarly and cultural presence.

In Ukraine, the numbers are difficult to assess given the ongoing war and the interweaving of pagan identity with national identity.

Across the Slavic world, the internet has been transformative. Online communities, social media groups, YouTube channels, and forums have connected practitioners who might otherwise never have found each other. The internet has also accelerated the spread of both scholarly reconstruction and fabricated "tradition" — the same forum might contain a careful linguistic analysis of Mokosh's name and a wholly invented "Slavic rune system" with no historical basis.

The movement is young. The oldest organized groups date to the 1990s. The tradition they claim is ancient. The gap between claim and organization is not a refutation — every revival begins somewhere — but it means that Rodnovery is still finding its shape. The questions that define its future are being answered now: Can it develop institutional mechanisms to separate sincere practice from political instrumentalization? Can it build scholarly credibility without losing the vitality of lived practice? Can it honor the ancestors without worshipping ancestry?

XII. The Fire at Arkona

In 1168, King Valdemar I of Denmark and Bishop Absalon of Roskilde landed on the island of Rügen with an army. They marched to the cliff-top fortress of Arkona, where the Rani — the last unconverted Slavic tribe — maintained the great temple of Svantevit (Svetovid), the four-headed god of war, fertility, and divination.

The temple was wooden, brightly painted, surrounded by a stockade. Inside stood the idol: taller than a man, with four heads facing the four directions, each with its own face. In one hand the idol held a drinking horn. Each autumn, the priest filled the horn with mead. If the mead remained through the winter, the next year's harvest would be good. If it diminished, famine was coming. A sacred white horse was kept in the temple precinct; the priests read omens from its movements.

Absalon destroyed the temple. The idol was chopped down, dragged out, and burned. The sacred horse was given away. The Rani were baptized. The last Slavic temple fell.

It fell — and it did not quite die. The memory of Arkona persists in Rodnovery as the foundational wound: the moment when the gods were silenced by force. Whether the modern practitioners at their forest altars are the inheritors of the priests at Arkona or simply people who read about them and were moved by the story is a question that each practitioner answers for themselves. The continuity may be cultural rather than institutional. The desire may be modern rather than ancient. The gods may be reconstructed rather than remembered.

But the fire burns. In clearings outside Moscow and meadows outside Kraków and living rooms in Prague and parks in Kyiv, people pour mead on the earth and call on Perun. They may be wrong about the details. They may disagree about the politics. They may be building something new while calling it old. But the desire — to speak to the gods in your own language, to honor the spirits of your own land, to belong to a tradition older than the tradition that replaced it — is real and human and not going away.

The drinking horn is empty. Someone is trying to fill it again.

Colophon

This profile draws on the scholarship of Kaarina Aitamurto (Paganism, Traditionalism, Nationalism, 2016), Victor Shnirelman (Russian Neo-Pagan Myths and Antisemitism, 2001), Adrian Ivakhiv (articles on Ukrainian nature religion and neo-paganism), Scott Simpson and Mariusz Filip (on Polish Rodzimowierstwo), Boris Rybakov (Paganism of the Ancient Slavs, 1981), Vladimir Toporov and Vyacheslav Ivanov (on the Perun–Veles Basic Myth), Helmold of Bosau (Chronicle of the Slavs, twelfth century), Thietmar of Merseburg (Chronicle, eleventh century), the Povest' vremennykh let (Primary Chronicle), and the extensive comparative mythological work of Marija Gimbutas on Baltic-Slavic religious continuities. On the Book of Veles, the analyses of Omeljan Pritsak and Henrik Birnbaum were consulted. Any errors of fact or emphasis are the author's.

Rodnovery is the largest and most contested of Europe's pagan revivals — a tradition built on fragments, sustained by desire, shadowed by ideology, and kept alive by people who believe the gods did not drown when Vladimir threw them in the river.

Profiled for the Good Work Library by Nyima (ཉི་མ།) of the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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