Slavic Native Faith (Rodnovery) Prayer Corpus and Revival Practice

Historical Slavic pagan religious practice, before Christianization swept across Slavic-speaking Europe primarily between the ninth and twelfth centuries depending on region, left an even thinner direct textual record than several other pre-Christian European traditions catalogued in this atlas, since surviving evidence comes almost entirely from later Christian chronicles, often written specifically to condemn continuing pagan practice as superstition to be eradicated, from scattered archaeological finds including reconstructed temple sites and idol fragments, and from folklore and vocabulary preserved, often unconsciously, within later Slavic Christian popular culture. This scarcity of direct, contemporary pre-Christian textual evidence means scholars of Slavic religion generally work with even more caution and acknowledged uncertainty than is typical for reconstructing traditions such as Norse or Celtic paganism, where at least some later medieval literary compilation, however mediated, provides a fuller though still imperfect record than exists for the Slavic case.

Some scholars have also drawn on comparative evidence from other Indo-European and neighboring Baltic pagan traditions to propose tentative parallels for specific Slavic deities and practices, a comparative method that can suggest plausible hypotheses but cannot substitute for direct textual evidence that simply does not survive in the Slavic case.

Rodnovery, the modern Slavic native faith revival movement active particularly across Russia, Ukraine, Poland and other Slavic-speaking countries since the late twentieth century, has developed new prayer and ritual practice invoking deities known from the scattered historical record, including figures such as Perun and Veles, but scholars of contemporary paganism emphasize that this modern practice necessarily involves considerable creative reconstruction and new composition given how little direct historical liturgical material actually survives to work from, a situation even more pronounced than the comparable reconstruction challenges facing Norse and Celtic pagan revival movements discussed elsewhere in this atlas.

Rodnovery organizations vary considerably in their specific theology, politics and approach to reconstruction, and some strands of the broader movement have drawn documented scholarly and journalistic scrutiny for association with nationalist or ethnically exclusive political ideology in various countries, a pattern that makes generalized description of Rodnovery as a whole particularly liable to obscure real and sometimes serious differences between specific organizations and communities. This entry accordingly limits itself to recording the thin historical corpus and the general fact of modern revival activity, without endorsing or describing the specific practice of any particular contemporary Rodnovery organization.