Slavic Native Faith (Rodnovery)

Rodnovers worship a pantheon reconstructed from chronicle notices, folklore, place-names and comparative study. Perun, the thunderer and god of warriors and of oaths, and Veles, associated with cattle, wealth, the underworld and poetry, are the two best attested and are often set in opposition to one another. Svarog is linked to the sky and to smithcraft, Dazhbog to the sun and to giving, Mokosh to the earth, to moisture and to women's work. Above or behind these many groups place Rod, a word meaning kin, birth and generation, understood as the source of life and of the family line. Some treat Rod as a supreme god and read the other deities as its aspects, which makes parts of the movement effectively monistic rather than polytheistic, and this is a live disagreement rather than a settled point.

Worship is held outdoors at a kapishche, an open shrine usually with carved wooden idols, a fire and a place for offerings. Rites involve bread, grain, honey, mead and flowers, sometimes animal sacrifice, and end in a communal meal. Officiants are commonly called volkhvs. Ancestors are honoured at fixed points in the year, drawing on the widespread Slavic custom of commemorative meals for the dead.

The festival year follows agriculture and the sun. Kupala Night at midsummer, with fires, bathing and wreaths, and Koliada at midwinter are the largest. Maslenitsa marks the end of winter with pancakes and the burning of a straw effigy. These survived in folk custom under Christianity and were reclaimed rather than invented, which makes them the best-grounded element of the whole practice.

There is very little to reconstruct from. No pre-Christian Slavic text exists. The chronicles list some gods without explaining them, the western Slavic temples are described only by hostile foreign clerics, and the archaeology is sparse and often ambiguous; even the Zbruch idol, the best known Slavic cult sculpture, has had its authenticity questioned.

That gap has been filled twice over. The most consequential filling is the Book of Veles, a text presented as pre-Christian Slavic scripture carved on wooden boards, which surfaced among Russian emigres in the 1950s on the strength of a claimed discovery in 1919. Philologists examined it and found its language incoherent as any historical stage of Slavic, mixing forms from different centuries and different languages. Academic Slavic studies regards it as a twentieth-century forgery, a judgement argued in detail by Lidia Zhukovskaya in 1960 and not seriously contested since. A number of Rodnover groups nevertheless treat it as sacred text, and others reject it outright; the disagreement runs right through the movement.

The second filling is folklore. Rodnovery draws heavily on nineteenth and twentieth-century collections of peasant custom, on the assumption that Christian practice in Slavic villages preserved a pagan layer beneath it. That model, often called double faith, is itself contested: scholars including Eve Levin have argued that it projects a division onto what participants experienced as a single religion. Some continuity is certainly real, as the seasonal festivals show. How much is unresolved, and on the surviving evidence probably unresolvable.

Rodnovery covers a wide political range, and an accurate description has to say so.

At one end are groups that treat it as a nature religion and a way of keeping local custom alive, are open to anyone, and take no ethnic position at all. At the other are groups for whom the religion is primarily an ethnic project, which describe Christianity as a foreign imposition that broke the Slavic peoples, and some of which are explicitly antisemitic. Between the two sits a much larger number of practitioners whose politics are conventional but whose vocabulary of blood, kin and native soil is shared with the first group's critics.

The standard scholarly treatment is Kaarina Aitamurto's fieldwork among Russian Rodnovers, published as Paganism, Traditionalism, Nationalism in 2016, which found the boundary between these positions porous rather than clean. Rodnover symbolism has also appeared among Russian and Ukrainian nationalist militias, and the war since 2014 has divided Ukrainian and Russian communities that had previously shared publications and gatherings.

Numbers are unreliable. Active practitioners across the Slavic countries are usually estimated in the tens of thousands, with far larger figures circulating from movement sources that count sympathisers rather than members. Poland's registered native faith organisations reported a few thousand members in the early 2020s.

None of this describes the whole. It describes a real internal division that Rodnovers argue about openly among themselves, and that anyone reading about the religion will encounter.