A Scripture Some Still Teach and Others Refuse

A forged text does not necessarily stay outside the traditions that might use it, and the Book of Veles has become a genuine point of division inside the modern Rodnover movement. Scholarship on post-Soviet neo-paganism, including Victor Shnirelman's study of how Russian neo-pagan movements built their ideology, describes a recurring pattern in which a young religious movement without an unbroken textual inheritance reaches for a document that can be presented as an authentic original source, because an appeal to ancient authority carries more weight than an admission that the tradition is being reconstructed from folklore and comparative scholarship. Some Rodnover organizations have taken up the Book of Veles on exactly those terms and teach from it as scripture. Other Rodnovers reject it just as firmly, and on the same philological grounds the wider scholarly world uses, arguing that a native faith gains nothing from defending a fabricated text and loses credibility by doing so. The atlas records the claim as it is actually made inside the movement, and records plainly that it is false, because a reader who encounters the book inside Rodnover literature deserves to be told which of the two descriptions applies.