The One Goddess of Vladimir's Idols, and the Thread of Fate

Mokosh is the goddess of the earth, of women's work and of fate among the East Slavs, and she holds a distinction: she is the only female deity named in the list of idols that Prince Vladimir is said to have raised at Kiev in 980, according to the Primary Chronicle. Her name has been connected both with wetness (moisture, the damp earth) and with spinning, and the two combine in her associations, spinning and weaving are hers, and the thread is fate, so that she both moistens the earth and spins out destiny.

Later church penitentials from Rus condemn women who confess to praying to Mokosh, which is unusually direct evidence that her cult survived Christianization at the household level, chiefly among women; Fridays, the day of women's work, were kept for her. Much of what is popularly said about Mokosh, however, comes from nineteenth-century folklore collections and from her partial merger with the Christian Saint Paraskeva rather than from any early source, and should be weighed accordingly.