Rodnovery Builds Forward from a Thin Foundation

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.