No pagan Slav wrote about Slavic religion, so everything known comes from outsiders and converts. The sixth century Byzantine historian Procopius reported that the Slavs worshipped a maker of lightning above all other gods. The Russian Primary Chronicle records that Prince Vladimir of Kyiv, before his conversion, set up idols of Perun the thunderer with a silver head and golden mustache, alongside Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl and Mokosh, the one goddess of the list; eight years later he had Perun dragged to the Dnieper and thrown in. German chroniclers describe the temple towns of the Baltic West Slavs, Arkona on Rugen with its four-headed Svantovit and oracular horse, destroyed by the Danes in 1168.
From these fragments scholars have built reconstructions of very different confidence. The structuralist school of Ivanov and Toporov read a single storm myth beneath the scraps, the thunderer Perun in endless combat with the serpentine Veles, lord of cattle, wealth and the waters below; others, including Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel, warn that the chronicle pantheons may be bookish constructions and that little about actual cult can be recovered. Svarog, often presented as a fire or smith god, rests on a single chronicle gloss.
What the texts do agree on is a religion of springs, groves and household spirits, oaths sworn by Perun and Veles in Rus treaty documents, and a dead who had to be feasted and remembered, themes that lived on for centuries in village custom long after the idols fell.