Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe, the Slavic and Baltic lands stretching across Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and the Balkans, presents one of the frustrating gaps in the study of European religion: the pre-Christian faith of these peoples is very poorly documented. There is no Slavic or Baltic equivalent of the Norse Eddas, no body of native myth written down before conversion; what is known of the old Slavic gods, Perun the thunderer, Veles the god of cattle and the underworld, the many-headed Svarog and Dazhbog, comes from fragmentary Christian chronicles (like the Russian Primary Chronicle, which records Prince Vladimir setting up and then, at his conversion in 988, tearing down the idols of Kiev), from a few foreign observers, and from later folklore.

The Baltic peoples (Lithuanians, Latvians, Prussians) were the last pagans in Europe, holding to their old religion into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, long after their neighbours had converted, which preserved somewhat more of their tradition. Eastern Europe later became a great heartland of Orthodox Christianity (through the conversion of the Rus) and of Roman Catholicism further west. In the modern era the region has seen a vigorous movement of Pagan reconstruction, Rodnovery, the Slavic Native Faith, which attempts, on this thin evidentiary base, to revive the old worship. The region thus stands for a religious past more lost than most, reconstructed from fragments and folk memory.

Pre-Christian Slavic and Baltic religion is worse attested than almost anything else this atlas covers, and honesty about that matters more than a full-looking page.

There is no native text. The written notices are brief, external and mostly hostile: chronicle entries recording the destruction of idols, a handful of passages in medieval Latin and Old Church Slavonic works, and descriptions by German and Danish writers of the temple sites on the Baltic coast that they or their allies were in the process of destroying. A list of divine names survives; what was actually believed about most of them does not.

Archaeology supplies sanctuary sites, carved posts and deposits. Folklore collected in the nineteenth century preserves calendar customs, songs and figures that plainly predate Christianity, but it was collected eight hundred years after conversion and had passed through those centuries.

Into that gap a great deal was written. The Romantic and national movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wanted a pagan past and produced one, and some of the material is outright forgery. The Book of Veles, presented in the twentieth century as an ancient Slavic scripture, is rejected by philologists on linguistic grounds and continues to circulate.

The result is that a confident-sounding account of Slavic mythology is usually reconstruction, and the reader is entitled to know which parts rest on a chronicle notice and which on inference.