Slavic and Baltic folk tradition

What it is

The pre-Christian religions of the Slavic and Baltic peoples, the folk practice that survived alongside Christianity, and the modern movements reviving both.

Slavic deities attested with reasonable confidence: Perun, the thunder god; Veles, his adversary, associated with cattle, the underworld and oaths; Mokoš, associated with women's work and moisture; Svarog and Dažbog.

Baltic: Perkūnas, the thunderer; Dievas, the sky god; Laima, who determines fate at birth; Žemyna, the earth.

The Perun-Veles opposition and the Perkūnas material are among the better evidence for reconstructed Indo-European religion, since they preserve structures also found in Vedic and Norse sources.

Where it came from

The Slavic sources are poor. What survives is chronicles and polemic by Christian outsiders — the Primary Chronicle of the Rus', Thietmar of Merseburg, Helmold of Bosau, Saxo Grammaticus — recording the destruction of temples more often than their contents. There is nothing comparable to the Eddas.

The Baltic situation is different, and this is the interesting part. Lithuania was the last part of Europe to be Christianised: officially in 1387 in the north and not until 1413 in Samogitia, some four centuries after Poland and Kievan Rus'. Latvia and Estonia were converted by crusade in the thirteenth century, and rural practice persisted long after.

The consequence is that pre-Christian material survived in folk song to a degree unmatched elsewhere. The Latvian dainas — short, formally strict quatrains — were collected from the nineteenth century, chiefly by Krišjānis Barons, who assembled well over a million texts into a purpose-built cabinet of drawers now held as a national treasure. They preserve deities, seasonal ritual, cosmology and a whole agricultural year, and they were sung by people who were nominally Lutheran.

Dvoeverie — double faith — is the traditional term for pagan survival beneath Russian Christianity. It should be used carefully: historians including Eve Levin have argued it is overstated, and that much of what was labelled surviving paganism is better understood as ordinary Christian folk practice.

How it is practised

Historically, in the agricultural and calendar year: Kupala night at midsummer, with fires, water and herb-gathering; koliada at midwinter, with masked house-visiting and song; and domestic observance directed at household spirits — the domovoi of the Russian house, who is propitiated rather than worshipped.

Modern movements:

Romuva in Lithuania reconstructs Baltic religion from folklore and song. Its legal history is instructive: recognised as a religious community in 1992, it sought full state recognition and was refused by the Lithuanian parliament in 2019 — and in 2021 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the refusal breached the Convention.

Dievturība in Latvia, founded in the 1920s, works from the dainas.

Rodnovery — Slavic Native Faith — is the largest movement, with substantial followings in Russia, Ukraine and Poland.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the Baltic material is unusually good, and that folk song is doing evidential work here that no other European tradition can call on.

We can say Rodnovery has a serious far-right problem, and it should be stated as directly as the equivalent problem in Norse heathenry.

Substantial parts of the Slavic native faith movement in Russia and Ukraine are entangled with ethnic nationalism, and some groups and symbols associated with it have been adopted by ultranationalist and neo-Nazi organisations in both countries. Not all Rodnovers are nationalists, and there are practitioners who reject it explicitly — but the movement has not produced anything comparable to heathenry's Declaration 127, and the association is stronger and less contested from within.

Baltic Romuva and Dievturība are generally distinct from this and are more closely tied to national cultural revival than to racial ideology, though the boundary requires attention rather than assumption.

We can say the reconstructions are reconstructions. Where Norse revivalists have late Christian sources, Slavic revivalists have chronicles written by people burning the temples, and Baltic revivalists have folk song that is genuinely rich and genuinely not a liturgy. Modern practice is built from that, and the honest groups say so.

We cannot say what was believed before conversion in any detail, and confident modern accounts of Slavic pantheons should be treated with the caution owed to reconstructions of reconstructions.

Further reading

• The Latvian dainas, in translation — the Latvju dainas collection, and Vaira Vīķis-Freibergs's scholarship on them.
• Eve Levin's work questioning the dvoeverie model.
• Kaarina Aitamurto, Paganism, Traditionalism, Nationalism (2016), on Rodnovery and its politics.