Slavic Mythology

Slavic mythology survives without a native written canon. What is known of the pre-Christian gods has been pieced together from scattered outside witnesses: Procopius in the sixth century, the Primary Chronicle's account of Prince Vladimir raising and then destroying idols in Kyiv, Thietmar of Merseburg's description of West Slavic temples, plus the inferences of philology and archaeology. Only a handful of divine names are secure — Perun the thunderer, Veles the cattle god, the goddess Mokosh, Svarog of the celestial fire — and their stories mostly come down as outlines.

The lower mythology is far better preserved. The domovoy behind the stove, the vodyanoy in the millpond, the rusalka at the water's edge and the night-spinning kikimora lived on for nearly a millennium after Christianization, recorded in Alexander Afanasyev's nineteenth-century tale collections and in the early-twentieth-century fieldwork of ethnographers such as Dmitry Zelenin, together with the great figures of the wonder tale: Baba Yaga, Koschei the Deathless, the Firebird. Church writers complained of dvoeverie, "double faith" — baptized peasants who still left porridge behind the stove — and that double faith is exactly what kept the mythology alive.

Hence its particular temper: the temples fell silent while the hearth fire stayed lit. The high gods crowd into a few lines of chronicle, but the spirits moved into every mill, rye field and stove corner, bargaining with people and moving house alongside them.