Religion of the Proto-Slavs

Abstract

Compared to other pagan religious systems of Europe, the Slavic religion is one of the least known. There are no known Slavic myths, that is the stories of the gods. However, the written Greek and Latin sources, the Central European (Russian, Czech and Polish), as well as the material relics (eg. The statues of the deities of the four faces ) allows us to specify different forms and characteristics of the Slavic religion: the multiplicity of deities, the worship of the deified forces of nature, the worship of fire, and the original worship of the sky. The gradual process of displacing the original Slavic beliefs in the context of Christianization began in the sixth century, and finally ended with the conquest of Polabians by the Germans (13th century). However, relics of the Slavic religion survived in the private beliefs in the 15th and 16th centuries and in the folklore to this day, although the form and scale of this survival has not yet been clearly defined.
This article makes references to contemporary and earlier academic achievements in the field discussed, a reflection based on polidoxy treated as a source of polytheism and prototheism as the primary phase of polytheism. References to historical monuments and findings of historians of antiquity, for whom the Slavs were often a closed and commonly unknown societal circle, which in this manner appeared to be a threat to first the Roman Empire and then later to Western civilization.