What was the religion of the Slavs before their conversion to Christianity?

The Slavs, a people originating from central and eastern Europe, have not always been Christians. But the paganism which preceded this monotheism is almost unknown to us, because of their “conversion without appeal”which stretched from the VIII^e at XII^e century under the influence of the Byzantines and the Latins, and which led to the obliteration “from the slightest memory of ancient paganism”writes Patrice Lajoye.

This CNRS researcher, who had already taken an interest in one of the main gods of this pantheon in his book Peru. Slavic storm god (Lingva, 2015), points out that, “therefore, the pagan Slavic religion proves to be particularly difficult to apprehend”. Sources on the subject are incomplete and often biased. The oldest are often Christian, therefore biased. And, in Russian, some books dealing with Slavic folklore
have been published since the end of the USSR, but they turn out to be scientifically disputed.

This historical black hole can also be observed in research: in French, the only comprehensive general work on the subject dates… from 1901! With Mythology and religion of the pagan Slavs (Les Belles Lettres, 208 p., €23), Patrice Lajoye therefore intends to collect rare and scattered works – including recent archaeological discoveries – in a book of synthesis. The opportunity to immerse yourself in this little-known culture, which emerged within the Indo-European matrix.

1. A cosmogony: in the beginning was a giant

In Slavic paganism, the story of the creation of the world seems to draw on an Indo-European myth of which there are many variants, observed from Scandinavia to India. According to this legend, the world was created from the fragments of the body of a giant killed by the gods and then cut up.

“His hair then gives vegetation, his blood, the waters, his bones, the stones”, details Patrice Lajoye, who also mentions a Russian legend explaining this origin. This reports the dialogue of an old man and his grandson given as ancestors of humanity and mentions the construction of a palace in bone, which would offer the “trace of a story of the dismemberment of a cosmic giant”.

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This myth of the cosmic giant coexists among the Slavs with another equally widespread mythical motif, that of the “cosmogonic plunge”. : this dualistic story stages the awakening of a first character who will send a second “at the bottom of the primordial waters to seek there what to make the earth”.

2. The origin of men: born of divine sweating

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