Paganism of the Ancient Slavs

The book by Academician B.A. Rybakov, the founder of the domestic school of medievalists, is the first volume of his fundamental study on the history of the origin and development of paganism among the ancient Slavic-Russian ethnic group.
In the first part of the book, the author invites the reader to dive into the millennial depths of the Stone Age, where the earliest hunting and agricultural beliefs of the proto-Slavic tribes originated, serving as a natural source for the mythological and cult system associated with our largely contradictory ideas about paganism.
In the second part, the author traces the formation of proto-Slavic culture during a later period of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, characterized by the development of predominantly agricultural culture and its influence on burial rites, the arrangement of sanctuaries, and the earliest mythological representations in their connection with Indo-Iranian and ancient Greek pantheons of gods.
In the third part, the author examines the process of forming stable ideas among the Slavs about goddesses and gods and thoroughly substantiates an original viewpoint on the cult of the god Rod and the Rozhanitsy, using both extensive archaeological and ethnographic material as well as the exceedingly diverse and still insufficiently studied Slavic folklore.