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 research on the history of the emergence and development of paganism among the ancient Slavic-Russian ethnos. In the first part of the book, the author invites the reader to dive into the millennia of the Stone Age, during which the ancient hunting and agricultural beliefs of the Proto-Slavic tribes originated, serving as a natural source for the mythological and cult system associated with our often contradictory notions of paganism. In the second part, the author traces the formation of Proto-Slavic culture in a later period of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, characterized by the development of predominantly agricultural culture and its influence on burial rituals, the arrangement of shrines, and the earliest mythological representations in their interconnection with the Indo-Iranian and ancient Greek pantheons of gods. In the third part, the author examines the process of forming stable representations of the Slavs about goddesses and gods and thoroughly justifies an original point of view on the cult of the god Rod and the Rozhanitsy, using both extensive archaeological and ethnographic material and the extremely diverse and still insufficiently studied Slavic folklore.