The Slavic Native Faith, commonly known as Rodnovery, is a polytheistic religion. Classified as a new religious movement, its practitioners hearken back to the historical belief systems of the Slavic peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, though the movement is inclusive of external influences and hosts a variety of currents. "Rodnovery" is a widely accepted self-descriptor within the community, although there are Rodnover organisations which further characterise the religion as Vedism, Orthodoxy, and Old Belief.
Many Rodnovers regard their religion as a faithful continuation of the ancient beliefs that survived as a folk religion or a conscious "double belief" following the Christianisation of the Slavs in the Middle Ages. Rodnovery draws upon surviving historical and archaeological sources and folk religion, often integrating them with non-Slavic sources such as Hinduism (because they are believed to come from the same Proto-Indo-European source). Rodnover theology and cosmology may be described as henotheism and polytheism—worship of the supreme God of the universe and worship of the multiple gods, the ancestors and the spirits of nature who are identified in Slavic culture. Adherents of Rodnovery usually meet in groups in order to perform religious ceremonies. These ceremonies typically entail the invocation of gods, the offering of sacrifices and the pouring of libations, dances and communal meals.
Rodnover organisations often characterise themselves as ethnic religions, emphasising their belief that the religion is bound to Slavic ethnicity. This frequently manifests as nationalism and racism. Rodnovers often glorify Slavic history, criticising the impact of Christianity on Slavic countries and arguing that they will play a central role in the world's future. Rodnovers oppose Christianity, characterizing it as a "mono-ideology". Rodnover ethical thinking emphasises the good of the collective over the rights of the individual. The religion is patriarchal, and attitudes towards sex and gender are generally conservative. Rodnovery has developed strains of political and identitary philosophy.
The contemporary organised Rodnovery movement arose from a multiplicity of sources and charismatic leaders just on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet Union and it spread rapidly during the mid-1990s and 2000s. Antecedents of Rodnovery existed in late 18th- and 19th-century Slavic Romanticism, which glorified the pre-Christian beliefs of Slavic societies. Active religious practitioners who were devoted to establishing the Slavic Native Faith appeared in Poland and Ukraine during the 1930s and 1940s, while the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin promoted research into the ancient Slavic religion. Following the Second World War and the establishment of communist states throughout the Eastern Bloc, new variants of Rodnovery were established by Slavic emigrants who lived in Western countries; later, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were introduced into Central and Eastern European countries. In recent times, the movement has been increasingly studied by academic scholars.
Overview
Scholars of religion regard Slavic Native Faith as a modern Pagan religion. They also characterise it as a new religious movement. The movement has no overarching structure, or accepted religious authority, and contains much diversity in terms of belief and practice. The sociologist of religion Kaarina Aitamurto has suggested that Rodnovery is sufficiently heterogeneous that it could be regarded not as a singular religion but as "an umbrella term that gathers together various forms of religiosity". The historian Marlène Laruelle has described Rodnovery as "more inclusive than just adherence to a pantheon of pre-Christian gods".
The scholar of religion Alexey Gaidukov has described "Slavic Neopaganism" as a term pertaining to "all quasi-religious, political, ideological and philosophical systems which are based on the reconstruction and construction of pre-Christian Slavic traditions". The scholar of religion Adrian Ivakhiv has defined Rodnovery as a movement which "harkens back to the pre-Christian beliefs and practices of ancient Slavic peoples", while according to the historian and ethnologist Victor A. Schnirelmann, Rodnovers present themselves as "followers of some genuine pre-Christian Slavic, Russian or Slavic-Aryan Paganism".
Some involved in the movement avoid calling their belief system either "paganism" or "religion". Many Rodnovers refer to their belief system as an "ethnic religion", and Rodnover groups were involved in establishing the European Congress of Ethnic Religions. The usage of this term suggests that the religion is restricted to a particular ethnic group. Some practitioners regard "ethnic religion" as a term synonymous with "Native Faith", but others perceive a distinction between the two terms. Laruelle has emphasised that Rodnovery "cannot necessarily be defined as a religion in the strict sense"; some adherents prefer to define it as a "spirituality" (dukhovnost), "wisdom" (mudrost), or a "philosophy" or "worldview" (mirovozzrenie).
According to Schnirelmann, it was the Soviet Union's official scientific atheism, which severely weakened the infrastructure of universalist religions, combined with anti-Westernism and the research of intellectuals into an ancient "Vedic" religion of Russia, that paved the way for the rise of Rodnovery and other modern Paganisms in Eastern Europe. After the Soviet Union, the pursuit of Rodnovery matured into the spiritual cultivation of organic folk communities (ethnoi) in the face of what Rodnovers consider the alien cosmopolitan forces which drive global assimilation (what they call "mono-ideologies"), chiefly represented by the Abrahamic religions. In the Russian intellectual milieu, Rodnovery usually presents itself as the ideology of "nativism" (narodnichestvo), which in Rodnovers' own historical analysis is destined to supplant the mono-ideologies whose final bankruptcy the world is now witnessing.
Rodnovery as a new synthesis
Schnirelmann has stated that Rodnovery does not actually constitute the "restoration of any pre-Christian religion as such". Rather, he describes the movement as having been "built up artificially by urbanised intellectuals who use fragments of early pre-Christian local beliefs and rites in order to restore national spirituality". In this way, Slavic Native Faith has been understood—at least in part—as an invented tradition, or a form of Folklorismus. Simpson has noted, speaking of the specific context of Poland, that unlike historical Slavic beliefs, which were integral to the everyday fabric of their society, modern Slavic Native Faith believers have to develop new forms of social organisation which set them apart from established society. Textual evidence for historical Slavic religion is scant, has been produced by Christian writers hostile to the systems being described and is usually open to multiple interpretations.
In developing Slavic Native Faith, practitioners draw upon the primary sources about the historical religion of Slavic peoples, as well as elements drawn from later Slavic folklore, official and popular Christian belief and from non-Slavic societies. Among these foreign influences have been beliefs and practices drawn from Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Germanic Heathenry, and Siberian shamanism, as well as ideas drawn from various forms of esotericism. Other influences include documents like the Book of Veles, which claims to be genuine accounts of historical Slavic religion but which academics recognise as later compositions. According to the folklorist Mariya Lesiv, through this syncretic process, "a new religion is being created on the basis of the synthesis of elements from various traditions".
Some Rodnovers do not acknowledge this practice of syncretism and instead profess an explicitly anti-syncretic attitude, emphasising the need to retain the "purity" of the religion and thus maintain its "authenticity". Other Rodnovers are conscious that the movement represents a synthesis of different sources, that what is known about ancient Slavic religion is very fragmented, and therefore the reconstruction requires innovation. Laruelle has thus defined Rodnovery as an "open-source religion", that is to say a religion which "emphasizes individual participation and doctrinal evolution, and calls for the personal creation of religious belief systems".
Ideas borrowed from other religions Rodnovers also use ideas, principles, and terminology of other religious systems. The idea of monotheism is often present: for example, Vsebog in the association Skhoron Yezh Sloven. The Rodnover concept of "Old Slavic monotheism", in which all gods are considered manifestations of a single god, is borrowed from the Book of Veles, which, in turn, borrowed it from Hinduism and "Aryan Christianity".
In most Slavic neopagan teachings, there is a creator God (Rod, Svarog), sometimes regarded as the One and Indivisible who created the world (or worlds). He gave birth to the creator gods of the Earth, the male and female principles (Svarog and Lada), who gave life to other gods. Monotheism can be combined with pantheism (for example, in "Skhoron Yezh Sloven").
The influence of Hindu currents is traced, like Trimurti. In a number of currents, under the influence of "Aryan Christianity", there is a modified idea of the Trinity ("the trinity of three triune trinities" according to Valery Yemelyanov); other Christian ideas are also borrowed. In some cases, "runic magic" and other elements of Western neopaganism are used. The Rodnovers' reverence of nature is connected with the ideas of "natural Aryan socialism" and natural "Aryan" (Slavic-"Aryan") roots.
A number of authors (Valery Yemelyanov, Vladimir Golyakov, Konstantin Petrov, Yuri Petukhov, Halyna Lozko, V. M. Dyomin (retired colonel, Omsk), Yury Sergeyev, S. G. Antonenko, L. N. Ryzhkov) tried to prove that the ideas of monotheism ("Vedic monotheism") and the Trinity were independently developed by Slavic paganism or "Aryan" religion.
Slavic folk religion and double belief
A different perspective is offered by the historian Svetlana M. Chervonnaya, who has seen the return to folk beliefs among Slavs as part of a broader phenomenon that is happening to "the mass religious mind" not merely of Slavic or Eastern European peoples, but to peoples all over Asia, and that expresses itself in new mythologemes endorsed by national elites. The notion that modern Rodnovery is closely tied to the historical Slavic religion is a very strong one among practitioners.
In crafting their beliefs and practices, Rodnovers adopt elements from recorded folk culture, including from the ethnographic record of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Practitioners often legitimise the incorporation of elements from folk culture into Slavic Native Faith through the argument that Slavic folk practices have long reflected the so-called "double belief" (dvoeverie), a conscious preservation of pre-Christian beliefs and practices alongside Christianity. This is a concept that was especially popular among nineteenth-century ethnographers who were influenced by Romanticism and retains widespread popularity across Eastern Europe, but has come under criticism in more recent times. Slavic Christianity was influenced by indigenous beliefs and practices as it was established in the Middle Ages and these folk practices changed greatly over the intervening centuries; according to this, Rodnovers claim that they are just continuing living tradition.