Reassessment, Unification, and Enlargement of the Sources of Slavic Pre-Christian Religion

Abstract

This article discusses the texts included in a new compilation entitled Sources of Slavic Pre-Christian Religion produced by scholars at the University Complutense in Madrid, Spain. This compilation responds to the challenges of previous historiographical difficulties inherent in the indirect sources available and in the previous incomplete collections of sources. Thus, this is the first work to consolidate all known sources on pagan practices of all the Slavic peoples—East, West, and South—and to include all known provenances of sources, including Latin, Greek, Slavonic, Old Icelandic, Arabic, and Persian. The resulting compilation reveals a more complex and sophisticated pre-Christian religion than previously assumed. In this article, Santos Marinas explains the reasoning behind the selection of the texts for this compilation and offers notable examples of some of the included sources on Slavic pre-Christian practices, particularly from Byzantine and Latin texts, that provide new insights into the sacred practices of the early medieval Slavic peripheries of Christendom.