Abstract
This paper focuses on the most peculiar aspect of the written sources on Slavic pre-Christian religion: the lack of indigenous reports on the topic and its consequences. Since Slavic paganism was described only by Christian and mostly non-Slavic clerics, the depiction of its gods, rituals, divination systems and other features is fundamentally blurred behind the ideological filters of so-called interpretatio Christiana.
The paper presents some of the issues connected with this problem. By analyzing the literary terms for Slavic religion and through a comparative case study of possible pan-Slavic theonyms in these sources, this paper shows the general difficulties in studying Slavic paganism and its medieval literary construction.
In support of these efforts is also an attempt to lay solid groundwork for historical reconstruction of the system of pre-Christian Slavic religion that has no voice of its own in the sources and is known only by means of the Latin and, later, Old Church Slavonic literary traditions, both of which emerged from a cultural contact situation, either contact of different cultures (Frankish and Saxon Christians vs. Slavs) or of different layers of the same society (Russian Christian clergy vs. popular religious syncretism and survivals).