Slavic · English · 1872
The Songs of the Russian People
W. R. S. Ralston
The first substantial English account of Slavic religion, assembled out of folk song by a translator who read the Russian scholarship and quotes it against itself. It is the only text in the corpus carrying all five of the Kiev gods at once — Perun on his rising ground, Volos sworn beside him in the treaties with the Greeks, Dazhbog and Khors as two names for the sun, Stribog as the god of the winds — and it is candid about how much of that is inferred rather than known.
Read The Songs of the Russian People in full at the linked edition →What this text attests · 5
| Name here | Rank given | # | Powers described |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | The Black God, representative of darkness, paired against Byelbog the White God — and reported as a belief attributed to the Western Slavonians which some writers suppose was once common to the whole family. Ralston gives it as a supposition twice removed, which is a second witness to how thin Helmold's single sentence is rather than a second witness to the god. | |
| — | — | The sun, and a son of Svarog — who is described as given to repose, deputing the work of creation and the ruling of the universe to his children. Ralston takes Dazhbog and Khors to be two forms of the one sun-god rather than two gods. | |
| — | — | The thunder-god, given supremacy among the Eastern Slavonic deities sooner or later, with his statue standing on rising ground at Kiev. Ralston also reports the theory that he was the particular god of the Scandinavian rulers rather than of their Slavonic subjects — a supremacy that may be an import, flagged as contested rather than repeated. | |
| — | — | The god of the winds, one of the images set up beside Perun's statue at Kiev with Khors, Dazhbog, Simargla and Mokosh. Ralston is direct that of most of that company very little indeed is known. | |
 Volos = Veles | — | — | Sworn by alongside Perun in the treaties with the Greeks, and suggested to be the god of the Slavonic subjects where Perun was the rulers'. Ralston notes that Volos kept his hold on the popular memory after Perun lost his, which is the reverse of what the chronicles would predict. |
