Summary
Boris Rybakov: Paganism of the Ancient Slavs
The book "Paganism of the Ancient Slavs" represents the first volume of extensive research on the origin and history of the development of pagan beliefs of the oldest Slavic Russian ethnos. In the first part of the book, the author takes the reader thousands of years deep into the Stone Age, at the time of the appearance of the first religious ideas in the hunting and farming community of proto-Slavic tribes, which were the logical basis for the creation of the mythological and cult system on which our often contradictory ideas about paganism rest. In the second part, the author traces the formation of proto-Slavic culture in a much later period of Slav ethnogenesis. He talks about the development of agricultural culture and its influence on the evolution of funeral rites, the way shrines were built and the formation of the oldest mythological representations through the prism of their connection with Indo-Iranian and ancient Greek religious and mythological systems. In the third part, the process of the emergence of stable and rooted beliefs among Slavs, as well as the birth of Slavic deities, is analyzed. The author explained his very original approach to the cult of Rod and birth women from several aspects, relying on rich archaeological and ethnographic material, but also on extremely diverse and still insufficiently studied Slavic folklore.
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