The Slavic Soul

Question: What do you think it is about the Slavic Gods that people seem to never come to a consensus about their PSP? The 'official' version is Duality (which isn't about Duality), but you guys went with Dvoeverie and there's also Prav, Bhag and Pravda. Seems like the Slavs have a lot of stuff going on.

It's not really so much something about the Slavic gods as it is the lack of good information in English on Slavic religion that gets people so topsy-turvy on the whole thing. The Slavs have precious little in the way of written record, and most of their information comes from folktales, scholar reconstructions and archaeological finds; trying to pull a coherent cultural idea suitable for a PSP out of that is a difficult task.

Duality, unfortunately, is a mess of an idea, which is why we discounted it out of hand. Not only do I suspect that the gravitation toward it is in part due to Neil Gaiman's treatment of Czernobog and Bielebog in American Gods (which is awesome, but also full of expected fictionalization), but it's such a widespread concept that it feels crazy to try to tie it to any one culture. The Slavs certainly aren't the owners of duality - they're not even the strongest practitioners of it, not with the Yazata standing, like, right there (and many scholars are of the strong opinion that much of the Slavic duality that is present in myth is borrowed from rubbing elbows with Persia anyway). It's an idea that really doesn't capture the spirit of the Slavic people or myths, and that wasn't very well executed, in my opinion, as a PSP anyway (though I respect later fan attempts to fix it).

Prav (and Pravda), unfortunately, doesn't do much better for me. I'm in total agreement that it's a concept that makes much more sense as a PSP than does Duality, but the problem is that it's a concept that was invented very, very recently by Slavic neopagans. Prav, as the concept of the righteous law of Svarog that binds the world together, was invented by the Book of Veles, a widely-discredited forgery from the 1950s that contains a lot of material that never appears anywhere else in Slavic myth. While the word prav does, indeed, mean law or rightness in various Slavic languages, we don't have any evidence of it as any kind of religious or cosmic concept that ties into the culture's myths. I don't feel a lot more of a focus on law and order among the Slavic gods and myths than any other - again, there are other pantheons that more embody that idea, like the law-obsessed Celestial Bureaucracy or the order-and-stability-focused Anunna. (For what it's worth, however, the Prav in the Fan-Written Resources thread over at the forums is a better attempt at coherently working with this idea than the Prav and Pravda on the Scion wiki, and its focus on Virtues is something we also did a lot with for Dvoeverie.)

Bhag is more of a weird mixed bag of a purview, because it's actually much closer to Indian than it is to Slavic. Bhag is a proto-Indo-European word, etymologically identical to the Sanskrit bhaj, meaning to portion out or allot. It, along with svarga, which the half-treatment on the Slavs in the Scion book suggests as a name for the Overworld, is borrowed directly from the Indian language and culture, where Svarga is indeed an Overworld, owned by Indra and a destination for pious Hindu souls. The words eventually found their way to the Slavs through the Persians, and are loanwords that don't really connect to their own ancient concepts; referring to heaven as "svarga" is actually a fairly recent development, as it's the word chosen to represent the Christian Heaven. What this all boils down to for Bhag (which is a weird little purview having to do with good luck that looks like it belongs in Ganesha's bag of tricks more than anywhere else) is that it comes from a lot of outside syncretic sources and is sort of floating around, unconnected to the Slavs in more than peripheral ways. A PSP needs to be the core essence of a pantheon, not an idea that linguistically might have been associated with them sometimes in the areas where they were influenced by someone else.

But the issue remains, after you clear all of those away, that it's still really difficult to come up with what, exactly, the defining power and cultural facet of the Slavic gods really is. In the end, we chose dvoeverie because it seemed to collect most of the things that the other PSPs were trying to do, and because it was a uniquely Slavic concept that has always been bound up in their religious practice and life. The Slavs live at the crossroads of the world and have been invaded, conquered, befriended and traded with more than anyone else, and somehow they have endured with their unique cultural flavor no matter whether the Celts, Germans, Persians, Greeks, or later the hordes of Catholicism were in charge. Their ability (documented historically) to worship more than one set of gods without any qualm, despite the apparent conflicts and overlaps between the two that sent other cultures into fits at the idea, represents an impressive ability to remain true to their core values no matter what's going on. And the gods of these people, already notoriously harmoniously associated with the natural world and its rhythms, could not help but be as flexible.

So Dvoeverie it is, for us. Nothing else struck us as simultaneously quintessentially Slavic, religiously significant and historically verifiable.