polska-w-opracowaniach: Slavic paganism

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Slavic paganism encompasses the historical pre-Christian religious beliefs, mythologies, and ritual practices of the Slavic peoples before their gradual Christianization between the 8th and 13th centuries. Rooted in broader Proto-Indo-European religion, the historical Slavic faith was polytheistic and animistic, characterized by a deep reverence for nature, ancestor worship, and rituals tied closely to the agricultural calendar. While a unified pan-Slavic pantheon likely never existed due to geographic fragmentation, certain core deities and cosmological concepts were shared across the East, West, and South Slavs.

Evidence: 39 • authority: 72

Modern paganism, also known as neopaganism and contemporary paganism, is a range of new religious movements variously influenced by the indigenous beliefs of pre-modern peoples across Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Despite some common similarities, contemporary pagan movements are diverse, sharing no single set of beliefs, practices, or religious texts. Scholars of religion may study the phenomenon as a movement divided into different religions, while others study neopaganism as a decentralized religion with an array of denominations. Adherents rely on pre-Christian, folkloric, and ethnographic sources to a variety of degrees; many of them follow a spirituality that they accept as…

Evidence: 38 • authority: 72

The Slavic Native Faith, commonly known as Rodnovery, is a polytheistic religion. Classified as a new religious movement, its practitioners hearken back to the historical belief systems of the Slavic peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, though the movement is inclusive of external influences and hosts a variety of currents. "Rodnovery" is a widely accepted self-descriptor within the community, although there are Rodnover organisations which further characterise the religion as Vedism, Orthodoxy, and Old Belief. Many Rodnovers regard their religion as a faithful continuation of the ancient beliefs that survived as a folk religion or a conscious "double belief" following the Christianisatio…

Evidence: 35 • authority: 72

In early Christianity, paganism (from Latin: paganus, lit. 'rustic') collectively referred to the diverse religious practices of all people who were polytheists. More specifically, it denoted anyone who did not adhere to an Abrahamic religion in the Roman Empire. The term pagan was an exonym used by Christians to distinguish themselves from those deemed outside their faith, and very few self-identified with the label. The origin of the term's application to polytheism is debated, as it lacked a static or consistent meaning among early Christians. Deriving from a Latin term that variably denoted a country-dweller, peasant, or civilian, individuals fell into the pagan class either because the…

Evidence: 26 • authority: 88

Baltic, Slavic, and Balkan Mythology. Abstract Baltic peoples included Latvians, Lithuanians—not Christianized until the early fifteenth century—and Old Prussians, who inhabited what is now eastern Germany and the Baltics and land extending as far east as Moscow beginning in about the middle of the second millennium b.c.e. By the first millennium the Balts, whose languages are closer to the ancient Indo-European Vedic language than any other European language group, had developed from a hunter-gatherer culture into an agricultural one. Not surprisingly, then, what little we know of Baltic mythology is a combination of perhaps very ancient nature deities and deities closely associated with f…