Slavic Native Faith's theology and cosmology
Slavic Native Faith has a theology that is generally monistic, consisting in the vision of an absolute, supreme God who begets the universe and lives as the universe, present in all its phenomena. Polytheism, that is the worship of the gods or spirits, and ancestors, the facets of the supreme Rod generating all phenomena, is an integral part of Rodnovers' beliefs and practices.
The swastika-like kolovrat is the symbol of Rodnovery. According to the studies of Boris Rybakov, whirl and wheel symbols, which also include patterns like the "six-petaled rose inside a circle" and the "thunder mark", represent the supreme Rod and its various manifestations. The vision of Rodnover theology has been variously defined as manifestationism, genotheism, and rodotheism.
Theological stances
Monism and polytheism: Rod and deities
Prior to their Christianisation, the Slavic peoples were polytheists, worshipping multiple deities who were regarded as the emanations of a supreme God. According to Helmold's Chronica Slavorum, "obeying the duties assigned to them, have sprung from his blood and enjoy distinction in proportion to their nearness to the god of the gods". Belief in these deities varied according to location and through time, and it was common for the Slavs to adopt deities from neighbouring cultures. Both in Russia and in Ukraine, modern Rodnovers are divided among those who are monotheists and those who are polytheists; in other words, some emphasise a unitary principle of divinity, while others put emphasis on the distinct gods and goddesses. Some Rodnovers even describe themselves as atheists, believing that gods are not real entities but rather symbolic and/or archetypal.Monotheism and polytheism are not regarded as mutually exclusive. The shared underpinning is a pantheistic view that is holistic in its understanding of the universe. Similarly to the ancient Slavic religion, a common theological stance among Rodnovers is that of monism, by which the many different gods are seen as manifestations of the single, universal God—generally identified by the concept of Rod, also known as Sud and Prabog among South Slavs. The Rodnover movement of Peterburgian Vedism calls this concept Vsebog.
In the Russian and Ukrainian centres of Rodnover theology, the concept of Rod has been emphasised as particularly important. The root *rod is attested in sources about pre-Christian religion referring to divinity and ancestrality. Mathieu-Colas defines Rod as the "primordial God", but the term also literally means the generative power of the family and "kin", "birth", "origin" and "fate" as well. Its negative form, urod, means something wrenched, deformed, degenerated, monstrous. Sometimes, the meaning of the word is left deliberately obscure among Rodnovers, allowing for a variety of different interpretations. The Russian volkhvs Veleslav and Dobroslav explain Rod as a life force that comes in nature and is "all-pervasive" or "omnipresent".
Manifestationism
Cosmologically speaking, Rod is conceived as the spring of universal emanation, which articulates in a cosmic hierarchy of gods. When emphasising this monism, Rodnovers may define themselves as rodnianin, "believers in God". Already the pioneering Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Shaian argued that God manifests as a variety of different deities.This theological explanation is called "manifestationism" by some contemporary Rodnovers, and implies the idea of a spirit–matter continuum; the different gods, who proceed from the supreme God, generate differing categories of things not as their external creations, but embodying themselves as these entities. In their view, beings are the progeny of gods; even phenomena such as the thunder are conceived in this way as embodiments of these gods. In the wake of this theology, it is common among Slavic Native Faith practitioners to say that "we are not God's slaves, but God's sons". Some Rodnover groups espouse the idea that specific Slavic populations are the sons of peculiar facets of God; for instance, groups who rely upon the tenth-century manuscript The Lay of Igor's Host may affirm the idea that Russians are the grandchildren of Dazhbog.
A Russian Rodnover leader, Nikolai Speransky, emphasises a dualistic eternal struggle between forces of good and evil; the former represented by Belobog, who created the human soul, and the latter by Chernobog, who created the human body. They are the twofold dynamism through which the supreme God expresses its spirits, taking part in the characteristics of both categories.
Clusters of deities
Pantheons of deities are not unified among practitioners of Slavic Native Faith. Different Rodnover groups often have a preference for a particular deity over others. The Union of Russian Rodnover Communities founded and led by Vadim Kazakov recognises a pantheon of over thirty deities emanated by the supreme Rod; these include attested deities from Slavic pre-Christian and folk traditions, Slavicised Hindu deities, Iranian deities, deities from the Book of Veles, and figures from Slavic folk tales such as the wizard Koschei. Rodnovers also believe and worship tutelary deities of specific elements, lands and environments, such as waters, forests and the household. Gods may be subject to functional changes among modern Rodnovers; for instance, the traditional god of livestock and poetry Veles is called upon as the god of literature and communication.Sylenko's monotheism
In Ukraine, there has been a debate as to whether the religion should be monotheistic or polytheistic. In keeping with the pre-Christian belief systems of the region, the groups who inherit Volodymyr Shaian's tradition, among others, espouse polytheism. Conversely, Lev Sylenko's Native Ukrainian National Faith regards itself as monotheistic and focuses its worship upon a single God whom they identify by the name Dazhbog. For members of this group, Dazhbog is regarded as the life-giving energy of the cosmos.Sylenko characterised Dazhbog as "light, endlessness, gravitation, eternity, movement, action, the energy of unconscious and conscious Being". Based on this description, Ivakhiv argued that Sylenkoite theology might better be regarded as pantheistic or panentheistic rather than monotheistic. Sylenko acknowledged that the ancient Ukrainian-Rus were polytheists but believed that a monotheistic view reflected an evolution in human spiritual development and thus should be adopted. A similar view is adopted by the Russian Rodnover denomination of Ynglism. Lesiv recorded one RUNVira member who related that "we cannot believe in various forest, field and water spirits today. Yes, our ancestors believed in these things but we should not any longer". For RUNVira members, polytheism is regarded as backward. Some polytheist Rodnovers have regarded the approach adopted by Sylenko's followers as an inauthentic approach to the religion.
Cosmology
Dual dynamism: Belobog and Chernobog
According to the Book of Veles, and to the doctrine accepted by many Rodnover organisations, the supreme Rod begets Prav in primordial undeterminacy, giving rise to the circular pattern of Svarog, which constantly multiplies generating new worlds. Prav works by means of a dual dynamism, represented by Belobog and Chernobog ; they are two aspects of the same, appearing in reality as the forces of waxing and waning, giving rise to polarities like up and down, light and dark, male and female, singular and plural. Man and woman are further symbolised by father Svarog itself and mother Lada.This supreme polarity is also represented by the relation between Rod and Rozanica, literally the "Generatrix", the mother goddess who expresses herself as the three goddesses who interweave destiny. She is also known as Raziwia, Rodiwa or simply Dewa, regarded as the singular goddess of whom all lesser goddesses are manifestations. In kinships, while Rod represents the forefathers from the male side, Rozanica represents the ancestresses from the female side. Through the history of the Slavs, the latter gradually became more prominent than the former, because of the importance of the mother to the newborn child.
The three qualities of reality and the ''axis mundi''
Triglav
In duality, the supreme Rod's luminous aspect manifests ultimately as threefold, Triglav. The first of the three persons is the aforementioned Svarog, and the other two are Svarog's further expressions as Perun and Svetovid. They correspond to the three dimensions of the cosmos, and to the three qualities of soul, flesh and power. Svarog represents Prav itself and soul, Perun represents Yav and flesh, and Svetovit represents Nav and spiritual power.According to Shnirelman, this triune vision and associations were codified by Yuri P. Mirolyubov and further elaborated by Valery Yemelyanov, both interpreters of the Book of Veles. In olden times, already Ebbo documented that the Triglav was seen as embodying the connection and mediation between Heaven, Earth and the underworld. Adam of Bremen described the Triglav of Wolin as Neptunus triplicis naturae attesting the colours that were associated to the three worlds, then further studied by Karel Jaromír Erben: white for Heaven, green for Earth and black for the underworld. Other names of the two manifestations of Svarog are Dazhbog and Svarozhich. According to the studies of Jiří Dynda, the three faces of Triglav are rather Perun in the heavenly plane, Svetovid in the centre from which the horizontal four directions unfold, and Veles in the underworld. The netherworld, especially in its dark aspect, is indeed traditionally embodied by Veles, who in this function is the god of waters but also the one who guides athwart them in the function of psychopomp.
In his study of Slavic cosmology, Dynda compares this axis mundi concept to similar ones found in other Indo-European cultures. He gives weight to the Triglav as a representation of what Georges Dumézil studied as the "Indo-European trifunctional hypothesis". The Triglav also represents the interweaving of the three dimensions of time, metaphorically represented as a three-threaded rope. By Ebbo's words, the Triglav is summus deus, the god representing the "sum" of the three dimensions of reality as a mountain or tree. In a more abstract theoretical formulation, Dynda says that the three completes the two by springing out as the middle term between the twosome, and in turn the threesome implicates the four as its own middle term of potentiality.
Svetovid
Svetovid is the four-faced god of war and light, and "the most complete reflection of the Slavic cosmological conception", the union of the four horizontal directions of space with the three vertical tiers of the cosmos, and with the three times. Helmold defined Svetovid as deus deorum ; Dynda further defines Svetovid, by Jungian words, as a "fourfold potentiality which comes true in threefoldness ". His four faces are the masculine Svarog and Perun, and the feminine Mokosh and Lada. The four directions and colours also represent the four Slavic lands of original sacred topography. They also represent the spinning of the four seasons.Ultimately, Svetovid embodies in unity the supreme duality through which Rod manifests itself as Prav, and the axial interconnection of the three times with the four dimensions of present space. In other words, he represents Prav spiritualising Yav as Nav; or Svarog manifesting as spirit in the material world governed by Veles. Dynda says that this conception reflects a common Indo-European spiritual vision of the cosmos, the same which was also elaborated in early and medieval Christianity as God who is at the same time creator, creature and creating activity.
Prav, Yav and Nav—Heaven, Earth and humanity
Cosmology of the ''Book of Veles''
According to the Book of Veles, reality has three dimensions, namely the aforementioned Prav, Yav and Nav. Prav itself is the level of the gods, who generate entities according to the supreme order of Rod; gods and the entities that they beget "make up" the great Rod. Yav is the level of matter and appearance, the here and now in which things appear in light, coalesce, but also dissolve in contingency; Nav is the thin world of human ancestors, of spirit, consisting in the memory of the past and the projection of the future, that is to say the continuity of time. Prav, the universal cosmic order otherwise described as the "Law of Heaven", permeates and regulates the other two hypostases.Genotheism and the worship of ancestors
In her theological commentaries to the Book of Veles, the Ukrainian Rodnover leader Halyna Lozko emphasises the cosmological unity of the three planes of Heaven, Earth and humanity between them. She gives a definition of Rodnover theology and cosmology as "genotheism". God, hierarchically manifesting as different hypostases, a multiplicity of gods emerging from the all-pervading force Svarog, is genetically linked to humanity. On the human plane God is incarnated by the progenitors/ancestors and the kin lineage, in the Earth. Ethics and morality ultimately stem from this cosmology, as harmony with nature is possible only in the relationship between an ethnic group and its own land. The same vision of a genetic essence of divinity is called "rodotheism" by the Ynglists.This is also the meaning of the worship of human progenitors, whether the Slavs' general forefather Or or Oryi, or local forefathers such as Dingling worshipped by Vladivostok Rodnovers. Divine ancestors are the spirits who generate and hold together kins, they are the kins themselves. The Russian volkhv Dobroslav emphasises the importance of blood heritage, since, according to him, the violation of kinship purity brings about the loss of the relationship with the kin's divine ancestor. The Ukrainian Rodnover and scholar Yuri Shylov has developed a theory of God as a spiral "information field" that expresses itself in self-conscious humanity, which comes to full manifestation in the Indo-European "Saviour" archetype.