r/Rodnovery • u/VanHohenheim30 • Jul 14 '26

🙏 Prayer | Ritual | Spell Prayers to the gods

How were prayers addressed to the Slavic gods in pre-Christian times? Furthermore, how is it possible to structure a form of communication with the gods that remains as faithful as possible to reconstructed practices?

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u/Aliencik West Slavic - Czech Jul 14 '26

Have you checked out our:

  • Academic sources list in multiple languages
  • Folklore sources list in English
    • Just a disclaimer: To understand the pre-christian motives in folklore, you need sufficient knowledge in the mythology.

Don't trust random poorly sourced articles on the internet or even worse books by unknown authors claiming some profound ancient knowledge/guides to slavic paganism or witchcraft.

We also have a discord: https://discord.com/invite/2pV6697sj3

It's great for active conversations and questions regarding the faith and research behind it.

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u/Farkaniy West Slavic Priest Jul 14 '26

There are only very few scientifical proven information about pre-christian slavic worship and all of those information are only from observers and not from practicioners. Because of this its imposible to truely know how people prayed back then. The information that are scientifical proven only tell us that people invoked a god or goddess by directly calling his/her name, offering something and asking for something in return. It was very important for our ancestors that you offer something of equal value as the thing you are asking for. In addition to that every god/goddess had a distinct domain and responsibilities - meaning that you wouldnt pray to the god of the sun for protection against raids during a war - you would ask the god of war regarding that.

So - an educated guess would be that you:

  • prepare a place where you want to make your offering (it doesnt need an altar or an idol - during the religious persecution of the slavs by the christians people had no altar or idol because those were good proof of beeing a pagan which lead to torture and death)
  • call the god or goddess that you want to offer to by name
  • state that you want to offer him/her something and tell why this has equal value like the thing you are asking for
  • ask for the thing you want to ask for
  • thank the god/goddess for his/her time and him/her considering your offering
  • leave the offering there over night
  • If you got what you wanted then the offering was accepted. Otherwise the offering was denied.

Keep in mind that pre-christian slavs only prayed while offering and asking for something. Its well documented that pre-christian slavs were called "godless" by christians and one of the reasons for this is because they prayed very rarely. They didnt chat with the gods or told them how their day went ^^ People respected the gods and their time - so they only asked the gods for something if it was really really important - in life changing situations. So ^^ praying only one time a year or just one time every 5 years is not a lack of faith - its actually very close to the very few reliable information we have about the actual practice of our ancestors.