#slavicedit

"Veles, also known as Volos, is a major god of earth, waters, livestock, and the underworld in Slavic paganism. According to reconstruction by some researchers, he is the opponent of the supreme thunder god Perun. As such he probably has been imagined as a dragon, which in the belief of the pagan Slavs is a chimeric being resembling a cross between a bear and a snake that devours livestock."

→ The only historic source that mentions this deity is a 12th-century biography of the proselytizing German bishop Otto of Bamberg, who, during his expeditions to convert the pagan tribes of Wendish and Polabian Slavs, encountered festivals in honor of the war-god Gerovit in the cities of Wolgast and Havelberg. Gerovit is most likely a German corruption of the original Slavic name Jarovit. The history of this deity was reconstructed to become god of vegetation, fertility, and springtime.

“Russian: Иван-Купала. He is celebrated on Kupala Night with rituals of purification through water and fire.”

"In Slavic mythology, Perun (Cyrillic: Перýн) is the highest god of the pantheon and the god of sky, thunder, lightning, storms, rain, law, war, fertility and oak trees. His other attributes were fire, mountains, wind, iris, eagle, firmament (in Indo-European languages, this was joined with the notion of the sky of stone), horses and carts, and weapons (hammer, axe (Axe of Perun), and arrow). The supreme god in the Kievan Rus' during the 9th-10th centuries, Perun was first associated with weapons made of stone and later with those of metal."

Gamayun is a prophetic bird of Russian folklore. It is a symbol of wisdom and knowledge and lives on an island in the mythical east, close to paradise.

"Also, the Slavs have a strange delusion. At their feasts and carousals, they pass about a bowl over which they utter words, I should not say of consecration but of execration, in the name of [two] gods — of the good one, as well as of the bad one — professing that all propitious fortune is arranged by the good god, adverse, by the bad god. Hence, also, in their language, they call the bad god Diabol, or Zcerneboch, that is, the black god."

slavic mythology: “The older she grows, the farther she walks. It is a good thing the world is round and she is fond of walking in circles or else she might disappear across three times nine countries in the thirtieth tsardom!”

The night before the holiday surpasses Ivan Kupala Day itself in its ritual content."