Book Review: Slavic Traditions & Mythology by Stefan Cvecković
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Recommended, with Caveats
"There is no word for 'worship' in the Slavic languages. Instead, we use the word slaviti which means 'to honour, to celebrate, to glorify, to feast,' because this is what we do." - Stefan Cvetkovic
Photo by Diana Rajchel
Disclosure: I will research the author after I review the book. I separate the author from the work to some degree because spirituality and moral problems exist hand-in-hand. I've found too much value as a spirit worker to simply meet the whole work due to an author's poor character. Sometimes, the villain Confessing the Evil Plan and Motivation comes in handy when fighting evil or establishing a degree of moral correction.
Also, shoutout to my heavy metal Polish librarian friend Cyn for gifting me this book. You have no idea what a healing read it has been for me!
How My Personal Story Intersects with Slavic Folklore
There is only commenting on an English translation of a book on Slavic spirituality if inserting a little bit about myself. For context, I was raised as "Christmas and Easter" Polish. My father was technically a second-generation Polish immigrant but lived like the first generation. His first language was Polish. He was raised Roman Catholic, and most of what surrounded him in early development was centered on the Polish language and culture. Despite his love for the English language, culture, and literature, the Slavic inner structure never disappeared in his life or from his frame of the world.
Note that Roman Catholicism was the dominant religious practice despite the Jewish-rooted last name Rajchel.
When he married my mother, he did something very unusual: he converted to her version of Christianity. At the time, it wasn't something men did in the United States. My mother's version was of a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the sort that routinely affirmed a certain superiority to Catholics.
My parents then raised my sibling in a town that was roughly 50% Italian Catholic while attending the more liberal and oh-so-economically-and-status aligned Protestant churches available. The result for me was a lot of cultural conflict and confusion, and token gestures around food and Polish tradition only happened as my mother would allow them twice a year.
The rest of the year, I was told how awful my father's family was, with quiet and not-so-quiet messages about the natural superiority of Protestantism.
Where the Book Comes In
I don't blame my father at all for agreeing to raise his daughters Protestant. For a guy born in 1933, he had a far better understanding of the need for feminism for men and women than my mother did. While Big Mistakes Were Made as a Parent, I knew by the end of his life that he respected me and understood why I made my choices. Few women I know have affirmation from their fathers, let alone respect.
Without going into the whole of my spiritual biography, I'll write that book eventually. Slavic Traditions of Mythology was the first book I had read recently that gave me the feeling of coming home. Over the last few years, I've been on a slow burn of self-healing and reconnecting with my healed ancestors. As I've become more connected to my immediate family, I've also been welcoming them and embracing their culture to embrace the complicated mixed and oppositional cultures that make up my being alongside them.
It explains me to myself in many ways, especially in the initial chapters. The most important aspects that stand out to me are home-centered spirituality as an animistic practice and the understanding that the ancestors and gods are the same - but from the Slavic perspective and my own experience as an animist of Polish and WASP descent living in North American soil, we don't worship gods. After five years of having my life and self stripped away by "oh, this is REAL and not an abstract concept" confrontations, one of the things that got eaten whole alongside my North American mainstream eclectic Wiccan/generalized Pagan identity was the entire concept of worship.
What replaced it, as I adjusted to a new understanding of the spirit world, aligns with the broader concepts of the Slavic animism described by Cveckovic. Is it an exact match? No, because the animistic relationships I am forming and living are in North America. But it looks similar, and I finally know why there's a snake under my stove and why there's now also a newer, smaller one that likes to slide in behind my microwave. I now know why, despite my passion for and service to cities, my home and how I keep it spiritually is so important. I now know why I inherited certain talents in communicating with the dead.
While I will poke fun at the low-key social climbing (sometimes down, sometimes up) that came from my parent's adventures in church-going and community-seeking, I am confident that, unlike many people, I wasn't harmed by it. The church community members often tried to support me in their clumsy ways. I didn't leave the church out of rage or rejection, but from that awkward knowing that there was a deep need, I just wasn't going to have fulfilled baking cookies for social hour and sneaking a dropper full of vodka into the communion wine.
The book speaks only to folklore, archaeological evidence, and the meaning people attributed to the seasons, death, and how they interrelated with water, land, animals, and survival. I find the book's second half more questionable, and the author did, too. Aligning the Slavic festivals with West European cognates sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. Also, I would have appreciated a chart on Southern Slavs versus Northern versus Eastern because those variations can matter when people like me attempt direct spirit work. I also got the impression that his inclusion of "Slavic gods" was under protest because they don't quite operate like they did under Hellenic, Hermetic, and Scandinavian influence. Calling them gods seems like a misnomer, and the author didn’t seem any more comfortable with the subject. I know I wasn’t.
I may change my mind as I read and explore more in the future, but for now, I think this book is a great starting point for people attempting to connect to their pre- and post-Christian Slavic roots. If you can get comfortable with animism as a spirituality that resists the cap of religion and that an underlying feral folk Catholicism is happening, you can get a broader view as you plunge deep into the world of dragons and babushkas.
Axe of Perun, origin Wikimedia Commons
