The authors of Slavic Gods and Heroes are of two minds regarding reconstructions of Slavic mythology. One the one hand, they offer one of the more radically skeptical positions on the Slavic pagan gods, arguing not only that “we know nothing about either the family relationships of Slavic gods or the conflicts between them” (1), but that “there was no pan-Slavic pantheon[; a]11 Slavic gods were purely local” (83) and even that the Slavic pantheons we know were artificial creations that responded to contact with Christianity by borrowing Christian figures and adapting them, “since [the Slavs] themselves previously had no traditional gods” (85). On the other hand, they offer their own reconstruction of “the proto-Slavic totemic myth” derived from Slavic state foundation legends, a set of sources that they argue has been neglected in research into Slavic pagan religion, which should be compared not to “the polytheistic religions of the neighboring Celtic, Germanic, and Finnish tribes,” but to the totemic cults “found among the Hungarians, ancient Turks, and the Wusun people” (129). In their creatively reconstructed ur-tale, “the common Slavic Forefather, the snake [Čech/Shchek], was killed by his son, the raven [Krok/Krak/Kloukas], who was killed in turn by his brother, the white eagle. The latter was exiled for the fratricide and sovereignty passed to their sister, the swan [Libuše/Lybed΄/Lobelos/Lebedias]” (129).

Such an argument ought to be grounded in clear evidentiary and methodological principles that are applied with equal rigor to the older reconstructions being demolished and to the new sources and arguments through which the new myth is reconstructed. In matters of controversy, asserted conclusions ought to be properly qualified, probabilities properly weighed and not converted too easily into certainties. Unfortunately, that is not the case here. Instead, confirmation bias appears as the hidden, underlying principle as methods and evidence that are rejected in the reconstructions of the Slavic gods are deployed in the reconstruction of the totemic myth, etymologies are declared unconvincing or “rather transparent” (128) without any argumentation, and skepticism is unevenly applied and disappears entirely in the reconstruction, where there is no differentiation made regarding the quality and applicability of the evidence offered.

The old gods are partly displaced by a circular argument. The assertions that the Slavic gods were “purely local” in nature and that they did not exist before the mid-tenth century are used as axioms to dismiss evidence and arguments (49, 54). This leads finally to the conclusions that the gods were local, did not exist anyway, and, a transparent corollary, that many were of Christian origin (83). In the case of Sventovit, the authors prefer the tale they admit is “likely fabricated” by the monks of Corvey, for whom St. Vitus was a key figure of veneration, that the Pomeranian Slavs converted the cult of that saint into a pagan cult, as the most acceptable explanation, given the lack of really ancient Slavic pagan gods (axiom #2) and the lack of a “convincing” Slavic etymology for the god's name (54). In the case of Veles, the transition from provocative speculation to seemingly ironclad conclusion, without any evidentiary basis, is striking: “it is conceivable [emphasis mine] that Sviatoslav [of Kiev] adopted the cult of St. Blaise [Vlasii] during his occupation of Bulgaria in 969–971. Thus, a Christian saint became a pagan Slavic god, just as St. Vitus did 12 years later” (81). Sventovit and Veles are among the eight gods asserted, without qualification, to be of Christian origin in the conclusion (83).

In their own reconstruction, one of the key pieces of evidence is the Lithuanian folktale “Eglė the Queen of the Grass Snakes,” which was recorded in the nineteenth century but “probably [!] preserved the basic plot of the most ancient common Balto-Slavic totemic myth with the figure of the grass snake as an ancestor” (97–98). This would seem to fall dangerously close to the methods of the Mythological School in its use of folktales, a school that they dismissed in their introduction (2–3) along with reconstructions, like those of Viacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov that supposedly “uncritically accepted” its conclusions (4).

Fans of entertaining Slavic myth reconstructions should skip the first part and enjoy the authors’ totemic myth, their account of the Iranian origins of Mokosh΄, their reconstruction of “the proto-Indo-European hippomantic ritual” (144), and the place of origin of Zmey Gorynych (151). Scholars devoted to rigorously-argued inquiry into Slavic mythology should engage the book fully armed and with great care.