The Pagan Spiritual World of the Eastern Slavs

Abstract

Slavic paganism is a coherent system of views that permeated the life of traditional Slavic society, which resolved emerging worldview issues, determined collective priorities and the resulting value and activity attitudes of people’s behavior.
Slavic paganism should be considered as a whole structurally organized worldview, which later had a great impact on the formation of the Ukrainian mentality. In this connection, it is important to note that all researchers, in one way or another, are inclined to the conclusion about the existence of systematicity in the structure of the worldview.
Thoughts about systematicity, proportionality, interconnectedness and interconnectedness of the functioning of the world structure are hidden behind the pretended vague and vague set of pagan ideas of the ancient Slavs known to us; about the commonality and interaction of spirit and matter as different manifestations of one substance; about the unity of the world in diversity as a manifestation of this unity, connected with some basic essence of things, which appears in paganism under the image of spirit-matter, which in its countless variations animates the entire Universe – from the gross matter of stones to the higher world of the gods.
The fact that the spirit is imagined as a refined matter is emphasized by many researchers who pointed out that our spirit, soul is closely related to the words blow, air, smoke, thought. At the same time, the worldview of the ancient Slavs allowed thoughts about the separation of the soul from the body, about a certain independence of it from the outside world.
Such a simultaneous semi-fusion and semi-separation of the spiritual and the material in the ancient worldview means that the concepts of spirit and matter were not identical and had rather pronounced characteristic features. The peculiarity of the pagan worldview is that there is no sharp boundary between matter and spirit. In the understanding of the Slavs, it is like different levels of a single substance, the diversity of which includes both the solid matter of the earth and the subtle matter of light, spirit and deity. Matter itself in this sense is alive and divine.
Slavic pagan cosmological views have a pronounced archetypal character. The ontological views of the Slavs were initially based on the postulate of the divine source of the entire universe, including people. Over time, especially under the influence of Christianity, which was established in Russia, these ideas underwent a transformation, which was reflected in the dualistic opposition of divine and diabolical forces involved in creation. At the same time, the dark beginning in the Slavic worldview mostly had a conditional and relative character. The understanding of time by the ancient Slavs is determined by the peculiarities of the mythological thinking of early peoples and is based on such fundamental ideas as cyclicity, the periodic reproduction of the primordial divine order, the divine temporary creation of worlds and the laws of the universe.