Slavic paganism presents a problem the other entries in this atlas mostly do not: there is no scripture, and there is almost no contemporary description written by anyone who believed it. Christianization from the ninth century onward destroyed or absorbed the material, and what survives has to be reconstructed from three indirect sources — hostile chronicles, folk practice that outlived the conversion, and the languages themselves.
That reconstruction gives a real but modest picture. Nav (Navь, Nawia) is the domain of the dead; the word is old and cognate with terms for corpse across Slavic and beyond, which is strong linguistic evidence that it is genuinely ancient rather than borrowed. Vyraj — also Iriy, Vyrai — is a warm country located beyond the sea or at the top of the world tree, and it is where migratory birds go in winter. That identification is the key to the whole system: the same place receives the souls of the dead and the birds, and in folk belief the souls travel as birds. Storks and nightjars carry them in summer, crows and ravens in winter. A soul was held to remain near its home for forty days before departing, which is why the fortieth-day memorial survived into Orthodox practice across the Slavic world and is still kept.
The dead were fed. Radunitsa and similar grave-feasts brought food, drink, and eggs to the cemetery in spring; the meal was shared with the dead, not merely offered to them, and the practice was durable enough that the church absorbed rather than suppressed it. Veles, the god associated with cattle, wealth, oaths, and the wet lowland, is generally reconstructed as the keeper of that pasture — the dead grazing in a damp meadow under a divine herdsman is a plausible Indo-European survival, though it is a reconstruction rather than a text. Not everyone went. Those who died wrongly — drowned, unbaptized in later Christian framing, suicides, girls dead before marriage — stayed as navki, rusalki, and similar restless dead, hovering at water and field edges. This category is the best-attested part of the whole complex, because it survived vigorously in living folklore long after the gods were gone.
And then the caution, which belongs in the entry rather than a footnote. The neat triad of Prav, Yav, and Nav — cosmic order, the visible world, and the underworld — that circulates widely as ancient Slavic cosmology comes from the Book of Veles, a twentieth-century forgery whose language is a fabricated mixture of modern Slavic forms with invented grammar, and it is now a fixture of modern Rodnovery rather than a reconstruction of pre-Christian belief. Nav is authentic; the tidy three-storey cosmos built around it is not. Including the Slavic dead in a comparative atlas means including that seam honestly: what survives is a set of practices around forty days, birds, grave-feasts, and the unquiet dead — vivid, patchy, and much less systematic than the diagrams suggest.
