Perun vs Veles

The thunder god of the Kievan Rus', sworn by in treaties and installed at the head of Prince Vladimir's official pantheon in 980 before Vladimir himself had his idol destroyed in 988.

Perun is the best-attested of the Rus' gods. The *Russian Primary Chronicle* has the Rus' swear by him and by their weapons in the treaties of 907 and 945, and again in 971; under 980 he stands first among the six idols Vladimir raises on the hill outside his Kiev palace, with a head of silver and a moustache of gold. Procopius, writing in the 550s, describes the early Slavs sacrificing cattle to an unnamed god who alone is "master of all" and "the maker of lightning", not a named source for Perun, but read by most historians as the same figure centuries earlier.

The "cattle god" (skotii bog) of the treaty oaths, sworn by beside Perun in 907 and 945, and left off Vladimir's 980 hilltop pantheon in a way scholars have long puzzled over.

The *Russian Primary Chronicle* has the Rus' swear by Volos, "the cattle god" (*skotii bog*), together with Perun and their weapons, in the treaties of 907 and 945. Unlike Perun, Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, and Mokosh, Veles is conspicuously absent from the six idols Vladimir sets up on the Kiev hill in 980. Later medieval and early-modern hagiographic tradition associated with Vladimir's baptism places a Veles idol separately, on the lower ground of the Podil district by the river, a detail that postdates the Primary Chronicle itself and should be treated with more caution than the 907 and 945 treaty text.