RITUALS
Several sixth-century sources refer to Slavic rituals of prayer. Procopius of Cesarea (3.14.23-4) mentions Slavs asking the gods for life in case of war or sickness; ibn Rosteh (C.
H. Meyer 1931: 93) notes the Slavic custom of praying to the god of heaven and fire for good crops; and Saxo Grammaticus (14.39.5) describes the appeal made by the priest and the people to the gods, asking for abundant future harvests over a huge offering of bread during the autumnal feast for the god Sventovit in Arcona. “Murmuring secretly” and shaken by their fear of the god’s power, the priests of Svarozic carried out divination in Riedegost (Thietmar 6.24). The gesture of prayer seems to be represented on one fragment of Slavic pottery from Schulzendorf, supposedly showing a person praying in front of the image of a deity (Gustavs 1979).The etymology of one pan-Slavic term for sacrifice, *treba (reconstructed inter alia from early forms of Russian and from place-names, and literally meaning “something you must do, obligatory action”), stresses the necessity of bringing offerings (Kahl 2004), and at least among the Wends it developed (somewhat like the term Yule among the Scandinavians) into a name for Christmas, probably as a reminiscence of a pre-Christian ritual feast held around the same time. Written sources, however, stress instead the importance of a feast held in the autumn, in Arcona “after the harvest”, and in Riedegost in November. Other festivals held in spring and summer are also well attested. The other Slavic general term for feast, as attested by Polish zertwa, which originally also had a religious connotation and etymologically means “to praise gods” (Gieysztor 1984: 251), seems to develop over time into the Polish verb zrec denoting gluttonous eating. And indeed, describing the feast for Sventovit in Arkona, Saxo Grammaticus 14.39.6) states that this occasion ends in gluttony.
It is difficult to distinguish any remains of such offerings in the archaeological material from ordinary kitchen waste. Sometimes, however, whole animals or large parts of animals were deposited, for example, parts of horses discovered around a kind of stone altar in Starigard/Oldenburg (Gabriel 1988: 78).The ritual feast was a kind of communion uniting gods and people, ensuring good order and prosperity. Christian sources explain that for this reason it was not allowed for Christians to eat together with “pagans”, as these were people who shared a table with the devil. According to the Conversio Bogoariorum (7) custom of sacrificing horses is a story in the Cosmae Pragensis Chronica Boemorum (1.11) about the Czech army sacrificing a donkey before a war expedition. The scenario might seem to indicate a historical link to Indo- European traditions of sacrifices of horses such as the Vedic asvamedha or Roman equus October, but the use of a different animal with culturally widespread negative connotations casts a rather uncertain light on the event related in the Cosmae Pragensis Chronica Boemorum.
A horse oracle combined with lot-casting is attested among the Western Slavs. Sacred horses were bred in the major West Slavic sanctuaries in Riedegost- Rethra, Szczecin and Arcona and were used by priests in divination, in order to decide about the most important public matters such as military campaigns and alliances. Like the Germans in Tacitus’s time, the Slavs performed lot-casting before hippomancy. As noted, in Riedegost (Thietmar 6.24) after this first lotcasting ceremony the lots were buried in a small hole in the ground and covered with sod. Then the horse was used. Contrary to the customs of the Germanic peoples as recorded by Tacitus, among the Slavs the sacred horses did not draw carriages, but were saddled although never ridden. A parallel account concerns a similar ceremony performed in Livonia (Slupecki 1998: 143-50). The act of divination performed in front of the temple consisted of a horse walking over spears stuck in (or arranged on) the ground. The outcome - good or ill fortune - was predicted depending on whether the horse stepped over the spears with the right or the left leg (or touched them with the hoof or not). The ritual had an interesting counterpart in the Roman ritual of equus October (Slupecki 2006). In Arcona (and probably in Riedegost) the oracular horse was white, whereas a black animal performed the same role in Szczecin (Slupecki 1998: 129-54).