Rod (Slavic religion)

Rod or Rid (Polish, Slovenian, Croatian: Rod, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian Cyrillic: Род, Ukrainian Cyrillic: Рід) is a conception of supreme God of the universe and of all its gods in Slavic Native Faith (Rodnovery). The same concept is also known as Sud ("Judge") and Prabog ("Pre-God", "First God") among South Slavs. The term rod is attested in Old Church Slavonic sources about pre-Christian religion, where it refers to divinity and ancestrality. Michel Mathieu-Colas (2017) defines it as the "primordial God", but the term also literally means the generative power of family and "kin", "birth", "origin" and "fate" as well. The negative form of the term rod, that is urod, means something wrenched, deformed, degenerated, monstruous.

Scholars have defined Rod as a concept of absolute, "general power of birth and reproduction". Valued scholar Boris Rybakov was among the first who identified Rod as the primordial God of the whole universe. Some scholars criticised Rybakov's position, including Leo Klejn (who identified Rod as fate or destiny) and Nikolai Zubov.

Rybakov also identifies swastika-like symbols, whirl and wheel symbols, which also include patterns like the "six-petaled rose inside a circle" and the "thunder mark" (gromovoi znak), as representing Rod and its various forms (whether Svarog, Perun, Svetovid, or other gods). Such symbols were still carved in folk traditions of north Russia up to the ninteenth century. According to Soviet-era Russian folklorist E. G. Kagarov, the Domovoi (the "Household God" associated with ancestor worship) is a conceptualisation of the supreme Rod itself as the specific family lineage and its stead.

...
Wikipedia