INCLUSION CRITERIA
An entry belongs in this tradition if and only if the method comes from pre-modern Slavic practice, attested in the ethnographic, chronicle, or archaeological record.
Geography: The Slavic-speaking lands — West, East, and South Slavic, from the Baltic and Elbe to the Balkans and the Rus'.
Time: c. 6th century CE to the point at which Christianization and then modern state formation displaced the practice, region by region and therefore at no single date: West Slavic practice ends at Arkona in 1168, the East Slavic conversion is conventionally 988, and folk practice outlived both by centuries in attenuated form. The entry gives the date of attestation and the date of suppression separately, because for most of this material they are the only two dates there are.
Required: All of the following:
- The collection's root criteria: a procedure, a mechanism, and stated limitations
- A source: chronicle, ethnographic record, or archaeology, named and dated
- A procedure recoverable from that source, not reconstructed from comparative mythology alone
Not sufficient: A deity, cosmology, or myth without a procedure. A nineteenth-century national-romantic reconstruction presented as attested practice. A Slavic-language method from a modern institution, which is placed by that institution.
Boundary: This tradition is ethnographic and pre-modern; the Soviet tradition is institutional and twentieth-century, and the two do not overlap despite the geographic and linguistic intersection. Propp's morphology is Soviet because a Leningrad formalist produced it in 1928, not Slavic because its material is the Russian folktale — the tradition records where a method was developed, not what it was developed about. Sources here are overwhelmingly hostile or foreign: Saxo Grammaticus described Arkona as a Danish chronicler writing about a practice his king destroyed, and the entry states that provenance rather than reading through it.